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 16 A topography of Freetown’s social imaginary Geographies of dreams Reflecting upon one of his first excursions into the tributaries of the Amazon, Claude Lévi-Strauss philosophizes about the “nature” of towns and the inherently metaphysical qualities of space they exhibit. He writes: And then there was that strange element in the evolution of so many towns: To drive to the west which so often leaves the eastern part of the town in poverty and dereliction. It may be merely the expression of that cosmic rhythm which has possessed mankind from the earliest times and springs from the unconscious realization that to move with the sun is positive, and to move against it negative; the one stands for order, the other for disorder. It’s a long time since we ceased to worship the sun; and with our Euclidean turn of mind we jib at the notion of space as qualitative. But it is independently of ourselves that the great phenomena of astronomy and meteorology have their effect – an effect as discreet as it is ineluctable – in every part of the globe. We all associate the direction east-to-west with achievement (…). (Lévi-Strauss 1961: 125-126) In Sierra Leone, this “cosmic” drive towards the west transcends the spaces of towns and cities. The normative, dichotomous perception of west and east and the therewith connected associations of achievement and wealth (west) and of failure and dereliction (east) find expression in various geographical relations and geographically bounded (and inspired) imaginations. These relations and their concomitant dreams are layered hierarchically in a tripartite order. Freetown , which is the most Western place in Sierra Leone not only in geographical terms, represents a much longed for destination but not the final gratification in that (cosmic) drive towards the west. The latter lies across the Atlantic – in the ultimate embodiment of the West itself: the United States of America. The story of Moses exemplifies all three layers of that perpetual drive towards the ever-better (imagined) west. Moses is a thirty-six-year-old relatively successful trader working in Freetown. Born in a small village near the Liberian border Chapter 16: A topography of Freetown’s social imaginary 151 (thus in Sierra Leone’s very east), Moses dreamt his whole life about the (various ) West(s) he wanted to go to. His dreams found their progressive – but yet unfinished – realization in his incremental migration towards the west. I went to Kenema when I was twelve to finish my schooling. After school, I went to Bo. In Bo I started my business. When I had enough savings, I came to Freetown. That was my big dream. For me, Freetown was like England or America. When you come from the provinces, Freetown is like small-London. It is the big world in Freetown. (…) For many years I was living in the East Side of Freetown. This is where you get when you come from the provinces . You live in the east, where the poor people live. Because in Freetown, the lodging system, the renting system, it is a big problem. The good living is only in the west. But it is very expensive to live in the west. So we stayed in the east for many years. When my business grew, me and my family we moved to Aberdeen, that is in the West End of Freetown. (…) I was always saving to go to the better places. Now I am saving again. I want to have the chance to go to the US to work in a warehouse. This is where I want to live now. In Moses’ short biographic account, the geography of, and the imagination about, “the better places” concur with and complement each other. Dreams are inscribed into places; places are inscribed into dreams. Achievement and success are ultimately associated with the move towards the west. And in fact, by moving geographically westwards, Moses moved socially upwards. The structure of these spatially oriented dreams (about and towards the West/west) consists of three main relations and directions: (1) from the provinces towards the “big world” in Freetown; (2) from Freetown’s deprived eastern parts towards its affluent West End; and (3) from this side of the Atlantic towards the other side, the (even) “bigger world”: the US. In a talk I had with a Freetonian scholar who travelled to and fro all sides of these three “dream”-relations, he added a fourth direction to what he described harshly but poetically as...

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