The paper explores the interplay between urbanization dynamics and the transformation of the role of religious institutions known as initiation societies in Sierra Leone. Initiation societies (also known as secret societies) have been fulfilling an important sociopolitical role in societies of the Upper Guinea Coast. Their progressive decline due to changing political conditions is a recurrent trope in the literature about those institutions. Similarly, debates in Sierra Leone about the future of initiation societies often oppose people who practice ‘traditional’ rituals, and Muslims and Pentecostals who consider those societies to be incompatible with ‘modernity’, ‘civilization’ and ‘urbanization’. While this supposedly unavoidable dichotomy would spell the end of ‘old’ beliefs, this paper looks at the contemporary transformation of initiation societies as a means to appropriate urbanization and protect oneself from it simultaneously. The ethnography presents dynamics of transformation of a male society known as Poro in the semi-urban local context of the Peninsula of Freetown, which is situated near the capital city and has undergone significant demographic changes and rapid urbanization over the past fifteen years.
Aesthetics and strategies of concealment at the heart of initiation societies constitute an asset for appropriating urbanization and yet, smoothing its deregulatory effects. Previous scholarship stresses in a longue durée perspective the role of concealment in institutions of the Upper Guinea Coast as a protective strategy in an unstable environment characterized by slave-raiding and warfare. The dialectical relationship between concealment and opening has resurfaced in the context of the post-civil war period (1991-2002), as the narrative of reconstruction and modernity tends to build on the disavowal of ‘old’ structures of power and yet, a revival of initiation has been observed in many regions. On the Peninsula of Freetown, the transformation of the role of the Poro society – away from its political functions and closer to its ritual and ‘cultural’ ones – illustrates the ambivalent process of taming and appropriating changes. The Poro and its related rituals are progressively integrated in a narrative of urbanization that stresses the importance of economic development and tourism. Nevertheless, the commodification of cultural resources is negotiated internally as ritual objects/masks/performances are separated between those who can become public and those have to stay secret. Similarly, the sale of sacred places provokes debate and fears, and yet is understood by many members as a welcomed ‘opening’ – if certain rituals can be continued elsewhere or in another way. The maintenance of rituals as a protective strategy against the perceived consequences of urbanization (presence of strangers, land grabbing, witchcraft…) is particularly relevant for people to approach urbanization as a controlled ‘improvement’.