The Scramble for Europe by Stephen Smith

Author:Stephen Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509534586
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

Musa Wo, the Legendary ‘Enfant Terrible’

Martha Carey, an American anthropologist, worked for the French NGO Médecins sans frontières during the civil war in Sierra Leone from 1993 to 2002. An ‘expert beyond experience’ in extreme violence, trained to resist ‘the anguish of the marrow’ and ‘see the skull beneath the skin’,6 she sought to understand the atrocities committed by the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), who punished civilians with a ‘short sleeve’ – an arm chopped off at the elbow – or a ‘long sleeve’ – an amputation at the wrist – to prevent them from ‘taking their destiny into their own hands’, the slogan used by those who advocated a return to democracy and an end to military rule. In an article entitled ‘Survival is Political: History, Violence, and the Contemporary Power Struggle in Sierra Leone’, Carey finds a crucial answer in the men’s secret society known as Poro and its initiation rites. She also reflects on a figure legendary throughout West Africa: Sundiata Keita, a warrior king and founder of the Malian empire in the thirteenth century. According to ‘The Epic of Sundiata’, of which several versions circulate across the region, the emperor was born a cripple, mocked by everyone for his inability to stand upright or walk. On the eve of his circumcision, however, he wrapped his arms around the branches of a baobab tree and, with superhuman strength, pulled the giant tree up by its roots. His feat frightened his half-brother the local king, who chased Sundiata and his mother from the court. Sundiata lived in exile until the day he was called home by his people to help repel an enemy invasion. He defeated the marauders, assumed the throne and acquired a vast empire through conquest.

In Sierra Leone, Sundiata Keita is known by the name of Musa Wo. His legend – peppered with cruelties, swindles and frauds – glorifies chaos. He is an ‘enfant terrible’, a monster both obscene and immoral, yet irresistible. He is the vigorous, ebullient incarnation of youth eluding the control of their elders in a carnivalesque world that has been turned upside down. ‘In the evolution of the war and the composition of the ranks of the various armed movements, the stimuli of class, ethnicity and economic category take a back seat to the older, deeper divisions between senior and junior generations’, writes Carey (2006: 107). She is talking specifically about Sierra Leone but, as we have seen, the small West African country is not alone in featuring a high percentage of young people: the same is true across the continent. If we extrapolate from Carey’s analysis, the intergenerational divide would be the mother of all conflicts in Africa.

‘Even my father, I will give him a bullet’, if – as the phrase implies – our cause requires it (Leonardi 2007: 391). For more than twenty years, some 250,000 young recruits have repeated this chilling phrase as an oath of allegiance in training camps run by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.