The same in all but name: marriage, slavery, patriarchy and politics, Sierra Leone 1890–1990

Abstract

Women and girls captured during times of violent conflict have frequently been forced to marry their captors. Following the recent civil war in Sierra Leone (1991- 2002), the Special Court for Sierra Leone determined that women who had been forced into wartime marriages had been subjected to a specific criminal offence that combined elements of sexual enslavement and ‘forced conjugal association’. This ruling can best be understood as the latest in a series of attempts to classify and demarcate both slavery and marriage in Sierra Leone. Drawing upon a range of archival sources, this interdisciplinary dissertation explores how the intersecting categories of slavery and marriage have been defined and deployed from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The dissertation foregrounds three key concepts, namely kinship, households and rights-in-persons that have played a continuous yet constantly evolving role in the ways in which peoples in Sierra Leone have organised their political and personal relationships within an historical context chiefly defined by British colonial conquest and authority. In the colonial period, the persistence of domestic slavery was concealed or legitimated by references to ‘marriage’. By maintaining a fluid definition of slavery and marriage, colonial officials maintained and extended their authority via local intermediaries. Though never entirely successful, these alliances were designed to maintain colonial authority. I show how women in rural Sierra Leone made the most of limited opportunities to challenge the prevailing status quo. It is a mistake to assume, as a number of recent analysts have done, that both the 1880s and 1990s are symptoms of an unchanging and immutable social order.