"The Place is so Backward": Durable Morality and Creative Development in Northern Sierra Leone.

Abstract

Residents of Makeni, Sierra Leone, describe their town and their behavior as “backward”. Both are “backward” because of the influences of trading, religion, bad governance, poor education, and war, but especially because of endemic poverty. People are preoccupied with the fact that they, and their town, cannot “develop” from this state. I use this preoccupation with “development”—and lack thereof—as a lens through which to examine how basic morality, in Sierra Leone the existence of individuals in reciprocal relationships with kin and other members of patronage networks, has become flexibly responsive to personal circumstances that are consistently “backward” and impoverished. Notions of reciprocity have become more concretely defined and closely aligned with relationships of overt mutual assistance: people are no longer taking their relationships for granted, and if they “develop” on their own, they expect not to have to assist anyone simply because the latter are kin. Some people flaunt their “self-development” by using their money on conspicuous consumption; a habit of politicians especially that is particularly morally contested in arguments over to whom any “self-made man” is obligated. People who “develop” too much without giving back to their social networks will be “pulled down” by the people they have neglected, and all of these habits are enhanced by the aid the town receives. These habits occur because residents, younger people especially, do not remember living in a stable or prosperous enough environment to assume that the exemplary morality—that of “taken for granted” mutual obligation with kin—is possible. Though conscious of what they ought to do in an ideal world, individuals live firmly in the world as it is, and make morally based decisions from this foundation. I argue that the consistent lack of a “normal” living situation, both in the pre-war past and in the present, means that, especially when studying a nation post-war, we cannot assume that a pre-crisis situation was “normal” and use it as a default comparison. Like morality, “normality” must also be studied as is and ought, or we risk ignoring the violent undercurrents that govern life that cannot be lived as it should.