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Abstract
This essay is based on recent fieldwork (2005–2006) among Sierra Leonean migrants, both legal and illegal, living in southeast London. Its focus is the lifeworld of a young Sierra Leonean man struggling to find his feet in a city that is both perplexing and perilous. It attempts to show how his struggle for legitimacy, security, income, and an ongoing sense ofconnectedness with his homeland is played out not only in his everyday survival strategies but in his active imagination.
Notes
1. I borrow the term ‘social imaginary’ from Charles Taylor to denote not just the ways in which people theorise social reality ‘in a disengaged mode’ but the ways they imagine their social existence in images, anecdotes and stories concerned with ‘how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fel lows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (Citation2004:23). I am, however, sceptical of the view that the forms of human imagining are entirely determined by socio-cultural conditions, and I agree with Sartre (Citation1940) that the imagination is but one expression of the human striving for presence in relation to others and the world. Inchoate, amorphous, and volatile, this will-to-exist fastens or focuses opportunistically on var ious objects, some actually at hand, some absent, some wholly fantastic, in its search to objectify or consummate itself in the world. But unlike reality-testing, imagining always goes beyond what the world actually is, or any person can actually be.
2. Arguably, the Revolutionary United Front was, however, a violent political repudiation of the old gerontocratic, patrimonial order in Sierra Leone, just as the postwar turn to radical Islam and Pentecostalism represents a radical religious form of modernity.
3. Nigerians referred to Peckham as ‘Little Lagos’.
4. Sewa separated from his girlfriend Stephanie because of fears that her jealous ex- boyfriend, who was half-Jamaican and half-English, might stab him or have one of his gang do so. ‘You have to be very careful of that mixed race; they are dangerous, they could do anything.’
5. In his study of the ‘cultures of secrecy’ associated with cargo cults in Papua New Guinea, Andrew Lattas perceptively observes that a preoccupation with realising ‘new identities and new forms of sociality’ that would emancipate the imagination and give scope for greater autonomy actually increase paranoid fears that others, notably whites, are tricksters and deceivers who are determined to keep power and wealth to themselves (1998:xxii, 45–49).
