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Rethinking burgeoning political consciousness: student activists, the Class of ‘99 and political intent in Sierra Leone*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Catherine Bolten
Catherine Bolten*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame, 611 Flanner Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA
*
Email: bolten.2@nd.edu
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Abstract

This article uses interviews with former student activists in Sierra Leone to explore what ideals motivate students to participate in political action. In Sierra Leone, students used the military as a cover for their own democratic programme, initially by encouraging a coup that they wanted to partake in, later by joining the officer corps themselves. I challenge the notion that student interactions with the urban lumpenproletariat and ‘militariat’ serve as evidence for their desire to cloak a lack of ideals in popular violence; rather I argue that coalitions are built as needs must to push a particular agenda, whether or not the agenda is known to all participants. In this case, that agenda was to ensure that an idealistic intelligentsia had economic and political futures that they had been denied under a paternalistic dictatorship. In essence student activism was elitist, not popular.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , September 2009 , pp. 349 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Neil MacDonald, Mamadou Diouf, Karen Smid, Wendi Haugh and Jessica Robbins for comments on early drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers from JMAS for their constructive suggestions.

References

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A note on interviews

It was critically important for the purposes of publishing this work to keep my sources as secure as possible. Instead of waiting to write this article until my sources cannot be politically harmed, I chose to write it now in order, perhaps, to better protect them by making their true intentions known. I had a particularly illuminating conversation early in 2008 with one member of Freetown's shadow political elite, in which he mentioned that ‘the Class of ’99 would be dealt with’ before they became too powerful within the army. I believe that he, and many other quietly powerful people in Sierra Leone, earnestly believe that the former student activists are only trying to garner enough personal support within the armed forces to produce another coup, should they deem one necessary or prudent to their own desires for political power. By revealing my sources' deepest motivations, namely the personal rewards that come with education in a functioning democracy, and the fact that at the moment of the re-instatement of democracy in 1999 the military was the only route to advancement, I am perhaps in a better position to protect them, and the military, from accusations of coup-mongering.