Dr Jennifer Diggins

This article explores the ‘apprehension’ (Vigh 2015) that permeates life in coastal Sierra Leone, as fisherfolk struggle to navigate a precarious economy of overfished waters and overstrained relationships. In a context of deepening environmental uncertainty, vigilance has come to be regarded as a key survival skill. People constantly scrutinise their social and material environment for evidence of fleeting opportunities or concealed threats. At sea, fishermen strain all their senses for evidence of shoaling fish and remain equally vigilant to rival crews, who may seek to deceive them in their competition for the same depleted resource. When fishermen return home with empty nets exchange partners regard them with suspicion, alert for clues that the crew sold their catch covertly in another coastal town. This erosion of trust, fostered through perpetual vigilance in a time of uncertainty, also generates a particular way of perceiving the occult. As elsewhere in West Africa, some people are thought to possess ‘witch eyes’, empowering them to see and move beyond the visible surfaces of the material world. When businesses founder or savings evaporate, people are quick to assume their fortunes were invisibly robbed ‘in a witch way’.  And yet, despite the deep mistrust through which people regard their social world, moral discourses about this supposedly rampant trickery, is nuanced. Despair, at believing oneself to have been grifted in some unseen way, is often tempered by a weary empathy for their antagonists’ poverty, and even grudging respect for their superior skills of perception and concealment.

This article explores the economic negotiations between Sierra Leonean fishermen and the women who compete to buy their fish; tracing how relationships of gendered intimacy and interdependence are being reconfigured in a context of deepening economic precarity. Fish stocks in Sierra Leone are in crisis. Fisherfolk look back with nostalgia to a past in which bountiful harvests had made it possible for transactions of fish to be simple and impersonal. Today, by contrast, it is almost impossible for women to access fish without working to develop strong personal relationships with fishermen: deploying gifts of food, loans of money, and even secret ‘medicines’ to secure the loyalty of potential customers. I analyze how men and women reflect on their growing impoverishment through discourses that emphasize their moral ambivalence at being drawn back into webs of interpersonal dependency and argue that these anxieties need to be understood in the context of Sierra Leone’s history of domestic slavery.

As a result of the autopsy of Sierra Leone's civil war, we have become familiar with a rather dystopian vision of ‘traditional’ economic life in that region. Combatants often described their family villages as spaces where profound inequalities were hidden within households; where labour exploitation was woven through kinship relations. This article follows several young men who fled conditions of bonded labour in their rural homes: not to join the war but to seek a new life in the commercial fishing economy. Elsewhere across the postcolonial world, there is a rich ethnographic literature illustrating that people on the fringes of the global capitalist order respond with profound unease as their economic lives become ever more strongly regulated by impersonal market forces. Less often acknowledged is the possibility that, for some people, in some contexts, severing social relations might be exactly what they want, and that therein lies the greatest appeal of an economic life characterized by market transactions. For the young men described in this article, commercial fishing appeared to offer a level of personal ‘freedom’ unimaginable within the patron–client structures of village life. However, most find themselves drawn rapidly back into new forms of extractive relationships.