Keywords: Sierra Leone, civil war, forced marriage, Sierra Leone Special Court. Pre-colonial Africa, marriage, gender.
During the Civil War in Sierra Leone (1991-2002) rebels abducted thousands of women, and gave them to soldiers as ‘wives’. These women became known as ‘bush wives’. After the war, during the Sierra Leone Special Court (SPSL) members of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) were found guilty of the crime of ‘forced marriage’. Yet often historians view what happened during the civil war as an isolated event, removed from a longer historical genealogy. However, the late 19th century was a similar period of upheaval in Sierra Leone and the abduction of women and children and giving them to soldiers as wives was commonplace. Historians such as Richard Reid have argued that guerrilla groups like the RUF were not a new phenomenon, but were archetypes of pre-colonial practices, which re-emerged in the 1990s. He argues that colonialism was merely a lid that halted pre-colonial patterns of political authority and state building, where much emphasis was placed on wives, slaves, and concubines as representations of wealth. Although at a superficial level a comparison between the abduction of women in the 19th century and the abduction of women in during the civil war seems apt, one cannot view the history of forced marriage during times of conflict as static and unchanging. This paper explores these two episodes in the history of Sierra Leone, and explores the nexus of marriage, slavery and warfare in the context of the colonial period, to try and examine how colonialism may have altered a society where marriage and ‘forced marriage’ played a key role in statecraft