Global Gangs: Street Violence across the World

8. “Playing the Game”: Gang–Militia Logics in War-Torn Sierra Leone

171 8 “Playing the Game”: Gang–­ Militia Logics in War-­ Torn Sierra Leone Mats Utas So when we were in the camp we just wanted to listen to [Tupac] Shakur music. So we went singing “West Side” and go on “ah-­ ah-­ ah-­ ah” [like the background fill-­ in in many rap songs]. So all the other soldiers they made the name famous. So we began to plait our hair and behave like American boys. If you go to some towns in the interior you will still see West Side Niggaz written on the walls. It was only when the government put charges against us that they started to call us West Side Boys. We called ourselves West Side Niggaz, yes [he says the last words slowly, as if tasting it with full satisfaction]. —­ interview with a mid-­ level West Side Boys commander, 2005 When I recently read Sudhir Venkatesh’s (2008) Gang Leader for a Day, I was struck by the feeling of total familiarity. I felt that I knew the setting and the actors to the extent that I could almost guess what would happen on the next page. In particular, the similarities were striking between the lives of the Black Kings, the Chicago Southside gang Venkatesh studied, and the ex-­ combatant street corner youths with whom I worked in postwar Freetown, Sierra Leone. These similarities, on one 172    mats utas hand, likely originated from a shared interest in comparable research questions. Venkatesh (2006, xi), for example, states, I was interested in one small part of this history—­ namely, how the organization came to develop and manage its lucrative drug-­ trafficking enterprise. I hoped to understand why young people chose this risky path (compared with other, mainstream avenues that might have been available); how they invested, saved, and spent the money they earned; and how a gang dealt with all the conflicts and problems that arose while running a business that was entirely illegal. My own interests were arguably much the same, but instead of drug trafficking, I was interested in what might be termed the “war enterprise .” My research focused on young men (and some women) who had actively participated in the Sierra Leone civil war (1991–­ 2002), and I wanted to understand how and why they had done so. On the other hand, as Venkatesh (2000, 282) argues in another book, “all local worlds have their own intrinsic historicity, an internal dialectic of structure and practice that shapes, reproduces, and transforms the character of everyday life within them”; he goes on to suggest that “it is the interaction of these local worlds with the structures, agents, and ideologies of the larger world that produces observable social patterns.” Seen from this perspective, it can be argued that there is much more to the observation that similarities exist between the gang studied by Venkatesh in Chicago and the ex-­ combatant youths whom I study in Freetown than a simple coincidence of research interests. In particular, drawing on studies of U.S. ganglands by Venkatesh (2008), Wacquant (2008), Bourgois (1995), and Hagedorn (2008), in this chapter I suggest that these similarities allow us to understand the logics of youth in postwar Sierra Leone in a much more nuanced way than more conventional approaches to studying war combatants. The chapter is structured as follows. I begin by considering the relationship between youth and politics in Sierra Leone. I then provide a brief overview of the country’s tormented history of violence and war and trace the origins of a youth group known as the West Side Boys (WSB), a splinter militia group that emerged as key players in the conflict around 1999–­2000 and who were one of a range of actors that emerged “playing the game”    173 during the Sierra Leone civil war. Most Western media accounts suggest that the WSB were nothing more than renegade, anarchistic bandits, devoid of any long-­ term goals. In actual fact, the WSB were a cohesive and well-­organized militia that played an important role in the conflict; military commanders and politicians employed them as part of their larger military and political strategies (Utas and Jörgel 2008). Most importantly, perhaps, the WSB adopted the global rebel and gang icon Tupac Shakur as a primary reference point for their social being, as the epigraph to this chapter reflects well. The relationship between Tupac, youth militias, and warfare in Sierra Leone is...