OCCASIONAL PAPER Centre of African Studies University of Copenhagen Controversy over Recent West African Wars: An Agrarian Question? Paul Richards January 2004 ISBN 87-91121-12-4 Controversy over Recent West African Wars: An Agrarian Question? Paul Richards Technology and Agrarian Development Group Social Sciences Department Wageningen University January 2004 Professor Paul Richards visited the Centre of African Studies in October 2003 where he gave a paper as part of his ongoing research into the causes of the numerous civil wars in West Africa. This Occasional Paper represents a revised version of this presentation and a presentation given at the Institute of Social Studies in The Haag. The author wishes to thank both audiences for helpful comments. Paul Richards is Professor of Anthropology and Head of the Technology and Agrarian Development Group, Wageningen University. Contents Introduction................................................................................................1 "Lumpen" violence?..................................................................................1 Detached agrarian youth (and a Zimbabwean parallel)..........................3 Bringing grievance back in.......................................................................4 RUF volunteers ..........................................................................................5 The legacy of domestic slavery in Sierra Leone.....................................7 Tied labour, bride service and court fines...............................................9 A war rooted in slavery? .........................................................................13 The Cote d'Ivoire connection - an old argument revived.....................15 Domestic slavery as an outcome of war................................................16 i. Men excluded from demobilization - the case of M.................................17 ii. Women excluded from demobilization - forced wives and sex workers.19 Grievance begets grievance ...................................................................21 Conclusion ...............................................................................................22 References................................................................................................23 Introduction Inter-related civil wars in Liberia (from 1989), Sierra Leone (from 1991) and Cote d’Ivoire (from 2002) have attracted various explanations. One briefly influential theory suggested “new war” was a post-Cold War upsurge of African barbarism (Kaplan 1994). Other accounts have stressed economic motivations (Berdal & Malone 2001; Collier 2000). Every war needs resources, but whether economics is a sufficient cause of war is controversial. There seems little evidence the West African wars were started by economic competition alone, and the “greed, not grievance” hypothesis has lost some of its shine. Cultural determinism, by contrast, continues to attract adherents (Huntington 2000). One account of the war in Liberia (Ellis 1999) links the violence to “privatization” of ideas about human sacrifice associated with Poro (the male initiation association). Those who consider culture effect, not cause, will be anxious to examine other approaches (Kuper 1999). This paper outlines an institutional approach, with an emphasis on the rural background of the armed factions in the war in Sierra Leone. Explanation focuses on the evolution of agrarian labour from “domestic slavery” in the late 19th century through “community work” and “bride service” in the colonial period to a predatory exploitation of uneducated rural youth today. “Lumpen” violence? There is agreement the civil war in Sierra Leone (1991-2002) represents a crisis of youth. Some see urban drop-outs as major protagonists. Abdullah (1997), Abdullah & Muana (1998) and Rashid (1997) substitute 1 the word lumpens for the more usual rareh, a Krio word apparently derived from the mispronunciation by 18th Century Savoyard entertainers in London of the English word “rare” (as applied to the delights on offer in their street shows). The rareh in Sierra Leone are urban youth of “no fixed abode”. Applied to a male, the term implies a lay-about or petty criminal, and to a female, a commercial sex worker. Rareh were recruited as election thugs under the regime of Siaka Stevens (1968- 1985). The military regimes of 1992-96 (the National Provisional Ruling Council) and 1997-98 (the Armed Forces Ruling Council) also inducted rareh from impoverished East Freetown into the ranks of the army. That the Revolutionary United Front (henceforth RUF) was also a movement of “lumpens” is an assumption that occurs readily to commentators of the Sierra Leonean diaspora, many with urban backgrounds (Abdullah & Muana 1998). Some have carried out research on urban youth, and some suffered at the hands of the “thugs” recruited by Siaka Stevens. It was easy to suppose the brutal RUF was a recurrence of a strategy by which some sections of the elite have sought to maintain a grip on political power (Kandeh 2000). Some commentators, additionally, were anxious to establish a clear “break” between their own radical political activities in the 1970s and ‘80s and the RUF’s naive and “improper” use of the same revolutionary teachings (notably the Libyan Green Book and the writings of Kim Il Sung on guerrilla warfare). The present essay explores the implications of a different finding - that the majority of the RUF were, in fact, young people of rural backgrounds, and that among the RUF leadership there was an “intellectual” core with a belief in tackling the country’s problems not just through revolution 2 (hence Revolutionary United Front) but specifically through agrarian revolution (Richards 1996, Richards et al. 2003). Food security, not diamonds, was the motivation claimed by the RUF, and a number of senior cadres have gone on, through demobilization opportunities, to establish social programmes for agriculture. Detached agrarian youth (and a Zimbabwean parallel) I will not dwell on the ideology of agrarian revolution, since the evidence is summed up in a paper in preparation by Krijn Peters based on interviews with some of the wartime leadership of the RUF. What I want to examine here is the social and historical background to RUF identification with “the agrarian question”, and why agrarian revolution might appeal to rural youth in Sierra Leone. There are parallels in my argument for Sierra Leone to the diagnosis Norma Kriger (1992) offers of the guerrilla war in Zimbabwe. Kriger studied under what conditions the peasantry allied with or resisted the Zanu-PF guerrillas. She concludes, for her sample, that “settled” peasants - i.e. those with land and families - either resisted Zanu or aligned with the movement only under pressure, but that the main supporters of the guerrilla were to be found among the ranks of the young people, and especially among those who lacked the land or other resources to marry and settle to the peasant good life. Similarly, I shall suggest that the recruits to the RUF were, in the main, young people marginalised from the rural agrarian structure by others more centrally placed within a decaying rural system. In itself this is perhaps not a very surprising claim. The army is often an option for the rural unemployed, and young people with few social commitments tend to be high risk takers. But what made some rural young people in Sierra 3 Leone rally to a movement promising deep agrarian reforms was the way a national political system preoccupied by wealth from diamonds “by- passes” rural administration, forcing its agents (chiefs and elders, themselves marginalized by years of neglect), to intensify “traditional” modalities for the exploitation of the labour of young people. The practices in question are rooted in the institutions of domestic slavery widespread in the Upper Guinean forest zone in the pre-colonial period, but prolonged by British colonial indirect rule. Rural squalor and diamond wealth flow in separate circuits. The diamond elite uses its money to import foreign food rather than secure it from local agriculture. The countryside suffered an arrested development, and the resulting sense of political community divided implacably into worlds of “haves” and “have nots” resurrected some of the resentments associated with an era of servitude not yet quite banished from living memory (domestic slavery was ended only in 1928). The resulting explosion has displayed some of the society-overturning violence of a classic slave revolt. As a movement the RUF was a brutal failure. But the problem of agrarian opportunities it tried to address remains. The key to preventing war in Sierra Leone, and perhaps more widely in the West African region, it is suggested, is institutional reform in the countryside that concedes to young people greater control over their own labour power. Bringing grievance back in The paper amounts to an explanation of the war in Sierra Leone in terms of “grievance”, not “greed”. A consequence of a forced division of labour (as Durkheim clearly understood [Durkheim 1893]) is low societal regard for the efforts of uneducated rural youth. Those of no account hunger to 4 be noticed. The war in Sierra Leone, it is here argued, is less about diamonds than respect. The grievance is perhaps the oldest in the book - the notion that violence can compensate a lack of social esteem.1 But it is also suggested that violence, as a reaction to grievances, is blind - conniving at the reconstitution of the very grievances it seeks to eradicate. The exposition proceeds in two steps. First, evidence is presented that the RUF acquired volunteer adherents mainly from rural communities in which institutional practices rooted in domestic slavery survived longest, and that these adherents cite the exploitation of their labour by elders as a factor in joining the movement. Second, it is noted that these practices of exploitation emerged as adaptations to late 19th century insecurity, and that by disorganising the countryside the RUF itself helped create conditions for the re-emergence of exactly the oppressive institutional arrangements against which it fought, helping perpetuate conditions for disaffection. New approaches to the agrarian question need to be tried. RUF volunteers Like the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, the RUF became infamous for building its movement through abducting young people. Recruitment by capture occurred from the outset, the RUF believing that malleable young people would become loyalists when they fully understood the movement’s message. Others joined, as they themselves say, “by 1 In the Book of Genesis Cain killed his brother Abel because Cain’s sacrifice was not acceptable to God. Durkheim taught that our sense of the sacred is a way of recognising society as a distinct reality, independent of (though sustained only by) individuals. If we accept Durkheim’s notion of the societal origins of the sacred then Cain’s violence stemmed from his lack of social esteem. 5