Introduction

Abstract

The themes and questions that animate this book emerged from my frustration with the way contemporary African conflicts have come to be understood. I had originally planned to write a book on the Sierra Leonean civil war as a way of finding answers to some of the very difficult questions that have continued to cloud understanding of what happened in that country in the 1990s. Armed conflict broke out in Sierra Leone in March 1991 when insurgents calling themselves the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) crossed the border from Liberia and initiated an insurgency gainst the All People’s Congress (APC) government of Joseph Momoh. Initially restricted to the countryside, the conflict gradually spread until it engulfed the entire country. By the time it ended in 2001, tens of thousands of people had lost their lives; thousands more had been maimed; atrocities of horrific proportions had been committed; widespread destructions of lives and property had taken place; governments had been convulsively jolted and toppled, and violence and war, in their nastiest proportions, had taken hold of Sierra Leonean society.

The real problem seems to be about epistemological configurations and the types of discursive practices they make possible.

—V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa