Secret societies in rural Sierra Leone

A new article by Peter Albrecht explores the Poro, a male secret society on the coast of West Africa, and how it conditions access to security and justice in rural Sierra Leone. It is published in the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.

The article critiques dichotomies between state and non-state and substantiates the networked quality of order-making as dispersed among a multitude of actors who intertwine disparate rationalities and registers of authority in order-making.

The secret nature of the Poro, the ‘sons of the soil’, and the ‘stranger’ are explored as central figures. Poro membership is essential to the production of social and physical boundaries between insiders and outsiders of a community. By conditioning access to local positions of power and decision-making about how resources are to be distributed, the Poro also conditions access to security and justice.

The networked quality of order-making becomes particularly noticeable when the police engages in Poro affairs, which accentuates the multitude of registers of authorities that are combined and assembled as the Poro and the police interact.