Introduction

On February 12, 1930 Albert Tonye married Agnès Albertine Ngonsémél in the Catholic church of Eseka in southern Cameroon. Agnès was Albert's first wife and, according to Tonye's account, they were both devout Catholics and had entered into the marriage according to their own free will. Tonye's father, Chief Makasso Malipem of the village of Songlipem, had sent Tonye at the age of ten to the Catholic mission at N'Gowayang to be educated and baptized. Between 1927 and 1929, Tonye had trained to be part of the colonial government and was appointed as an écrivain auxiliare, or secretarial assistant, in the regions surrounding Eseka and Sangmélima. In their first few years together, Agnès and Albert had several children, and Agnès managed their home in Eseka. In 1932, however, Albert fell out of favor with the colonial service, who revoked his position in Eseka and transferred him to Ouesso in the French colony of Moyen Congo. This kind of professional banishment was made worse by the fact that the colonial service refused to also transfer Agnès and the couple's children to Ouesso, a situation Albert described in his letters as “stranding” him “in a foreign land without any affection or family comfort.”

Throughout the next six years, Albert Tonye's career disappointment and marital separation grew into a political predicament for the French colonial administration and a delicate matter of religious diplomacy for the French Catholic Church in Cameroon. Beginning in 1932 and extending through 1938, Tonye began writing a series of letters – several dozen in total – to district officers in Eseka, to Pierre Aubert, the Governor of Cameroon, to Léon Solomiac, the Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa, to Bishops Mathurin le Mailloux and François-Xavier Vogt, and to Pope Pius XI in Rome, arguing that he had been married in the eyes of God and French law, and that the administration was violating a sacred bond in effectively terminating his marriage without his consent by separating him from his wife. For the next six years, Tonye condemned the French government, slandered his wife, aggravated his extended family, and tried to outsmart the Catholic clerical elite in his quest to reunite his family as well as expand his household by taking a second wife to replace Agnès in her absence.

Political violence in post-conflict Sierra Leone has been primarily characterised by inter- and intra-party conflicts, peaking around elections but erupting occasionally throughout the democratic cycle (ARI 2011). The 2007 elections for example saw significant clashes between supporters of the Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP) and the All People's Congress (APC) (Christensen & Utas 2008). The 2012 elections were deemed peaceful, yet during the campaign there were attacks on the opposition leader as well as skirmishes between party supporters (CCG 2011; Mitton 2013). These forms of violence have been far more common than violent action ‘from below’, which, as we saw in Chapter 4, is difficult to organise. Electoral violence is not new to Sierra Leone. As Chapter 1 showed, the country's political history is rife with examples of young people being mobilised for chiefdom elections or as hired hands under the APC's repressive one party state. In the aftermath of war, these events take on new meanings and they are shaped by the specificities of reconstruction and democratisation.

Regardless of their collocation in history, young people's violent exploits around elections summon a specific version of the ‘ticking bomb’ narrative, one that envisions their political engagement as destabilising by framing them as actors mobilised ‘from above’ by entrepreneurs of violence (see Collier et al. 2003). The assumption here is that youths, made corruptible by poverty, are easily exploited by powerful political interests. This narrative depicts young people lured by the immediate material rewards offered for acting violently as well as the opportunity for profit in the midst of chaos.

This chapter looks at the intricacies of the process for recruitment in political violence and how they relate to young people's labour market experiences. Following the political violence trail revealed an interesting contrast between two groups’ involvement in violent political incidents. The first was a group of Belgium sellers, who had on occasions made themselves available for violence around elections. The second were members of so-called political party ‘task forces’. A comparison between these two groups’ experiences reflects the importance of understanding political violence through the lens of young people's competition for inclusion in redistributive networks. Violence was used by some young marginals as a form of navigation, a way to signal loyalty to political strongmen in an attempt to cement reciprocal relationships, or to elicit the ‘love’ of a sababu.

Marriage in the Church and State

The religious meaning-making of Christian marriage in southern Cameroon was directly linked to transformations in social relations between and within African families, and was also enmeshed in the rise of new local political authorities and, by extension, the passage of French colonial laws governing African family life and the use of wives and relatives as laborers. Even in the years leading up to the declaration of the French mandate in 1922, African Christian principals recognized that chiefs not only coordinated everyday men and women's village settlements and labor prerogatives, they also directly competed with laborers, commoner men, and family fathers for dominance in the family sphere and even within the realm of sexual intimacy. By the mid-tolate 1920s, conflicts between African chiefs and everyday men over women and laborers spurred religiously supported social mobilization on a broad scale.

Chiefs’ increasing interference in Africans’ family lives was in part a result of French administrative initiatives to reform polygamy and increase the birth rate. In the early 1920s, Governor Jules Carde and colonial minister Albert Sarraut envisioned that African chiefs would assist in increasing population rates (faire du noir), which would develop Cameroon's mise en valeur and export productivity. Later, Governor Robert Delavignette forwarded in his 1931 study, Paysans Noirs, that chiefs could remedy “injustices” in the family sphere that limited Africans’ “productive possibilities.” Believing polygamy to be a primary cause of syphilis and infertility, the French administration instituted new laws discouraging various ways of arranging marriage – never criminalizing polygamy outright, but rather shaping new boundaries for betrothal and espousal. The major flaw of the plan was that new marriage laws were to be enforced by chiefs, who were granted considerable powers to challenge rivals’ claims to women or children. Chiefs in southern Cameroon were appointed as judges or assesseurs in tribunaux indigènes and tribunals of first degree, where they ruled in matters that affected their subject populations’ intimate lives, and also wielded power through local police forces, who could take control of vulnerable local women. Chiefs could also counter any resistance to their judgments or authority with jail sentences or fines of one hundred francs without due process of law, employing the indigénat with the full support of the French administration.

The post-colonial war in Mozambique, which lasted two decades, holds a central place in national, regional and international history. Many academic works have associated the war with external factors, thus reducing the guerrilla to a proxy force, to marionettes of destabilization, and a movement without any social base or political project, fighting a non-ideological war, if not just being ‘a cult of violence’. Thus Renamo has eventually come to be perceived internationally as an incarnation of evil, ‘the Khmer Rouge of Africa’, and it has been labelled as a terrorist organization because it was ‘waging a war of terror against innocent Mozambican civilians through forced labour, starvation, physical abuse and wanton killing’. Such interpretation of the nature of Renamo has seriously limited our understanding of the nature and dynamics of the Mozambican armed conflict.

It is the anthropological work of Geffray and Pedersen that prompted a paradigm shift, away from explanations focused on external factors to those focusing on internal factors. Scholars who followed on from their investigations revealed resistance by large sectors of society to the modernizing projects of the Socialist Frelimo regime.

The dynamics of the war in Nampula province have been analysed by Alice Dinerman in 2006. In her book, Dinerman uncovers many dynamics noted by previous authors. However, she continues to argue that the war remained a destabilization campaign from start to finish, not only because using Renamo was Pretoria's main strategy to discipline Frelimo and force it to make the policy changes favourable to the apartheid state, but also because Renamo set about building up the political and administrative wings it had because South Africa's agenda remained unchanged and the rebel leadership never seriously entertained the belief that it could challenge Frelimo's historical place in contemporary Mozambique.

In the year 2000, Graham Harrison offered a more nuanced view. He advanced the interpretation that the war and the method used by the authorities to extract resources from the residents directly and indirectly exacerbated the material crisis in Nampula society and helped Renamo evolve from a small, externally created, rebel group, into a large guerrilla army that eventually controlled entire regions of the country.

The proclaimed goal of my colleagues in this volume is to provide a finer-grain picture of the 1977–1992 civil war in Mozambique. Operating mostly at the level of provinces and localities, their chapters go quite far towards this goal. Moreover, their chapters shift the focus of analysis from the Renamo insurgents and their regional sponsors in Rhodesia and the apartheid South Africa to the internecine war itself in its many facets. Shifting analysis to the domestic and localist perspectives arguably has its valid intellectual and political rationale. Yet such analytical shift is fraught with new limitations in terms of space and time. Let me try to push our research agenda still further in a dialectical movement. While the Mozambique tragedy in the 1980s had surely acquired local dynamics, it was also a specific instance in the worldwide collapse of communism and, more generally, the extinction of ‘Old Left’ parties.

This chapter therefore assumes a different perspective tending towards the macrohistorical level. Unlike the rest of the authors, I must admit that my knowledge of this war remains limited to an isolated series of personal observations from the mid-1980s. Yet, in the words of Russian revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the ‘land you hungered with | you can never … forget’. Back in 1984 in the province of Tete where I worked as an interpreter with a team of Soviet geologists, I ‘hungered’ and I also had to carry a gun and a couple hand grenades: in self-defence and, in the last instance, to avoid falling into enemy hands alive. Almost daily somewhere on the roads and in the villages of Tete province, the Matsanga (popular expression for the Renamo rebels) perpetrated spectacularly cruel acts as grim proof of their intent. Luckily for me, Mozambique did not have the jihadist and tribal traditions of Afghanistan where several of my classmates died during the Soviet intervention in the 1980s. In direct confrontation, the Matsanga, as well as many government soldiers proved poor shots, usually fleeing after the first bursts of fire. The majority of ordinary fighters on both sides were the illiterate young conscripts from villages pressed into the fighting with very little training or motivation.

In her celebrated 2009 lecture, the Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned her audience of the ‘danger of a single story’. ‘Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again and that is what they become’, she noted. This chapter is about the stories told about employment and unemployment in Sierra Leone's post-war moment. These stories and the reasons they are told show how different forms of economic activity are valued. These valuations are a first step towards understanding how experiences of work shape young people's social identities and relations.

The chapter begins by discussing how and why unemployment has been securitised in Sierra Leone. It outlines the ways in which policy-makers have woven a narrative about the dangers of unemployment that is specific to the circumstances of post-war Sierra Leone, showing how international shifts in thinking about post-war reconstruction merged with local interpretations of the war to influence the policies’ content in the country. It also considers why these accounts emerge from interactions between different sets of actors involved in policy-making and implementation and through the convergence of a variety of different motivations and interests. Through these interactions, specific definitions and assumptions emerge about who the unemployed are and what dangers they pose to the reconstruction process. The chapter then goes on to compare and contrast this official story with the stories of everyday survival that exist in Sierra Leone's capital, offering portraits of young people's varied lived experiences in four different urban microcosms as they engage with the realities of the post-war economy. By introducing the protagonists of this research, and offering an insight into the lives of motorbike riders, street traders, commission chasers and ‘idle women’, it aims to show the multiplicity of economic activity amongst those who do not fall within the sphere of formal employment. Furthermore, the chapter examines how young people themselves understand and interpret their labour market positions and experiences of work in the city. Descriptions of marginal livelihoods are thus complemented by a discussion of what work means, how notions of employment are negotiated in a quest for economic inclusion and the ways in which these understandings frame young people's assessments of their current situation vis-à-vis their future aspirations.

This study has explored narrative motifs and patterns relating to final things and new beginnings – the damnation and salvation of the soul. Instead of a traditional summary or conclusion I have chosen to end by exploring how our principal themes feature in the most celebrated of the Icelandic sagas. Christian themes in Njáls saga have, of course, been studied and accordingly I shall refrain as much as possible from covering familiar ground. My aim is to show how some of the principal patterns, themes, and motifs highlighted in previous chapters feature in Njáls saga. This work reveals how a late-thirteenth-century author could creatively apply these to a uniquely long and complex saga.

We begin with the relatively minor figure of Kolskeggr, the brother of Gunnarr Hámundarson. Kolskeggr's most notable role is to ride with Gunnarr to the ship that waits to take the hero abroad after he has been judged an outlaw. Famously, however, Gunnarr decides to return to his farmstead and confront his fate. Knowing well that this choice portends Gunnarr's certain death, Kolskeggr seeks to change his brother's mind but to no avail. We next encounter Kolskeggr in Denmark at the court of Sveinn tjúguskeggr. One night he dreams that a man, illuminated in brightness, commands Kolskeggr to arise and follow him. The figure promises him a bride and that he will become his knight (‘riddari minn’). A wise man interprets the dream as foretelling that he will go south and become God's knight (‘guðs riddari’). Kolskeggr accepts baptism in Denmark but spends the rest of his career as commander in the Varangian Guard in Constantinople. Thus one of the first Icelanders in Njáls saga to convert to Christianity leaves Iceland never to return. Kolbeinn's path to salvation steers him away from the blood-feud of his home country, albeit here to defend Christendom rather than reside in a cloister.

The fate of Kolskeggr (who now disappears from the story) manifestly contrasts with Gunnarr's fate.

THE THREE ESSAYS IN THIS SPECIAL SECTION ask a deceptively simple and seldom addressed question: What did Goethe (and his contemporaries) hear? While there are numerous monographs and essays on Goethe and visuality, sound and the acoustic dimension have not been explored in the same focused, sustained way in Goethe studies. Indeed, the acoustic dimension has often been marginalized in Goethe scholarship and in eighteenthcentury studies more generally, in which the Enlightenment “hegemony of the visual” tends to reproduce itself. Both in the cultural production of the “long eighteenth century” and in latter-day scholarship, the acoustic appears as the marginalized other of both textuality and visuality. In eighteenthcentury poetological texts and works of criticism, for example, an overemphasis on the acoustic performance of literature is often characterized as potentially inimical to the autonomy of the literary work. Such biases can be seen to be at work, for example, in Schiller's 1789 essay Über Bürgers Gedichte (On Bürger's Poems), in which Schiller distances himself from the oral performance of literature through mildly pejorative references to “Gesellschaftsgesänge” (convivial songs) and “die Musikliebhaberei unserer Damen” (the musical amateurism of our ladies) as well as more explicitly dismissive allusions to Gottfried August Bürger's onomatopoeic excesses—“das Klinglingling, Hopp, Huhu, Sasa, Trallyrum larum u. dgl (the klingaling, hopp, huhu, trallyrum larum and the like).” A simultaneous distrust of and longing for the acoustic dimension, particularly music and its sensual associations, is a recurring theme throughout German literary history: written many years before Thomas Mann's Wagnerian obsessives emerged on paper, the fateful reading of Ossian in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther offers an early example of how Romantic orality can precipitate unhealthy excesses of emotion and unwholesome collisions of life with art. It is easy enough to contrast the Romantic obsession with reviving the “dead letter of print” through oral performance with Goethe and Schiller's seemingly more mature fascination with the visual and classicist literary forms; if the classical is “healthy,” to paraphrase Goethe's own famous line, it is because it has healed itself from the “sick,” irrational and regressive longings of Romanticism for primitive orality.