I Did It to Save My Life: Love and Survival in Sierra Leone by Catherine E. Bolten (review)

I Did It to Save My Life: Love and Survival in Sierra Leone is a book about the diversity and boundaries of survival strategies that people adapt in extremely violent conditions like a civil war and their persistent claim to humanity to justify their actions, even the most violent ones. It is the ethnography of Catherine E. Bolten’s fieldwork in a marginalized town in Seirra Leone, Makeni, right after the end of the civil war, 1991–2002. It consists of eight chapters and the bulk of the book—seven of the chapters—is based on the narratives of seven people involved in the war in one way or another. Bolten conceptualizes and theorizes this particular conflict with the notion of love, a Krio—the lingua franca of Sierra Leone—term “expressing the bonds of mutual identification, sacrifice, and need between individuals and groups of people” (2). Obviously, what Bolten sets out to do is an unusual undertaking: analyzing the Sierra Leone civil war, which is notorious for rapes, amputations, and kidnappings, through emotions. She carries it out very successfully.

Bolten starts with a concise summary of the colonial and postcolonial historical background of Sierra Leone and proceeds with the contextualization of Makeni in the political and economic landscape of the country. Makeni is a town stigmatized by the nation for being occupied by the rebels during the war and also for not expelling the ex-combatants afterwards. From the two introductory chapters I gather that she in fact predicates the emergence of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) insurgents and the outbreak of civil war on the colonial legacy and subsequent challenges traditionally associated with it in the postcolonial period, such as unequal distribution of resources, uneven economic development, clientelism, and paternalistic and authoritarian governments. However, since ethnic and tribal conflicts play no role in the Sierra Leone civil war, as they usually do in African wars, she focuses instead on sociocultural aspects of the country to understand the factors leading to the war in addition to those listed above. Her focus on Sierra Leonean culture takes us back to the concept of love dominating the social relations and organization.

Love is the most central and recurrent concept in Catherine E. Bolten’s book; it is defined as a cultural practice regulating not only the reciprocal relationships between individuals but also those between people and the state, and thereby almost all aspects of Sierra Leoneans’ lives—social, economic, and political. As opposed to its romantic connotation in Western cultures, love in Sierra Leonean context culturally has a material and pragmatic aspect to it, due also to the severity of socioeconomic settings.

As interesting and innovative as it is, the overuse of the term, as the book progresses to explain the reasons for almost all doings of Sierra Leoneans, from ordinary people to politicians, might leave the reader wondering whether she stretches the term a little too much; Bolten avoids resorting to more universal concepts and feelings such as conflict of interest, frustration with exclusion and deprivation, or revolting against injustice to make sense of some of their actions. My interpretation is that Bolten deliberately makes use of the terms and also the language used by her narrators to be true to their story as much as possible. Therefore, instead of compassion, care, and social bonds she uses love, or instead of social and political leaders and chieftains she refers to “big men,” thereby aiming not only to produce a sincere and authentic account but also enabling readers to empathize with the narrators to a greater extent.

Bolten is aware of and reflects on the issues related to memory, such as its selectiveness and influence of intersubjectivity, along with the pitfalls of relying predominantly on narratives—for example, the tendency of interlocutors to exaggerate. However, none of the pitfalls actually pose...