When anthropologist Michael Jackson arrived in the village of Firawa in Sierra Leone during the late 1960s, the outside world still seemed far away. He wrote of how the socio-spiritual realm of his subjects was contingent upon physical place – a way of being defined by indigenized Islam, oral historiography, and intimate knowledge of their fields and forests. As in any remote hamlet, life in Firawa could be difficult, but Jackson observed how, in their daily struggles, people were comforted by a feeling of socially mediated control and understanding. There, he wrote, ‘what you give in the course of your life will somehow be given back, and whatever you receive will be shared. You respect your elders, parents and rulers and in return they protect you and see to your welfare’ (Jackson, 2005, 69).

Returning 50 years later, Jackson was struck by how this system had broken down. The old modes of authority had been swept away by civil war and the growth of the state. Rather than focus on the transformation of the village he had known into a struggling town, he took as his subject the plight of its youth who once would have passed their lives in the fields, but now eked out a precarious living on the streets of the capital or in faraway England. For them, he writes, ‘the time-honoured roles of gender and of age together with hereditary chieftaincy, cult associations and labour collectives, are no longer binding or viable.