3 HOME TRUTHS

Ambiguous Houses

It did not take me long to taste the various flavors of ambiguity within the homes that I stayed in and frequented in Freetown. I was regularly reminded of how just below the surface of seemingly convivial and close relationships lurked long-harbored tensions. I was struck by people’s generosity and care and the willingness for poor households to accept new residents. At the same time, though, I learned that such gestures were sometimes interpreted as harmful and exploitative. Just as strangers could become kin through living together, so too could kin become strangers and forced out of the home. The dependence that many of my neighbors had on those living around them was seen as both a source of strength and a source of vulnerability, with trust and reliance often morphing into secrecy and suspicion.

In Freetown, the home was a particularly ambivalent space for young men and women. Even before the epidemic, young people I became close to would spend much of the day in and around the house.⁵ Many did not have regular jobs to go to or money to spend. In the absence of formal employment, it was often around the home and the neighborhood that business did happen. Opportunities for informal work might come up, or there were the ongoing circulations of money and things to attend to. Being indebted to friends, family, and neighbors was commonplace, and repaying creditors often required pressuring your own debtors to square up, so things would often get messy. Channels of opportunity and sustenance in the home could easily flip into exploitation and indebtedness, reenforcing dependencies and threatening the real dangers of social stagnation and decline. Home ownership, however unobtainable, remains a primary marker of social adulthood, and hanging around the family home can be interpreted as a sign of laziness and immaturity.⁶ These value systems are legacies from an earlier era when wage labor in factories, on docks, and on the state payroll were realistic possibilities for young people in Freetown, as well as harkening to kinship-based systems of land tenure, which are more prominent in rural areas.

Ambiguity around the home is readily observable in Freetown simply from the terms that family members, neighbors, and friends use to greet one another. One set of terms is clearly derived from the language of family: “bro,” “sister,” “auntie,” “uncle,” “pa,” “ma,” and so on. These are applied much more widely than among formal kin. Another set of common terms is derived from the language of business and work, and yet these terms are used regularly in and around the home and neighborhood. These include “senior man,” “boss-man,” “grand-jon” (male boss), “sisi” (female boss), “manager,” and “bor bor” (apprentice). The rule is generally to acknowledge seniority by using appropriate terms, although sometimes this rule is jokingly inverted. Sometimes relative seniority between two people is itself ambiguous or circumstantially dependent, so different terms might be used at different times.

Greeting is not an incidental formality in Freetown but instead is an essential part of community life. It was through learning how to greet others appropriately—after quite a few slipups—that I also learned where the boundaries of my neighborhood community really were. If I was walking along the major road feeding into the neighborhood, passersby did not normally greet or expect to be greeted. As soon as I turned into the side street or path, I was told off if I did not greet a passerby appropriately, especially if the person was senior to me.

The coexistence and interchangeability of terms of greeting that derive from the orders of kinship and business, while in themselves serving to demarcate social relationships, point to instabilities and ambiguities between these different social orders.⁷ The inclination to view a relationship alternately through either lens produces two distinct visions of the expectations involved, which youths are particularly prone to getting caught between. A great deal of social energy goes into determining which social order’s perspective should take precedent in any given circumstance. An everyday example is a young person doing household chores. Examined through the lens of kinship, this looks like the fulfillment of a familial obligation. Seen through the lens of business, it could easily be interpreted as exploitative, unpaid labor.

In the sections that follow, I describe episodes from three different domestic settings I knew well in the Congo Town neighborhood that serve to illustrate the patterns of ambiguity, conflict, and resolution that characterized life in and around the home. The first case is in Foday’s room and parlor, a small two-room house in which several young men lived together, including myself for the first half of a long period of fieldwork between 2013 and 2015. The second is in the Bangura family compound where I lived for the second half of this period composed of several closely connected family units. And the third is on the Cole land, adjacent to the family compound, where there was a dispute between an uncle and a nephew. All three cases preceded and spanned the Ebola epidemic, in part revealing the ways that experiences of and responses to the emergency were entangled with ongoing relational dynamics.

Foday’s Room and Parlor

Foday, my first host, the young taxi driver and musician we met in chapter 1, lived in a small house located near to the base of the valley around which the Congo Town neighborhood lay. The external walls were built with cement blocks, and the internal walls were makeshift medium-density fiberboard. The roof was made of corrugated metal sheets. The house was not connected to running water; we filled buckets from a nearby tap. Access to the house was via a steep rocky path down from the main road. Foday, in his midtwenties, built the home on land belonging to the fourth and only surviving wife of Molay, his deceased grandfather who was the patriarch of the family and had migrated to Freetown in the 1950s. Foday held a leasehold agreement, according to which the property, including the structure that Foday built, would return to his grandfather’s wife after six years unless he then paid rent to her.

As noted earlier, I had gotten to know Foday during a previous visit to Freetown. He agreed to host me when I arrived. Life in the home was fun and stimulating, but it was also ultimately a place I found challenging to live in. Many youths from the neighborhood would hang out there, playing video games, watching DVDs of TV shows and movies, or listening to and recording music. The atmosphere was often playful and quite male. This was somewhat balanced by the neighbors’ place, which housed mostly female residents under a strong maternal figure. The proximity between the homes, both physical and social, made it feel at times like we were all living together under one roof.

When Foday was not driving a taxi, he focused on music. He ran a small recording studio—located in the front room—that would typically operate at night when electricity was more reliable than in the day, when there were regular power cuts. The normal sleeping arrangements were me sharing the bed with Foday, with Umaru and Sam, two of Foday’s male cousins, sleeping in the parlor on the sofa and a makeshift mattress when recording had stopped. Umaru was slightly older than Foday, as the lines on his forehead revealed. He was a teenager during the civil war, when he fought as a rebel soldier, although he did not talk about this much. Umaru was now a comedian by profession and carried a warm and playful disposition through much of his social life. He presented a weekly comedy radio program and was hired by people in the area to perform at parties, but this work had not yet translated into significant financial reward. Umaru and Foday had a very intimate friendship, which they described as “brotherhood.” Sam, a few years younger than Foday, was the bor bor of the house who had come to stay with Foday after Sam’s father died. Sam was young but ambitious about progressing in life. Foday’s father had asked him to take Sam under his wing as a driving apprentice, and he agreed.

While all three were cousins and roughly the same age, their reasons for living together and the character of their relationships went beyond family. Foday had hundreds of cousins, but Umaru and Foday had met at the funeral of an elder within the family, and their relationship soon became close-knit. They became collaborators in the shared project of gaining traction in Freetown’s entertainment scene. Their friendship also involved daily acts of tactile playfulness, sharing clothes and food, and attending church and family events together.

Sam and Foday’s relationship was initiated by Foday’s father but took on a life of its own. Sam expected Foday to become his “boss” and “big brother” and to initiate him into the driving business by teaching him how to drive and then employing him as a driver. From Sam’s perspective, becoming close to Foday and working around the house was a way of encouraging Foday to take him under his wing and give him the tools to earn a living. On a day-to-day basis, Sam performed household tasks such as cleaning the house, washing clothes, and collecting items from the shops. Foday sometimes gave Sam portions of food, which Sam often received from family and neighbors, and provided him with a floor to sleep on. This was a common arrangement for young people moving into a household; a roof over their head was conditional on either contributing money (if they had an external income) or working for the house.

The three relationships, while built around acts of care, mutual support, and intimate proximity, were ultimately unstable. Umaru and Foday’s relationship became increasingly strained. While Umaru, as a more senior and well-connected person in the entertainment business, was in many ways a desirable partner for Foday, Umaru soon began to look like something of a liability; Foday was putting more into relationship on a day-to-day basis. The difficulties were compounded when Umaru, while using a motorbike that Foday had obtained (in exchange for his car), left the keys in the ignition at the top of the path leading down to the house while he ran down to fetch something. When he reached the top of the path again, the motorbike was gone. This incident, however, appeared to me to reveal—rather than necessarily cause—a dysfunctionality in Foday and Umaru’s relationship. Umaru came with his mother to the house to officially beg for Foday’s forgiveness, as they did not have the money to replace the bike, and Foday reluctantly accepted. He admitted to me afterward that he did not feel that he had much of a choice.

The relationship between Sam and Foday became even more riddled with resentments and animosity. Foday never got around to teaching Sam to drive, which was Sam’s primary goal in living with Foday. Lessons were still held up as a possibility by Foday whenever Sam brought up the subject but were continually delayed when it came to practicalities. Increasingly Sam felt that he was being exploited and that his junior status of bor bor was becoming further cemented. Sam once said to me with reference to Foday that “we should be working together as brothers, so we can develop, but he doesn’t take other people’s problem seriously.”

These grievances were rarely expressed directly, however. If they were, then they would provide the concrete evidence necessary for aggrieved parties to formally complain to higher authorities, such as Foday’s father in this case. Or they might, people feared, lead to indirect retaliations, such as sharing negative stories about each other with others in the neighborhood or family or through witchcraft attacks.⁸ Rather, grievances were enacted symbolically around the house, a stage on which expectations were renegotiated on a daily basis. Sam stopped helping out so much in the house, and Foday started doing much more of his own cleaning. Equally, Sam would accept Foday’s offers of food much less regularly, finding food instead among other neighbors and friends with whom he had close relationships, independent of Foday.

On one occasion Foday, Umaru, and I were sharing a plate of rice and cassava leaf stew with fish prepared by one of our neighbors. Foday called out to Sam, who was sitting on the veranda listening to music in his headphones, “Come, let’s eat.” After a few loud shouts and no response from Sam, Foday, frustrated, exclaimed, “He does this too much! This is the last time that I am going to offer him food.” For Sam, these gestures demonstrated that he was not entirely reliant on Foday. For Foday, they signified that he owed Sam less. Eventually Sam started spending nights elsewhere, although he left his clothes at Foday’s as a marker that he still had a place there. In one tense moment, Foday moved Sam’s clothes from their usual spot when he was cleaning the house one weekend, sending the signal that Sam was no longer welcome in his home. Eventually after three years together, Sam moved out to stay with a friend elsewhere in a more equal-footed relationship, similar to that between Umaru and Foday.

But Sam was obsessed with finding a place of his own. He told me once, with a tone that conveyed frustration mixed with quiet resolve, that “if I move out, I believe I will be able to progress more if I am on my own.” He attempted to negotiate with the same grandma in the family who owned Foday’s land to build on a small plot of land nearby, but this proved challenging given Sam’s relatively distant connection to the main family compound in the area (where none of his nuclear family lived). It was notable to me that Sam seemed to see having his own place as a means to an end, a way of getting on in life more generally, rather than an end in itself. The lack of a place of his own was not the consequence of having no regular, good employment, but, as he described it, was instead almost the reason for it. The logic became clear when Sam explained to me that “Foday would respect Umaru more if he had his own place. At his level, he should have his own place.” This exemplified a paradox that was central for many young people such as Sam and Umaru. Getting on required at one and the same time living under the protection of close support figures, who straddled the boundaries between kinship and business, and being independent from them.

The Bangura Family Compound

After eight months or so with Foday, I transferred to a small room and parlor of my own within a family compound only a few hundred meters up the hill from where Foday lived. It was shortly after this move that Ebola regulations began coming into effect. My move was partly in response to tensions in Foday’s home, which felt exacerbated by my presence in the already crowded space that also contributed to some tension between Foday and myself. Perhaps this move was part of my own coming of age in Freetown. The family compound belonged to the Bangura family. I was particularly close to James, the oldest son in the Bangura family, who was friends with Foday, although their relationship too was rocky. In the main house in the compound, which comprised three small bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, and a veranda, lived James’s father Jonathan—who grew increasingly frail during the course of my fieldwork—and his four children. Jonathan’s wife Leah also lived in the home with her three children. Leah was a regular churchgoer in her late forties and a strong maternal presence in the compound. In adjacent homes lived several other relatives, including James’s uncle and aunt and their daughters and his great-uncle. During my stay several occupants came and went, giving the extended household a shifting character.

The social structure of the home was fairly typical of Freetown family compounds. Unlike Foday’s room and parlor, the Bangura home was intergenerational. However, while hierarchies defined by formal notions of kinship were acknowledged in principle, in practice roles and responsibilities were also continually renegotiated. Jonathan, a cook by profession, was designated as head of the compound. Strictly speaking, the most senior family member was Mohammed, a short, loudly spoken builder, nicknamed “Boys” because he was often found with an entourage of young apprentices. Mohammed was a son of the mami (senior woman) who founded the compound. The mami had arrived from upcountry in the 1950s and acquired the land, initially to establish a women’s initiation society. This still operated during my fieldwork though in a much less prominent form; there was one dark room in the corner of the compound to which only the initiated had access. Mohammed had never married, had not been educated, and did not hold a steady job or have a steady income. His precarity was undoubtedly exacerbated by a heavy drinking habit and somewhat erratic behavior. He had several children, but many of them were estranged from him. As a result, his seniority within the family was significantly depleted.

Jonathan was frail during my time at the compound, and he died shortly after I left. His wife Leah had taken over some of his professional responsibilities as a cook and had also taken over many of the key decision-making processes in the household, another mark of seniority. James, a cook and waiter, also became more involved in managing the house at this stage. He took over as head of the household alongside Leah when his father passed away. Uncle Samuel, a distant relative who lacked any claim to the land, did not attempt to replace Jonathan as head of the household but, as an educated and respected schoolteacher, held seniority and respect within the compound, which was regularly acknowledged at family gatherings.

Beyond the more formalized decision-making processes—such as at family events and gatherings—hierarchies within the home were performed on a day-to-day basis through various enactments of a “chain of command.” For example, senior people were entitled to and would regularly send junior people to the shops to buy something for themselves or for the house. This activity could only be performed this way; sending a more senior person would be seen as highly insulting. For people who were closely positioned in terms of status, sending each other was a semi-humorous way of asserting seniority.

Another example involved the distribution of the daily pot of rice and plasas (sauces/soups) that were cooked in the home. The more senior people in the home would have their own portions set aside, often with larger quantities of meat or fish. Once they had finished eating, it was their responsibility to redistribute portions of food to the more junior members of the household. Food sharing would often extend beyond the established residents of the home, serving to nourish broader networks of relatedness and establish their connection to the home. As one friend put it, “Your base is where you eat.” The passing down of food could reassert hierarchies, but food could also be shared in more humbling ways.

Zainab was a long-term resident of the compound, a young woman I came to know as James’s sister. I discovered much later that she was not formally related to the Bangura family. She was the longtime long-distance girlfriend of James’s first cousin Victor, whom James had grown up with in their native village. James was particularly close to her as a result. Victor had been living in Ghana for several years, where he was training to become a Catholic priest, which created some ambiguity about the status of his relationship with Zainab. There were expectations of celibacy, of course, but Victor did not seem intent on adhering to this religiously.

Zainab slept in a room that she rented immediately adjacent to the main family rooms. She often did her cooking separately, which gave her a degree of independence. She was studying and was also working at a hotel in town as a receptionist. At one point she juggled two full-time jobs at separate hotels. She had incorporated herself into the family—beyond her relatively fragile connection through James’s cousin—partly by contributing to family expenses. She made especially generous contributions to family programs such as weddings but also contributed by being a respected and caring figure in the compound. For much of the time that I was living there, Zainab took care of two children from the Bangura family whose mother had unexpectedly passed away until they were transferred to a more permanent residence. These activities strengthened her position within the family, and she was regularly called to family meetings where important decisions were made. However, her connection to the family was never entirely stable. In the physical absence of her boyfriend, she kept local boyfriends without letting it be widely known; this was a common practice but nevertheless was somewhat looked down on. These relationships involved not only companionship but also some additional income from which the family benefitted. At the same time, though, Zainab’s other relationships could be used against her when asserting her claims to the residence.

Not everyone coming into the household did so with such success and acceptance as Zainab. For a few rocky months Leah’s niece Kadiatu, a young woman in her mid to late twenties, came to live with us. Kadiatu enjoyed an active social life. Leah had taken Kadiatu under her wing; Kadiatu’s mother, Leah’s younger sister, did not have the resources to look after her. In addition, Kadiatu had four children fathered by various partners and was unable to look after them. Leah explained to me that she hoped the compound would provide Kadiatu with a stable environment until she was able to settle down herself. A condition, presumably unspoken, of Kadiatu living in the compound was that she would contribute to daily household tasks such as cooking and cleaning.

While Kadiatu’s kinship connection to the house was more direct than Zainab’s and Kadiatu was older, her lack of external income (she had neither a job nor financially supportive partners) made her manifestly lower status within the home. She was tasked with household work alongside the children and teenagers in the house, one of whom she was sharing a bed with. Before Kadiatu’s pregnancies, Leah had previously been sponsoring her education. Kadiatu expected Leah to pay for her to continue her education now that she was living under her or to take a course such as in cookery. But Kadiatu saw this as a false promise that was dangled like a carrot on a stick while she cooked and cleaned, not unlike Foday’s promise to teach his younger cousin Sam to drive.

Tension progressively grew in Kadiatu and Leah’s relationship, coming to a head over several issues. The first was Kadiatu’s habit of leaving the home in evenings, sometimes coming back very late or spending the night elsewhere. Kadiatu had recently started seeing Umaru, Foday’s cousin, and would sometimes spend the night with him on the floor of his parlor, where I had been previously living. Leah worried about Kadiatu. Some nights she sat on the chair on the veranda waiting for her niece to come home. The second issue was business-related. Leah had loaned Kadiatu money to start a small fish-selling enterprise. The plan was to buy from a local fisherman and then sell the fish door to door. What happened instead, according to Leah’s plausible reports, was that Kadiatu borrowed fish from market traders downtown on credit and sold them on without significant profit while “eating” (wastefully spending) most of Leah’s seed money. She was slowly repaying Leah’s loan until she found herself in debt over her head to the fish seller downtown. Leah reluctantly forked out more cash to bail Kadiatu out.

Part of the problem was the ambiguity in Leah and Kadiatu’s relationship. Leah regarded Kadiatu as her daughter while she was living in her house. But Kadiatu did not regard Leah as her mother and thus did not feel that she needed to obey house rules, such as coming home early and working around the house. Perhaps she saw Leah more as an investor. During one heated argument that took place outside the house, Leah cried, “If your child does not act correctly, you will feel it,” a statement that got straight to the heart of the matter. When Kadiatu came close to Leah she became both a family member and a business partner. But the business project, while perhaps being a source of connection early on, had ultimately strained their familial bond. Finally Kadiatu left the house, leaving her tensions with Leah alive and unresolved.

After many months of bubbling tension, Kadiatu came to beg Leah. This was an official way of talking grievances out and apologizing. The meeting was formally witnessed by several neighbors and significant family members and was chaired by the young formally dressed pastor of the Pentecostal church that James, Umaru, Kadiatu, and Foday attended. During the course of the meeting, grievances were openly expressed. The pastor talked about how this was an opportunity to “start again.” At one point he told Leah, “You are in fact the mother, this is your child,” thus clarifying the underlying tension as well as astutely drawing direct attention to the root cause of the problems. Leah was still as she heard this, her eyes slowly welling up. It was only through confronting this issue that their tension could resolve, although it seemed to take Kadiatu’s moving out of the home to get there. As the event reached its climax, Kadiatu, in line with tradition yet with a hint of knowing exaggeration, fell to her knees, touched Leah’s feet, and begged for forgiveness. Both women looked each other in the eyes and started laughing.

The Cole Land

The land adjacent to the Bangura compound was owned by Mr. Cole, an elder who had returned upcountry to his native village. When Mr. Cole passed away, the land became the object of dispute between his son, Brima, and his brother, Andrew, both of whom resided there. I had become friendly with Brima, who was close to both James Bangura and Foday, acting like something of a big brother to them as they were growing up. Brima was in his early to midthirties. He worked as the intelligence officer at the local police station, which was a steady job, but he was badly and unreliably paid. Brima was a well-known figure in the neighborhood. He would act as an informal consultant for residents when they were considering taking an issue through the formal legal system. Brima lived in a small room and parlor with his wife Sally and their two young children.

The Cole land was subdivided into several units containing smaller homes like Brima and Sally’s. By the road was a much larger multistory compound that had been built by his uncle Andrew—a former police officer—and Andrew’s wife Fatu. Andrew had made a significant amount of money when he was posted at the airport, having become embroiled in the illegal cocaine trade. The operation was eventually busted. Andrew was scapegoated by the police force and was dismissed from his duties and sent to prison for some time. Now out of prison, he had become an established member of the community and the family. Andrew lived primarily off rent collected from the houses on the family land as well as from a small grocery store that Fatu ran from the ground floor of their house. Brima, however, was permitted to collect rent from the group of houses directly next to his own, which supplemented his own salary from the police force.

Mr. Cole’s death threw these arrangements up in the air. The documents for the land were in his name and in his possession. According to Brima, his father had intended to hand over the documents to him as his wife’s oldest son (although he also had children with other partners) but had never gotten around to putting Brima’s name on the documents. Nonetheless, Brima would have had strong claim to the property if he was able to access the original documents. In a cruel twist of fate, his father’s corpse had been rapidly collected by an official Ebola burial team—according to state of emergency protocols—while Brima was still on the road. And the documents for the land were in his father’s pocket! Brima’s account, regardless of its veracity, speaks volumes about the ways that the tensions of the Ebola emergency animated existing family dynamics.

Andrew, as Mr. Cole’s younger brother, was a senior member of the family and a longtime resident on the land and had a strong claim to it after his brother’s passing. Such disputes between children and siblings of the deceased are commonplace in claims to land in Sierra Leone, given ambiguities in inheritance protocols. The conflict blew up when Andrew began collecting rent from the whole property, ignoring the previous arrangement in which Brima received a share of the rental income. Brima felt that was under increasing pressure to leave the property. He saw his half-brother Alfred, who shared the same father, being groomed by Andrew to replace Brima as the property’s caretaker. But Brima bitterly interpreted this as the same ultimately manipulative form of care that he too had received from Andrew.

Andrew had helped bring Brima into the police force and, in a more amorphous sense, into adulthood. As Brima put it, he “gave me my first Guinness stout” (a popular bottled beer). Brima’s indebtedness to and respect for his uncle were interwoven with feelings of betrayal and resentment. All of this was crystallized for Brima when Andrew spoke to him at Mr. Cole’s funeral. Brima told me that “I distinctly remember him saying, ‘I will look after you now.’ It was an ironical statement.” The event of death brought to the fore competing interests that had been suppressed beneath the convivial surface of everyday life shared by neighbors in a close-knit social environment. Brima had taken on a nurturing role with Andrew and Fatu’s daughters, regularly helping them with their schoolwork and giving them lunch money. Likewise, Brima and his wife Sally’s daughter, Aisha, went regularly to Andrew and Fatu’s to play and eat.

For Brima, the conflict was a test of pride, dignity, and resolve. Andrew and Fatu “did not have mind” to tell him directly to leave. Instead, they employed indirect means to make it intolerable for Brima to stay, thereby forcing him and his family to depart by their own volition. This approach, I was told, was “the typical African way.” Brima was convinced that Andrew and Fatu wanted to prove that he could not survive without collecting rent from the property: “They wanted to see me suffer.” Brima believed that they had intentionally cut off his electricity by contacting someone from the National Power Authority through another neighbor who worked there and had similarly distanced himself from Brima. Brima was also sure that Fatu was targeting him and his family through occult rituals. He accused Fatu of preparing a spiritually poisoned salad for him to eat. However, as with his electricity being intentionally cut off, this was indirect and difficult to confirm.

Brima isolated himself for some time, not socializing with his neighbors as he normally would have done. He started building a small house on the outskirts of town, where he had bought land a while back and had been planning to build. He did not intend to give up the fight by leaving, but the knowledge that there was to be a place where his family could “live in peace” and “keep things to themselves” was a source of comfort to him. It also proved that he could survive without collecting the rent. Brima was clearly insecure about being seen as overly dependent on others for a helping hand.

The instability of Brima’s emotional state during this period seemed to me to correspond closely to the progress on his new house. Each stage that was completed gave Brima more confidence, marking the transition from being socially reclusive and cut off to engaged in the community. The relationships he had cultivated with Andrew’s daughters were also key in overcoming the hostilities. Andrew’s oldest daughter came to Brima’s house to appeal him to become close again with her family, claiming that they were acting stubbornly because they had consumed poisoned food prepared by Andrew’s former wife, which had “changed their minds.” Brima remained cautious about letting down his guard and reconnecting. “Trust takes a long time to build back,” he told me, not least because he feared that exposing himself further to them would enable them to take advantage of him again. He suspected that Fatu’s call to perform a sara (ceremony) with his daughter Aisha after she was ill so as to protect her from witchcraft was in fact a means of spiritually attacking her and them, of coming close with bad intentions. In turn, Brima felt aggrieved that the close and supportive relationship he had built with Andrew and Fatu’s daughters had not been acknowledged.

As a form of cease-fire, Brima and Sally went to beg formally to Andrew and Fatu in the presence of Mr. Barrie, a respected community elder and a prominent member of the local mosque. Mr. Barrie acknowledged the “big wahala” that everyone was talking about, gently shaking his head as he spoke with a tone of quiet but dignified authority. Although Brima believed that he was in the right, as the less senior person it was his responsibility to apologize to his uncle. Andrew was visibly upset about bad language that Brima had used against him and, in a Shakespearean turn, had claimed that Brima had actively spread the rumor around the family that Andrew had killed Brima’s father. The session was an opportunity for Brima to voice his grievances against his uncle, and some measure of peace was achieved. The issue over ownership of the compound was not resolved, and Andrew continued to collect all the rent, but the “bad feeling in the heart” was ameliorated. Shortly afterward, Brima told me that “dignity is more important than money.”

For Brima, a key moment in the reconciliation process was the eventual celebration of his and Sally’s wedding anniversary after some delay. The big sound system blasting out the latest Nigerian Afrobeat music was a proud message to Andrew and Fatu that he was living his life to the fullest rather than suffering. He sent them and his other neighbors food and drinks from the party. It did not seem coincidental that it was during this semipublic celebration that Brima and Fatu finally spoke at length in the middle of the dancing area, visibly—although not audibly—airing what they had been holding inside.

Conflicts of Care

The three cases outlined above all speak to conflicts of care within and around the home, despite significant differences in living arrangements and domestic structures. Ambiguity between different sets of expectations around care and domestic roles seems to bubble below the surface, erupting in moments of dispute, and then sinks back down when things are, at least temporarily, resolved. Care itself has a double-edged quality. In one moment it is experienced as nourishing and supportive, and in the next, particularly for young people, it is infantilizing and exploitative.

Such conflicting attributes of care get to the core of the almost inevitably unstable dynamics of human intimacy. In Sierra Leone, there are well-developed ways of thinking and talking about the tensions of home-based care. As elsewhere, witchcraft is understood as a malevolent force transmitted by those close by through the sharing of food or the targeting of victims in their sleep. For example, in the Cole land dispute, Brima accused his aunt of poisoning a salad that she had prepared for him. The discourse of witchcraft speaks to the kinds of day-to-day ambiguities and conflicts that I have described in this chapter. For youths in Freetown, care around the home can be stigmatizing and deadly—socially, economically, and emotionally—just as it is nourishing and vital.

As discussed in chapter 1, the dual potential for freedom and slavery engendered in kinship goes back at least as far as the Atlantic slave trade. But in twenty-first-century Freetown, it finds particular expression through the demands of kinship and business that are simultaneously placed on domestic and familial relationships. The fulfillment of young people’s desires to become somebody typically requires acceptance within familial networks at the same time as it requires some degree of independent economic worth through land, home ownership or an income. In practice, however, both parts of the puzzle are dynamically—and often paradoxically—interconnected: you need family to make it in business, and business to make it in family. Young people find themselves wanting recognition within the home and then wanting to leave altogether.

In the room and parlor, Foday and Sam were cousins and so in kinship terms were roughly on an even footing. In business terms, Foday was Sam’s boss even though the promised driving apprenticeship never materialized. This relegated Sam to a junior role in the home, which came with a heavy load of household chores. When Sam became increasingly dissatisfied with the lack of progress on the business front and the chores, he attempted to renegotiate his place in the home by demonstrating that he could survive independently. This was symbolized by rejecting Foday’s invitation to eat from his plate. In another circumstance, Foday’s invitation would be read as a caring and generous gesture. But in this instance, it was interpreted by Sam as a cruel act of manipulation.

There were similar patterns in the Bangura family compound. Although Zainab’s formal connection to the family was weak because she had not married in, she had successfully become kin by contributing to household and family projects, funded in part by income that she drew in externally from her employment as a hotel receptionist. Kadiatu’s story was the reverse. Work in the house felt exploitative and demeaning, and her failed business enterprise with Leah, her aunt, resulted in their relationship being suspended. When their relationship was finally reconciled, it was possible only by the reinforcement of Kadiatu’s subservient position to Leah.

Finally, in the Cole land dispute, competing claims between an uncle, Andrew, and a nephew, Brima, became interlaced with other measures of seniority, notably professional and economic. Andrew had helped to bring Brima into the police force, thus playing a large role in his development. But after his father had died, Brima had found his uncle’s promise to look after him threatening because he feared that it would now stunt his development, restricting his independence. In the end, however, Brima decided to not leave the compound even if it meant accepting his uncle’s seniority.

These patterns, or cycles, within caring relationship around the home were characterized by prolonged phases of ambiguity, punctuated by moments of clarity, typically when tensions reached the boiling point. This is not dissimilar from Victor Turner’s classic notion of a social drama: “a limited area of transparency on the otherwise opaque surface of regular, uneventful social life.”⁹ It was during these moments of domestic crisis, or emergency, that the entangled yet conflicting modalities of care—supportive and exploitative—and the primary registers of status—kinship and business—unraveled, with participants being able to clearly glimpse their constituent parts.

It is not coincidental that these events and the discussions that I had with participants during and around them were critical in developing my own understanding of the foundational social dynamics of the home. And yet, nonverbal gestures were often just as significant if not more so in making sense of and ultimately resolving tensions than what was spoken: Sam’s refusal to eat from Foday’s plate, Kadiatu touching Leah’s feet, and Brima and Fatu’s exchange on the dance floor.¹⁰ The interplay between different ways of knowing—spoken or unspoken and embodied—that come to fore in an emergency, whether micro, such as family dramas, or macro, most obviously during the time of Ebola, is a theme that will crop up again in the chapters to come.

This chapter began with a discussion of Ebola quarantines and the mixed responses they elicited. In some cases, people complained about being cut off from their established networks of care. In other cases, being cut off was understood as the latest development in an ongoing tussle between residents or neighbors, quite separate to the Ebola epidemic. And some Freetown residents sought out quarantines because of the material benefits that came with them.

It was well known that Ebola spread through channels of intimacy and familial care; much of the public health messaging directly spoke to this. Ebola was cruel because it rendered care for the sick and the dead potentially life-threatening for the caregiver. Alternatively, falling ill could lead to the sick being stigmatized, with normal expectations of care morphing into exclusion. But contact, sharing, and care among networks of family and friends was crucial in getting through the emergency and maintaining important social relationships. Thus, Freetown residents faced major dilemmas in adhering to the demands of the official Ebola response, which tended to emphasize separation and distancing oneself from others, and the demands of family and friends to come close to one another during a crisis.

How new was all of this? This chapter has suggested that at their core, such ambiguities around intimate and domestic relationships were far from novel in Freetown. In fact, young people in Freetown prior to the Ebola epidemic were greatly preoccupied with navigating between different social orders and negotiating their contradictory sets of expectations. In the domestic spaces of the home and the neighborhood—settings that are central for African youths but widely overlooked—the dominant social orders are those of kinship and business. As we have seen, determining which social logic should take precedent in a particular instance is foundational to the disputes and resolutions outlined in this chapter. The fundamental mutual interdependence and yet irreconcilability of the two logics, underpinned by a broader economic context of material scarcity and extraction, is a central factor in the current manifestation of what has been called the crisis of youth in Africa.

But the Ebola emergency did represent a new vantage point regarding an old problem. The disease was an alarmingly physical and exaggeratedly cruel manifestation of conflicts of care around the home. Ebola revealed new dimensions of long-standing social ambiguities and came with new ways of talking about and responding to them. Sometimes this amounted to unusual clarity and novel solutions to ongoing and deep-rooted challenges. While domestic and intimate relationships significantly shaped young people’s experiences of the emergency, the emergency in turn reanimated and reconfigured established ordinary social processes. These themes are developed further in chapter 4 and chapter 5, which center in part on developments in the Bangura family during Ebola.