1 MARGINALIZED COSMOPOLITANS

The Houses That Molay and Foday Built

Foday, whom we met in the introduction, was my first host in the Congo Town neighborhood. He was in his early to mid-twenties at the time of the Ebola emergency. Although his life and social world had some of the hallmarks of the lost generation of disconnected youths we often read about in contemporary African cities—and to be sure, some the challenges he faced are unique to his generation—he was in fact closely following on from his parents and grandparents in attempting to build a meaningful life that straddled the close-knit social worlds of their home village in the rural Northern Province of Sierra Leone and the coastal capital city of Freetown. The Freetown in which Foday’s grandfather Molay arrived in the 1950s was a different and smaller place from the bustling and sprawling city of today, but his basic projects of building a life and a family by navigating between coexisting social orders was in many ways the same.

Foday was a charismatic and good-looking young man who worked as a taxi driver. However, he was increasingly focusing on his dream to be a recording artist and a music producer. We were originally introduced by my brother Jacob, who had become close to Foday’s family while living and working in Freetown. When I arrived to undertake fieldwork, Foday agreed to host me in his small two-room home, which he shared at the time with two of his cousins. All three were in their twenties.

At first glance, the surroundings of the house, near the base of the Congo River valley, could easily be described as a slum and its inhabitants as the “marginal youths” who make up a large percentage of the population of Africa’s contemporary cities. The house was without running water, and electricity was sporadic. The land was a few meters above the base of a valley that flooded each rainy season, leaving all the houses around Foday’s susceptible to heavy damage each year (figure 2). Foday’s external walls were built with cement blocks and were therefore more secure than neighboring houses constructed from corrugated metal. As unmarried young men, none of the residents cooked regularly. Instead, they relied on neighbors and family for food or would walk to the junction with the main road to buy street food when they had some money to spend.

Yet, by the standards of young people in Freetown, Foday’s situation was desirable. Despite the lack of basic amenities, his home was fitted with a TV, a sound system, a personal computer, a mixer, a keyboard and a microphone for recording music, and a dresser full of fashionable clothes. Singers and producers would regularly come to the house to record Krio- and English-language tracks inspired by American hip-hop, Nigerian afrobeat, and Jamaican dancehall.³ The land that Foday built the house on had belonged to his now-deceased grandfather, Molay, who had passed it onto his fourth wife. Foday’s grandmother was Molay’s third wife, however, and there many siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles above him in the pecking order. It was something of a coup that he managed to build on the land even if the arrangement was not favorable. The house was leased from Molay’s fourth wife, and in six years it would be handed over to her unless Foday started paying rent at that point.

Molay grew up in a Loko-speaking village in the Northern Province of the country. He had migrated to Freetown in the late 1950s as part of a large wave of rural-urban migration. As with many young migrants, he found work on the docks. Freetown had one of the largest ports along the Atlantic coast of Africa. It was used to export iron ore and other raw materials sourced in the region and also had long-held strategic significance for the Royal Navy. It was for this reason that Freetown was made the capital of British West Africa during the colonial period. With his salary, Molay was able to buy a sizable plot of land in the Congo Town area that stretched from the top to the base of the valley. At the top of the plot of land at a well-located corner of one of the streets that cuts through the neighborhood, Molay built a family compound. The compound, which remains structurally unchanged today, is divided into four two-room units, one for each wife. Foday had grown up in one of these units along with three sisters. The roof is now rusted, with holes covered by makeshift plastic bags and metal sheets. The paint has faded, and the walls are crumbling.

Yet, Molay’s house remains the family hub in Freetown. Its endurance coexists with its overcrowding and crumbling facade, as subsequent generations have made it their home there in the absence of alternatives. As Foday’s older brother Alhassan once explained to me, the fact that the family was not able to maintain the home or build another floor above, as other neighbors had done, is testament to the inability of family members to get along with one another and cooperate. Foday’s home, in contrast to that of his grandfather, was only meant to be temporary. It was the hub not of an intergenerational family but rather of his cousins, friends, and fellow musicians, fitted with modern electronics and entertainment systems. The waged formal work that Molay and many of his generation participated in has become increasingly hard to come by. Foday’s income came from informal enterprise in music and transport and from the patronage of family and friends in Freetown and overseas. His possessions and assets, the vehicle that he operated and the equipment at home, were transitory. Some were borrowed or on loan. Others would be sold when money was needed.

The family that Molay had bought the land from in the Congo Town neighborhood were Krio, the Freetown-based ethnic group that traces its history to the former slaves who had migrated from London, British colonies in the Americas, and along Africa’s Atlantic coast. The neighborhood owes its name to early settlers who came indirectly from Congo via intercepted slave ships after the British ban on the international slave trade. As Fyfe, in his colorful eight hundred–page History of Sierra Leone, published in 1962, tells it, “The Congo people who, it is said, preferred to live by the waterside, left their hilltop at New Cabenda and followed the pretty stream dignified as the Congo River down to Whiteman’s Bay where in 1816 they bought from a Maroon woman a site for a new home, Congo Town.”⁴

The “pretty stream” is now part of the densely settled community where Foday built his house, and Whiteman’s Bay is now a bustling port for small-scale fishing and transport and a produce market. Today there are about twenty thousand residents living in the Congo Town neighborhood. Across the valley is the Siaka Stevens national stadium, built by Chinese contractors in the 1980s. The neighborhood contains many standard features of Freetown neighborhoods, including a cemetery with its own paved access road adorned by colonial-era lampposts. The road to the cemetery, laid down shortly after independence, is the only paved road in the neighborhood. The neighborhood also includes schools, churches, mosques, small food shops and bars, tailors, makeshift workshops of carpenters and mechanics, “cinemas” for watching international football games, a covered market, and a police station. Some of the original two-story wooden Krio houses remain, built in an architectural style inspired by town houses in Louisiana and South Carolina and complete with shutter windows, wooden staircases, verandas, and attic rooms under triangular roofs.

But like most of Freetown, which has tripled in size in the last few decades, the neighborhood is much more crowded today.⁵ Most of the residents are either rural migrants who began to arrive from the early 2000s in the aftermath of the civil war or are related to or descended from earlier migrants, such as Molay. The neighborhood streets are not merely the means of moving through the neighborhood but are also spaces of business and socialization in which the distinction between “family” and “neighbor” is regularly blurred.⁶ Sitting on chairs outside shops and food stalls, friends “keep time.” Mechanics use corners for repairing vehicles. Children play street games, including football with goals made of rocks. Women get their hair “planted,” often on a weekly basis, in makeshift street salons or by friends and sisters. Most homes do not have kitchens; cooking takes place on the veranda or in the street.

The streets are also stages for seasonal and national festivities as well as family rites of passage. In December, streets host their own carnivals in which large sound systems are leased to play through the night. Secret societies hold masquerade performances, often unannounced, on street corners. In this multifaith neighborhood of Christians and Muslims, religious festivities also take place on the street. On “pray day” (Eid), public spaces such as football fields are packed with worshippers wearing newly tailored clothes. On New Year and Easter, residents march behind their local debul (masquerade “devil”), who acts as a kind of neighborhood mascot. Weddings and funerals also involve processions through the streets, and the more prominent the family the bigger the procession, which in some cases includes marching bands and convoys of jeeps. Baby-naming ceremonies, in Krio called pulnador (take outside) are, by definition, held on the street outside the home.

Molay’s generation of young immigrants was documented by the anthropologist Michael Banton in his influential book West African City: A Study of Tribal Life in Freetown, published in 1960. The study spoke to sociological debates, popular at the time, around “de-tribalization,” which connected to the mass rural-urban migrations that were occurring around the globe. In Freetown, Banton observed new ways of being “tribal” by forming professional associations and new forms of kinship and electing tribal headmen. In other words, migrants were discovering ways of maintaining ethnic traditions and ties through distinctly modern social and political organizational forms. Additionally, rural migrants emulated the long-standing Krio political and professional class of Freetown for whom Western education and British cultural orientation were intermixed with maintaining close-knit familial networks, in part through the celebration of family rituals, particularly funerals.⁷

More recent studies of African cities, especially those centering around today’s youths, tell a radically different story. In the so-called neoliberal African city, breakdown, improvisation, flexibility, and the spectral are operative concepts as economic decline, state decay, and crumbling urban infrastructure have become commonplace.⁸ Rural youths continue to flock to cities in search of opportunity or after being displaced through conflict or appropriation of land, while at the same time centralized provisions for urban management deplete. Recent studies of Freetown have focused on its wartime and postwar dimensions, in which violent and neoliberal regimes of work, combined with patrimonial politics, are key organizing principles.⁹ Such renderings resonate with what I saw in Freetown, but they do not tell the whole story.

The young people I got to know well and lived with certainly experienced a great deal of unpredictability and volatility in their lives, paradoxically combined with the stuckedness attributed to recent generations of poor African youths.¹⁰ Formal health systems are badly resourced, with many people relying on informal clinics and home-based care. Jobs are hard to come by. Linked to this is the shrinking of state capacity, as the economy has radically informalized and the state, particularly the police force, has become actively predatory regarding vulnerable young informal workers. Intimate and familial relationships are marked by monetary indebtedness, giving them great potential for instability as boundaries blur between friends, rivals, business partners, debtors, creditors, family, and housemates. The international world is often seen as the only real way out through out-migration or financial flows from diasporic remittances and NGO development programs.

However, the world that I knew in the Congo Town neighborhood did not fit neatly into the more apocalyptic paradigms of African city life, even if the constituent elements were there. These elements coexisted with more structured types of associational and family organization described in their nascent forms in mid-twentieth century accounts of the city. It is even possible that dependence on these forms of support has increased now that the workplace and the state cannot be relied on as they once could. There is a strong community ethos in Freetown neighborhoods and a high degree of secular and religious associational membership. The looser individualized subjectivities associated with contemporary neoliberal cultures and the anonymities of cosmopolitan city living are balanced with the close-knit neighborly lifestyles. While the young men such as Foday at the heart of this book might at times resemble the hustlers and “shifters” inhabiting the African megacity, much of their social lives center around less glamorous and desperate, albeit contentious, arenas of family and domestic life, arenas largely unaccounted for in renderings of contemporary African cities.¹¹ The children and grandchildren of migrants to Freetown maintain strong connections both to family in their home villages and family members who have migrated overseas. Banton might have been interested to know that Foday and his siblings still considered Molay’s birthplace “their village.” Foday would visit several times a year for festive occasions as well as when he was unwell to be looked after by his mother and father who returned there after decades in Freetown.

In the sections below, I outline three aspects of Sierra Leone’s globally interconnected history that are particularly significant in the shaping of the region today: slavery, colonialism, and independence. In times of emergency, it is as if buried, traumatic histories erupt from below the surface, playing out again in new, unsettling configurations. The key point, though, is that the Ebola epidemic and the international and local responses did not come out of nowhere. While old disruptive dynamics of foreign intervention were replayed during the emergency, the integration of long histories of global entanglement mean that frameworks were in place through which ordinary people caught up in the Ebola emergency were able to respond in their own terms. As with Foday and his grandfather Molay, strategies for dealing with the imbalances between different social orders have been passed down through the generations.

Slavery

The Atlantic slave trade, in which over ten million enslaved Africans were shipped to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, was central in shaping the world today and, not least, Sierra Leone. The country’s name is a variation of Serra Lyoa (Lioness Mountain), coined by a Portuguese explorer in 1462 with reference to the shape of the mountains along the Freetown peninsula. As in much of West Africa, trade in commodities such as ivory and gold developed along the coastal areas and down rivers. Gradually expanding trade networks significantly impacted the organization of local societies. The region’s thick forests and coastline are thought to have separated from others in precolonial times. Yet, not long after European contact, parallel and likely connected radical transformations were taking place inland with the Mane invasions from the north, ultimately linked to the spread of Islam. By the mid-sixteenth century the region had become well integrated into the Atlantic system in which British companies and forces dominated.

Extractive trade relationships emerged over a period of centuries, but a major turning point was the sheer scale of the trade in people that comprised the Atlantic slave trade. From 1562, demands for labor in the colonized lands of the Americas fueled the capture and transportation of West Africans who would then be sold into slavery. Investments came from loans from grossers in the city of London, who funded private shipping and slaving operations based in British port cities such as Bristol, Liverpool, and Southampton. In what is known as the triangular trade, slaves were shipped from Africa to the Americas, coffee and sugar was shipped from the Americas to Europe, and arms and textiles and other manufactured goods were shipped from Europe to Africa. Sierra Leone was one of the primary sites of capture in West Africa, particularly for slaves bound for North America. Linguistic and cultural connections to Sierra Leone can be observed to this day among the Gullah people, the African America group living in the Low Country region of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. Many African Americans trace their family back to a slaving castle at Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone River, which has become a tourism and pilgrimage site in recent years.

The Atlantic slave trade had a major impact on social formations around the coast of Africa and farther inland.¹² Low-density internal slavery coexisted with the high-density slavery of the Atlantic trade. Unlike high-density slaves, who were permanent social outsiders used purely as labor, low-density slaves were varyingly incorporated into local kinship systems. In some cases, slaves had their own social units that, while distinct from full households, reproduced kinship-like structures over time in tandem with full households. In African contexts, slaves sometimes held positions of political power, in part because they were not seen as threats to those who were freeborn. In other cases, slaves did marry into elite lineages. The huge demand for slaves during the Atlantic trade led to a new class of local “big men,” who gained power by brokering between European traders and traditional authorities. The trade, however, encouraged raiding and conflict between political groups. Times of crisis would often see shifts in internal slavery from low density to high density.¹³

Internal slavery in West Africa came to a “slow death.”¹⁴ Slavery was legal in most of Sierra Leone beyond Freetown until 1927, more than a century after the ban of the international trade. British colonial authorities relied on slave labor economically and were willing to tolerate and even quietly encourage it even if they claimed to promote abolitionism. Historians have linked the demise of legal slavery to a number of factors, including the economic collapse of the Great Depression as well as the resistance of slaves after returning from fighting in World War I.

However, the boundaries between the practices of internal slavery and kinship-based dependencies in Sierra Leone have continued to be blurry. On the one hand, kinship has long represented liberation from slavery, as slaves secure their rights over children and spouses in some cases through the payment of bride prices. And yet, on the other hand, incorporation into kinship groups on unfavorable terms is itself often understood as a form of enslavement. In agrarian economies in rural Sierra Leone and in West Africa more broadly, labor is traditionally scarcer than land, so economic power has been understood as connected less to the ownership of land, money, and things and more to “wealth in people.”¹⁵ “Big men” typically accumulate wealth in people by marrying their daughters to young men who are unable to pay bride prices. They are thus forced to work the land of their fathers-in-law to pay off their debt. The dissatisfaction of rural youths with such exploitative relationships was a driving cause in many leaving their villages and joining rebel groups during the civil war in the late twentieth century. Even in Freetown today, young people who feel stuck in exploitative domestic relationships describe their predicament as slavery.

If the mass extraction and commodification of people is one side of the story of the Atlantic salve trade, then the founding of Freetown is another. Freetown was settled in 1787 by four hundred or so former slaves from London. The land was bought from a local king by the London-based Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor. The early settlers faced poor harvests, conflict with neighboring groups, and an attack by French sailors. With limited options, some of the settlers worked for local slavers or established their own slaving operations. With the momentum of abolitionism growing after decades of grassroots campaigning and resistance, the slave trade in the British Empire was formally banned by an act of Parliament in 1807, although the practice of slavery in many British colonies remained legal. Prior to this, Thomas Peters, the African-born campaigner who had escaped slavery in America, held meetings with abolitionists in London and the Sierra Leone Company, who agreed that Freetown would be formally designated as a refuge for freed slaves. Peters led a second wave of settlers, known as “black loyalists,” who came via Nova Scotia. They had escaped from plantations in Virginia and South Carolina and gained freedom after fighting for the British in the American Revolutionary War. Subsequent waves of settlers included Jamaican Maroons and a piecemeal migration of Black British colonial subjects, particularly those who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars. Many additional recaptives, slaves intercepted from illegal slaving operations, were sent to Freetown, despite originating from sometimes distant parts of the continent. By 1850, Freetown’s population had risen to fifty thousand.

Colonialism

The multifaceted history of slavery in Sierra Leone cannot be understood beyond the colonial structures in which it was enmeshed. Freetown was ceded to form a British crown colony in 1808—only thirty years after it was founded as a refuge for former slaves—and served as the capital of British West Africa. Freetown’s sizable natural harbor was a well-suited base for the Royal Navy as well as a port for the export of agricultural and mineral resources. Throughout the nineteenth century, the colony expanded from Freetown and its immediate vicinity into the interior of Sierra Leone, increasing British access to commerce and resources. By the late nineteenth century, Britain faced increasing competition with France over regional influence in what came to be known as the “scramble for Africa.” The British employed their preferred method of indirect rule in colonizing the interior of Sierra Leone. Instead of institutionalizing a state bureaucracy and a legal system throughout the territory, the British acquired economic and political control by developing favorable patronage relationships with preexisting or newly created “customary” elites. Freetown residents, particularly the Krios—the ethnic group who trace their lineage to the city’s transatlantic formerly enslaved founders and settlers—were cast as mediators between Indigenous groups and Europeans, negotiating treaties and trade agreements. This role led to both socioeconomic prominence within the colonial hierarchy and racist resentment by colonial authorities. While the positions of the Krio people in Sierra Leonean society has shifted over the centuries, they represent an enduring model for brokerage between local and global social orders for Freetown residents of different ethnic backgrounds.

In 1896 the British established the Sierra Leone Protectorate, which encompassed much of the country today. Despite its name, the protectorate utilized forceful and coercive measures. Few “native” authorities subjugated themselves to the British willingly. Many organized armed resistance against colonial authorities, most famously the chief Bai Bureh, leader of the Hut Tax War who is depicted on one of Sierra Leone’s banknotes. Existing political structures were replaced with a network of “paramount chiefs,” local authorities who were pliable to British interest. The paramount chieftaincy system is still in place today. The expansion of imperial influence from the crown colony of Freetown to the protectorate came hand in hand with a reverse migration of people from the interior to the coastal city. While some became involved in the production and export of agricultural products—palm oil, cocoa beans, and coffee as well as raw materials such as iron ore and, later, bauxite and diamonds—the majority of the residents of the protectorate engaged in small-scale farming of cassava, rice, and peanuts as well as hunting and fishing.

The colony, comprising Freetown and its immediate surroundings, and the protectorate, the vast mostly rural hinterland of Sierra Leone, were separated only by an invisible boundary. Yet, each had its own separate legal and administrative systems, which remain distinct today. Colony residents were subjects of the British Crown and were therefore required to abide by English law, whereas protectorate residents were subject to the customary law of native courts and the “improvised justice” of the Frontier Police. Land tenure in the colony operated with English concepts of freehold interest, while those of the protectorate were rooted in customary principles.¹⁶ While slavery was banned in the colony in the early nineteenth century, it was legal in the protectorate until the twentieth century.

Christopher Fyfe’s History of Sierra Leone is dotted with a litany of accounts of deadly epidemics during the British colonial period for which the mosquito-ridden marshes and jungles around the Freetown peninsula were a natural breeding ground. For the year 1859, Fyfe notes:

One disease after another broke out—fever, yellow fever, measles. Smallpox ravaged the villages [around Freetown]. At least 500 died in seven months. The doctors fell ill, Dr Bradshaw, the Colonial Surgeon, with yellow fever—from which, a rare case, he recovered. Only one Army Surgeon was left to tend the sick. The forty-two European deaths (half the European population) included both bishops, the Roman Catholic priests, and the headmaster of the Grammar School and his wife. Only one senior official died, Smyth, the Colonial Secretary, of smallpox. It was in this terrible year that the vultures or turkey-buzzards are said to have first come to Freetown where they have since been so conspicuous.¹⁷

There were other major yellow fever outbreaks in 1884, 1897, and 1916.¹⁸ Options to drain the swampy regions at the turn of the century were discounted, with the Colonial Office finally opting to move Europeans to the hills, which were served by a newly built railway line. The expression “white man’s grave” was coined in popular colonial-era accounts of West Africa.

The White colonialists were, of course, much better off than most of Freetown’s Black residents. British colonial approaches to disease management tended to be authoritarian and punitive. They employed techniques such as quarantining and disease mapping, measures that were central to the official Ebola response in 2014–2016.¹⁹ The effectiveness of colonial-era public health measures were undermined by the little attention given to caregiving and material support for the poor and sick. By far the deadliest epidemic to hit Sierra Leone was the global 1918 influenza pandemic, known as the Spanish flu, that killed fifty million people worldwide and at least hundreds of thousands in West Africa. The virus entered Freetown through the harbor and then spread via the thousands of dockworkers and ultimately along train lines and other trade routes into the interior, devastating communities throughout the country.²⁰ The death toll from the flu and from the food shortages connected to it was a significant factor in growing dissatisfaction with colonial governance, along with the mass recruitment of young men to fight in World War I.²¹

The position of the Krio people shifted radically during the twentieth century. As mentioned above, the ethnic group inhabited a political and economic niche as mediators between native groups and the British colonizers. The Krio legal status was nonnative, that is, not belonging to any of the country’s sixteen ethnic groups. The Krio people were somewhat assimilated into British colonial culture, expressed in involvement in education, forms of property ownership, English-sounding names, Western dress, transatlantic architectural styles, Christian religious practice, and links to the Black diaspora. In a new constitution drafted in 1951, the protectorate and the colony were formally united after much contestation and resistance from Krio authorities. As White colonial officials took over as middlemen, Krio people found themselves on the receiving end of increasingly direct racism. At the same time, a new cohort of political elites from native ethnic groups began to replace Krio politicians, taking advantage of their ties with residents in the former protectorate. However, Krio businessmen retained control of economic niches in the capital, while others acted as influential members of Freetown’s professional and civil society. The Krio people developed more covert and performative means of maintaining their elite status while emphasizing their distinctiveness from other Sierra Leoneans.²²

Postcolony and Conflict

Sierra Leone gained national independence in 1961. Unlike the more anticolonial and revolutionary breaks in other former colonies in Africa, such as Ghana and Kenya, and in neighboring Guinea, Sierra Leone’s independence was markedly conservative. Sierra Leone has continued to be Western-leaning and procapitalist in its orientation, with political relations maintained with its former colonizer. An important factor was the country’s sizable economic growth in the period directly preceding independence. The 1950s saw growth in diamond and iron ore mining. This funded infrastructural developments, such as roads, railways, and schools and colleges.²³

In 1968 after a democratic transition of power between political parties and two failed military coups, Siaka Stevens came into office, initiating over two decades of what was in effect a one-party state. Faced with the inherited dual system of government of elected representatives in urban areas and the chieftaincy systems in rural areas, an informal network of patrimonialism thrived in place of formal political and economic processes. The global economic crises in the 1970s, fueled by the skyrocketing price of oil, hit Sierra Leone hard, as occurred with many economies in the Global South. The state in its weak neopatrimonial form was ill-equipped to respond effectively, while international arrangements effectively negated any alternative. Sierra Leone, like most poor states under Euro-American capitalist influence, underwent major structural adjustment reforms from the 1970s to 1990s, which attempted to loosen the state’s grip on the free market. In hindsight, it is clear that these policies amounted to little more than weakening any political and economic obstacles to the continued extraction of resources and wealth from the Global South to the Global North while maintaining favorable market conditions for importing foreign goods, such as by cutting local trade tariffs. In 1979 the International Monetary Fund negotiated an economic stabilization plan for Sierra Leone, loaning the government money under the condition that it reduce state spending. Major cuts were made in the areas of infrastructure, manufacturing, health, and education. The railways were permanently closed, along with a major iron ore mine. The economy subsequently collapsed, with drastic shortages of staple foods, and roughly 80 percent of the population falling below the poverty line. Political and economic elites in Sierra Leone began to prioritize their own short-term security—supplying imported rice to clients such as the army and the police—over long-term survival by, for example, employing and supporting the education of their loyal subjects.²⁴

Long-term prospects looked poor as Sierra Leone’s financial dependency on external organizations and countries increased, with economic arrangements turning increasingly extractive. This sowed the seeds for the decade-long civil war, beginning in 1991, following a military coup led by a twenty-six-year-old junior officer, Valentine Strasser, in response to a recent “democratic” election that was understood to be rigged. International pressure mounted to overthrow Strasser, who posed a threat to the existing economic and political arrangements. International sanctions on trade brought the country’s economy to the breaking point. The war itself was a spillover from Charles Taylor’s uprising in neighboring Liberia. In Sierra Leone, rebel groups were led by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), composed of an alliance between young, educated revolutionaries dissatisfied with the failing political and economic system and mainly uneducated rural youths escaping harsh labor conditions cemented by forced marriages and indebtedness to local elders. The RUF fought a stealthy guerrilla war primarily out of camps in the rainforest but also took major regional towns and parts of Freetown. The RUF employed shock tactics, such as extreme and performative violence, but was also driven by neoliberal logics of “just in time” economic production.²⁵ The underpaid military proved unable to contain the RUF, and the use of external mercenaries by the government was financially unsustainable. In the late 1990s following the second rebel invasion of Freetown, British and Nigerian military intervened. The RUF came under increasing financial pressure as trading links to Liberia became strained and in 2001 signed a peace accord. An estimated two million people were displaced during the war, many of them youths.

The closing stages of the war and its aftermath saw the deployment of international peacekeepers, a World Bank–sponsored disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration program aimed at the former rebel soldiers and a high-profile liberal peace and reconciliation process operating out of Freetown.²⁶ During the Ebola state of emergency, international and state militaries were again deployed on the ground, with the official response taking on a highly securitized flavor as military checkpoints were set up countrywide. The postwar period saw a proliferation of NGO-centered development and humanitarian activity—described as the “crisis caravan”²⁷—focusing on areas such as youth empowerment, family planning, and disease prevention. Some successes were achieved in the management of cholera, Lassa fever, and HIV/AIDS and in restarting vaccination programs. However, the aid industry’s reliance on international funding contributed to failings in several areas. Funding disproportionally targeted “exceptional” viruses such as HIV, with programs poorly integrated with efforts to address wider societal and public health failings.²⁸ The relatively rapid turnover of international staff working in the aid sector of Sierra Leone in the postwar years meant that when Ebola hit, there were limited numbers who had experience in working in Sierra Leone’s public sector.²⁹ In addition, the security of international staff in aid organizations was prioritized over those in impacted communities, reproducing global, racialized health hierarchies.³⁰

The international aid apparatus has become an ordinary part of the hustle and bustle of life in Freetown and many other towns and cities in the region, albeit in a smaller-scale form than during emergencies such as Ebola. Public health posters appear around the town, along with NGOs’ signs, branded gear, and white jeeps. International NGO jobs are widely coveted by workers in Freetown due to the pay and benefits they offer. NGO talk has infused the everyday language, while numerous local development and youth empowerment groups offer NGO-inspired sensitization programs and development initiatives.

In 2007, a relatively peaceful general election was held in which there was an internationally celebrated democratic transfer of power from the Sierra Leone People’s Party to the All People’s Congress. And in 2018, the reverse occurred. Yet, Sierra Leone remains one of the poorest countries in the world. There is widespread dissatisfaction with the political process, with continual reports of corrupt practices, political infighting, and a disconnect between mainstream political discourse and the reality on the ground. State-sponsored development projects, increasingly outsourced to Chinese companies, are regarded as superficial and short-term initiatives, rarely contributing to meaningful local investment, as the country’s natural resources are routinely signed off to foreign investors in shortsighted deals. Popular personal engagement with the state, through its legal and bureaucratic institutions and medical facilities, is often fraught, regularly relying on informal arrangements or bribes, with state employees being routinely underpaid. Young people are still faced with limited economic opportunities, relying on precarious informal work to get by or the support of patrons, family, and friends with means. Health systems are highly underdeveloped and actually de-developed in line with the neoliberal doctrine of recent decades that has seen international demands for state expenditures to be cut. Infant and maternal mortality rates are among the highest globally. These conditions sowed the seeds for Ebola to become not only a regional emergency in Sierra Leone and its neighboring countries of Guinea and Liberia but also, in the language of the World Health Organization, a public health emergency of international concern, paving the way for another large-scale, narrowly focused international intervention.

In 2014–2016, Ebola represented both a deadly affliction and a large-scale public health and humanitarian intervention. The emergency was in many ways a manifestation of the very precarities that have characterized ordinary life in poor African cities such as Freetown. The infectious disease thrived in crowded communities that lack adequate health and sanitation infrastructure and in places where the state and other bureaucratic entities are either mistrusted or absent. But at the same time, as the following chapters will reveal, the time of emergency was not unfamiliar and, in surprising ways, was widely welcomed by young Freetown residents as a period of unusual clarity and possibility. As opposed to the notion of two worlds embedded in global health discourse, the language of international intervention was neither alien nor unintelligible to ordinary people in Freetown. Rather, it was like a dialect of their own cosmopolitan language.

Freetown and many other cities in the Global South have been modern for hundreds of years, a fact that is repeatedly forgotten. Many of the customs and organizational forms of the Krio elite from the early and mid-twentieth century, who were culturally and socially interconnected with British colonial and Black transatlantic culture, have become mainstream in Freetown among the non-Krio majority. The intertwining of professional and familial networks, renegotiated around ritual occasions, has become widespread. Brokerage between local and global social orders remains a primary means of economic gain and social mobility in the spheres of work and family.³¹ Kinship in Freetown has long toed a blurry line between slavery and freedom, which young people such as Foday continue to navigate to this day.

In making sense of and responding to the Ebola emergency, Freetown residents were conditioned by the everyday social, economic, and political entanglements immediately preceding and during the outbreak. But they also drew upon deeper personal and societal memory: the experiences of crisis and intervention during and after the civil war in the 1990s and early 2000s, the legacies of British colonialism and independence, and the largely buried history of the slave trade, of which the coastal areas around Freetown were primary locations of extraction and trade of human cargo as well sites of freedom and return. This history is essential to understanding why an underresourced and vulnerable state with a highly depleted medical infrastructure was yet again so susceptible to heavy-handed foreign intervention and equally, how residents of Freetown, a poor yet historically cosmopolitan city, were equipped to shape how it played out in their own terms.