4 EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY
Before the first day of a three-day lockdown in Freetown, Sierra Leone president Ernest Bai Koroma gave the following speech:
Everybody in every house in every community in this country is very important in our fight against Ebola. Avoid touching each other, avoid eating bush meat, avoid visiting the sick, avoid attending funerals, report illnesses and deaths to the nearest health facility or call 117. We know some of the things we are asking you to do are difficult. But life is better than these difficulties. Today the life of everyone is at stake, but we will get over this difficulty if all do what we have been asked to do. Ebola is no respecter of persons. It is not an APC [All People’s Congress] or SLPP [Sierra Leone People’s Party] disease. It is not a disease of any political party, or ethnic group or district. Anyone who is not careful can endanger themselves and others that they love. These are extraordinary times, and extraordinary times require extraordinary measures.
This was one of several lockdowns declared in the city during the Ebola state of emergency. From the perspective of the various national and international authorities dedicated to the official Ebola response—collectively assembled under the National Ebola Response Centre—lockdowns presented an opportunity for homes to be systematically monitored for Ebola cases. The discovery of a potential case, evidenced by illness or death, generated a call to the 117 emergency service. The 117 service would coordinate with medical personnel and burial teams, all trained in Ebola safety protocol. A positive Ebola test triggered a twenty-one-day quarantine, the incubation period of the virus. Lockdowns, optimistically branded as “stay at home,” were also opportunities for intensive sensitization programs, known as os to os (house to house), whereby residents were given basic information about identifying Ebola symptoms and the now legally enshrined protocols for informing the authorities. After households had been monitored, they were marked above the door with a series of numbers and letters in chalk. In a more general sense, lockdowns issued the message “this is an emergency.”
The president’s message hit home but not exactly in the ways that I had envisaged. Rather than waking up in a tense environment of people imprisoned in their homes or paralyzed by fear of the deadly outbreak that had not yet penetrated into the neighborhood, I woke up hearing my neighbors exchanging holiday greetings to each other, as they might do at Eid, Easter, or on Independence Day. As my neighbor Auntie Susan commented on seeing my reaction, “families and neighbors are all forced to spend time together around the home.” This was something that in everyday life could be carefully managed. Another neighbor recounted a joke posted on a WhatsApp thread in which a young man realized that the lockdown was the new holiday when a girl asked him for her “lockdown” (i.e., a holiday gift, as might be received on Christmas or New Year’s). The National Power Authority had arranged for electricity to be provided for the full three days. This was much more consistent than the norm when blackouts were daily occurrences, sometimes lasting for weeks at a time. Movement was restricted not to individual homes but rather to areas within a residential neighborhood’s side streets and paths. Beyond these, the major roads were dead quiet, an inversion of the usual bustle of morning city traffic.
Taking center stage during the lockdown was an aid distribution from the local mosque, which was a major talking point among my neighbors. Hundreds of bags of rice and plastic containers of oil, donated by an international charity, were collected in the mosque’s gated courtyard, which was being guarded and monitored by local city authorities and police. For much of the day there was a long line outside of members of households who had received tickets from the authorities in surveys of the neighborhood conducted ahead of the lockdown. The houses that were prioritized in this distribution were those in the newer area of the neighborhood closer to base of the valley, many of which are built from temporary materials and deemed poorer. I was struck when one young man, walking out of the mosque with a bag of rice over his shoulder, exclaimed loudly to me and a few others that “this is the first time I have benefited from APC [the ruling party] in eight years.” As some disgruntled neighbors living in the older higher-up part of the neighborhood pointed out, though, it was not as if the upper part of the neighborhood was fabulously wealthy. As the afternoon progressed, the line, which seemed to be moving ever more slowly in the beating sun, grew restless until eventually, amid much shouting and discord, the gates of the mosque slammed shut.
An older woman who ran several small businesses in the city commented to me that “they [the authorities] will be back later after dark. Bend bend business [corruption] works at all levels.” She was not, however, unsympathetic: “So many jobs get paid so little here, and you have to pay for transport and everything, so it is not possible to build up any other way here.” Perhaps she could relate, as her break in business had come during the Sierra Leone Civil War when she informally bought and sold goods in aid shipments. “The system is working through sababu [connections/luck], not just through need. For some it is harder to get food than for others,” explained another neighbor who did not receive a distribution. Some residents who did receive shared their portions with unlucky neighbors. I witnessed one young woman in a home that I visited regularly in the less established part of the neighborhood carefully measuring out the bag of rice and the carton of oil into four equal portions for her immediate neighbors who had not received distributions. This was a striking contrast with the usually much less quantified and more protracted mode of sharing and reciprocating between these neighbors.
The fact that food was itself so central is worthy of comment. On one level, this points to a reality in which surviving Ebola went beyond avoiding contact with the virus or receiving appropriate treatment. Survival also meant being able to eat and to share, which in many cases meant providing for dependents and proximate others. Ebola did not introduce these demands but in some cases did exacerbate them. Loss of employment, closure of produce markets, and restrictions on travel and trade were all contributing factors. On another level, food was a way of thinking about and making sense of the emergency. My neighbors’ responses to the distribution were mixed. Some complained about the corruption that they saw, whereby established public authorities were abusing their influence to profit for themselves and, inevitably, their own networks of dependents. Others celebrated being public beneficiaries in ways that they were not accustomed to. This included the residents of the less established part of the neighborhood who were prioritized in the survey and the young man leaving the mosque who celebrated being a beneficiary of the government for the first time and perhaps being deemed a breadwinner when he got home.
Uniting this flurry of activity around food during the lockdown was people’s collective orientation toward different dimensions of ordinary life. I suspect that this was in part a response to unusual and in some ways frightening times. For the established public authorities administering the distribution, this meant leveraging their authority in order to reproduce and, arguably, reinforce existing hierarchies during a period of change and uncertainty.1 For the more marginal social and political actors, such as the poorer residents and youths, the lockdown offered a partial glimpse into what a more idealized version of neighborhood life could look like: a well-resourced and benevolent state that was able to provide reliable electricity and material assistance to those in need, not just those with connections, combined with more equitable and transparent relationships between neighbors. Ebola had rendered these values a national priority, as the opening line of the president’s speech made clear: “Everybody in every house in every community in this country is very important.”
The president was half correct in the final line of his speech: “These are extraordinary times, and extraordinary times require extraordinary measures.” The times were extraordinary, but the measures in this case were not. Rather, they were in different ways remarkably ordinary. As discussed in chapter 1, a number of the core epidemiological techniques of the official Ebola response were in keeping with British colonial approaches to the Great Influenza epidemic almost a century earlier. Equally, the visibility of international aid was not new. NGOs and international organizations have been a mainstay in Freetown in the decades following the civil war in the 1990s and early 2000s. Yet, the Ebola measures did have an unusual flavor to them nonetheless. That the lockdown presented a stage for heightened scrutinizing of the practices of public authorities and family life by my neighbors was in part caused by the fact that everyone involved was primed to experience those three days as a somewhat unusual event. This chapter explores what I call the “extraordinary ordinary,” referring to the unusual openings for prized notions of ordinary life to unfold during emergencies particularly for those for whom crisis of one sort or another is more the norm rather than the exception.
The Extraordinary Ordinary
“New normal” was a global buzzword during the COVID-19 pandemic as people around the world experienced lockdown for the first time. For many, the pandemic entailed more time at home than they were used to. Arrangements in workplaces, schools, and colleges changed, which allowed some to work and study at home. The abrupt halting of people’s normal patterns of socialization and daily routines caused significant anxiety and distress. Those used to certain securities faced a more conditional, contingent, and precarious existence. Hospitals were overstretched, and doctors were forced to make difficult decisions about who should be given ventilators. For such people, the new normal was perhaps more accurately the new abnormal.
For others, however, the new normal was actually not that new at all. Rather, it was in many respects an old normal. A vast number of the world’s population do not enjoy reliable health care. Working from home is not unfamiliar to those who perform domestic labor on a daily basis, particularly women. Epidemics and official responses to them can in many cases reenforce old normal challenges.2 For many of Freetown’s residents, Ebola was a little closer to this model. However, as we shall see, there is more to the story than the reenforcing of preexisting inequalities and challenges.
My friends and neighbors in the Congo Town neighborhood did not take Ebola lightly. Families set up chlorine handwashing stations at the entrance to their homes. Deaths in the community were typically reported to the authorities according to official protocol. But at the same time, they did not exceptionalize and prioritize Ebola in quite the same way that the global health intervention demanded. Ebola was unknown and frightening, but it was still not the most dangerous life-threatening disease at large. Routine illnesses such as malaria and typhoid continued to be deadly, perhaps even more so due to the enforced closure of many local clinics and pharmacies. Ongoing challenges in securing livelihoods, supporting dependents, and moving through the life course in a dignified way persisted.
As I have already outlined, when Freetown residents talked about Ebola, it tended to index something much more expansive than a novel disease. For example, as will be expanded on in chapter 5, when someone died and received an official Ebola burial—the protocol for all deaths during the outbreak regardless of cause—they were Ebola victims even if it was clear and medically proven that they had died from another cause. When young people complained about Ebola, they were often referring to loss of livelihood, boredom, and lack of adequate health care, features of life that were all too familiar. When someone materially benefited from Ebola aid packages or employment in the official response, they were described as eating Ebola money.3
On one level, the term Ebola referred to a wide array of aspects of life and death in the time of Ebola, many of them byproducts of an epidemiologically focused intervention and state of emergency. On another level, “Ebola” was a new way of talking about and responding to the short-comings and possibilities of ordinary life in Sierra Leone. This was a striking juxtaposition to media and official discourses around Ebola that emphasized what was exceptional and extraordinary about it. As I came to understand, this orientation toward ordinary life was not despite the uncertainties of the emergency or the very real dangers of the Ebola virus but rather, in some important respects, because of it.
The concepts of ordinary and normal are, of course, multifaceted. Do the terms “ordinary” and “normal” index a reality or an ideal, and if so, whose? 4 In Sierra Leone, this question was particularly pronounced during the 1991–2002 civil war. While bodily violence of war was shocking and thus televisable, it obscured the structural violence embedded in cruel and arbitrary systems of governance that have persisted as the norm from the time of colonial rule.5 Furthermore, love—a locally specific means of positively rendering personal relationships—permeated the activities of many of those caught up in the conflict in ways that actually exceeded what was normally possible.6 In the aftermath of war while international agencies attempted to re-create a prewar normal, more in line with statistical average, farming communities sought an “ought to be” normal rather than a return to a deeply challenging situation.7 Following these insights from wartime in Sierra Leone, I emphasize here that ordinary life must be understood not simply as a manifestation of what life ordinarily looked like but rather as a response to being confronted with somewhat extraordinary circumstances.
On one level, responding in this kind of way might be understood as a reaction to the uncertainties and urgencies of the emergency. Doing and being preoccupied with ordinary things or attempts, especially by more privileged actors to reinforce ordinary hierarchies, were in part a way of creating a comforting sense of order. Such a response has been noted particularly in the face of war, where a focus on the maintenance of everyday social relations works to normalize life in a context of rapid change and uncertainty.8
But as an epidemic, Ebola in Freetown differed in some important respects from wartime even if people would sometimes connect the two. During Ebola, authority was unusually centralized within unusually well-resourced state apparatuses, as opposed to the fragmented authority often found in conflict zones. The front lines of the epidemic were not battlefields, city streets, or insurgent encampments but instead were the intimate spheres of the home and the family. It was within these domains of care that transmission typically took place but also where flexible and adaptive support was generally received in a climate of lockdowns and curfews. Crucially and perhaps in common with some conflicts, the Ebola emergency was understood as distinctly temporary, with attention placed in an unusually collective way on the near future, the unknown point at which the crisis would be declared over.
For those already facing some degree of ongoing crisis, such as youths and young adults living in precarious circumstances with few foreseeable possibilities of fulfilling their own desires to start families and progress along the life-course, the temporary yet unfolding time of emergency—with its renewed configurations of family and state—was imbued with unusual promise for enacting unrealized ideals of ordinary life, or the extraordinary ordinary. The extraordinary ordinary was a new normal that tended to reflect young people’s long-term priorities. It was simultaneously ordinary in the sense of centering on the day-to-day domains of work, home, and family and was extraordinary, first by being realizable due to the unusual conditions of a global emergency and second by being prized by the actors involved and requiring careful adaptation, creativity, and negotiation between established and novel ways of doing in order to enact. As we have explored, young people in Freetown lives are largely defined by the necessity of navigating between different overlapping and social orders. In chapter 3 these were the logics of kinship and business in and around the home. In chapter 2 these were the competing expectations around workers recruited into the official Ebola response. During emergencies such as Ebola, the fact of the existence of different materially unequal social orders becomes unavoidable—expressed in the notion of two worlds discussed in chapter 1—rather than murky and buried beneath the surface. The extraordinary ordinary thus refers to the unusual clarity and possibilities that emergencies present to ordinary people. To illustrate this further, I now turn back to James, the eldest son in the Bangura family we met in chapter 3, and his girlfriend Aisha, who was pregnant for the first time during the height of the Ebola state of emergency.
Life-Crisis Ritual
It was a rainy evening two months after the three-day lockdown described at the beginning of this chapter. The state of emergency had been in effect for almost a year. By now the rate of Ebola transmission was on the way down, but weariness seemed to be growing. Every evening there was a radio announcement of the number and location of new cases and the number of deaths countrywide. I had listened to the announcement with some neighbors in the Cole compound—including Brima, the young police officer we met in chapter 3—who had gathered for an ad hoc bachelor’s eve celebration; one of the group was getting married the next day, despite regulations on such gatherings. At that point several days had passed with no new cases identified locally, but the daily announcement brought the unwelcome news of a handful of new cases upcountry. The state of emergency was set to be lifted after forty-two hours had elapsed with no new cases coming to light (double the incubation period of the virus). The clock had been reset.
The party was taking place on a much smaller scale than might normally have been expected. Gatherings of more than ten people were now illegal, although many people paid off the police in order to bypass this law. But the groom was short of money. We had made a collection for a crate of locally brewed bottles of Guinness stout. One neighbor who worked for the National Power Authority had used his influence to secure electricity for our area so that we would have light and could dance to an R&B, Afrobeat, and Reggae playlist put together by James. James Bangura, usually the first to dance and crack a joke, was uncharacteristically quiet and contemplative, sitting by himself on the veranda. Brima, the police officer, explained that “James is feeling the effects of Aisha being close to giving birth.”
Aisha and James, who were in their midtwenties, had been together for about two years. Aisha became pregnant shortly after the declaration of the state of emergency in 2014. The couple speculated that they conceived during one of the early lockdowns.9 She was studying business management and finance at college, but the college had been closed until further notice during Ebola.10 Aisha was very entrepreneurial. She set up a small shop in a makeshift room adjacent to her mother’s veranda and sold everyday household items such as canned food, biscuits and sweets, mosquito-repellent coils, powdered milk, tea, and soap, which she would buy downtown in bulk. Aisha would go once a month to the luma, a produce market out of town, where she would buy palm oil and rice to sell, both to stock her own shop and sometimes also on behalf of her father, who had a small farm out of town. James, who worked at a restaurant and guesthouse in a nearby neighborhood, would spend much of his free time between these places of business. Aisha ran several esusu (rotating credit association) schemes, each with slightly different financial structures (varying sums and varying intervals of collection and distribution). Aisha’s mother had a stall in the local food market, and many of her fellow market women were in Aisha’s esusu. James had invested several hundred dollars in her shop, and equally Aisha had recently contributed to James’s sister’s wedding expenses, both of which bound them together as a couple looking toward a shared future. At this point, however, James was out of work. The restaurant and guesthouse that he worked at, which catered mainly to international customers, had suspended its operations because of the Ebola emergency.
Brima’s comment about James’s worry over Aisha’s pregnancy was perceptive. As James and I arrived back at his family compound, Aisha was sitting on the veranda of the house belonging to James’s uncle and aunt, Samuel and Susan. The two of them were both standing close by, alongside two of Aisha’s close female friends from the neighborhood. Aisha was in severe pain. Her feet were swollen, and she could barely walk without assistance. A few hours earlier she had gone to the NGO-run maternity clinic where she had registered earlier in her pregnancy, but they told her that she was not close enough to delivering and sent her home. James suggested going to Connaught Hospital—one of Freetown’s main hospitals—but this idea was rejected. Aisha had attempted to enroll in its maternity ward several weeks earlier but had not found the process easy; the state hospitals were severely overstretched during the epidemic and were also deemed hotspots for Ebola transmission, which made people hesitant to go. Instead, Aisha and her friends headed to Aisha’s family compound, a few hundred meters down a steep path into the valley, where her mother was preparing for a traditional sara (small ceremony) that aimed to bring about an auspicious delivery. They had decided to go to a local mami, an old lady and former nurse, who would deliver the baby at her home using a combination of Western procedures and customary methods. James and his aunt Susan were particularly unhappy about this option. James told us that “they do not have much faith in that family; Christians do not make sara.” Aisha’s family was Muslim, although Aisha had started attending church with James’s sisters. Susan agreed: “We wait for God to intervene.” I asked if God was intervening now, and they laughed. Uncle Samuel advised James against interfering further: “This is women’s business.” The tension and uncertainty weighed heavily on us all, exacerbated by the fact that this was Aisha’s first birth. According to Auntie Susan, “If you have more experience you can give birth at home, but if you panic you may need a caesarean, and they can’t be trusted to do that.”
James went to his pastor to pray privately with him, as is routine for fathers before childbirth. On Susan’s instruction and against her husband’s advice, we called a friend in the neighborhood, a taxi driver, who drove Susan and me to the mami’s house on the other side of the valley, which was experiencing a blackout at the time. The mami was frail, and it seemed as though she had been drinking that evening. Based on Aisha’s swollen feet, the mami had deduced that she would require special treatment and was therefore prepared to refer her to the formal medical authorities. Susan fetched Aisha from inside, and we walked her back to the car, where they drove back to the clinic. Aisha was once again turned away despite being in severe pain and feeling as though she was ready to deliver. The following morning Kei—a neighbor of Aisha’s who was married to James’s adopted sister, Momi—took Aisha back to the clinic, where she was finally admitted. James was still unhappy to be out of the loop.
Later that same day, James and I met Aisha at the gates of the clinic carrying their newborn baby boy, who would be named Moses. The clinic was publicized as free for patients, but Aisha was forced to make an informal payment before she could be discharged, just as she had made a similar under-the-table payment to be registered. We returned to the neighborhood with the baby, stopping first at James’s family compound and then on to Aisha’s compound. The neighbors crowded around the baby, telling the couple tenki (thank you). The baby was taken to a room where Aisha and James had arranged for the baby and Aisha to stay, near to her family. Despite her earlier dismissive comment about traditional ceremonies, Auntie Susan performed a sara of rubbing salt and leaf around the umbilical cord so it would fall off in three days, and the baby was washed. Food was served, prepared by Aisha’s mother and neighbors.
As result of having spent their formative years living near each other in a close-knit neighborhood, James Bangura and Aisha had many mutual friends and family. Aisha lived with her frail mother, whose immediate neighbors were Momi (James’s sister by adoption) and her husband Kei. Kei and Momi were major figures in the homes of both James’s and Aisha’s families. Kei operated a small car mechanic business; most days he could be seen lying under rusty cars or directing a team of apprentices near the entrance to the Bangura family compound, where he parked the cars. As an authoritative male figure, Kei acted as an uncle to Aisha, whose father lived upcountry. Momi had inherited the role of head of the local women’s secret society, established in the 1950s by the matriarch of the Bangura family who had initially settled in the area. As a result, Momi split much of her time between the compounds, where she was key figure in both. Foday, my first host, and his cousin and roommate Umaru (the comedian who we met in chapter 2), were old friends of James’ and lived close to Aisha. They all attended the same church, and James and Umaru regularly ate food prepared in Kei and Aisha’s house. This increased after Umaru began sleeping with Kadiatu, the niece of James’s stepmother Leah, which as described was the source of some tension between and within the families.
Early in their relationship James described Aisha as his “best friend” and often sang her praises to me. He had her number saved in his phone as “my wife,” and they would often, somewhat jokingly, text each other, calling each other names such as “the father of my child” and “the love of my life.” On several occasions, however, Aisha expressed to me a concern that she wanted James to think more about their future. She wanted him to get better at saving money and not to waste it on drinking and “cheap popularity,” by which she meant hanging out with friends who were not “serious about the future.” She convinced him to join an esusu scheme, to which he paid 10,000 Le (roughly two dollars) a day. Aisha feared that James was spending money on other women. He in turn complained that she was overly jealous and suspicious, but Aisha told me that it was the wasted money that concerned her most.
Aisha wanted to build a household with James, but having grown up in Freetown, she knew all too well that men could not be relied on; she once explained to me how important it was not to become too dependent on men. However, Aisha had to reconcile her desire for self-reliance with her desire to be a wife. As she once explained to me,
when you are from a poor family, you need to find money in different places because men will let you down if you don’t. But if you have money they will treat you better and will have to listen to you, as you won’t be so reliant on them. When I was growing up, I didn’t know how to cook, I would just go to school and come back and not help around the house, just sell market goods. It is only now, because of James, that I have learnt how to cook and keep the home.
In many respects, the pregnancy came at a bad time. Both James and Aisha experienced significant financial strains that coincided with the pregnancy and the declaration of the state of emergency. In response to travel restrictions in and out of the country as well as daily curfews on business activity during the crisis, the restaurant and guesthouse where James worked closed its operations; James lost his job and received little financial compensation. Aisha experienced her own financial crisis, as the esusu that she ran dramatically crashed. One client threatened legal action, after which Aisha ran away for several days, not telling her family or James where she had gone. In addition, the small grocery store that Aisha and James ran together struggled during this time in part because the luma were banned under state of emergency regulations.
James and Aisha remained unmarried, which made honorable family formation challenging. James attempted to “lay kola” for Aisha. This is the traditional or country method of marriage in which the husband and his family give a bride price—symbolic and monetary gifts (including kola nuts)—to the bride and her family at an engagement ceremony. The initial meeting between the families, however, was not fruitful. James complained that Aisha’s family was asking too much for the bride price, not taking account of Ebola or its impact on the ways he had previously supported Aisha. Some of Aisha’s friends were also critical of her family. As one female friend put it, “They should not treat her like meat for sale; that is old-fashioned thinking.” Aisha’s family also failed to offer to prepare food for the engagement ceremony, a traditional obligation of the bride’s family. James was a “stranger” entering the household—despite in practice being a neighbor and a regular visitor—and therefore formally required hospitality. James called a meeting with his family to seek advice about whether he should attempt to renegotiate, but his father advised him strongly against making another offer, since that would bring shame on his family. Aisha told me later that she had not wanted her family to offer to prepare food for the event even on a modest scale. She feared that this would lead to even greater embarrassment down the road when they failed to mobilize the resources required to put together a wedding on the grand scale considered appropriate.
By the time Aisha gave birth the couple was still unmarried, and there were no wedding plans in the pipeline. This contributed further to the instability around their son’s birth and its immediate aftermath; parental roles and responsibilities were not clearly defined. Perhaps for this reason, Aisha and James organized a large-scale pulnador (baby naming ceremony, literally bring outside), which was performed two weeks after the birth. Traditionally this ritual would have been performed one week earlier, symbolizing the new arrival’s first outing and introduction to the community. A name would be given to the baby during the ceremony, which was often administered by an elder or a religious leader. Following this tradition, James and Aisha arranged a small ceremony a week after the birth, administered by James’s uncle Samuel, who was a respected schoolteacher. But they also spent an additional week arranging a much bigger public ceremony. This was challenging not just because of their financial situation but also in legal terms. State of emergency bylaws prohibited gatherings of more than ten people, although at this point, approaching the end of the first year, the rules were beginning to relax. Using connections with the local police station via their neighbor Brima from the Cole compound, James and Aisha were able to secure a uniformed police presence at the ceremony, thus giving it the required semblance of legality.
Hundreds of people were invited, including significant figures such as James’s former boss at the restaurant and guesthouse who made a financial contribution. James was relieved that the relationship had not died; in fact, the pulnador had proved to be a vehicle for keeping it alive. Aisha invited members of the Muslim youth group to which she had belonged before she had converted to Christianity, James’s religion. Many of the guests were mutual friends and neighbors from the neighborhood. The event took place in an open space behind James’s family compound under a tarpaulin. They carefully arranged rented chairs in neat rows around the small square. Fresh ginger ale was served to the guests while they waited for the ceremony to begin. The ceremony was overtly Christian; proceedings were led by the pastor of a church that James had recently started attending. Hymns were sung, verses from the Bible were read, and the pastor delivered a sermon during which he commented that childhood should be taken more seriously in Sierra Leone, given that people are “once an adult, but twice a child.” He spoke about how parents often start to neglect their children after a few years and commented disapprovingly on the fact that many Sierra Leoneans have children out of wedlock, as was the case for Aisha and James. The pastor added, however, that “God would judge the parents according to how they raised their child.” This was a welcome and comforting message. The sermon was followed by the official naming of the baby, whom Aisha held in her arms as guests came and placed money in her lap, as is customary. Afterward, food prepared by James’s sisters and stepmother Leah was served on disposable plates. It was the type of food, often called “white food,” that is typically served at wedding receptions: jollof rice, noodles, prawn crackers, and balls of beef. All of these features of the ceremony—the food, the religious aspects, and the scale—were more reminiscent of a Christian wedding ceremony than a typical pulnador.
The fact that the baby naming ceremony resembled a modern wedding was not coincidental; it seemed to be a self-conscious substitute created by Aisha and James as an attempt to present a positive public image as they set about starting their own family. The life-course ritual itself involved improvisation and adaptation alongside conservative, traditional features. The pulnador was delayed for a week and took place on a much larger scale than would normally have been the case. At the same time, the embrace of a respected family ritual, in which a baby is honorably accepted into a community, was a significant nod toward tradition. The ceremony thus represented an alignment and fulfillment of intergenerational expectations pertaining to social reproduction. Conversely, the ceremony reflected the tension between generational hierarchies and in this respect had an almost antiauthoritarian bent to it. After all, Aisha’s parents had not agreed to James’s initial request for marriage, deeming the payment too small. And James’s family had advised him against renegotiation, with its risk of further humiliation. It was notable that Aisha’s parents were not present at the ceremony and nor was James’s father, who remained in his room. His absence was attributed to his frailty at the time, and he was indeed ill. The ceremony occurred while James and Aisha lacked formal employment, so money and other resources were in short supply. But the ceremony helped to establish a network of support around the baby, all the more valuable given the uncertain circumstances into which he had been born. And James’s inclusion of his former boss from the job he had lost during the Ebola emergency helped to reestablish an important relationship with a patron that the epidemic had jeopardized.
Ebola clearly presented serious obstacles to the social acknowledgment of movement through the life course. But for young people, challenges surrounding the life course were not novel.11 In Sierra Leone, with one of the highest rates of child and maternal mortality globally, pregnancy and birth are always risky regardless of whether there is a global health emergency. On top of this, as has been well documented in scholarship in recent decades and discussed in previous chapters, African youths face widespread difficulties in participating as central actors in life-course rituals and family-based social reproduction and, in related ways, achieving social adulthood. Although many young people in Freetown have children, they struggle to start their own families in honorable and widely accepted ways. As James and Aisha’s case exemplified, this was often not because of being disconnected from family, as is often suggested in crisis of youth scholarship, but instead because of being greatly and complexly interconnected, making it challenging to untangle and realign intimacies necessary for honorable family formation. Additionally, it was difficult for many of those whose family straddled town and country to find the right balance between meeting both modern urban and traditional rural expectations.
Therefore, Ebola landed in a place in which social reproduction was already in crisis. For those stuck or marginal in family networks, the emergency—including regulations explicitly targeting family rituals—did not necessarily impede rituals’ efficacy. In fact, traditional ritual seemed to be injected with heightened potency and possibility for young people. It is perhaps fitting that an emergency would be productive of ritual. Ritual-based social reproduction—even at its most ideal—is a crisis-ridden process, hence the term “life crisis” used by some anthropologists as a synonym for life course or life cycle with reference to ritual. Ritual, as an event, typically comes as a break in the normal flow of social life and is often infused with an atmosphere of urgency and regulation, which participants relate to in heightened and personal ways, what Victor Turner calls “the subjunctive mood.”12 In the rhythm of family life in Freetown, the greatest demands are often made in the buildup to and during rituals. It is at these times—especially around sickness and death and birth and marriage—that the need for material support, or for people to show up, is most potent. During Ebola when officially sanctioned adaptation to rituals was under way, ritual gained renewed meaning for youths in part due to the greater possibility they found for their own adaptations.
The baby naming ceremony was illegal under state of emergency regulations, given restrictions on gatherings of over ten people. But for the participants it remained a priority, which cannot be written off as frivolous or uniformed. Rather, the ceremony reflects a reality in which social life continued despite and in some senses because of Ebola, a case of the extraordinary ordinary. Surviving Ebola was not only a matter of avoiding contagion or receiving treatment but was also a broader social matter of getting through the emergency in an honorable and meaningful way. The family and the home were the primary targets of official security-focused regulation and scrutiny, which resulted in people often being forced to spend more time at home and with family than they were used to. Family-based rituals were thus an appropriate form for young people to enact meaningful transformation during the emergency. The urgent and temporary albeit unfolding and uncertain qualities of the emergency were harnessed by young people in pursuing their own projects of honorable family formation. Although regulations presented obstacles, these could be creatively overcome, as James and Aisha found out. However, the fact that during the emergency family rituals, particularly burials, were being intentionally regulated and reshaped by authorities, in line with epidemiological priorities as well as some adherence to tradition, made it more acceptable and possible for ordinary people do so too, in line with their own priorities.
For James and Aisha these priorities were at once short-term, in securing a safety net around their newborn son, and long-term, in gaining public recognition of their new family. By adapting a traditional baby naming ceremony to serve as a modern wedding, they were able to attend to these priorities. In doing so, they were enacting established practices in Freetown of navigating between different social orders, following on from the Krio, the decedents of the former British and American slaves who founded the city in the late eighteenth century and brokered between local and British colonial orders during the colonial period, outlined in chapter 1. In Freetown, the Krio present an enduring model for those of different ethnic backgrounds—such as for James’s and Aisha’s families who were from indigenous Sierra Leonean groups—of how ritual and ceremony are used to maintain familial networks, which are central for surviving different scales of crisis and emergency. But James and Aisha were also drawing on their more immediate personal experience of navigating the social expectations of kinship and business, described in chapter 3, in the intimate spaces of the home and family. The Ebola emergency presented openings whereby coexisting yet contradictory social orders were more clearly delineated by those caught up in them, which allowed for them to be creatively realigned.
In a well-known essay, Jane Guyer describes a global temporal shift in the early twenty-first century—reflected in both neoliberal economic and Pentecostal religious thinking—in which the near future is “evacuated.”13 Without medium-term predictability and continuity, collective attention is instead focused on the immediate present and a long-term, somewhat fantastical, future. This would relatively accurately describe much of the life that I and other researchers observed among young people in Sierra Leone pre-Ebola. In the time of Ebola, however, young people’s relationship to the near future was transformed in some important respects. Although the near future remained uncertain, it did occupy a great deal of collective attention.14 In chapter 2 we saw how for those employed in the official Ebola response, the near future was a space that was reinhabited in interconnected ways by formal employment, personal life projects, new solidarities, and the keeping up of family commitments.15 The near future was a national preoccupation as the rate of new Ebola cases was continually monitored, which ultimately determined how long the state of emergency would be in place. In other words, there was an unusual sense of continuity between activities in the present and the imagined future.
It was within this temporary yet unfolding time of emergency that the extraordinary ordinary—the unusual openings for prized notions of ordinary life during crises—could play out. But this was not a given; it required careful attentiveness and negotiation, as pitfalls were plentiful. This chapter explored the extraordinary ordinary during several events: a neighborhood lockdown, a birth, and a baby naming ceremony. Each of these events were in different ways conditioned by the state of emergency and international humanitarian intervention, featuring novel regulations on family life and material flows. But these events reveal young people’s agency in shaping the emergency in line with their own priorities and ideals. Although ongoing challenges and inequalities did not disappear and were in some cases exacerbated by the official Ebola response, young people discovered transformative potential in a number of the features of the emergency, including: the transformed state and family, the atmosphere of urgency, collective attention on the near future, the unusual capacity for family ritual to be adapted, and the unusual clarity on the existence of multiple social orders in day-to-day life.
These transformations were significant because of the ways they contrasted and interacted with the deep-rooted, slow-burning crisis that young people in Freetown as well as across the continent and the globe face in realizing inherited and personal ideals and expectations, in particular notions of personhood and maturity based on the ability to start families, find jobs, and receive recognition and support from elders and the state. In chapter 5, we look at another crisis that befell the Bangura family, although this time at other end of the life course.