Abstract
Looks back on the recent past in order to imagine the future. The ultimate take away from the stories of the polio-squats is that hope for a better future lies in the hope that flickering moments of communitas kept alive in places of destitution will help safeguard the humanity of humankind. The chapter leads also the main thesis of the book to its logical endpoint, showing that if discourses on, and practices around disability do not speak about universal truths, but rather reflect and respond to the hegemonic culture of specific spacetimes, than disability activism in Africa probably has arrived to a cross-road in an epoch when a whole world system is undergoing a profound transformation. Although civil society is never far from the dangers of rigidification, co-optation and depoliticisation, the unknown future opens up to vast spaces of new possibilities for civic agency, of which DPOs might be the forerunners.
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Notes
- 1.
Lantern Night is usually celebrated as part of the festivities of Independence Day. It is an important part of popular culture and hundreds of thousands of people come to the city centre to participate in it. Leaders of the country assist to the spectacle, they distribute prizes to the neighbourhoods and youth organisations with the most successful lanterns. The festival originated in the 1930s as part of the end of Ramadan festivities, but it was successively integrated to local public culture, losing its religious connotations.
- 2.
Manish would not, however, have agreed with Agamben’s (1998) concept of ‘bare life’ as connected to a ‘state of exception’. Bringing historical (namely Greek) examples, Agamben points out that the Western distinction of human life as both specifically human and animal (purely biological) is sometimes lost in circumstances that are depicted by governance structures as exceptional. In those moments, human life is reduced to its most basic biology, opening the way to a politics of extermination. It is problematic to import the concept to a Sierra Leonean context where an oppressive timescale is not exceptional but ordinary. What results from it, the reduction of certain lives to their basic biological functioning is neither total, nor wilful; it is just the by-product of the hierarchisation of lives according to—extremely unequal—social statuses.
- 3.
See: Szántó (2018) Sierra Leone General Elections 2018—A personal diary https://matsutas.wordpress.com/2018/04/16/sierra-leone-general-elections-2018-a-personal-diary-by-diana-szanto/ and (2018) Congosa politics: Rumours and elections in Sierra Leone https://matsutas.wordpress.com/2018/05/28/congosa-politics-rumours-and-elections-in-sierra-leone-by-diana-szanto/.
- 4.
The reference is here to the novel by the Czech writer Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). Kundera plays with the philosophical idea of ‘eternal return’, positing that, to the contrary, each human life is unique and unrepeatable. This uniqueness implies responsibility, but also freedom, or ‘lightness’.
- 5.
Amongst the many articles investigating the slow demise of the NGO sector by authoritarian states, see: http://www.economist.com/news/international/21616969-more-and-more-autocrats-are-stifling-criticism-barring-non-governmental-organisations.
- 6.
Personal communication by John Clarke.
- 7.
Fukuyama talked In the framework of a conference organised by the Central European University: “Democracy and its discontent” 9th October 2015.
- 8.
This speech was delivered at the annual Summer University of the party FIDESZ in Tusnadfurdo. (Romania) in July 2014. The full text of the speech can be read here: https://budapestbeacon.com/full-text-of-viktor-orbans-speech-at-baile-tusnad-tusnadfurdo-of-26-july-2014/.
- 9.
While I am writing these lines I read in the newspaper about the report produced by the Finnish research centre Bios for the UN. The report’s rough conclusion is that capitalism as usual is not able to get us off from the track of auto-destruction caused by climate change. The report is accessible here: https://bios.fi/bios-governance_of_economic_transition.pdf.
- 10.
In Theory from the South the Comaroffs describe this form of democratisation as ‘a very thin idea of “government by the people”’ (2012:29).
- 11.
Source: African Minerals Condemned in Sierra Leone. London Mining Network. 11 May 2012 http://londonminingnetwork.org/2012/05/african-minerals-condemned-in-sierra-leone/ (Accessed: 20.06.2012).
- 12.
Source: Cf. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/10/sierraleone-socfin-idUSL6N0JP45E20131210, Accessed: 3 January 2014.
- 13.
See: The International Centre for Not-for-Profit Law, 2016 https://www.movedemocracy.org/case-studies/sierra-leone.
- 14.
On the topic of the abortion Bill see in the national media: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-31941025.
- 15.
Koroma denied having had intention for nominating himself for a third time or extending his term. Even if he had such intentions, he got gradually detached from the idea as its implementation became more and more improbable in the face of the resistance—less by the people than by the international community.
- 16.
Koroma was internationally criticised for sacking the Vice-President on the basis of doubtful charges. For more details on the political crisis this incident produced, see: https://www.google.com.vn/search?q=koroma+sacks+vice+president&rlz=1C1GCEA_enHU780HU780&oq=koroma+sacks+vice+president&aqs=chrome.69i57.7382j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.
- 17.
Source: THE GROWING INLFUENCE OF CHINA IN SIERRA LEONE By MC Bah- Atlanta, GA-USA, http://standardtimespress.org/?p=4633.
- 18.
- 19.
The resistance to turn full heartedly towards illiberalism is explained maybe less by total commitment than by the fact that Sierra Leone is not only indebted to China, but also to the IMF. IMF conditionalities have always narrowed down the economic and political possibilities open before indebted countries. On the Chinese influence see for example: https://thediplomat.com/2018/03/we-are-chinese-how-china-is-influencing-sierra-leones-presidential-election/.
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Szántó, D. (2020). Hope. In: Politicising Polio. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6111-1_8
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