Liberty and moral ambivalence:

Guinean hosts viewed Liberian refugees with the same ambivalence and fascination that many held for their own children, who were embracing the consumerist ethos of Guinea’s postsocialist 1990s. Loma-speaking farmers’ categories for evaluating historical change and refugee comportment grew out of metaphors of embodied agency and morality. These categories challenge some aspects of both Guinean elites’ and contemporary anthropologists’ understandings of the meaning of post–Cold War social change. [subaltern historiography, embodiment, Guinea, West Africa, fast capitalism, postsocialism] O n December 22, 2008, Guinean president Lansana Conté died, ending almost 25 years in office. Conté’s rule had begun in a coup d’état following the death in office of Guinea’s first postcolonial leader, Sékou Touré. Similarly, on the morning after Conté’s death, a military junta took over, headed by Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, a fiery and loquacious junior officer. Many Guineans welcomed the power grab by the junta, in part because the constitutionally mandated interim leader, president of the National Assembly Aboubacar Somparé, was widely disliked and mistrusted. Somparé was the symbol of a system that Guineans almost universally considered dysfunctional and morally repugnant. In Conakry on a research sabbatical during 2008 and 2009, I challenged many of my Guinean friends about the takeover, asking, “How can you support this coup, when the outgoing regime you hate so much began in exactly the same way?” Their responses varied, but many came back to Camara’s promises to reinject morality into the Guinean public sphere and the management of the state. In an interview he gave two days after seizing power, Camara said, “I could not, as a patriot, watch my country continue to get dragged down . . . . It would also have been irresponsible to leave the country in the hands of a government that was corrupt and moreover riven by internal quarrels.” He described himself as “allergic to injustice,” claiming, “I react spontaneously to combat it. Everyone who knows me knows that I always speak the truth, even if I have to suffer the consequences. I hate lies, hypocrisy, and ingratitude” (Seck 2009). Still, I pressed, talk was cheap, and this was the rhetoric of every junior-ranks coup, words betrayed by actions in the vast majority of such takeovers in Guinea and around the world. Many Guineans noted their own misgivings along these lines but also reminded me that Camara came from one of the small ethnic groups of Guinea’s forest region, where I had lived on-and-off for 20 years and conducted my Ph.D. research. “You know that Dadis is a Forestier,” one colleague said. “So, his ‘yes’ is yes, and his ‘no’ is no,” she continued, quoting a positive stereotype that many Forestiers use to describe themselves and that was once considered accurate by other Guineans too.1 AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 247–261, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C © 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12128 American Ethnologist Volume 42 Number 2 May 2015 In fact, Camara turned out to be increasingly erratic and unwilling to cede power, and he presided over an ugly one-year interregnum of economic pillage and violence that culminated in the massacre or rape of over 200 unarmed demonstrators trapped by security forces inside a football stadium. His behavior did much to shatter the positive stereotype of Forestier honesty and reliability, but it opens a window onto the subject of this article: the lived complexities of moral ambivalence I recorded a decade earlier in the forest region where Camara was raised. To explain that ambivalence, I first give a broad overview of several of the significant and simultaneous changes that contributed to the rise of a distinctive form of fast capitalism in Guinea in the 1990s. Fast capitalism is a term used both by Michael Watts (1992) and Douglas Holmes (2000), with a debt to David Harvey (1991). It has an analytical advantage over the blanket term neoliberalism, often used by anthropologists, in that it focuses on the experience of the acceleration of change. Guinean farmers identified the changes of the 1990s as neither new nor liberal but as a return to an earlier, precolonial, politicaleconomic configuration. What was most disturbing about this shift was its speed, unpredictability, and the sense that its momentum might result in major imbalances. Guineans in the 1990s had to learn on the fly how to manage new circuits shaping the flows of information, capital, consumer goods, and styles. The experience of such rapid change created confusion, frustration, and considerable anxiety. These worries are captured by the term fast capitalism. In the second part of this article, I present the interrelated Loma concepts of booyema and ziiεlei to refract these changes. While the terms carry the broad connotations of “liberty” and “security,” respectively, both derive from conceptions of embodied morality, agency, and causality, with booyema meaning literally “by the agency of my arm or hand” and ziiεlei meaning “cool heart.” As Loma-speaking farmers use these terms to describe the differences between historical periods, they make it clear that increased scope for individual gain, identified as booyema, has often come at the expense of the ziiεlei, or security, of the majority. The two tendencies exist in an inverse relation, according to Loma speakers talking about historical change. Their ratios have oscillated over time, from the perilous but lucrative period of intervillage slave raiding in the late 19th century to the oppressive but peaceful colonial and socialist periods and then to the newly dangerous and unpredictable period of postsocialist change and regional war in the 1990s. The third part of my discussion explores how anxieties and disagreements about the moral valences of different embodied enactments of liberty became crystallized in the figure of the Liberian refugee resident in Guinea. The Liberians were themselves victims of the untrammeled greed, ruthlessness, and booyema of Charles Taylor and the other warlords who fought the Liberian civil war. At the time of this conflict, Guineans were debating the proper balance of booyema and ziiεlei in the context of the rapid changes taking place in their own country after the end of socialism. Refugees thus offered a convenient foil but were also catalysts in Guineans’ conversations about the morality of liberty, especially in matters of bodily comportment, dress, sexual and marital conduct, commercial practices, and even eating and defecating. The proper balance between entrepreneurial energy and security, whose contours had become frustratingly hard to define in Guinea, could be more easily discussed by focusing on the comportment of refugees. Debates about foreigners and about Guineans themselves were interlinked in complex ways.2 The discussion of booyema, ziiεlei, and the figure of the refugee sheds light on the moral calculus Guineans used to evaluate both historical change and individual comportment and hints at their theories of how the two were interrelated. Refugee comportment became a prism for parallel debates about the positive and negative aspects of the socioeconomic changes that had accompanied the postsocialist era. These discussions surrounding moral ambivalence also help to explain why so many Guineans warmed to the 2008 junta, whose moralistic rhetoric channeled some aspects of the Sékou Touré–era socialist ethos, even if it sidestepped the politics of pan-Africanism and postcolonial nationalism. By bringing together these seemingly unrelated strands, I contribute to the conversation about rapid social change in African countries that have been subjected to the package of legal, financial, and political policies most often glossed as “neoliberalism.”3 The material from Guinea suggests several general contributions to this conversation. Disaggregating the series of simultaneous changes going on alongside the political-economic reforms that began with structural adjustment allows us to see that ordinary people’s greatest attention and energy were focused not at the direct or even indirect effects of such political-economic shifts but, rather, at embodied comportments that have an autonomous history and trajectory of their own. The end of socialism marked the end of many hated restrictions on Guineans’ everyday lives, and the fantasy of full participation in a consumerist form of cosmopolitanism was powerful and seductive. At the same time, many Loma-speaking villagers quickly discerned the links between the powerful desire for things and the potentially violent forces of booyema used to get them. Attraction and critique are thus intertwined in the concepts of booyema and ziiεlei and accompany a considerable degree of anxiety that if the balance between “liberty” and “security” gets badly out of kilter, the result could be violent antisocial disruption. Following from this point, if we choose to read farmers’ concerns with propriety as a genuine disagreement with intellectuals’ models of cultural causality (and not as a misrecognition of their own situation), the Loma-language conceptions of booyema and ziiεlei allow us to see that this