Abstract
From a micro, macro, and global perspective much can be learned from Chris Coulter’s Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers: Women’s Lives through War and Peace in Sierra Leone. Coulter sensitively and compassionately takes us on an ethnographical journey through narratives of her informants, and one woman in particular. Her story enables us to examine how the war impacted individual lives and the wider effects and implications of postwar demilitarization and reconstruction from an interpersonal, family, community, societal, and global context.
Coulter examines how structural conditions locally and globally impact women’s war and peacetime experiences, how women articulate and interpret these experiences, and the coping strategies women employ by choice or predicament to survive. She argues that war and peace are not mutually exclusive but interrelated in ways that articulate cultural continuities, such as local notions of gender, moral values, kinship and marriage systems, and structural violence. Because gender is not a fixed entity, what it means to be a woman is context specific and informed by cultural notions of gender and wider economic and political changes. Coulter argues that Western and humanitarian assumptions about whether these women could be viewed as “bush” wives or combatants, victims or perpetrators, or “inherently peaceful” are inconsistent with the realities of the Sierra Leone experience where her informants were both, depending on how they interpreted and coped with experiences such as conformity to expected gender norms, reconciliation, healing, fear, and shame (p. 238). In a culture where women were traditionally viewed as wild and unruly, life in the bush enabled such women to “unleash” this behavior and disrupt expected gender norms. Thus, women combatants were treated more harshly after the war, because as women, they were seen as deviant, unnatural, and wicked, and brought shame on their families. Many women ex-combatants were therefore reluctant to disclose their role in war during demobilization and postwar reconstruction because of the stigma attached to a violation of gender norms.
The book is divided into seven chapters. The first two chapters provide historical context and overview of marriage, family, kinship structure, and livelihood options. She shows that although the rebel movement violated conventional norms and social hierarchies, rebel camps were similarly patterned around the traditional social structure of a village. Typical examples were pseudo family-based domestic groups, mammy queens, polygyny as a marriage practice, and the vital role of women as food producers and processors. Chapters three and four address women’s lives during war, focusing on abduction, rape, and female combat. She argues that preexisting understandings of morality such as virginity and marital sex and failure to enforce national legislation about sexual violence, made it difficult for abducted “wives” to conceive sexual violations they experienced as rape regardless of whether it was at the time of abduction or during their time as “wives.” Such understandings however shaped how they viewed new types of globalized and pornographic sexual violence since such experiences violated cultural taboos about sex and sexuality. The next three chapters focus on how women coped with the postwar reconciliation, demobilization, and reconstruction process and the difficulties of making a living and regaining acceptance. Coulter argues that the healing and reconciliation process would have been more effective if based on criteria that trained people for a sustainable livelihood instead of quick-fix approaches such as public testimonies of healing and trauma. While there are new laws protecting women and various initiatives to promote gender equality, abducted and ex-combatant women remain peripheral because of their lack of ability to generate an income and attitudes towards them in the postwar society.
This is exceptional ethnography with much to recommend. Coulter draws on narrative, observation, and historical methodologies. Her use of intersectionality and political economy discourse clearly show how women interpret and navigate the complex interconnections between relations of kinship, marriage, morality, and livelihood under conditions of war and peace. Coulter keeps us aware of her role and relationship as a researcher using self reflexive analysis.
Since this is an ethnographic work based in a particular region, I wonder how typical these women’s experiences were in relation to counterparts in other parts of the Sierra Leone, particularly in the southern and eastern provinces where cultural contexts are not necessarily similar in regard to relations and obligations women occupy in family and kinship groups, as well as their rights to the title of chieftaincy. Also, from a historical perspective, it would have been interesting to explore efforts made by women’s indigenous social networks to protect women’s lives and livelihoods during crises situations beyond those in the domestic sphere. The agency of Ghanaian and Nigerian market women during colonialism and military coups in the twentieth century provide relevant examples. Sociologists, anthropologists, human rights, and women, gender, and sexuality studies scholars will find this an extremely useful book for research and teaching.