RETHINKING STUDENT-AUTHORED ‘REVO(LOOT)SHON’ IN SIERRA LEONE

Sierra Leone has a long history of student activism that has been intimately intertwined with violent riots, uprisings, and recently encouraging a spirit of ‘revolution’ that led to the civil war that lasted from 1991 to 2002. This paper focuses specifically on the role of students at the nation's universities in forming a coalition of the disgruntled with the young urban lumpenproletariat – the rarray boys – in the 1980s, and how the students' political reach extended to the weakest link in the national power structure: the army. The students encouraged young army officers, drawn from the same lumpenproletariat, to institute the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) coup in 1992. After the failure of the coup to provide entrée for students to the political elite, they melted back into the fabric of society. They re-emerged in 1999 when a Nigerian takeover of military command allowed them to join the officer corps and thus attach themselves to an establishment that allowed them the political and educational advancement that they had always sought.

Ibrahim Abdullah has meticulously documented the seeds of revolution in Sierra Leone through an investigation of how violence became the tactic of choice for urban youth from the 1960s forward. Though student activists at the nation's elite universities were the original authors and proponents of violent revolution to overthrow the corrupt government of the All People's Congress (APC) in the 1980s, Abdullah notes that they withdrew from visible political activity well before their ideas congealed in practice in the form of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the resulting civil war (Abdullah Reference Abdullah1998: 219; Reference Abdullah, Honwana and De Boeck2005: 180). Their cause of political revolution, which preceded the ‘violence writ large’ that the RUF unleashed upon the nation between 1991 and 2001, was taken up instead by their consorts in Freetown's back-alley bars, the urban lumpenproletariat known as the rarray boys, who pushed violence as a revolutionary tactic. This he attributes largely to students falling away from a movement – which perpetually seemed to lack political ideals apart from ousting the government in power – after leader Alie Kabbah was suspected of embezzling funds (ibid.: 219).

It was this absence of an advertised programme of what kind of revolution they sought that meant that, at the movement's peak in the mid 1980s, the students had to accept essentially uncritical and unquestioning elements – the lumpenproletariat – into their cadres in order to bolster numbers (Abdullah Reference Abdullah and Abdullah2004b: 3).Footnote ¹ It was these very elements that seized control of the movement after its original authors dispersed in 1987, and people like Foday Sankoh, a barely literate ex-army corporal, emerged as its leaders. The momentum of valorised violence among the underclass promoted by the students inspired wave after wave of proletariat ‘revo(loot)shon’, from the RUF to the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) coup in 1992 and the bloody Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) coup in 1997 (Abdullah Reference Abdullah, Honwana and De Boeck2005: 174). From the leadership of all three organisations – the mostly illiterate, sporadically employed, ‘alienated’ urban youth – Abdullah argues that their ‘project’ must have originated with the original explosive mix of elite politics and brutal anger that was generated when students and marginal youth mixed in Freetown's back-alley bars from the 1960s forward. He emphasises that the students did not participate in the next decade of violence (ibid.: 180), relegating them to stand as its irresponsible authors. Lansana Gberie (Reference Gberie2005: 50) concurs with the fate that Abdullah assigned to the student activists. To Abdullah's assertion that organised student politics ended with Alie Kabbah's return from revolutionary training in Libya, he adds that the rest of the students ‘settled back to whatever they were doing before’. I find this conclusion deeply unsettling: what were the students really working towards, and would they end years of activism because of a simple embezzlement scandal?

Few articles on student movements in Africa assess deeper motivations. Williams (Reference Williams2004: 556–7) meticulously documents how political consciousness developed among Namibian students in the 1970s, in solidarity with South African students' nation-building project, but falls short of probing why students would suffer the expulsion and exile that many of them experienced, simply so that ‘the nation’ could benefit. Similarly, Sharp (Reference Sharp2002: 33–5) documents that Malagasy students struck to overthrow French rule and French favouritism, but not what benefits, if any, they hoped to accrue by doing so. Klopp & Orina (Reference Klopp and Orina2002: 45, 49, 55–6) move closest to the issue as they state that Kenyan students were fighting a repressive regime that had emptied their libraries, crowded their classrooms, and forced them to pay fees with the knowledge that they would be unemployed unless they agreed to be co-opted. Can we assume that the elite young people in Sierra Leone who spent their university careers agitating for everything from working infrastructure on campuses (Rashid Reference Rashid and Abdullah2004: 80) to the democratic reform that would rid the country of hated dictator Siaka Stevens (Richards Reference Richards1996: 35, 52) would disappear and ‘return to what they were doing’ after the original movement, however shaky its political motives appeared, dissolved? These students, many of whom had been arrested, jailed, tortured, and expelled from their respective universities, had nothing but further thoughts of political change.

To understand why, we must dig deeper to understand the motivations of student activists. For many students in Sierra Leone, the intent was an accountable democracy – the only governmental form that utilises the intelligentsia – and not, as Abdullah (Reference Abdullah, Honwana and De Boeck2005: 180) terms it, anarchic ‘revo(loot)shon’. Student actions in Sierra Leone were not directionless anger, and assuming so leads to a potential misreading of their relationship with the rarray boys. Students elsewhere in Africa have joined with their working-class and peasant counterparts to instigate revolution, but all stood to gain different things in the end.Footnote ² Students believed they would be in a position to take part in a new government, and their radicalisation was in part due to their desire to push their privilege.Footnote ³

It is critical to understand motivation. Anthropologist Mariane Fermé (Reference Fermé2001: 2) writes: ‘The effective use of ambiguity has been – and continues to be – more productive than the pursuit of social ideals of transparency’. In her study of the Mende, the largest ethnic group in Sierra Leone, she asserted that people become powerful through their ability to contain secrets and manipulate the visible world by activating forces beneath the surface (ibid.: 19). I argue that the student activists did not court the violent tendencies of the rarray boys in order to inspire a system-destroying revolution, nor did they merely melt back into the fractured landscape of their destroyed nation once their organisation dissolved. Rather, taking up Fermé's call to interrogate the non-transparent by analysing the stories of students who seemed to disappear provides rich ground for reassessing the historical record. Student activists attempted to control the rarray boys in order to protect and promote the interests of an educated elite that could run the country. When this failed they dispersed and waited for further opportunities to act. Melting back into the fabric of society was not an end-state, but rather a respite from their previous ineffective works of blatant, violent protest against a regime that attempted to co-opt or disperse them (see Klopp & Orina Reference Klopp and Orina2002: 48 for similarities with student activists in politics in Kenya).

In particular, the NPRC coup was not the opportunistic seizure of power by disgruntled officers who had emerged from the urban lumpenproletariat and sought revenge on ‘the system’, as both Abdullah (Reference Abdullah, Honwana and De Boeck2005: 185) and Gberie (Reference Gberie2005: 75) assert. Former student revolutionaries encouraged officers to initiate a coup in order to create a possible transition to democracy, and students hoped to pull the strings from behind the scenes. They saw the military as the weakest link in the network of power, and tried to influence that link in order to invisibly manipulate the political situation in Sierra Leone, creating an accountable democracy run by a well-educated elite. Seven years later, in 1999, nearly 200 students and former students, spurred into action by the 6 January invasion of Freetown by combined RUF and mutinous military elements, joined the officer corps of the new Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLAF). Their aim was to ‘take the fight directly to the rebels’ in the words of one, and end the war to protect the future of the country, partially by protecting education from further damage by both political repression and violent disruption. Since the military had been the primary culprit in both, it was the military that had to be infiltrated and reformed. Using interviews with the involved students, I explore these points fully in the following sections.

STUDENT ACTIVISM BEFORE THE RUF: FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE

Abdullah (Reference Abdullah, Honwana and De Boeck2005: 173) argues that the climate of repression occurring under the rule of the APC and President Siaka Stevens legitimised for youth a discourse of violent revolution as an alternative path to political power. He emphasises that this repression created an imagined community among disparate classes of youth among whom the pursuit of state power was the ultimate goal, and violence – public, specifically aimed at political elites – was the modus operandi.

A broader examination of students' relationships with governments in Africa provides the foundation for a different perspective: student activities are as much as reaction to governments that fear their potential power as they are the original and only threat to that power. The Marxist Derg in 1970s Ethiopia made student service in rural areas mandatory as a way to remove the intelligentsia from the capital and the centre of politics, as those same students had called for a civilian government immediately after the coup (Donham Reference Donham1999: 22, 29). This was followed by the ‘Red Terror’ of 1976–7, a brutal wave of violence designed to crush opposition, especially from students (Mamdani Reference Mamdani, Mamdani and Wamba-dia-Wamba1995: 2). In Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko instituted a ‘youth wing’ of his party in order to teach students to accept his dictatorship, rather than threaten it (Schatzberg Reference Schatzberg1978: 425). Students resisted because they saw Mobutisme – which educated students to stay in rural areas – as a threat to their potential political power (ibid.: 429). In Madagascar, the revolution against French rule was largely fostered by dispossessed students from the rural areas who were not part of the small, co-opted elite protecting their privilege in the highlands (Sharp Reference Sharp2002: 33). Jomo Kenyatta was deeply suspicious of Kenyan students, whose activities he could not control, and he attempted to coerce them into accepting the status quo because they depended on the state for access to civil service positions (Klopp & Orina Reference Klopp and Orina2002: 47–8).Footnote ⁴

Students gain awareness of their potential power when they realise that the government sees them as a political threat. Sierra Leonean students struck because they stood as the only political opposition to the APC dictatorship, and they were undertaking these actions in part in defence of their education, which had been hampered by Stevens' personal profligacy and penchant for diverting state funds to his political cronies (see Reno Reference Reno1995: 142), his fear of an intelligentsia that could possibly oppose him, and his successor Momoh's compliance in continuing this policy.Footnote ⁵ Their relationship with the rarray boys, then, was a marriage of convenience, rather than part of the revolutionary doctrine.Footnote ⁶

This means that the community that existed between students and rarray boys was probably only imagined in the context of increasingly dispossessed students feeling that they too were being forced to the margins of the nation (see Klopp & Orina Reference Klopp and Orina2002: 66), and that they therefore had something in common with the rarray boys. But they did not have everything in common. The student leaders themselves had no illusions about the relationships they cultivated in the shadowy bars of Freetown, called potes. They needed numbers on their side, but their fight was to ensure the survival of an educated populace: themselves.Footnote ⁷ If the lumpens also benefited, it would be a positive secondary effect. Contrary to Mamdani's (Reference Mamdani, Mamdani and Wamba-dia-Wamba1995: 7) assertion that the distinction between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ movements is false, I argue that the student/rarray boy connection made a subverted elitist movement seem overtly popular.Footnote ⁸

On the first point, when I questioned a former Njala University student directly on the consequences of being a student activist, he recalled the following story:

Though his platform mentioned revolution, it was clearly in the context of creating an accountable democracy, and not just mere ‘revo(loot)shon’. He and other activists paid the price for their election and strike, and it was other students from Sierra Leone's three universities who came to demand their release. Their public threats of violence seem to add weight to Abdullah's assertion that all political protest at the time was violent, but violence was not required for the students' release. They were released when, according to the activist, someone ‘from Freetown’ alerted the police to the political impropriety of holding students so publicly without charging them.

This same activist was kidnapped a year later under the same pretence: that he and his fellows were trying to overthrow the government directly. The students had to answer these charges directly to President Momoh, who himself thought they wanted his demise:

This man exudes supreme confidence in his power as a leader; clearly in telling this story he was aware of how threatened the government felt by an intelligentsia that could organise so many people. He states that Momoh agreed to do something, and offered them taxi fare back to Njala. The students refused, asking that Momoh give the money to unpaid teachers. This small gesture points to an undercurrent of the students' concerns with governmental support to education, and how their drive for democracy was largely an attempt to safeguard education in the country and thus give it a viable future outside the parasitic state. Rashid (Reference Rashid and Abdullah2004: 80) notes that student protests in the 1980s were equal parts protests against Stevens' plans for a life presidency and protests against the decrepit conditions on university campuses, and this student activist's priorities were no different.

A different student activist makes the simultaneous pursuit of democracy and strong education clear, as well as how student leaders were happy to use others who were not members of their student unions to shore up the numbers of people protesting, to draw increased attention to their cause, and to protect themselves. This relationship did not necessarily extend beyond the simple pursuit of strength and effectiveness in numbers. As Rashid (Reference Rashid and Abdullah2004: 77) reminds us, not only did lumpens and students have an ambivalent relationship in the 1970s, as Stevens' party thugs – who were drawn exclusively from the ranks of the rarray boys – actively suppressed student protest, but Sierra Leonean universities have historically been a bastion of elite privilege (ibid.: 69). Protests for democracy, no matter how popular throughout the world or who was involved, made little headway against a recalcitrant government. Leaders made the decision to go underground:

This decision was based on an assessment of the tactics used to that point. The student leaders who were still active determined that overt action achieved nothing except highlighting student leaders for the government so that they could be harassed more effectively. This does not necessarily mean, however, that all student activists on the nation's campuses were aware of or involved in crass coalition-building involving the rarray boys. The former editor of The Tablet stated in an interview that his main purpose was awareness:

These students vocally opposed one-party rule, and paid the same price as their even more radical colleagues. The fact that all went to jail on the same terms highlights the possibility that these students, as well as the police and APC, were not aware of the even greater radical revolutionary tendencies of the actively instrumental group. Fermé (Reference Fermé2001: 6) states: ‘ambiguous practices are common in situations of political danger … these strategies unfold in the absence of ideals of transparency in the exercise of political and social agency in “normal” times’. The most radical students did not allow themselves to be differentiated from more earnest activists, such as The Tablet editor, lest they face greater punishment. However, once expelled, they concealed their activities to protect themselves. Relinquishing direct activity may have protected the students, but it also loosened their control on others. In this respect Abdullah and Gberie's assertions that the students ‘disappeared’ is actually a reflection of the fact that students had an over-inflated sense of their own power to manipulate people and events once they were no longer visibly active.

CONCEALED ACTIVITY: STUDENTS ENCOURAGE RADICAL ACTION

Most analyses of the first coup to occur during the 1990s, the NPRC in 1992, attribute it solely to a small cadre of young army officers, disgruntled about their lack of pay, provisions and terms of service, who left the war's eastern front and drove to Freetown and took over the government in a bloodless coup as President Momoh and his cabinet fled to Guinea (Bangura Reference Bangura2000: 554; Gberie Reference Gberie2005: 68; Kandeh Reference Kandeh1996: 390; Peters Reference Peters2006: 47; Peters & Richards Reference Peters and Richards1998: 184; Richards Reference Richards1996: 9; Zack-Williams & Riley Reference Zack-Williams and Riley1993). Only a few mention the relationship between students and coup leaders. Rashid (Reference Rashid and Abdullah2004: 84, 89) noted that coup members Tom Nyuma and Kombah Mondeh had participated in many student-led protests in 1980s Freetown before joining the army, and were members of the ‘militariat’, the military equivalent of the lumpenproletariat (see Kandeh Reference Kandeh1996: 388), but delved no further into these connections. Kandeh (Reference Kandeh and Abdullah2004: 164) notes that the students were the first to emerge in support of the NPRC coup. Kandeh and Rashid, like Abdullah (Reference Abdullah, Honwana and De Boeck2005: 180) and Gberie (Reference Gberie2005: 70–1), assumed that the shared attributes were a result of the fact that many of the officers grew up in the lumpen-dominated slums of Freetown, where they were influenced by the violence-laden pote discourse of revolution, and, like the rarray boys, were tired of living in poverty under the APC.

The coup was not the proprietary idea of the officers. It was encouraged by some of the former students who went underground in the 1980s. Abraham (Reference Abraham and Abdullah2004: 202) is the only scholar to note that the coup was planned well in advance, but states that the RUF expected to be involved in the new government and were rejected because of their excessive demands. I believe this RUF partnership never occurred because these soldiers' first loyalties, however brittle, were to the students who encouraged them to seize power. Student concerns that the country was being run by a nepotistic oligarchy, rife with corruption among those who were loyal to the regime, and were afraid of the power of the intelligentsia to oppose them, were echoed among the younger officers in the army. The officers resented their seniors who, loyal to the APC, became rich from their connections while the young officers recruited from the lumpenproletariat specifically to fight the war died at the front (see Kandeh Reference Kandeh1996: 392).

These two groups shared a feeling that the unjust enjoyment of political privilege must end. Because many young officers were from the slums of Freetown, they – the ostensible ‘militariat’ – had developed friendships with the students, and joint discussions created resolve that a coup was the answer. Students wanted a government that had a vested interest in stopping the RUF from overrunning the country, and they found a no more assenting audience for this idea than the young military officers who bore the brunt of fighting the war. One student remembers it thus:

These students desired the coup not only to overthrow a corrupt government, but to overthrow a government that hindered their ability to pursue their personal agenda of finishing their educations and joining an economically successful and politically influential intelligentsia. Essentially, they wanted merit-based political privilege. Stevens had spent the majority of his presidency destroying the intelligentsia – the only group that might legitimately oppose him – by starving the universities of funds, and forcing skilled workers to either go overseas or submit to co-optation into the regime (see Zack-Williams Reference Zack-Williams1990: 28), a tactic not unique to Sierra Leone (see Klopp & Orina Reference Klopp and Orina2002: 49, 51). The future of an incorruptible student was bleak under the APC, as was the future of an ambitious young officer without political connections. The two were a natural mix.

The student–military combination was not happenstance. One student, upon returning from exile, re-enrolled in school, and tapped once again into the revolutionary network once he discovered that Momoh's educational policies were just as bad as Stevens'. His connections with the rarray boys who later joined the military allowed him and his fellow activists to create support amongst students and soldiers, whether or not supporters knew what they were doing, for what became the coup:

Strasser not only had pre-knowledge of the coup, but was himself already in Freetown to meet the soldiers coming from the front. He had left the front several months earlier when he had sustained shrapnel in his leg from an RUF RPG attack (see Gberie Reference Gberie2005: 67). According to an officer I interviewed who, as a young soldier, was used as a driver for the coup convoy that came from the warfront, it was Solomon A. J. Musa, later deputy chairman of the NPRC, who organised the convoy (Army Major, Freetown, 28.4.2005 int.). Elation among the students with the coup was brief, however, as not only were the promises of an end to the war and a move towards democracy not met, but the NPRC leaders turned their backs on the students.

FALLING AWAY FROM FAILED IDEALS: STUDENTS FIND ALTERNATIVES TO THE NPRC

The NPRC turned out to be no better than the corrupt machine it replaced; and it was in their frustration with the coup leaders that students reveal their true elitism. Jubilant officers moved into the houses of their predecessors, drove their cars, partook in outrageous displays of wealth, and engaged in illicit diamond mining (Kandeh Reference Kandeh1996: 394). People quickly became disillusioned, none more so than the students who had supported the coup. The students were discouraged not only because the NPRC proved to be just as decadent and corrupt as the APC, but because the officers failed to live up to the promises they had made to the students: ‘They had led us to the expectation that they would make appointments among we the educated people, because they were hardly literate and they were just babies!’, said one, revealing his arrogance as an educated man.Footnote ⁹ In spite of the fact that some student radicals took minor positions within the NPRC (see Rashid Reference Rashid and Abdullah2004: 85), none of them wielded the influence they had hoped for. Most felt that the NPRC had become just as bad as the APC, and they tried to force the officers to hold elections:

The students had been deceived: they thought that because they had influenced their rarray boy counterparts so successfully, first in the potes and then in the army, they would partake in the spoils of power. This failed attempt at king-making and puppetry marked the effective severance of the relationship between students and rarray boys. It indicates that the students had cultivated a relationship with their more marginal counterparts in order to extend their ostensible influence over wider social networks, so that they had a larger stake in any resulting new government. It was as Abdullah (Reference Abdullah, Honwana and De Boeck2005: 180) states in this case: the students were attempting to expand the base of their own political opposition to incumbent government. They had thought they would be able to partake in the coup they encouraged through the common grievances of all dispossessed youth, and the rarray boys proved them wrong.

The extent of collective radical student action effectively ended at this point, but that did not mean that the students abandoned their projects of ending the war, installing democracy, and gaining institutional support for education. They watched in horror as the country deteriorated further under the NPRC, and then, after democratic elections installed a government in 1996 that also failed to end the war, enlisted soldiers and RUF combined to instigate the coup of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) in 1997. At this point, activists had no choice but to pursue individual ideological paths:

Students only emerged again in Sierra Leone once Nigerian forces defeated the AFRC in February 1998. The Nigerian General Maxwell Khobe took the position of Chief of Army Staff under the reinstated government of Tejan Kabbah (see Gberie Reference Gberie2005: 116), and recruited new officers for a reformed Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLAF).

THE CLASS OF ’99: THE STUDENTS THEMSELVES MUST ENSURE THE COUNTRY'S INTEGRITY

The despotic and chaotic rule of the AFRC from May 1997 to February 1998, followed by the invasion of Freetown on 6 January 1999, were defining moments for a new generation of students at the nation's universities who, just like their predecessors, came out strongly in support of democracy. Though President Tejan Kabbah had violently suppressed their protests against pensioning former president Momoh, when the AFRC seized control of the government, the students came out in support of the very president who had quashed them a few months earlier (Kandeh Reference Kandeh and Abdullah2004: 177–8). Ten years younger than their compatriots who had been expelled from university for organising protests and plotting ‘revolution’ under President Momoh, this tumultuous time was the first instance that political chaos spurred this generation of students into collective action in the name of democracy. One student at Fourah Bay College recalled his decision to join the army:

The decision for him and his fellow students to join the army was easy. The protracted and increasingly bloody war threatened their educations as it pressed in on Freetown and other urban centres. The RUF, replete with perpetually drugged and largely illiterate youth, were the very lumpenproletariat who gained their initial inspiration from student revolutionaries. However, the audacity to threaten their superiors, the intelligentsia, was too much for the students to bear:

The older generation of student activists who had fled the country following the political fallout of the protests in 1987 had in large part returned to Freetown, and were also interested in taking part in the new army. After the bitterness of their failure to participate in an NPRC composed largely of the same lumpenproletariat that they thought they could control, many decided that the only way to exert the influence that they desired in ensuring both the security of the country and the accountability of its democracy was by joining and refashioning the army themselves.Footnote ¹⁰ As a Nigerian who did not know their personal political histories and would not exclude them on these grounds was running the military, it was their only exploitable entrée to government. Because they were so much better educated than their predecessors, it would not take long, in a military that was being held accountable by foreigners, for them to rise through the ranks. As they had learned through bitter past lessons, military men were in a stronger political position than outsiders:

This interviewee's emphasis on education as the hallmark difference between the new generation of officers and the old reinforces my argument that he and his compatriots did not merely mix with the rarray boys in the potes in the pursuit of violent ‘revo(loot)shon’. Rather, the student activists were out to destroy an oligarchic and nepotistic system that explicitly excluded the intelligentsia. The political elite was marked by its loyalty to a dictator rather than its capability, and was thus responsible for destroying the country not just economically in the 1970s and 1980s through corruption and their own ineptitude, but also physically in the 1990s by having weakened the army – and the will of the people to resist an insurgency – to the point where a chaotic and seemingly directionless group of ‘ragtag’, in one officer's words, could run rampant (Army Major, Freetown, 24.3.2005 int.). The students had been unsuccessful in challenging the system from the outside in the 1980s, and only found their route to political elite status themselves when a Nigerian general provided them with an opening a decade later. To protect the intelligentsia one cannot just advocate democracy, but must have access to enough political power to ensure it, and in Sierra Leone the military was the most obvious route.

Not six months after this interview the officer quoted above was offered an educational sabbatical from the army to attend law school, an opportunity at which he leapt. Many other officers from the ‘Class of '99’ had also taken sabbaticals in order to either finish the studies they had started before the war, or to pursue advanced degrees. Several are studying law, and others Masters degrees in Political Science.Footnote ¹¹ Their unwavering interest in securing their own educations through the army is further evidence that students develop political consciousness, and pursue an end to repressive governments, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the only way to protect the educational institutions that nurture them, and ensure the value of their educations to the political and economic process. Participation in politics was part of the goal when propping up the NPRC and hoping for ministerial appointments. Participation cannot be viewed just as a coincidental outcome; for example, Williams (Reference Williams2004: 557) noted that many former student activists in Namibia are now ministers because their political experiences shaped their consciousness. Desire to participate was always part of the equation. Thus we should re-examine our theories about the motivations and drive of student activists – who are simultaneously idealistic and elitist – in Sierra Leone and elsewhere in Africa.