ZOE MARKS
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATION: SIERRA LEONE
In Sierra Leone, everyone has a unique recipe for groundnut soup.1 I learned this while traveling in the provinces to interview participants in the country’s ten-year civil war. As I visited people’s homes, I gradually learned to cook Sierra Leonean food with my hosts and interlocutors, including several former wives of the rebel leader Foday Sankoh. Cooking with women from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was a privilege. In spending time with them, they told me stories about the war and shared their present-day experiences, educating me in the material realities of their daily life and subtly shifting the power balance of my research. As experts of their domain, navigating cooking pots and coal fires, they gained control over the context and content of our visit. Groundnut soup, a ubiquitous Sierra Leonean dish, gradually became a crucible for forging connections and better understanding the lives of the people I met.
There was no obvious connection between cooking and my research. I was in Sierra Leone to examine how insurgency changes over time and to understand how the RUF was able to sustain a decade-long civil war despite minimal support and largely coercive recruitment. Yet the social ebb and flow of eating and waiting defined my experiences around the country as I met hundreds of interviewees through diverse gatekeepers. The twelve months I spent traveling, lodging, eating, and passing time with RUF interlocutors was essential to my learning who they are as people and how they experienced insurgency. As I sought care and reciprocity in research-based relationships, cooking emerged organically as a practice alongside other more (or less) sophisticated methods. As a result, my dusty field notes include scattered shopping lists and recipes alongside descriptions of rebel strategy and tactics, laws and orders, and harms and hardships witnessed and survived.
My experiences in Sierra Leonean kitchens underscored the strength of some cultural taboos, even as I researched why fighters had blithely and wildly broken other norms. Watching boys kill chickens and women prepare them for stew helped me understand more viscerally how men and women can be socialized for particular forms of violence. Attending to the social side of social science research—through food—helped me to better understand the personal and gendered experiences of war and its aftermath. Creating and sharing something as simple as a pot of soup with interviewees also made carrying and sharing their heavy stories more manageable.
Cooking together is a bridge between common courtesy (always offer to help your hosts) and practicality (meet your interlocutors where they are). For me, it was also a deliberate act of feminist solidarity, physically stepping out of the privileged realm of men talking politics with a foreign researcher, in order to physically step into the world of women. In Sierra Leone, as elsewhere, women are busy preparing food, chasing children, and working. Joining them provided a poignant window into how gender, power, labor, and money affected their lives in intimate, ordinary ways. Moving between gendered spaces enabled me to listen to and learn from women who also lived through the war and were instrumental to the rebel group’s survival. Other scholars have written about this not-quite-ethnography as immersive fieldwork2 and ethnographic interviewing.3 Successful embedded research requires equal parts of spontaneity and patience on the part of the researcher—taking advantage of both moments, what Lee Ann Fujii describes as “accidental ethnography,”4 and long periods that Mats Utas, Clifford Geertz, and others call “deep hanging out.”5 In Sierra Leone, my hanging out happened while waiting: for phone calls, for people to show up, for the rain to stop, for transport to arrive, for rice to be served. Offering to help with whatever tasks busied the people around me was an easy way to make myself useful, learn new skills, and build connections.
Much like the adaptive life history interviews I conducted, cooking in Sierra Leone has no crisp instructions, units of measurement, or timers—you adjust as you go. Women showed me how to “buy buy” (Krio for shop/buy) oil, seasoning, smoked fish, and other ingredients at the market, where they are sold in standardized volumes that roughly translate into cooking quantities. A cup of peppers is not the same volume as a cup of rice—and you can buy either small cups or large cups—but all are sold at common prices. After learning the markets, I learned the magic combinations of MSG and seasoning used for various soups and sauces, and how to identify flowering basil by the roadside. I studied carefully how to chop onions with no cutting board, slicing the thinnest slivers off the peeled top into a wooden mortar. These experiences strengthened my conversational skills in Krio, Sierra Leone’s English-based lingua franca, so I could build rapport and navigate sensitive interviews alone. Throughout Africa there is legitimate distrust of researchers, health professionals, legal teams, and others that dates to the colonial era when wealth was gained by taking people’s knowledge, products, and land. Similar patterns of extraction without accountability continue today. Sierra Leonean culture is warm and welcoming, but circumspect about divulging the whole truth to strangers, a practice compounded by political systems built on ubiquitous and powerful secret societies.6 Speaking Krio, cooking with women, and staying with interlocutors’ families provided a way for me not just to overcome distrust but to earn trust.
MAMMY B.
When I first met her in eastern Sierra Leone in 2009, Mammy B. was a wisp of a woman hiding behind a brilliant smile.7 I assumed she had always been thin. Having known her for ten years now, I’ve come to understand that when she said things were very hard for her back then it was because her postwar husband withheld money for food. The day I arrived on her doorstep with one of her friends from the war, she welcomed us with big hugs followed by a long stretch of nostalgic catching up. Over the following weeks, we visited often and took local trips together to visit mutual friends and other interviewees. On the day we set aside for her interview, she insisted on cooking for us, so we agreed on groundnut soup—a budget friendly crowd-pleaser—and sent her son with a small fistful of bills to buy the ingredients. Thus began my first cooking lesson from one of the former wives of Foday Sankoh (1937–2003), the founder of the rebel group. Cooking with Mammy B. was the first time I saw a strong woman delegate killing a chicken to a young boy, and it was the first lesson I had in how to char, boil, pluck, and dismember the bird.
As an interviewee, Mammy B. was quick to talk about her past and equally quick to move on to other subjects. Over a small coal fire under a hot midday sun, she told me how Sankoh met her years before in a similar setting and had fallen in love with her beauty. She laughed about how little changed in her life after they were married because he was often away. He would send food and gifts between visits, and she said she was happy she could provide for her family during the early years of the war. As the RUF faced growing scarcity and insecurity, so did she. She navigated most of the conflict alone with their son because Sankoh was imprisoned and his other wives were scattered across the country. Like other women I interviewed, much of her wartime experience was spent doing what we were doing—cooking, chatting, tidying, and waiting.
Cooking with Mammy B. in her sparse compound a day’s walk from the former RUF headquarters provided a stark illustration of the trade-offs that characterized life in rebellion. Under duress in the war, she partnered with a man who had power and status, but his protection and resources waned with his political power. By the time I met her, Mammy B. had even fewer options, having married a man with modest resources who did not provide for her family. She glowed with pride when discussing her son, but when he ran off to do chores, she whispered about the challenges they faced and the social weight of postwar stigma. Bereft of her wartime support networks and social status, Mammy B. struggled to find enough money and food for them. Cooking together helped me navigate the tensions of asking delicate questions and discreetly providing material support, while also demonstrating respect publicly and privately for the wife of the former “leader of the revolution.” It gave us time alone, away from men, in which she told me things she did not want other members of the RUF to overhear. In later years, she left her husband and moved to the city. Now our visits are characterized by urban bustle, not rural idyll, and though our conversations and visits revolve around similar characters, the story has changed. Her new home reflects the ways her postwar life continues to evolve as she pursues a better life for her son and herself.
AUNTIE F.
Just a couple of weeks after my interviews with Mammy B., in a town where the paved Freetown highway once ended, I met Auntie F., another wife of a top rebel leader.8 She lived with her children on a leafy compound with a garden her mother tended at the back. There were friends and neighbors around, but no male partners. Auntie F. is a woman who smiles with her eyes and laughs with her belly. When she and I sat down together, she was quick to dive into the stories she thought most important—how she and the Commander had met, and her opinions of his other wives. She also carved out space to share heartaches and grief about the hardships of war and lost family and friends.
She was warm and took to me with ease, and I tried to reciprocate in kind as a gracious guest. I had a few interviews in town that day, and the last person I met with was a friend of hers who wanted to meet in F.’s house. When he and I finished talking, my interlocutor that day (the former head of RUF security) reappeared to join us. I knew from their languid postures and social norms that the men would sit in the parlor trading war stories until food appeared before them. As a foreigner and a visitor, my status dictated that I, too, should stay—and my research mandate was to absorb their reminisces. But I had written down war stories all day. I knew their arc and explanatory limits. I excused myself to join F., her mother, and a gaggle of children at the back of the house where I could put down my notebook and set one foot (albeit never both) out of the research exchange.
Freed from the constraints of data collection, I asked Auntie F. if she would teach me to make groundnut soup. She deferred to her mother, translating her Mende-language9 instructions for me and interpreting her movements. She laughed at what I knew—for example, to wait for the deliciously crusty rice at the bottom of the pot to be served—and what I didn’t know, how to open a tin can with a knife. After we ate, Auntie F. said she wanted to show me something and asked me to wait in the parlor. She returned with a smile on her face but no more twinkle in her eye and pressed into my hand two photos: one of her wartime husband, and one of their son. “He looks just like his father!” she exclaimed, passing the photos to me and then to her wartime companions as she painfully related how he had disappeared with his father in Liberia. We spent only one day together, but by crossing out of the stilted interview structure and into the domestic realm that day, I saw more closely the strength of her family ties, the fragility of their material possessions, and the abundance of their farm and garden. I also sensed that this was a temporary interlude for F., who was not much older than I. As the former wife of a powerful man, she had cultivated hopes and dreams bigger than what the town at the end of the road had to offer. I later heard that she moved to the provincial capital, but by the time I visited her new home there, she’d already crossed the border and moved to Liberia. She was searching for her son.
FIGURE 2.1 Auntie F. cooking in her mother’s kitchen.
MAMMY I.
Mammy I. is an important grandmother. She has little patience for the teenagers and infants causing a ruckus in her sunset years, and even less patience for white strangers who come knocking at her door speaking elementary Krio. When we met in 2009, she was dismayed by my surprise visit, so similar to those of lawyers for the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the war crimes tribunal. Her home was no sanctuary, crowded as it was by neighbors, family, and a menagerie of useful animals. But it was a domain in which she could assert control over a stressful life. I visited twice—once leaving a message, then, introducing myself and being given a date to return—before she invited me on the third visit to sit across from her in the two-chair parlor. She asked me not to record and not to take notes, but agreed to an interview when she learned the scope of my project. Then, she asked me what I wanted to know.
She was arguably one of the most important and powerful women in the rebellion, but her perspective on its political project was hard to pin down. One minute she was blustering and scowling, proclaiming she alone opened and operated the transborder supply routes that kept the RUF going during its hardest years. In the next minute, she presented herself as a discreet and reluctant revolutionary, caught like so many others in a system she did not design. As Mammy I. told me in sparse terms about the timeline of RUF trading between eastern Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire, she leaned into a large plastic bowl balanced in her sturdy lap. Wrapped in a well-worn but stately lappa (fabric tucked like a skirt around the waists of women of all ages), she relentlessly cut into a clean-plucked chicken carcass.
“When did you first learn about the RUF?” I asked gingerly. She swiftly chopped off the chicken’s head and answered.
“How often did you cross from Guinea to Liberia and Ivory Coast?” She leaned back and pointed its claws at me. “Where did the money come from?” The crudely sharpened blade sawed back and forth in the palm of her hand, releasing one foot and then the other into the bowl.
“What did they do with the supplies you brought?” Her hands snapped its wings backward and sliced down the chest. “Whom did you trust?” She pulled the innards out and dumped them in another bowl at her feet.
“Did you meet the leader personally?” She scattered the kittens that appeared near her ankles to investigate. “Were there any other women with your position?” She cracked the back of the bird to better split open its thighs.
“Did they pay you?” With a thud the long kitchen knife came down on the leg joints. She said as much with her movements as with her words.
Working methodically, she looked up only periodically to scrutinize my face in the shadows as she weighed the value of each response she gave. She never paused in her task. Watching the dull blade, I saw that her firm grip was more powerful than the knife in pulling apart the bird. Between my deliberate questions and her brusque answers, the exchange became a metaphor for how she had survived the war: with restraint, she wielded simple tools, using force and precision to transform mundane trading activities into realms of extraordinary power.
Finally I asked, “What, if anything, do you hope for in the future and what worries you most about the present?” Mammy I. didn’t look up, and she didn’t respond. She pulled a rag from under the heavy plastic bowl now weighed down with chicken meat. She wiped her hands and adjusted her seat, seemingly tired of my questions. I wish I could remember exactly what she said, but I can only paraphrase from my field notes: “I am an old woman now. The war is done, but still we struggle. I want to live in peace.”
She hoisted her bowl, along with her lappa, and turned toward the door. “Come visit me again sometime,” she added with a nod. And I did.
THE MEN AT KISSI ROAD
Toward the end of my doctoral fieldwork, I spent many days in and around a compound in Eastern Freetown, where a small clutch of former RUF commanders and intelligence officers—all men—lived communally. It was an overcrowded property with no water, toilet, or electricity. The latrine out back had collapsed, and one of their wartime enemies lived next door, but poverty kept the dozen or so families pushed together. Everyone knew each other’s business, and everyone knew me. In the days leading up to my departure, I told the men whose stories I’d been documenting that I wanted to cook for them. Many months of letting other people cook for me had left me with a fierce urgency to reciprocate, and I had some village chickens from the provinces that needed to be regifted before I left. Although I stopped eating meat when I was ten, I had encountered so much death during fieldwork—from bushmeat,10 to war stories, to malaria—that I thought it was time to confront its visceral reality by killing the chickens I had been tending. The morning of our small party, I swaddled one of my flapping chickens in cloth and bundled her, head out, into a black plastic bag tucked in the back seat of my sunbleached two-door Suzuki.
At Kissi Road, I triumphantly handed the bird to one of my friends before going off to the market with Haja, one of the women neighbors in the compound, to “buy buy” the rest of the supplies. In retrospect, it was an ill-conceived feast. Despite months of participant observation in kitchens, I had decided to cook attieke, a dish I had never seen prepared and woefully underestimated the labor intensiveness of making. When I returned from the market to start cooking and declared that I wanted to kill the chicken myself, I was met with a stern “no.” The men called over a twelve-year-old boy, Haja’s son, and told me he would kill the bird for me. I insisted that I wanted to do it, “it’s important for me to learn,” I pleaded, surprised by their refusal. “Absolutely not,” said men who had otherwise shown infinite patience sharing with me personal stories and hidden histories. One of the men finally looked at me exasperated and said, “You’re a woman. Women can’t kill animals.”
For a moment, I felt time stop as I replayed in my head the past two years of studying women’s experiences in the RUF. Suddenly I saw more clearly the power of social taboos—and their transgression—in Sierra Leone. As everyone agreed that I would not be allowed to kill the chicken, I realized what cultural consensus felt like as it played out in everyday situations. Perhaps most important, I realized how easily social norms can enforce compliance. I asked some follow-up questions and was intrigued by the limits of my friend’s vague explanation about motherhood and protecting women’s fertility. But I also let it go. We compromised, and I was allowed to watch as he cut the neck of my chicken. Holding it down, he told me to watch out for blood, and I inched backward into the wall of the house. When it was over, I let Haja’s son clean it while I focused on slicing the onions and waited to fry my remarkably lean bird. Hours later, when the food was finally ready, my friends praised the chicken—a true country fowl!—that had been given to me by Auntie F.’s mother, and they shared their helpings with the younger boys who waited in the wings for leftovers. Not a word was said about my movement in and out of gendered spaces—cooking with Haja or eating with the men—nor my navigation between friend, confidant, and researcher. Everyone had been observing one another and participating in the relational nature of interview research all along.11
REFLECTIONS
Cooking groundnut soup with Auntie F. and Mammy B. provided a bridge out of political violence and legacies of war into the material reality of their present-day lives. It built mutual rapport and offered insight into household roles and family networks: who came to eat, who was served first, who did the chores, who gave instructions, how much meat was in the pot, and how many spoons there were for serving. The stories they shared and the ease with which we passed time showed a marked contrast to the authority Mammy I. displayed during my visit. Watching this grandmother of the erstwhile revolution butcher a chicken provided an embodied experience of the power and physical potential of women, themes I’d studied extensively through interviews. I saw how she translated her emotions into a methodical and mundane task, which helped me better grasp how anger and revenge could propel methodical and mundane violence. This was underscored in many of my interviews with former fighters in which they described being given drugs that “made you see a person like a chicken.” By making room for cooking during fieldwork, I better understood this metaphor as over and over again I saw that chickens were small things that could be killed by someone’s son at the back of the house. I also better understood the extent of social rupture in which women and men, boy and girls, could kill not just chickens but fellow citizens.
For all the lucid stories and insights I gained cooking with interlocutors, the political economy of hospitality in Sierra Leone remains obscured to me in many ways. I have tried over the years to pay for my share and to subsidize my hosts’ families on top of that. But I suspect I will always come out a debtor for the generosity of time and spirit with which people have greeted me. I once planned to write a cookbook featuring the food and stories of women from the war. They enthusiastically walked me through staple dishes, and I took a few lengthy photo essays. But I never wrote the cookbook. After returning to the UK, I worried that it reified gender stereotypes, amounted to little more than a self-indulgent travelogue, or fed foodie exoticism, even though the opposite was what had so affected me. Maybe cooking and eating together in Sierra Leone simply felt too intimate to be measured, translated, and shared.
Over time I have come to appreciate that the afterlife of fieldwork cannot be contained within the parameters of its premise as a well-defined research exchange. Moving between the present and past, analysis and experience, has turned my interviews into relationships and my data into memories. When I sit down to write, I often feel trapped between the obligation to share and a duty to protect what’s sacred. Perhaps, if Sierra Leone taught me anything, it is that meals—like stories—are meant to be shared, and it is largely by sharing that they become sacred.
GROUNDNUT SOUP
Recipe adapted from Fatmatah Mansaray, Chairlady, RUF Party Women’s Wing
The original dish serves 100–130 people; this is adapted for 6–8. Tofu, shrimp, fish, or vegetables can be substituted for meat—add more or less as your budget and preferences allow:
2 small white onions, finely chopped
1/4 c. fragrant hot chilies, diced or whizzed in a food processor (tiny nenekoro are hard to find outside West Africa, but a mix of scotch bonnet, red, and green bird’s eye chilies work well)
1/2–3/4 c. vegetable oil (this helps bind the peanut butter and can be ladled off at the end if desired)
3/4–1 c. groundnut paste (all natural smooth peanut butter)
4–5 garden eggs,12 sliced in half moons (substitute 1 small or 3 Japanese eggplants)
1 small tin tomato paste (3 tablespoons)
2–3 maggi or jumbo cubes (or 2 chicken and 1 beef stock cubes)
1–2 teaspoons “white maggi” (MSG)—optional
salt (to taste)
3–4 sprigs of patmenji (basil)
10 c. water
1 small village chicken—killed, cleaned, cut, boiled, seasoned (with salt, black pepper, and maggi), and fried in hot oil
1–2 small firm white fish (e.g., snapper or tilapia)—cleaned, cut in chunks, seasoned (with lime juice, salt, black pepper, and maggi), and fried in hot oil.
Heat the vegetable oil in a large soup pot and add the onions and peppers, cooking covered, stirring occasionally, until translucent—about 15 minutes. If using garden eggs, while onions and chilies cook, peel and slice the garden eggs, then heavily salt and leave to sit for ten minutes; rinse and wash away the bitter seeds, draining the half moon pieces (eggplant can just be peeled and chopped). Soften the groundnut paste/peanut butter in one cup of water before adding it to the pot with two quarts of water. Bring to a boil. Add garden egg slices and leave to boil until the groundnut paste is fully emulsified and the foam at the top of the pot has disappeared—this takes about thirty minutes, keep a close eye on the pot as the foam likes to boil over! Stir in the tomato paste, maggi/stock cubes, and seasoning, as well as any fish, chicken, other protein, or additional vegetables. Add roughly torn basil leaves and salt to taste; add water, or conversely, boil with the lid off to reduce the liquid. Serve over rice.
______
Zoe Marks is lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Marks, Zoe. “Sexual Violence in Sierra Leone’s Civil War: ‘Virgination,’ Rape, and Marriage,” African Affairs 113, no. 450 (2013): 67–87.
• ——. “Sexual Violence Inside Rebellion: Policies and Perspectives of the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone,” Civil Wars 15, no. 3 (2013): 359–79.
• ——. “Women in Rebellion: The Case of Sierra Leone.” In Oxford Handbook on Women, Peace, and Security. ed. Jacqui True and Sara Davies, 489–500. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
NOTES
1. I am tremendously grateful to the many people who taught me to cook and love Sierra Leonean food, and who shared their time for the stories in this chapter. Special thanks go to Fatmatah Mansaray, with whom I updated the recipe, and Erica Chenoweth, Chisomo Kalinga, and the editors for their invaluable feedback on previous drafts.
2. Edward Schatz, Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
3. James P. Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview (Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1979).
4. Lee Ann Fujii, “Five Stories of Accidental Ethnography: Turning Unplanned Moments in the Field Into Data,” Qualitative Research 15, no. 4 (2015): 525–39.
5. Mats Utas borrows the phrase “deep hanging out” from Clifford Geertz, who inadvertently coined James Clifford’s term in his book review: Clifford Geertz, “Deep Hanging Out,” New York Review of Books, October 22, 1998; Mats Utas, Sweet Battlefields: Youth and the Liberian Civil War (Uppsala, Sweden: Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University, 2003).
6. Mariane C. Ferme, The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
7. Mammy (pronounced with a soft “a”) is a Krio term of respect for a woman with social status. I use initials throughout to protect her and others’ anonymity.
8. Auntie is a Krio term of respect for a woman with social status; this was how F. was introduced to me by her fellow ex-combatants.
9. Mende is one of Sierra Leone’s many languages, spoken by about a third of the population, primarily in the country’s south and east.
10. Bushmeat refers to local game meat, such as small deer (duiker), large rodents (grasscutter), monkeys, and wild cats, all caught in the fields or forests primarily using traps. In Sierra Leone, like most parts of the world, forests are a common source of meat for people living in rural areas and provide delicacies for those in urban areas.
11. Hanif Abdurraqib, introduction to Prince: The Last Interview, by Prince (London: Melville House, 2019), vii–xiii; and Lee Ann Fujii, Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach (New York: Routledge, 2017).
12. A kind of small, bitter eggplant.
