The Paradoxes of History and Memory in Post-Colonial Sierra Leone

Sylvia Ojukutu-Macauley, Ismail Rashid

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2013
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780739180037
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This anthology reflects the complex processes in the production of historical knowledge and memory about Sierra Leone and its diaspora since the 1960s. The processes, while emblematic of experiences in other parts of Africa, contain their own distinctive features. The fragments of these memories are etched in the psyche, bodies, and practices of Africans in Africa and other global landscapes; and, on the other hand, are embedded in the various discourses and historical narratives about the continent and its peoples. Even though Africans have reframed these discourses and narratives to reclaim and re-center their own worldviews, agency, and experiences since independence they remained, until recently, heavily sedimented with Western colonialist and racialist ideas and frameworks. This anthology engages and interrogates the differing frameworks that have informed the different practices—professional as well as popular–of retelling the Sierra Leonean past.

In a sense, therefore, it is concerned with the familiar outline of the story of the making and unmaking of an African "nation" and its constituent race, ethnic, class, and cultural fragments from colonialism to the present. Yet, Sierra Leone, the oldest and quintessential British colony and most Pan-African country in the continent, provides interesting twists to this familiar outline. The contributors to this volume, who consist of different generations of very accomplished and prominent scholars of Sierra Leone in Africa, the United States, and Europe, provide their own distinctive reflections on these twists based on their research interests which cover ethnicity, class, gender, identity formation, nation building, resistance, and social conflict. Their contributions engage various paradoxes and transformative moments in Sierra Leone and West African history. They also reflect the changing modes of historical practice and perspectives over the last fifty years of independence.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Rebellious Subjects and Citizens: Writing Subalterns into the History of Sierra Leone
• 3 Clapping With One Hand: The Search for a Gendered “Province of Freedom” in the Historiography of Sierra Leone
• 4 (Re) envisioning the African Diaspora: Historical Memory and Cross-fertilization in Post-colonial Sierra Leone
• 5 Historical Memory, Pan-Africanism, and National Identity
• 6 The Chalmers Commission and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Sierra Leone: Official Inquiries as Historical Memory
• 7 Decolonization and the Rise of Krio Separatism
• 8 The Roots of Military Praetorianism in Sierra Leone
• 9 History and Memory in Contemporary Sierra Leone: Re-inscribing Fragments from an Atlantic Past
• 10 History, Memory, and Post-colonial Sierra Leone
• 11 Sierra Leone at Fifty: Confronting Old Problems and Preparing for New Challenges
• 12 They Hold Up Half the Sky: Prospects and Challenges for Sierra Leonean Women in the Twenty-first Century and Beyond
• Bibliography
• About the Authors