Suanne Kelman’s article is both cogent and thoughtful as it reviews Lansana Gberie’s A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF and the Destruction of Sierra Leone, on the internal conflict in that country. The events portrayed are indeed horrible: the RUF brought death, destruction, maiming, rape, murder and chaos to the country—they destroyed it, and left an entire generation knowing only violence. However, there is a great silence in both Gberie’s and Kelman’s accounts, and the absent issue is in fact the heart of the matter that can explain the recent violence. It is the issue of redistribution policy, which is an attribute of most countries in tropical Africa and throughout the third world. This is a tool employed (in various forms) by many corrupt governments.
If diamonds provided the economic engine for the destruction, the underlying cause of the struggle resided in what can be termed “urban-elite bias” and the marked urbanrural disparity that existed in Sierra Leone for over a century, even before the time of formal colonialism. The peasants in the countryside were “ripped off ” during the British Protectorate and imagine their shock when the newly independent government continued their exploitation after 1961.
To understand this bias, you need to consider the contrasting lives of city dwellers and their kin in the countryside. The rural peasant in Sierra Leone was poor, living close to starvation and having little access to education, clean water, electricity or health supports. Life expectancy was about 30 years, and malaria was everpresent. The prospect for the young was a future dominated by elders and unemployment. Meanwhile, life in the city was far superior, especially for the friends of government, the elite. Life expectancy was about twice as long, infrastructure and services were available, as were power, water and jobs. And the young found freedom from age constraint in the city.
These disparities were not natural. In the colonial past, the city was favoured and the rural peasant exploited. The sad thing is such differences were continued and even enhanced by the redistribution policies of the newly independent government. They employed tools such as overvalued currency, food pricing, produce marketing, taxation, urban employment creation, etc. At the outset of independence these resources derived from rural peasants were intended to enhance national development with a focus of national economic development upon the urban centre. However, the dictatorial (corrupt and later oneparty) state shifted the resources resulting from this ruralurban transfer into the hands of the elite. What was public was made private.
The former president, Siaka Stevens, is equally as villainous as Foday Sankoh and Charles Taylor: one source indicated that when he retired and left the country, he took a billion dollars with him (this money could have improved the lives of millions of peasants). This redistribution system was operated by Stevens’s government for almost two decades, briefly as a ruralurban reassignment but soon evolving into a peasantelite transfer.
I wish to underline the fact that the causes of Africa’s poverty have two addresses, one in the world trade system and the other in local misrule using redistribution tools. As well, I would end with a cautionary note: these conditions (disparity and transfer) continue to exist and ferment in the countryside.
Dr. Barry Riddell
Editor, Canadian Journal of African Studies
Kingston, Ontario
