This chapter emphasises the multifaceted influences that impact individuals as they initiate, sustain, and terminate relationships. These relationships extend beyond the immediate couple, involving broader kinship and societal frameworks. People make nuanced distinctions between various relationship forms and the roles and responsibilities assigned to partners. The chapter highlights the significance of local terminologies in conveying the manifestation of pleasure, different relationship forms, and emotional dynamics. While the fluidity of contemporary relationships in Freetown may appear less burdened by inequality than rural marriages, they encounter their own set of challenges. Such relationships lack reliable foundations, potentially collapsing and leaving individuals without the support of family or community. Additionally, violence can emerge from power imbalances, manipulation, and the complex interplay of emotions and entitlement. This chapter sheds light on how love and relationships are intricately interwoven with societal expectations, personal aspirations, and economic constraints, ultimately shaping the emotional landscape of Freetown.

Horrors of Slavery announced an abolitionist politics unacknowledged by Romantic-era antislavery activists: place-based, self-liberation initiated and led by Black women. Reworking the abolitionist figure of the sorrowful, enslaved Black mother, Wedderburn celebrated his mother, Rosanna, who demanded that his enslaver father manumit him, and championed his grandmother, Talkee Amy, as a higgler and obeah woman who “trafficked on her own account.” Similar freedom practices are then traced throughout The History of Mary Prince. Prince’s repeated petit marronage demanded enslavers’ acknowledgment of her kinship with her parents and husband. As a higgler, like Talkee Amy, Prince used the produce from the provision grounds to assert freedom in fugitive markets. Wedderburn and Prince’s life narratives brought stories of Black women’s place-based freedom practices to a white audience.

This chapter moves backward in time to trace the Maroons’ decolonial relationship with the environment, starting with Queen Nanny, a leader in the First Maroon War and a present-day National Hero of Jamaica. Narratives of Nanny’s warfare against the British noted that her fight included growing pumpkins in the rugged Blue Mountains. The chapter then turns to a critically neglected Romantic-era text, R. C. Dallas’s History of the Maroons. Although primarily a military history, Dallas repeatedly admired the Maroons’ communal “superabundance.” Similarly, J. G. Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition, accompanied by William Blake’s illustrations, described Maroon settlements as viable, sustainable societies that were notable alternatives to plantation capitalism. The Maroons’ agricultural and culinary “superabundance,” documented by Dallas, Stedman, and Blake alike, suggests a Romantic-era ecological critique rooted in communal decolonial practices, which supplements the Romantic figure of the solitary walker who critiques society by communing with nature.

This chapter analyses how external violence impacts on relationships and social dynamics in Sierra Leone, particularly in urban areas. The civil war (1991–2002) disrupted historical marriage and gender roles, reshaping relationship dynamics. In contemporary Sierra Leone, youth face socio-economic obstacles that alter their path to adulthood. They navigate being stuck in youthhood through favours and debts, challenging conventional expectations like formal employment and marriage while securing their future. Urban settings encourage diverse relationship practices, allowing for more open exploration of desire. However, families still play a significant role in mediating conflicts between partners. Youth, unable to establish formal alliances through marriage, create relationship forms that bridge personal desires, societal expectations, and economic constraints. Understanding these complex relationship dynamics is vital, as violence can arise from the tension between personal aspirations and the demands of committed relationships. In urban Sierra Leone’s complex social landscape, violence, intimacy, and social structures are intricately intertwined.

This ethnography explores violence in relationships in Sierra Leone, using the ‘teeth and tongue’ metaphor to reveal the complex interplay between love and violence, particularly in gender dynamics. It examines how global agendas lead some states to extend regulatory control into intimacy, often perpetuating neo-colonial mechanisms. The study probes the clash between rigid state laws and the nuanced intricacies of lived experiences, analysing the impact of ostensibly impartial rights discourses. The book analyses the effects of external violence on relationships (Chapter 2), contemporary relationship dynamics in Freetown (Chapter 3), and critiques prevalent conceptualisations of love and violence phenomenologically (Chapters 4 and 5). It then examines the mediation and regulation of violence by households and communities (Chapter 6), state courts for adults (Chapter 7), and the legal treatment of minors (Chapter 8). The book traces the impact of new legislation on young men who were imprisoned and their partners (Chapter 9).

Wedderburn’s view of Black-led abolition was further outlined in his life narrative, Horrors of Slavery. The narrative initially emerged as a series of letters to a working-class periodical, Bell’s Life in London, after the editor had questioned whether plantation owners ever enslaved their own mixed-race children. The question prompted Wedderburn to share his life story, in which he represented himself as a “product” of plantation slavery and testified to his father’s moral depravity as a “slave-dealer.” Although the letters prompted threatening replies from his half-brother, Andrew Colvile, Wedderburn republished the Bell’s Life letters as a pamphlet that was sold by ultra-radical booksellers in London. Horrors radically tracked Wedderburn’s life from slavery on a Jamaican plantation to his harsh sentence of solitary confinement in an English prison for blasphemous libel, making it an essential supplement to more commonly studied Romantic-era slave narratives, such as Equiano’s Interesting Narrative.

In his Journal of a West India Proprietor, Matthew Lewis documented numerous encounters with the people he enslaved. Guided by Wedderburn’s argument that the provision grounds must be guarded “above all” for Black liberation, this chapter argues that tensions over provision grounds permeated Lewis’s encounters. After granting an additional day per week on the provision grounds as “a matter of right,” Lewis documented that enslaved people were growing poisons, unleashing fires, harboring crowds of destructive livestock, and providing sustenance for self-liberated Black people. Despite noticing these dangers, Lewis wrote to William Wilberforce detailing a plan for emancipating the people he enslaved by giving them his plantation, a proposal feared to be “dangerous to the island.” Lewis’s Journal recorded that his plantations were undermined, not by overt rebellion, but rather by the success of the Black ecological project: The botanical and animal ecologies of the provision grounds were anticipatory abolitionist commons that would be drawn upon in the coming emancipation.

How do adults decide whether to report relationship violence to the police in Sierra Leone? This chapter analyses the intricacies, risks, and societal consequences, highlighting the role of gender, social status, and influence. Drawing from ethnographic accounts and first-hand experiences, it examines how, after the civil war, relationship violence, previously a private matter, became a public and political concern. Legal reforms impact addressing domestic violence, and both men and women face challenges reporting violence, such as social status loss, family/community fines, and social exclusion. In contemporary Sierra Leone, gender parallelism is not a fact but a strategic construct subject to negotiation and transformation. Individuals navigate conflicting gender norms, expectations, and responsibilities, highlighting the complexities of masculinity and femininity within a changing social and legal landscape. Effective policies should align with local contexts and promote dialogue to render reporting violence possible and promote gender justice.

This chapter argues that the provision grounds continued to trouble the Victorian imagination. The radical nature of the provision grounds emerged vividly during and after the abolition of slavery in 1834 when newly freed Black people challenged the plantocracy by staying put on their communal provision grounds. Both antislavery and proslavery writers developed strategies for displacing Black Jamaicans from their land. Abolitionist Joseph Sturge, for example, recommended importing provisions from Haiti to weaken Jamaica’s internal markets and make workers dependent on wages. Thomas Carlyle’s notorious “Discourse” seethed with racist rage focused on “Quashee” surrounded by pumpkins, a synecdoche for independent, agriculturally successful Black people. In Carlyle’s essay, the planter picturesque becomes an abolitionist grotesque of “waste fertility,” an environment of seemingly out-of-control plants and animals swarming around free Black people unwilling to participate in Britain’s wage labor economy. Carlyle’s coinage of “waste fertility” inadvertently illustrated the Black geographies championed by Wedderburn.

This chapter analyses household and community mediations of violence in Sierra Leone, which emphasise social relationships over harmony. These non-state dispute resolutions consider overall character rather than specific actions, with (character) witnesses playing vital roles and blame being shared amongst disputing parties. Informal mediations prioritise maintaining social groups over individual or relationship harmony. Grievances are deemed inevitable but must be contained within individuals through rituals like ‘swallowing’ to prevent wider community disruptions. Proximity, gender, and kinship dynamics influence case-dependent assessment, often leading to harsher punishment for women despite their prominence in mediation. The chapter challenges the notion of harmony ideology and emphasises the difficulty of forgiveness. Swallowing grievances aims to preserve relationships and contain conflicts while minimising state interference. Sierra Leoneans must choose between informal and state mediations. Institutions in this legal pluralism highlight different aspects – fact vs context, acts vs character, preservation vs rupture – resulting in different outcomes.

Robert Wedderburn was deeply influenced by his enslaved mother and grandmother, who raised him in Jamaica. After migrating to London, he became a key figure in ultraradical circles and was prosecuted by the British government for blasphemous libel. Wedderburn’s vision for abolition from below sought to forge a transatlantic alliance between English agrarian radicals and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Wedderburn’s influence was documented in Robert Cruikshank’s caricature, A Peep in the London Tavern, which depicted him challenging the proto-socialist Robert Owen. After a review of existing scholarship that places Wedderburn within ultraradical circles or focuses on his mixed-race identity, the Introduction argues that understanding Wedderburn’s advocacy for land-based insurrection requires dialogue with scholarship in Black geographies. Wedderburn’s insights about place-based resistance to slavery are then illustrated in a reading of James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica.

This book synthesises a decade of engagement with Sierra Leone, exploring the myriad manifestations of violence in relationships and its negotiation, mediation, and punishment. Employing ethnographic methods, participant observation, multi-perspective interviews and focus group discussions, the study also incorporates ‘love’ and life histories, complemented by primary and secondary sources. Research collaborators played a crucial role in challenging and shaping interpretations. The study emphasises deep ethnography, embodied methodologies, relationship cultivation, respectful collaboration, and a nuanced approach in addressing these sensitive social, political, and legal topics. The chapter introduces pivotal research sites, highlights the significance of ethical considerations, and underscores the transformative impact of sexual violence during the early stages of the researcher’s work and her community’s response. Furthermore, all research participants were fully informed of the research’s objectives and provided oral consent. To ensure anonymity, identifying details of some research collaborators were omitted, pseudonyms used, and details altered to safeguard collaborators.