Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers: Women's Lives through War and Peace in Sierra Leone (review)

Within the emerging genre of "warscape ethnography," several methodological limitations continue to pose problems for researchers. One concerns the paradox at the heart of ethnography in general: the very richness of individual experience on which qualitative approaches are grounded makes it difficult to generalize about broad-scale regional processes like war and peace. Another concerns the problem of change over time: how much of the postconflict landscape is a product of the war itself, and can "prewar" social structures account for the distinctive character of any specific period of violence? Particularly in Africa, where supposedly timeless "tradition" is all too often offered as an explanation for everything from entrepreneurial warlords to child soldiers, studies of wars and their aftermath tend to be either too situated in their local context, or not situated at all. In addition, the presence and power of global humanitarian institutions tends to be either overemphasized or ignored. Within this literature, Chris Coulter's Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers stands as a model for how to negotiate these problematic dichotomies.

Coulter begins by carefully delineating the scope of her project, an ethnographic study based on multiple periods of fieldwork in northern Sierra Leone between 1998 and 2004. She interviewed about one hundred women and worked closely with ten, most of whom had been abducted as young unmarried girls from rural agricultural communities by rebel groups and attempted to return to their families years later, at the war's end. Common to these women's experience was the trauma of the initial violent rape by multiple men, sometimes apparently modeled on images from commercial pornography, lasting a period of days or even weeks. At some point each was commandeered or "rescued" by a high-ranking man who claimed her as a "bush wife" and offered protection in return for sexual and domestic services. Many of them also received military training and were required to participate in violent attacks on civilians; women are estimated to have made up about 30 percent of the armed forces during the war. Over the course of years, some women rose to positions of real authority as commanders' wives and as soldiers in their own right. Coming from impoverished rural communities, they suddenly had access to looted goods, as well as command over the labor of others. Coulter notes that the various forces operated without any centralized distribution networks for food or supplies; their success depended on the processing, carrying, and cooking of stolen crops, most of which was carried out by women. The neat, bounded categories favored by humanitarian organizations—of victim and perpetrator, sex slave and rebel combatant—are confounded in the persons of these women

One of the great strengths of this book is that Coulter conducted her research in Kamadugu Sokorala, the same Kuranko village studied for over thirty years by Michael Jackson beginning in the late 1960s. Coulter therefore has a remarkable body of ethnographic and ethnohistorical data in which to anchor the narratives of her informants. Sweeping changes in rural social institutions like kinship, marriage, the division of labor by gender, and opportunities for making a living can be understood in terms of the war years, but also as due to processes under way well before the war began. In the current moment, she finds that rural men and women, parents and children, no longer know what to expect from each other, or how much they can depend on each other for support. While some find this exciting and liberating, for others the sense of social isolation is profound. This is an ethnography, not just of war, but of the Kuranko, and of Sierra Leonian society in general, rendered in clear, jargon-free prose that is a pleasure to read and that makes the text an excellent option for teaching.

Young women attempting to return to their families after...