An Accidental Sect: How War Made Belief in Sierra Leone

Abstract

Idealists consider beliefs cause wars. Realists consider wars cause beliefs. The war in Sierra Leone offers some scope to test between these two views. The main rebel faction, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was, sociologically speaking, an accidental sect. It lost its original ideologues at an early stage, and absorbed others with a different orientation as a result of military misfortunes. Bombing reinforced the sectarian tendencies of an enclaved movement, and belief proliferated. This confounded military assessments that the movement could be rapidly brought to heel by a private military intervention sponsored by British and South African mineral interests. The movement became an uncontrollable juggernaut, driven by strange sacrificial notions directed against rural populations it had once set out to liberate. The war in Sierra Leone is consistent with the Durkheimian argument that performance forges collective representations. Dealing with armed insurgency in Africa requires appreciation of the artefactual and circumstantial character of social and religious beliefs.

Notes

1. The allusion is to Samuel P. Huntington's book The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order (Simon & Schuster, 1997)

2. Many thanks to Ian Cross, Music Faculty, Cambridge University, for making available the text of his forthcoming article in Musicology Australia.

3. Cf. Rene Girard, Violence and the sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1979).

4. On Durkheim's discussions of the Roman sodales and medieval guilds, and their religious functions, see especially Professional ethics and civic morals (trans. Cornelia Brookfield, Routledge, 1957).

5. A large part of the Upper Guinean coastal forests of West Africa, from Guinea, through Sierra Leone, to western Liberia belongs to this zone in which the passage from childhood to adulthood is marked by initiation into an appropriate sodality, Poro and Sande. Several writers have commented on links between secret society initiation and the recent civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Explanations vary according to whether the social commitments involved are seen as culturally determined (Ellis 1999) or as an artefact of initiation (Richards, 1996), cf. Kastfelt (2005) for a good summary of the issues. See also Hojbjerg (2005) for a valuable case study.

6. Hale is usually translated ‘medicine’, but the term is broader than medication or treatment, and includes aspects of skill and knowledge.

7. Durkheim terms the negative implications ‘social pathologies’, the topic of Book III of The Division of Labour in Society.

8. Particular support came from communities in the extreme east of Sierra Leone. Here, the Kissi people are split into three countries (Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone) and, isolated from three distant capital cities, have long cherished separatist ambitions.

9. Samuel Bockarie (‘Maskita’), Augustine Gbao, Eldred Collins, Issa Sesay and one other.

10. A Nigerian-led West African peace-keeping force was attempting to enforce an end to the uprising of Charles Taylor in Liberia, and mounted air attacks on Taylor's allies, the RUF, to cut supply lines from Sierra Leone.

11. On the politics of the enclave see Douglas (1993), ch 2.

12. Anabaptist – meaning those who re-baptised – the chosen term of their opponents in the Reformation. The Anabaptists rejected the procedures of Zwingli and other reformers in sprinkling infants in order to secure their civic registration as a perversion, for political purposes, of the Biblical rite of adult immersion.

13. EO was founded in the early 1990s and disbanded in 1998, after a change in South African law banning mercenary activity. Military operations appear to have been directed by Eeben Barlow, a veteran of 32 Battalion, the special operations unit of the former South African Defence Forces. Some light has been thrown the modus operandi by subsequent events. Among company founders was Simon Mann, a British former SAS officer, based in South Africa. In 2004 Mann was arrested in Zimbabwe and jailed for seven years for his part in a coup plot in Equatorial Guinea, involving the former British Prime Minister's son, Mark Thatcher. On arrest, Mann was accompanied by 62 veterans of 32 Battalion. In Equatorial Guinea the plotters sought a lucrative oil exploitation concession. A major difference between the operations was that in Sierra Leone EO supported an internationally recognised, if unpopular, military regime; in Equatorial Guinea the aim was regime change

14. Oxford-educated Arabist and poet, Rupert Bowen. Bowen retired from a posting in Namibia in 1992. He was later present at several discussions between Col. Tim Spicer and the newly appointed British High Commissioner to Sierra Leone, Peter Penfold, over a replacement for EO in Sierra Leone, Sandline International; for further information see Sierra Leone Arms Investigation, ‘A Report into the Sandline Affair’ by Sir Thomas Legg and Sir Robin Ibbs, The Stationery Office, London 1998 (available at www.fco.gov.uk, follow links to official documents).

15. Members of the RUFP – the political party formed after the Lome accord in 1999 – explained in a recent interview (Richards & Vincent 2006) that many of the problems of the movement – specifically its loss of political momentum – stemmed from the arrest of Sankoh and marginalisation of the ideological leadership in 1997 (Sankoh was detained in Nigeria, eventually to be returned to Sierra Leone to face a treason trial and death sentence), and the subsequent take-over of the movement in the bush by the ‘five man leadership’ personally loyal to Sankoh, but not to the political ambitions of the movement. Münster and Waco are among the more famous instances of sectarian implosions under siege.

16. A leader of the RUF women's wing told me that her decision to join the movement had been as a result of the torture and death of her husband in army detention in Daru Barracks, in Kailahun District in 1991. He, too, appears to have been amputated.

17. A similar change appears to have taken place recently in northern Uganda, regarding the Lord's Resistance Army/Movement.

18. Disarmament, demobilization and reintegration.

19. Rory Stewart, ‘My moment in charge’, The Guardian Weekend, 10 June 2006, pp. 20-24