EDITOR’S NOTE: Dear Readers, the below is the first post of a three-part series on the moral economy of resource extraction, with its attendant violent commodification of people’s lives. In this post, Ben Cox, an editorial assistant for The CIHA Blog, sits down with Danny Hoffman to discuss his latest book. Topics addressed include the politics of photographic representation; mobility, labor, youth and violence; and future projects in West Africa. All images have been graciously provided by Danny Hoffman.
Ben Cox (BC): The title of your first book is War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia. What are the stakes of doing an ethnography in a warzone? What is the book about?
Danny Hoffman (DH): The phrase the “war machines,” and the theoretical underpinnings of the book is from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, but what I have really been interested in is thinking about young men and their participation in the conflict on both sides of the Mano River, which forms the border between Sierra Leone and Liberia. I am thinking of these guys as essentially a labor force, which I think is an unusual way to think about African violence, at least in a lot of the popular literature, but also in anthropology and political science as well. I was interested in the movement of young men across the region, and the forces that allow for them to be assembled and deployed as laborers in a certain kind of violent economy. What I found during the time of this research was that for a lot of the fighters on both sides of the border, the work of going to war was one form of labor that they didn’t necessarily think of as being qualitatively distinct from any other form of labor, such as taking diamonds, tapping rubber, etc. The thing that interested me was: how are these guys moving around the region, what are the forces that allow them to be assembled and deployed, and how does that change for them over time, if it does? For one of the groups that I worked with, the Civil Defense Forces in Sierra Leone, they followed an interesting trajectory. They began as a village-based community defense body and then, over time, became essentially a mercenary pool of reserve labor to be deployed around the region. The book follows that trajectory. It looks at these factors within the history of the region and the history of the conflict, and then doing a closer ethnographic reading of the different facets of those processes in various regions over time.
BC: One concern of The CIHA Blog is the politics of representation and the stereotypes one often encounters around depictions of Africa. One of the great things about your book is your conscious effort to put your amazing images in dynamic tension with the text. How did you try to negotiate the balance between the goals of your book through text and image?
DH: Thanks. I appreciate your saying that. I think that, maybe especially for anthropologists, but anyone working in Africa on issues of conflict, it is so hard to get away from the questions of representation – not that one should try to get away from them. They are central. For me, one of the nice things about being able to work in two mediums is that you can play each off the other, in what I hope is a kind of dynamic tension. I have increasingly over the years come to think that the realist documentary mode of still photography has never, and never will be able to, escape the baggage that it carries when you are talking about photographs of violence in Africa. It is such a weighted topic and the stereotypes are so prevalent.
I think in and of itself, regardless of what you intend as a photographer, or even the context in which you display some of these images, they carry so much meaning and are so closely associated with the way Africa has been represented for so long – as a space of incredible violence, senseless violence, ahistorical violence. You cannot at this point use that realist mode of photography to document or explore issues of violence in Africa without having to take into account that there are just some ways in which people are going to read those images which you cannot get past.
For me, this is where it becomes really important to think about what you might pair those images with. The book, at least hopefully, tries to put the images that are of black male bodies — that include weapons, that include people engaged in acts of violence — it tries to pair those with text that is very careful to give those images context, to talk about what is taking place, what are the larger structural forces that are also at play in this moment. And also to pair these images with scenes that are surprising for an African conflict zone. It shouldn’t be, but it is still, I think, surprising for people to see images of an African warzone that includes domestic scenes. People sharing meals, going through life processes, all the stuff that is usually written out of the African war story [see also Mary Harper’s latest post for The CIHA Blog]. Putting those images together hopefully results in some unexpected results, and pairing them with text that attempts to give some background to what those images are and where they come from.
That said, the other concern, the flip side of this problem is: do you risk minimizing the real tragedies of some of these spaces? It is fine for me to say that these young men who were involved in the war are living at the margins of the city, or the global economy, and here is everything you need to know about them. By saying all that in the text, do you risk minimizing the very real violence that is at the heart of what they are doing? So, to some degree, my hope is that the photographs serve as a kind of reminder of that. Hopefully, it succeeds. It is a bit of a gamble, and it felt like that putting the book together, that regardless of what you say, people will come away with certain ideas based on the images or text. Probably the single image that has received the most commentary, at least that I have heard about, is the cover image. I have had a few people say, “Well, look, you are writing this book where you are trying to get away from this very stereotypical view of African violence, and yet here is the cover with the gun, the arm.” And I think that is a fair point. Hopefully, again, by the end of the book, one has a different understanding of what something as simple as the cover means. I think people have criticized the cover, not without reason, but that was a gamble I was willing to take – that the cover image could serve as a reminder of the gravity of what we are talking about.
BC: You describe the book as a “frontline anthropology,” which becomes really interesting when you mobilize the metaphor of the “barracks,” so that this is a frontline anthropology of things in constant movement and change, even if they fall into a similar logical pattern. Could you speak a little about the idea of the barracks?
DH: The barracks was an important idea for me. In thinking about the assembly and deployment of young men and their labor during times of conflict, I got intrigued about this idea of the barracks, which is a formation that is really all about the possibilities of bringing together young men and their bodies, and their potential for violence and violent labor, and holding those bodies and that potential in a state of readiness, and then quickly deploy it wherever it is needed. That seemed like a very useful way to think about processes that were going on all over West Africa. You had cities, refugee camps, labor camps in the forest – all of these various spaces – that were doing exactly that. They were points of assembly for young men and places of deployment. I started thinking of this region as a network of barracks spaces.
One of the places that was important for the book and my research was, literally, a barracks: the ruins of the old Brookfields Hotel in downtown Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. This was a place that had been a luxury hotel prior to the war. Like a lot of these spaces around Africa, it is more of a compound than a single building. During the Revolutionary United Front’s occupation of Freetown, they had essentially occupied the hotel. Then the crew I worked with, the Civil Defense Forces, forced the military and RUF out of Freetown, and they took over the hotel themselves. When the government had been reinstated in 1998, they kept the CDF fighters in the hotel for a number of years. The hotel functioned as a barracks for the CDF. As the fighting was going on in other parts of the country, men would be deployed from Brookfields to go upcountry to different regions. They also became a labor reserve for lots of other forces in the region. When the LURD forces in Liberia were recruiting, they brought in a number of CDF fighters, and a number of them transited through the Brookfields Hotel, or were recruited directly from it. A lot of the region’s armed gangs operated as the war was coming to an end, and immediately afterwards, they operated out of the Brookfields Hotel. It became the center of Freetown’s drug trade for a while. There were weapons trades based there. Even the British Army, when they were rebuilding the new Sierra Leone armed forces, would come to Brookfields periodically to recruit Sierra Leoneans to be trained for the new army. Ethnographically, it was a fascinating place to see this process at work, and to see who could have access to these young men, from politicians who would come to the hotel to look for young men to campaign for them, or the UN coming to the hotel to let people know about the disarmament processes. It became a catch-all space for the assembly and deployment of men, and violence was really the thing that marked the logic of keeping them there. That was the thing that these guys had to offer. Brookfields is one space among many. It was a fairly literal barracks space, but it was just one among many in the region that exemplified this same logic.
BC: What was the day to day, on the ground experience at Brookfields or with the CDF? What kinds of space did you inhabit during your research?
DH: I did a lot of moving! I spent a lot of time going up and down the road networks around southeastern Sierra Leone. A lot of the young men that I had gotten to know in CDF were crossing the Liberian border to fight with LURD, and I traveled with them across the border for a little while. But Brookfields was really a seminal place for a lot of the fieldwork. You have to picture this space – it was really extraordinary. Very very crowded, hundreds of young men living there. They had been there long enough that there was now a complex community who occupied the hotel. The dependents of the fighters also lived at the hotel – wives, girlfriends, children, extended family networks. Lots of people had moved into the hotel. For a while, I was living on the balcony of one of the rooms that was occupied off and on by about six young men, and sharing that space with them. The hotel, for the most part, had been severely damaged, but not totally destroyed, so there was very little furniture, though surprisingly regular electricity, no running water. I would spend my days moving around the hotel, doing interviews, hanging out.
Things that were of concern to the entire Brookfields community tended to take place in the parking lot. It was the place where you could see who was coming and who was going. When there would be rumors about new phases of the disarmament — which a lot of the young men living in Brookfields toward the end of the war were waiting for, because there would be material benefits that came with that (cash, etc), — so they would stay in the Brookfields Hotel and they would wait for news of the disarmament and they would sit along the wall of the parking lot for hours on end. It became a great place to see what the rhythm of life was like for these guys. The men were waiting to be deployed upcountry. They didn’t have much advance warning or know where they were going to go. They would play soccer in the parking lot, or checkers, or do whatever. There were a number of those kinds of spaces around the hotel: peoples’ rooms, but also more public places that I would spend the day moving from one to the other. As with all anthropologists, just spending a lot of time hanging out, and learning a tremendous amount about how these guys both thought and talked about their experiences, and also how they actually performed them.
BC: I think that is a very evocative image building on what you said above. Within a purported warzone, here we have guys playing soccer or hanging out on the wall for hours and hours, and engaged in nuanced negotiations about where they need to be, for themselves and their families, and anticipating what types of opportunities might be coming.
DH: Absolutely. There were a couple of moments that were really striking. For example, just watching some of the combatants playing soccer day after day. Inevitably these matches would end up in fights, and often quite bloody ones. They would play for money, which was not high stakes, but certainly was something. There was this moment in watching one of these matches when someone scored, and of course it was contested. The whole thing ended up in a brawl. It was at that moment, and this is one reason it was important for me, that I realized that as devastating as this war was there were surprisingly few outright pitched battles between belligerent forces. The violence of this war was much more domestic and interpersonal. And here was this graphic illustration of exactly what it was like to be living in a warzone. As dramatic as those “frontline” or stereotypical clashes between forces were, most peoples’ experience of this conflict, including combatants’, was on a much more everyday level. It was the militarization and hypermasculinization of otherwise routine encounters. And that was something that I think as an anthropologist you can get access to because of the disciplinary conventions of spending a lot of time hanging out with people. Seeing those kinds of incidents really gave you a sense of what it meant for them to be living day after day in this state of existence.
BC: What, then, about the bodies themselves? Audiences in the West are most often confronted with the same kind of images you discussed earlier, and not a soccer match. You include an image from the Aberdeen Road Refugee Camp in the book.
DH: If there is one icon of the war in Sierra Leone that people recognize, it is the image of the amputee. This was a conflict that was marked by some extraordinary displays of violence written literally on the body. I was very interested in what experiences were all about at a very personal level. The logics by which one performs violence on human bodies, and the idea that power in this region, in a sense, was demonstrated by one’s ability to enact certain kinds of violence on other people’s bodies, that the amputations have been a fascinating subject for a lot of the observers of the war in Sierra Leone. Why bother to do that? What is the logic in mutilating someone on that level? And I still don’t know that anybody has a really good explanation of that, including the combatants themselves. But I do think there is something about the spectacularization of violence and being able to demonstrate in more and more graphic ways what one is capable of. I think that is an important thing to keep in mind about this war.
Elsewhere, I have written about, and thought about, the ways in which the labor of violence asked of these young men is not the labor that soldiers, say, in the US military are asked to do, which is a much more mechanized kind of fighting. You may be on the frontlines, but more and more what you are doing is operating machines. Whereas, for young men in West Africa that were being deployed as fighters there, they are being asked to make their bodies into the machines. They are being tasked with laboring on a very manual level. That is important to how they moved around the world – their lifeworlds. You would see it in the physical changes that would take place in the body. These are their bodies; bodies that are hardened by a certain kind of work, whether mining diamonds or campaigning on behalf of politicians, which is a very physical and often very violent form of engagement. In all the types of labor they were being asked to perform are manual work, generally unskilled, and often very dangerous. Just thinking about putting the actual physical body at the center of what I have been trying to think about has been an important move. It comes into the book in different ways.
BC: You discuss the idea that West Africa is a kind of “laboratory of the future.” Can you talk about the temporality of the production of this book, both the research and the writing, and where it might yet go?
DH: I was very much aware of the time frame in which the work was done, both the fieldwork and writing. I was actually in the US on September 11, 2001. I was in New York waiting to fly back to West Africa. Because of the grounding of planes, I delayed my departure for Sierra Leone for a few weeks. At least some part of the fieldwork took place in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, and it was no less a conversation in West Africa than it was in any other place in the world. So just on that level, the sense that things were about to change on a global scale, and that was going to play out in West Africa, as well as elsewhere, was very evident. It was impossible to escape. But what I was finding, too, that a lot of the global discourse about what the future looked like mapped so strongly onto Sierra Leone’s recent history. And it just became more so as time unfolded, especially about what young men might be called on to do, about the forms of capitalism that were at work around the globe that were creating radical disparities, that were based on incredible exploitation of places that had natural resources, like this part of West Africa. All of these things that really seemed to be, for those who were paying attention, to be on the surface in Sierra Leone for a few years before they became part of the global conversation. As we moved into the US occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and you began to hear conversations about asymmetrical warfare, about the outsourcing of security to local actors.
Again, all of these ideas that have played out in Iraq and Afghanistan seemed to be increasingly a part of how the US military and other forces around the world are talking about security, economies, and all of these things that if we looked to West Africa over the last two or three decades, we see them there already. If you want to know what it means to recruit young men to perform the labor of security in Baghdad, or Kabul, you have an example of what that looks like from Sierra Leone and Liberia over the long term. My feeling was that you couldn’t talk about West Africa and violence without linking it to the global economy, but doing that also meant paying attention to the time frame. You couldn’t talk about security, militarization, and violence in West Africa without realizing that it is part of a whole system of processes that are playing out elsewhere. But I think they are actually playing out in West Africa first. Even things like the justice apparatuses that are being put in place. I remember talking to a lawyer who was involved in setting up the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the UN’s war crimes tribunal, and having this very heated debate with him about the wisdom of prosecuting certain people rumored to be the subject of indictments. And at one point he finally said to me, “The thing that you don’t understand is that no one cares about Sierra Leone. The only reason anyone is doing this is to see if it will work, so that when we capture Saddam Hussein, we can try him in Iraq.” And it was just an extraordinary moment of candor. You had somebody who was really part of this international apparatus admitting to me – and I think to himself – that in fact a great deal of international engagement in this region is a grand experiment. What can we do – here is a place to try it out! Of course, not all of that is conscious. But we do see a lot of that, and we always have, where the tools and mechanisms of empire being tried out in the colonies first. And so I don’t think that dynamic has changed any. I think this is also related to the idea of a “frontline anthropology.” I think that is part of the imperative for anthropology. For people that are working in these spaces that are changing very quickly, that are on the cusp of things with global reach, I think there is an imperative to think about the temporality of what we do, how we write, and who we write for.
BC: If you could change anything about the book now, what would you change?
That is a good question. Two immediate things I could think of: First, in order to fit the press’s parameters, I had to cut out two chapters. Had I to do it over again, I would probably have reconfigured the book a little to include material from those two chapters because I think some of what was cut was more important than I realized. There is that, and then, I would actually do a little more about writing about the Brookfields Hotel. Some of the work I am doing right now is thinking a bit more about the built environments of the city. There is a lot that I have hinted at in the book about the physical configuration of these barracks spaces. Even in the time since the book was finished, I have done a lot more reading and thinking about the importance of built environments. That part of the barracks argument could have been made much more strongly.
BC: What are you working on now?
DH: I will be spending next year studying architecture and urban design. I think the next stage in this research is to think more about some of the security discourses in Africa. I have gotten more and more interested in how the US military, but also the UN, the African Union, etc, talk about how one thinks about and performs security in Africa and its cities. Whether it is sending in troops or sending in young men to be security forces – all of these things are natural outgrowths of the kind of work I have been doing, and become more and more prominent on the world stage in thinking about African cities and the future of security. So, a lot of what I have been finding is that a lot of the theoretical writings that military thinkers are referring to at this point are coming out of architecture and urban design. Things like: How do you secure a neighborhood? The Somali example right now: the US military is training African Union peacekeepers in how you move through a city, not by walking down its streets, but by blasting your way through people’s living rooms.
This is a new evolution in the global discourse of how one wages war in a city. I have become more interested in studying architecture and design over the next year in order to be more fluid in the literatures that are informing those kinds of decisions. All of this is part of larger, longer term project on urban conflict in Africa. This is a big project that involves work back in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and I will probably also return to some of the places I visited as a journalist.
Danny Hoffman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington. You can visit his personal website here. He can be reached at djh13@u.washington.edu.
Ben Cox is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine, and an editorial assistant for The CIHA Blog.