Journal of African Cultural Studies
Vol. 21, No. 2, December 2009, 197 –218
The afterlives of 2Pac: Imagery and alienation in Sierra Leone
and beyond
Jeremy Prestholdt
University of California, San Diego
The popularity of slain American hip-hop star Tupac Shakur has become a global barometer
of youth malaise. Taking a multidisciplinary approach that weaves social history, cultural
studies and globalization studies, this paper highlights the convergence of socioeconomic
alienation and media proliferation since the early 1990s. I argue that this confluence has
given rise to new global heroes such as Tupac, icons that have become components of a
planetary symbolic lingua franca that has yet to gain significant analytical attention. I
outline the transnational import of Tupac by considering combatants’ evocations of him
during the Sierra Leone civil war (1991–2002). Militant factions’ attraction to Tupac –
their use of Tupac T-shirts as fatigues and incorporation of his discourse into their
worldviews – offers insight on how young people have sought broader relevance for their
particular experiences through the imagery of global popular culture. Tupac references
allow for a powerful stereoscopy; they reveal mediated communities of sentiment as well
as the psychological traumas of violence and social alienation. The symbolic discourse of
Tupac imagery during the Sierra Leone war thus expands the relevance of a civil war to
broader patterns of alienation while revealing planetary sentiments in the minutia of Sierra
Leone’s devastation.
1.
Introduction
Gunfire woke the residents of Kukuna, a small town in northwest Sierra Leone. A group of at
least one hundred young men and women appeared, all wearing T-shirts bearing the image of
American rapper Tupac Shakur. There were so many young people wearing Tupac shirts that
some townspeople assumed that Kukuna was hosting a hip-hop concert. But as screams filled
the night air and buildings were set ablaze residents recognized those wearing the T-shirts as
the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a rebel group attempting to overthrow the government
of Sierra Leone. Defenceless, Kukunans watched their town burn, their food carried away,
and twenty-eight of their neighbours and relatives killed (Fofana 1998).
It was late September 1998 and Kukuna was one of many towns in northern Sierra Leone
decimated by the RUF in their advance towards Freetown. The rebels had come to depend on
local communities for sustenance. They had also come to believe that civilians could be terrorized into complacency. In the early years of the war RUF commanders determined that they did
not need to win the support of civilians, only their acquiescence. Thus, the RUF preyed on rural
populations. The rebels looted and raped civilians, humiliated or killed figures of authority, and
conscripted juveniles to replenish its ranks. On the night of the Kukuna attack many townspeople
refused RUF demands to set their own homes on fire. The attackers chose seven of those who
resisted and hacked off their limbs. It was a grisly warning to civilians who would defy RUF
commands. It was also a graphic illustration of the extreme power young combatants wielded
over civilians and the ways in which combatants externalized their own psychological
Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1369-6815 print/ISSN 1469-9346 online
# 2009 Journal of African Cultural Studies
DOI: 10.1080/13696810903259418
http://www.informaworld.com
198 Jeremy Prestholdt
traumas. By 1998 Tupac references had become another, if more subtle, dimension of the
war’s psychodynamics. The symbolic appropriation of Tupac by the RUF in their advance
towards Freetown was an example of how young people sought broader meaning for their
experiences, justification for their actions, and psychological solace from the chaos they
were unleashing.
In September of 1996 Tupac Shakur – a.k.a. 2Pac and Makaveli – was the victim of a driveby shooting in Las Vegas. Shakur was only twenty-five when he died, but his remarkable life
and brutal murder elevated him to the position of an almost mythic hero. Tupac was born in
New York in 1971. At age 20 he rose to stardom with his first solo album 2Pacalypse Now.
Between 1991 and 1996 Tupac released six albums; the last three, Me Against the World
(1995), All Eyez on Me, and the posthumous The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory (1996)
held the number one position on the American charts. At the same time Tupac pursued a successful film career, starring in six Hollywood films including box office successes such as Juice
(1992) and Poetic Justice (1993). Tupac’s death at the height of his career catapulted him to
global superstardom. In Africa, for instance, by the end of the 1990s only the spectacular
presence of Bob Marley overshadowed that of Tupac. Shakur’s music was popular in many
parts of the world before his death, but the drama of his murder during a highly publicized
feud between his Los Angeles label Death Row and New York-based Bad Boy Records
added an extraordinary mystique to his afterlife. The glitz and violent imagery of the war of
words between the acclaimed MCs – a war that had only just begun to subside when Tupac
was murdered – captivated hip-hop fans around the world.
I was in East Africa a few months after Tupac’s murder. He was on the minds of many young
people. Questions were legion: Was Tupac really dead? If so, who killed him? In Nairobi,
Mombasa, Arusha, and Dar es Salaam Tupac was everywhere: on walls and buses, in barbershops and video cafes, in cassette stalls and blasting from car sound-systems. In the years that
followed murals in Los Angeles, New York, Tijuana, Tokyo, St. Petersburg, Lomé, Cape
Town, and Freetown honoured Tupac. His image adorned shops and homes in Johannesburg,
Lima, and Port-au-Prince. Graffiti in Norway, Germany, Slovenia, Cyprus, Guineé, the
United Arab Emirates, and New Zealand praised him. His image has even been featured on
the national stamps of Tajikistan and Moldova.
Appreciating these transnational meanings of Tupac necessitates considering, simultaneously, the commonalities of reference to him and the particularities of such appropriations.
Though Tupac may be little more than an empty signifier for some, his global iconicity suggests
that the act of evoking him is, in degrees, a symbolic engagement with an ostensibly infinite but
practically limited assortment of signs. For many, Tupac appeals to diverse self-images in ways
that constitute and reflect a disjointed community of sentiment (to borrow Arjun Appadurai’s
phrase) across differing, even oppositional social and political landscapes (Appadurai 1996).
The RUF’s references to Tupac were but one manifestation of a larger fascination with the
hip-hop star. Yet his use in Sierra Leone is of exceptional import because it was often of
greater gravity, under circumstances more extreme, than almost anywhere else.
During Sierra Leone’s civil war it was Tupac’s global popularity as well as the severity of
life and proximity of death, circumstances that mirrored Tupac’s lyrical imagery, which
attracted young people to the rap icon. Thus, Tupac references in Sierra Leone allow for a
powerful stereoscopy: they reveal disconnected communities of sentiment as well as the particular psychological traumas of violence. In the post-Cold War era of increasingly shared signs, a
stereoscopic view of Tupac imagery brings into sharp focus a common sense of significance and
the simultaneous divergence of individual interpretation. Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war
(1991 – 2002), the global circulation of Tupac iconography, and the ways these intersect
provide unique evidence of both the domestic repercussions of post-Cold War geopolitical
Journal of African Cultural Studies 199
Figure 1. Tupac Poster. Mombasa, 1999 (photo courtesy of the author).
shifts and the development of a common transnational symbolic discourse. Tupac imagery in
Sierra Leone thus expands the relevance of a harrowing war to broader patterns of social
alienation and collapses planetary sentiments into the minutia of Sierra Leone’s devastation.1
2.
The world is a warzone
During Tupac’s short career he recorded hundreds of songs, released five albums, starred in
several Hollywood films and earned acclaim as well as condemnation from critics. Shakur’s
extraordinary rap skills and impeccable timing seeded a meteoric rise to stardom in the
hip-hop world, while his charisma and Janus-like personality propelled his acting career.
Tupac’s recordings spanned just five years (from 1991 – 1996), but they showcase the artist’s
incredible range. He was equally comfortable with themes such as social inequality and
police brutality as with vacuous materialism and misogyny. Tupac indulged in the conspicuous
consumption and braggadocio common to hip-hop, but his lyrics were often as eloquent as they
were raw. Perhaps most importantly, in word and image Tupac embodied many ideals of black
masculinity promoted by the hip-hop industry: personal strength, fearlessness and defiance of
social restraints.
Controversy also contributed to Tupac’s celebrity. His tumultuous final years were marked
by a series of criminal and civil cases as well as nearly a year in prison, events that inspired one
200 Jeremy Prestholdt
of his most referenced refrains, ‘It’s just me against the world’ (Me Against the World, 1995). He
was badly beaten by police in Oakland, Vice President Dan Quayle and Senator Bob Dole
famously condemned his music, and he embraced the term ‘thug’ – notably on his 1994
release, Thug Life: Volume 1 – that was often used to describe him. While his tracks shifted
towards increasingly violent themes in the last months of his life, Tupac’s apparent sincerity
of expression regardless of the topic added weight to his words. In the facile milieu of the
music industry, Tupac’s messages seemed to come directly from the heart.
More than any other development in Tupac’s life, his public feud with acclaimed New Yorkbased rapper Biggie Smalls a.k.a. Notorious BIG gained the world’s attention. In November of
1994 Tupac was shot five times, twice in the head at nearly point blank range. His survival of the
attack earned him an air of invincibility. Tupac believed that Bad Boy Records’ MC Biggie
Smalls was behind the shooting, and he launched a vicious verbal assault on both Smalls and
his label. This feud, later publicized as a rivalry between the East and West Coast hip-hop
scenes, coloured the final year of Tupac’s life with overtones of violence and retribution. His
earlier concern with broader issues of social and racial justice seemed to fade into aggressive
and nihilistic imagery. Though the identity of his attackers was never proven, the violence
Tupac narrated in the very prolific year leading up to his death (which included the albums
All Eyez on Me (1996), 7 Day Theory (1996) and posthumously produced records such as
Still I Rise (1999) and Better Dayz (2002)) reflected his sense of being under attack.
Lyrics featured on these albums, many of which would be repeated by young combatants
in late 1990s Sierra Leone, conveyed a sense of righteous violence. One of All Eyez on
Me’s (1996) greatest successes on the charts, ‘Hit ‘em Up’, encapsulates this discursive shift.
Instead of a critique of racism or police repression, themes common in Tupac’s earlier recordings, ‘Hit ‘em Up’ is an aggressive assault on Biggie Smalls and Bad Boy Records. Many of his
last tracks were also tinged with paranoia, regret, and references to violent death. ‘Troublesome
‘96’, which also appeared on All Eyez on Me, outlines the necessity of violence as a response
to violence and the psychological repercussions of this response for the victim-turnedaggressor.2
Afraid to sleep
I’m having crazy dreams
Vivid pictures of my enemies, family times
God forgive me cuz it’s wrong
But I plan to die
Either take me in heaven
And understand I was a G[angsta]
Did the best I could raised in insanity
Or send me to hell
Cuz I ain’t begging for my life
Ain’t nothing worse than this cursed ass hopeless life
(‘Troublesome ‘96’, All Eyez on Me 1996)
The dual aggression and despair that marked many of Tupac’s later songs offered a resonant
soundtrack to the lives of many young people in the late 1990s. Moreover, the vulnerability displayed on many of the tracks such as ‘Troublesome ‘96’ cemented his place as a larger-than-life
hero with empathy, or someone who understood the experiences of those suffering from injustice
and trapped in poverty.
Tupac’s reflection on multiple dimensions of violence in urban America – from the perspectives of victims as well as perpetrators – struck a chord with young people living through
Journal of African Cultural Studies 201
circumstances analogous to those Tupac described. Carlos D. Morrison referred to Tupac’s
‘death narratives’, or regular reflection on violent death and references to the world as a
‘warzone’, as powerful articulations of the realities many of his American listeners’ experienced.
Yet the other side of Tupac’s message, according to Morrison, has been equally appealing.
Tupac’s lyrics are steeped in the rhetoric of resilience, of overcoming unjust conditions of
life. What Tupac offered, following Morrison, was an outline for the practice for surviving
the ‘killing fields’ of America (Morrison 2003, 202). Indeed, Tupac’s perceived invincibility
offered psychological solace for young people who experienced violence as part of their
everyday lives. In Tupac’s voice young people found a presence that was equally fearless and
encouraging (Dimitriadis and Kamberelis 2001; Gilmore 2006; Dyson 2003).
Finally, Tupac’s ability to narrate divergent subject positions and his resistance to hollow,
reassuring metanarratives created a discourse that Eithne Quinn summed up as embracing
the ‘confusions of overlapping, conflictual, and commodified narrative’ (Quinn 2002, 188).
To many American critics such overlapping, conflictual, and usually third person narration
seemed contradictory. During Tupac’s life this narrative multipositionality, or his convincing
articulation of the subject positions of those whose experiences were different from his own,
left many wondering what Tupac really stood for (Kelley and Harper 1996). In the malleability
insured by his death, however, this multidimensionality, when combined with his general
criticism of systemic injustice and empathy for perpetrators as much as victims of violence,
made Tupac a potent mirror of diverse desires: for courage and power, even among those
who share few experiences beyond the celebration of Tupac.
After his death Tupac became ubiquitous. But those who have identified with him and look for
inspiration or comfort in his words have occupied different and sometimes diametrically opposed
subject positions. This, more than anything, suggests the enormous flexibility of Tupac, a quality
critical to his emergence as a planetary hook for what Raymond Williams referred to as a
structure of feeling (Williams 1977). Young people in many parts of the world have grafted
their own experiences of alienation, of physical and psychological trauma, onto Tupac’s iconography. The hyper-masculinity and glamour that Tupac exuded has led many young men to
embrace him as a model of manhood, while interpretations of his narratives as reflections of
universal frustration, suffering, and grievance insured a wide appeal. This helps to explain
why Tupac has been seen as alternatively fashionable, inspirational, and prophetic.
Tupac’s imagery resonated with urban America but transcended its specific circumstances.
South Africa offers a particularly revealing microcosm of the perceived relevance of Tupac’s
rhetoric for young people of diverse backgrounds. In 1999 – about the same time the RUF
appropriated Tupac – a Johannesburg barbershop was covered with Tupac posters and stickers.
The owner, teenager Shaku Biserat, asked his family and friends to call him ‘Tupac’. ‘All the
things [Tupac] sings about are the things that happen in real life to me and my friends’,
Biserat explained. ‘The way we grew up, the poor life’, he continued, ‘is the life Tupac lived.
And he made it out. . .That’s what we want, too’ (Terry 1999). Gangs from Johannesburg to
Cape Town also took up Tupac as an inspirational figure (Thompson 2003; South African
Press Association 2000; Melvin 1999; UN 2007). In Boksburg, Gauteng the slain head of a
gang called Thugs (in reference to Tupac’s album, Thug Life: Volume 1 (1994), Jermaine
‘Turbo’ Van Wyk, gained the world’s attention when he masterminded a cash and diamond
heist at the Johannesburg Airport. Van Wyk was so taken with Tupac that not only was his
gang’s name drawn from Tupac’s discourse but his personal motto was also ‘To Live and Die
in SA’, a reference to Tupac’s (1996b) hit, ‘To Live and Die in LA’ (Philip 2004).
In 2000 Tupac fans in a small town near the Eastern Cape’s Magusheni tribal authority
canvassed his imagery over local signs. Fans wrote Tupac’s name on almost every official road
sign, while new signs were erected along the main road reading, ‘West Coast’, ‘Live by the
202 Jeremy Prestholdt
Figure 2. “Only God Can Judge Me.” Tupac tailgate artwork. Cape Town, South Africa, 2008. (photo
courtesy of the author)
Gun’, and ‘PAC’, the latter bearing an AK-47 in reference to a tattoo on Tupac’s stomach (Haw
2000). Three years later Walter Madondo, an admirer of Tupac and inmate serving a life sentence
in Rooigrond Maximum Security Prison, explained the broad attraction to the murdered hip-hop star.
‘Pac sang about life as it is’, Madondo suggested, ‘[u]npolished’ (Madondo 2003). Across South
Africa the notion that Tupac’s words derive from a font of experience that mirrors and gives
broader relevance to shared depravities made him a compelling hero in the years after his death.
Tupac’s narration of violence has gained particular relevance in times of war. Combatants in
many locales have drawn on Tupac imagery. In 1999, for instance, just as Tupac was given a
prominent place in RUF iconography, an Aboriginal uprising on the South Pacific island of
Guadalcanal claimed Tupac as a guiding figure for their movement (Wehrfritz 1999). In Bunia,
Democratic Republic of Congo, ethnic Hema militias used Tupac T-shirts as uniforms. Perhaps
more surprising, members of the Congolese armed forces also integrated Tupac T-shirts into
their dress (Sengupta 2003; The Namibian 1999). In 2002, multiple rebel groups in northern
Côte d’Ivoire began using Tupac T-shirts as uniforms (Ferreira 2002). Charles Blé Goudé,
leader of an Ivoirean government-sympathetic group opposed to the rebellion, which used hiphop as a politically mobilizing force, explained young peoples’ attraction to American hip-hop
stars like Tupac: ‘When [American rappers] sing, you listen, and the message comes straight to
you’ (Packer 2003, 73; Osumare 2005). It is the power of the medium, its rawness and lyric’s metaphorical proximity to many young peoples’ experiences that Tupac has come to represent.
For Tupac to become popular globally timing was important. The end of the Cold War and
the collapse of global socialism as a doctrinal alternative to liberal democratic capitalism caused
many revolutionary icons to lose their relevance. Where Marxism, Maoism, and socialism writlarge once offered guerrillas what Bernard-Henri Lévy termed the ‘providential self-assurance’
that they were part of a worldwide battle, in the wake of the Cold War few anti-systemic references retained global significance (Lévy 2003, 1). Of course, an end to ideologically oppositional superpower politics did not erase conflict. Contra Francis Fukuyama (1992), the ‘end
of history’ demonstrated that conflict was not necessarily prefigured by dogma (Bøås and
Dunn 2007). Moreover, without the Cold War’s global contest of ideological influence, powerful
nations saw little political expediency in involving themselves with civil wars that would pay
few geopolitical dividends. For Sierra Leone what came at the end of history was not peace
but the raw reality that much of the world saw its destruction as inconsequential.
The disinterest of powerful nations did not strip the Sierra Leone civil war of meaning for
those who suffered or killed. Although young combatants were neither steeped in the theories
of ideologues nor offered providential self-assurance in their killing, war intensified the need
for a broader relevance to their actions. It also deepened young peoples’ desires for mythic
Journal of African Cultural Studies 203
heroes. Throughout the war icons such as Rambo, Chuck Norris, Bob Marley, and Tupac were
critical frames of reference for young people, both because they already constituted a broader
symbolic vocabulary in and beyond Sierra Leone and because they represented qualities to
which young combatants aspired. Tupac was particularly important in the waning years of the
war since his rhetoric of alienation seemed so resonant with the experiences of young Sierra
Leoneans. He offered allegories of invincibility, a voice for sentiments of frustration and
angst, and reassurance that those caught in and perpetrating cycles of violence were not alone.
The end of the Cold War also ushered in an era of media proliferation critical to Tupac’s
global popularity. The increasing availability of video and commercially produced music
offered means for interpreting the world that were open to diverse translations. Perhaps for
the first time in world history the accessibility of these media created an array of symbols recognizable across the planet, a symbolic lingua franca, but one that did not always ensure continuity
of translation. Tupac’s primary medium of music allowed for what Paul James has referred to as
a ‘disembodied’ form of global mobility because of its ease of replication (James 2005). In Sierra
Leone recorded music was particularly accessible because it neither required literacy nor access
to more costly technologies such as video or the internet, which had only reached limited audiences in the mid-1990s.
The pressing circumstances of the war initially made reflection on the interface of imagery
and violence in Sierra Leone tangential. When the RUF’s use of Tupac did gain public attention,
reflections often took a dismissive tone that demonstrated a lack of consideration both for the
circumstances of his popularity and interpretations of his life and death. Many analysts presumed
combatants’ embrace of Tupac was little more than a frightening evocation of the worst of
American culture: misogyny, violence, and drug abuse. Sierra Leonean government officials
blamed Tupac, and aspects of American popular culture generally, for inciting violence. In
the desperation of the war analysts failed to consider the particular appeal of Tupac to young
combatants. In hindsight, the fact that combatants who committed a great range of terrible
acts evoked Tupac suggests that there is value in considering and meanings. Moreover, the
incorporations of Tupac into the symbolic vocabularies of other places and other wars since
the end of the Sierra Leone conflict indicates that Tupac’s appropriation in Sierra Leone represents an early manifestation of broader sentiments.
The attack on Kukuna by RUF fighters wearing Tupac T-shirts was one of the earliest evocations of Tupac in the Sierra Leone war. That event, as well as subsequent uses of Tupac during
the invasion of Freetown in 1999, the rise of a militant faction called the West Side Boys (WSB)
whose name was borrowed from Tupac’s rhetoric, and Tupac’s enduring popularity in post-war
Sierra Leone begs further concentration on the psychology of violence, the strategic logic of the
war, and the globality of a conflict that seemed to have little international relevance. Tupac
imagery offers a unique way to understand both conflict and global symbolic discourse
because it necessarily moves analysis beyond political economy to the life-worlds of combatants, a move deemed necessary by many analysts of the war.
During the war Yusuf Bangura suggested that combatants were developing their own
ideologies, ones he suspected, ‘may have reinforced their views about their own marginality
and provided rationales for the looting and outrageous violence they committed against
society’ (Bangura 1997, 185; Maxted 2003). For Bangura Sierra Leone could not be fit into
preconceived frames for understanding the perpetuation of conflict since rebels neither
advocated a clear ideology nor articulated specific social goals. Bangura, Ibrahim Abdullah,
Lansana Gberie, David Keen and many other analysts have convincingly argued that the particular kinds of violence manifest in Sierra Leone are only explicable through the self-perceptions of
those who formed the majority of the RUF, Sierra Leone Army (SLA), and other factions
(Abdullah 2004; Bangara 2004; Gberie 2006; Keen 2005).
204 Jeremy Prestholdt
The RUF’s foot soldiers, as well as a sizeable proportion of the SLA, were the most marginalized of the rural and urban poor, often with little education or social mobility. Many were
volunteers, but by the end of the conflict most were conscripts. In a war without a guiding ideology, fought by those who often had little choice in fighting, young combatants sought ways to
express what Ibrahim Abdullah and Ishmail Rashid typified as the conflicting ‘zeal’ and ‘pain’
by which they carried out their orders (Abdullah and Rashid 2004, 243). Bridging these two
positions, understanding the psychodynamics of violence as a community of spirit, requires a
conceptual leap that Tupac imagery helps to propel. Similar to young people’s attraction to
him in other parts of the world, Tupac resonated with Sierra Leonean combatants because his
was a voice of simultaneous criticism and empathy. He outlined a worldview that both accorded
with and helped to articulate the psychological trauma of extreme violence. For young people
co-opted to fight and goaded to externalize their pain, Tupac offered motivation and solace in
the layered experience of alienation, anger, and brutality.
3. To be a man in this wicked land
Baimba Bompa-Turay was just a boy when he was taken by the RUF during their 1999 invasion
of Freetown. His father was brutalized and his sister was killed. Though spared death he had little
choice but to fight alongside his captors. Like many other boys he was forcefully addicted to
crack cocaine and trained to kill. The drugs and his camaraderie with fellow juvenile combatants
initiated Bompa-Turay into extreme violence. ‘We were invincible’, he explained, and he did
‘vicious things’ (Harman 2002). During his years with the RUF, Bompa-Turay’s best friend
was a sixteen-year-old who had taken ‘Tupac’ as his nom de guerre. In September of 2000
the boys’ unit was ordered across the border into Guinea. Outgunned and malnourished they suffered a terrible defeat. Bompa-Turay was shot twice. He survived, but Tupac was fatally
wounded and died in his arms. Though most of Bompa-Turay’s friends were killed that day
he recovered from his physical wounds. The psychological trauma was far deeper – at the
end of the war he was committed to a mental hospital in Freetown. Bompa-Turay’s life is emblematic of many young conscripts who both suffered and inflicted great suffering on others, while
using global popular culture references such as Tupac to give meaning to their experiences.
To understand the actions of young combatants and the relevance of Tupac to them we must
appreciate both how the war was fought and the specific logics of its violence.
For a decade the civil war ripped apart the quotidian existence of Sierra Leoneans. It was a
war that knew no boundaries. All sides targeted and preyed on civilians, though the most notorious faction was the RUF.3 The RUF initiated the war in 1991, relying on a vague populism that
it later articulated in its manifesto, Footpaths to Democracy (RUF/SL 1995). The RUF’s populist message, however, never extended beyond grievances against the federal government generally, and figures of authority imagined to have been responsible for the poverty and
marginalization of Sierra Leoneans, in particular. What weight this populist rhetoric carried
was lost as its ideologue proponents were expunged from the group in the early years of the
war. In order to consolidate his power, the anti-ideologue RUF commander Foday Sankoh
embarked on a campaign of executing his rivals and emerged as the movement’s leader.
Ultimately, Sankoh’s faith that violence alone was sufficient to unseat Sierra Leone’s political
elite – the ‘corrupt system’ in RUF parlance – overrode any interest in co-opting the populace.
Because of Sankoh’s indifference to violence against civilians and the RUF’s habitual looting,
most Sierra Leoneans rejected the movement (TRC 3A, ch.4, 73). This rebuff angered the rebels
who responded by inflicting greater violence on local populations. If the RUF developed an overarching strategy it was that of terrorizing civilians into acquiescence while maintaining control
over rutile, diamond, and gold mining areas in order to finance the insurgency.
Journal of African Cultural Studies 205
Violence against civilians, as evident in the mutilations at Kukuna, aimed to intimidate civilians as well as opposing factions. But the actions of young combatants also hinged on a much
less conscious drive. For the rank and file conscripts the war became a theatre for exerting power
over the lives of others. Acts of violence were often displaced responses to feelings of alienation
on the part of young combatants, a response intensified by the experience of military indoctrination (a point to which I will return). For most combatants, destroying the conventions of the
‘corrupt system’, looting civilians’ possessions, and forcing their will on those in traditional positions of power was a psychological salve. The war opened up possibilities for addressing the
frustrations and humiliations of life, and the gun offered unprecedented opportunities for
respect. As Corporal Gadafi of the SLA explained to Ishmael Beah, a teenage recruit who
would later write an account of his years fighting with government forces: ‘[the] gun is your
source of power in these times’ (Beah 2007, 124).4
The gun offered extreme power. It forced the performance of respect. Those young people who
had been children – thus powerless – before the war, and were systematically degraded as child
soldiers, demanded respect from those over whom they wielded power. Theirs was a desire to, for
the first time, be in control of their own lives in part through the proxy of others’ suffering. The
craving for respect and recognition would prove a powerful psychical drive for both conscripts
and volunteers throughout the war (Keen 2005, 56, 79). Killing became an indulgence of the
desire to be someone of import; it demonstrated that the killer, though often young, wielded
the power of life and death over others. This, what Achille Mbembe has termed necropower, or
the unambiguous demonstration of domination, revealed itself in the worst of the war’s atrocities:
forcing young people to kill their parents; forcing parents to kill their children; young girls castrating men; asking victims if they wanted just their hand cut off or their whole arm; forcing women to
dance after the murder of their husbands; systematic rape regardless of the victim’s age or status
(Mbembe 2003). These were calculated attempts to humiliate civilians, overturn a gerontocratic
system, and demonstrate the power of those committing such atrocities (Utas and Jörgel 2008).
Since the RUF could not draw on popular support for recruits, and its leaders believed that
soldiers did not need to be ideologically motivated, it turned to abducting and conscripting
juveniles – the most malleable of all potential soldiers. Recognizing that children as young
as five, but more ideally between the ages of ten and fourteen, could be coerced into doing
virtually anything their commanders wished, the RUF created a core of preteen and teen
combatants. While the SLA attracted many young men seeking to avenge the death of a
family-member or loved-one, by the mid-1990s the RUF was largely dependent on forcibly
conscripted juveniles. Post-war surveys reveal that as many as 72% of all ex-combatants
claim to have been forcibly conscripted, while 70% were either small children or juveniles at
the start of the war (PRIDE 2002).
Recruitment was a process of psychologically distancing the conscript from his or her
family. Children captured by the RUF were often compelled under the threat of death to kill,
maim, or rape members of their communities, even family members. This served to alienate
young people from their families and make them believe that returning home would be difficult.
To ensure that they did not try to escape, conscripts were often branded or cut with the faction’s
initials. Conscripts were then distanced from whatever moral precepts they maintained by being
forced to repeatedly kill, maim, or rape. To alleviate some of the psychological trauma of
violence, juveniles were given marijuana, ephedrine, crack cocaine, heroin, and diazepam.
When drugging resulted in addiction conscripts became easier to manipulate (Keen 2005).
Finally, older combatants convinced conscripts that they should accept their new comrades as
their family. Orphaned, or at least estranged, young people usually came to trust and build
relations of reciprocity with their captors. In the chaos of the war, the structure of combat
units offered a kind of familial, patrimonial order (Murphy 2003; Peters 2005). Though initially
206 Jeremy Prestholdt
traumatized and disoriented, initiates became accustomed to the values and beliefs of their
captors-cum-comrades as well as the extreme violence of everyday life.
Young conscripts were socially dead and then reborn into killing (Vigh 2006).5 Through this
social engineering factions developed juvenile fighting forces fiercely loyal to their commanders
and that exhibited little sympathy for their victims. Initiates were encouraged to show no mercy
for perceived enemies, military or civilian, and focus their anger and feelings of humiliation on
them. For many combatants violence became a comfort that some could not easily suppress even
once out of combat (Beah 2007, 136). This cycle of violence, of abduction, violent indoctrination, and the externalization of pain, contributed to the perpetuation of the war. As a result, civilians as much as opposing forces suffered the displaced angst and psychological pain of juveniles
the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) described as ‘victim[s] turned
perpetrator[s]’ (TRC 3A, ch.4, 77).6
Though perhaps the majority of RUF combatants were conscripted at a young age, others
joined willingly. Immediately after the war the Sierra Leone TRC heard testimony from
young, mostly male combatants who joined the RUF voluntarily. Their stories were remarkably
similar. They were lower class young men whose parents had worked in the agricultural sector
and who had received no benefits from the long reign of the pre-war ruling party, the All Peoples
Congress (APC). Many had some education before the war, but this education had been severely
restricted since higher education was not available for the majority and university scholarships
were controlled by the ruling party (Peters 2004). Clientelism, corruption, and nepotism were
rife under the APC, and so opportunities and resources were regularly distributed to those
who enjoyed close party connections. The young and impoverished suffered most under this
system since they enjoyed little access to circuits of patronage and distribution (ContehMorgan and Dixon-Fyle 1999, 144).
Exacerbated by structural adjustment policies in the 1980s, a ‘crisis of youth’ reached
extreme proportions in the early years of the war (Bangura 2004, 33; Hoffman 2003). During
the war some young people had so few opportunities to realize their social or economic aspirations that they quickly embraced the prospect of taking up arms (TRC 3A, ch.3, 43). For volunteers, joining the RUF was seen as a means to accumulate wealth and prestige as well as a
response to perceived injustices (TRC 3A, ch.4, 106; Beah 2007, 199). Though multiple
forces shaped the choices and actions of combatants, by the late 1990s most combatants, both
volunteer and conscript, sought redress for the physical, social, or psychological violence
they had suffered. Perhaps even more importantly, both initiates and volunteers of every
faction, whether RUF, Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), WSB, SLA, or local
self-defence militias (groups corporately termed the Civil Defense Forces, or CDF), came to
believe that their actions were justifiable.
The RUF and AFRC painted their victims as ‘collaborators’, supporters of the system. They
came to believe that attacking all authority figures was just since, in the words of many ex-combatants who testified to the TRC, this was part of the larger goal of ‘bringing down the system’
(TRC 3A, ch.4, 47, 56; Fithen and Richards 2005). The desire to destroy the symbols of a
hierarchy in which young combatants had little stake was made manifest in the humiliation of
authority figures, government representatives, or anyone socially respectable. This desire also
explains why the RUF and AFRC even mutilated, raped, and killed the elderly. Anger directed
at anyone maintaining a semblance of social authority became a regular expression of a deeper
desire to invert the dominant social order (Keen 2005, 245). In the combined pain and zeal of
perpetrators’ actions, looting was justified as redistribution while killing and maiming were
imagined as legitimate forms of retribution (Abdullah and Rashid 2004, 243).
Combatants created and reinforced their own moral universes, ones that for every faction
hinged on presumptions of the righteousness of their actions. And whether a response to
Journal of African Cultural Studies 207
government injustices or rebel atrocities, combatants saw their own perpetrations of violence as
essentially defensive.7 Rebels, for instance, believed that the system they would usher in would
be more virtuous because it would invert the old social order. As a result, they claimed a position
above pre-established law (Keen 2005, 75). This perception of righteous violence and the
evocation of a higher justice explain why Tupac’s track ‘Only God Can Judge Me’ (All Eyez
on Me 1996) became a mantra for RUF and AFRC fighters in the late 1990s. Anticipating
the sentiments of the rebels, Tupac asks on the track, ‘Is it a crime to fight for what is
mine?’ The lyrics then build on themes of fatalism and historic injustice: ‘Everybody’s dyin’
tell me what’s the use of tryin’/I’ve been trapped since birth, cautious, cause I’m cursed/And
fantasies of my family in a hearse’. ‘Only God can judge me now’ the chorus concludes, appealing to a transcendent reckoning that may weigh the rapper’s actions against the world he
inherited.
Much like how combatants perceived their own actions, the violence Tupac narrated in ‘Only
God Can Judge Me’ and other tracks was reactive. It was violence as self-protection, either in
retaliation or a means of restitution for past injustices. His lyrics depict young men devoid,
indeed robbed, of opportunity by a corrupt system that leaves few choices other than violence.
At the same time Tupac’s lyrics paint a picture of internal torment, of the violence exacted on
young people having myriad reverberations. Such a worldview crystallized the experience of
young combatants in late 1990s Sierra Leone incredibly well. ‘Secretz of War’, from the posthumous album Still I Rise (1999), offers an example of the way Tupac articulated the conflicting
emotional frames of defensiveness, aggression, and anguish.
I’m seeing demons
hittin’ weed
got me hearin’ screams
scared to go to sleep
watch the scene like a dope fiend
The chorus follows by offering an ideal of fearlessness, of overcoming these anxieties through
action:
niggaz pass the clip
and watch me bring ‘em to the floor
I got some shit that they ain’t ready for
I got the secretz of war
(‘Secretz of War’, Still I Rise 1999)
Young combatants listened to and repeated Tupac’s lyrics as a mirror of the psychology of the
war that consumed them. Touting the secrets of war, Tupac offered a channel for the articulation
of combatants’ sentiments.
Young people’s self-images were equally important to the appropriation of other mythic
heroes. When the TRC asked child soldiers what they imagined to be the ideal qualities of a
‘commando’ (the preferred RUF terminology for combatants), they commonly responded
with terms like ‘tough’, ‘fearsome’, and ‘brave’ (TRC 3A, ch.4, 78, fn141). The everyday
rhetoric of military factions emphasized fearlessness above all other character traits. Thus,
both the RUF and SLA revered Rambo and Chuck Norris because they exemplified the kinds
of fearlessness to which many young people aspired. Commanders and conscripts alike took
names such as ‘Rambo’ and ‘First Blood’.8 One child recruit-turned-commander testified
to the TRC, ‘I was feared by most of my colleague commandos because of my bravery and
208 Jeremy Prestholdt
attacking skills. That was why my colleagues called me young Rambo’ (TRC 3A, ch.4: 119,
78, fn141).
From the beginning of the war the RUF used the Rambo film First Blood (1982) as a training
video. As early as 1993 the SLA likewise screened Rambo movies to prepare combatants for
offensives. Rambo offered practical instruction in guerrilla warfare and provided inspiration
to young combatants. Moreover, as Paul Richards has demonstrated, the image of one man fighting a superior force and living by his wits in the forest resonated with combatant experiences and
aspirations (Richards 1996). Ishmael Beah recalled of his time with the SLA, ‘We all wanted to
be like Rambo; we couldn’t wait to implement his techniques’ (Beah 2005, 121). Rambo seemed
to accord well with the worldviews of combatants because the underlying tension of the film
First Blood was reactive. Like Rambo, combatants rationalized their actions as a response to
the figurative first blood drawn by systemic oppression or, for SLA conscripts, rebel attacks.
Rambo was an official icon of the RUF in the early years of the war while Tupac became
something of an organic hero – what Marc Sommers has referred to as a ‘patron saint’ – for
multiple factions in the war’s final years (Sommers 2003a). Tupac’s image and rhetoric of
fearlessness and invincibility, like that of Rambo, stood as an ideal for combatants. So it is
no surprise that as with the nom de guerre ‘Rambo’, RUF, AFRC, and WSB combatants,
including Baimba Bompa-Turay’s sixteen-year-old comrade, called themselves Tupac.
Tupac’s imagery, however, offered a symbolic package more complex than Rambo’s. While
Tupac appealed to young combatants’ desires for courageousness, his words were more
profuse and his critiques of corruption as well as his justifications of violence were more
compelling than those of action film characters. Moreover, Tupac offered an idealized image
of black masculinity. He embodied much of what young Sierra Leoneans dreamed of: strength,
intelligence, and wealth.
For those who suffered physical and psychological abuses, who felt that they had nothing to
gain from the perpetuation of the pre-war political system, and who imagined violence could
bring them a more ideal existence Tupac offered a mythical anchor for their desires. He not
only appeared to understand and sympathize with combatants, but he could articulate their
anxieties while representing the kind of invincibility and bravery to which most combatants
aspired. Tupac functioned as a heroic figure that provided a model for, to borrow a verse
from the track ‘Troublesome ‘96’, being ‘a man in this wicked land’ of war-torn Sierra Leone.
4. A ghost in the killin’ fields
Tupac was part of a pantheon of transnational icons referenced by combatants. These icons, from
Rambo to Bob Marley, were elements of a national and global symbolic lingua franca that
preceded the war but gained new dimensions in the 1990s. Like Tupac, each of these icons
was malleable. For instance, young Sierra Leoneans perceived Bob Marley as representing critiques of injustice, general rebelliousness, or, given the fact that reggae was not popular among
older Sierra Leoneans, generic youthfulness. These meanings contributed to the RUF’s use of
Bob Marley T-shirts as uniforms in the early years of the war. The shirts became so closely
associated with the rebels that by the late 1990s people seen wearing Marley Ts were presumed
to be RUF (Fofana 1998).9 In and beyond the war-zone references to American culture, and
especially African-American culture, were common. This was particularly true among the
urban poor. In 1997 Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Social Welfare identified Freetown gangs
named the Bloods, X-Clan and Niggas with Attitude (Fofana 1997). Another gang, the Crips,
painted a larger-than-life-size mural of Tupac flanked by an eagle clutching a skull in its
talons. The muralist painted the words ‘West Side’ on a scroll stretched between the eagle’s
wings.
Journal of African Cultural Studies 209
Sierra Leonean young people’s familiarity with African-American popular culture was both
an indication of the preeminence of American iconography globally and a manifestation of
deeper currents that have joined the reaches of the Black Atlantic over centuries. Since Freetown’s
founding by diasporic Africans from North America, Jamaica and the UK many Sierra Leoneans
have remained connected to cultural, political, and discursive currents across the ocean. This
depth of connection, in part, accounts for the nom de guerre Black Jesus – a reference with
complex historical meanings across the African diaspora – taken by a notorious RUF commander.
Black Jesus references illustrate a kind of ideological transnationalism (to borrow a phrase from
J. Lorand Matory) that informed the dreamscapes of many young Sierra Leoneans before and
during the war (Matory 2005).10 The fact that in his music Tupac likewise referenced the figure
of Black Jesus, who he described as a saviour sympathetic to a racialized experience of degradation, suggests that Tupac and his Sierra Leonean audiences shared many common references.
The attack on Kukuna in 1998 was one of the first to see the RUF’s use of Tupac T-shirts as
fatigues. However, references to Tupac in the context of the war can be traced at least a year
earlier, to the months following Tupac’s murder. In April 1997, only weeks before a military
coup that ousted the newly elected president Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, police in Makeni detained
a secondary school student in possession of rifles, grenades, and explosives. His nickname was
‘Tupac’ and he was presumed to be working with the RUF (Fofana 1997). Soon after Tupac’s
arrest in Makeni Sierra Leone military officers, frustrated with the government’s lack of
support for frontline troops and perceived favouring of the CDF, overthrew the Kabbah government. In place of the elected government, and under the leadership of Major Johnny Paul
Koroma, the conspirators established a military junta that called itself the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC). The coup would lead to a cascade of events that briefly brought the
RUF to the capital, spurred the intervention of multiple foreign military forces, created the West
Side Boys, and intensified violence against civilians. The targeting of civilians reached a crescendo during the 1999 RUF invasion of Freetown, and the atrocities committed by the RUF
shocked the world. In the midst of these events combatants’ references to Tupac multiplied
and the words of the slain rapper gained greater meaning.
After taking control of Freetown in 1997 the AFRC called on the RUF to join the Koroma
junta. For the AFRC this overture was the most expedient way of bringing an end to the war.
RUF leader Foday Sankoh, who was then detained in Nigeria, gave the AFRC his blessing and
called on the RUF to join the junta. Soon RUF fighters marched into Freetown and exacted
revenge on a populace that had shown no interest in their cause. Fortunately for Freetown’s residents, AFRC/RUF control of Freetown did not last. The Kabbah government-in-exile gained the
support of the Economic Community of West Africa’s military force, the Economic Community
Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), a conglomeration of units consisting in large part of Nigerians.
In February 1998, ECOMOG drove the AFRC/RUF coalition out of Freetown and reinstated
President Kabbah. In their retreat AFRC/RUF combatants vented their anger on civilian
populations. Towns such as Bombali, Koinadugu and Kono along the rebel’s escape routes
from Freetown suffered horrible fates at the hands of the embittered AFRC/RUF.
Soon after their retreat from Freetown AFRC/RUF units attacked ECOMOG troops in the
strategically important town of Kenema. Though they lost the battle, reports from Kenema
described rebels for the first time as wearing Tupac T-shirts and red headbands, simultaneous
references to Tupac and Rambo (Sierra Leone News 1998). The RUF’s use of Tupac imagery
had come at a critical juncture in the war and at a time of Tupac’s rapidly increasing transnational popularity. The RUF had long forsaken any clear ideology and engaged in violent conscription. Now combatants had tasted power, faced international military coalitions, been
humiliated by defeat, and were forced back to the periphery. Simultaneously, Tupac’s global
popularity was skyrocketing.
210 Jeremy Prestholdt
In the fall of 1998 the AFRC launched an offensive from the north to retake Freetown. The
RUF joined them in a scorched earth push towards the capital ominously dubbed Operation No
Living Thing. The campaign was the horrific apex of processes of conscription and indifference
to the suffering of civilians. Determined to reclaim Freetown and nursing feelings of betrayal,
AFRC forces took the lead in a campaign that was both more vengeful and ruthless than any
to date. They sought to intimidate the ECOMOG/SLA coalition and exact revenge from
civilians who they imagined had supported the ECOMOG invasion. As AFRC and RUF
forces pushed towards Freetown other young people, mostly Freetown and provincial youth
who seized the opportunity to loot, began swelling their ranks (TRC 3A, ch.3, 212). In early
January of 1999 this invigorated force broke through ECOMOG/SLA positions and entered
Freetown. The invasion would demonstrate the rebels’ incredible capacity for brutality, and it
would reveal that Tupac was now a lodestar for the RUF rank-and-file.
As the AFRC/RUF streamed into Freetown residents reported that they had Tupac song
titles and lyrics painted on their vehicles. The invading forces scrawled references such as
‘All Eyez on Me’, ‘Hit ‘em Up’, ‘Only God can Judge’, and ‘Death Row’ on their pick-up
trucks (Sommers 2003b, 12 – 13).11 Many of the invaders wore Tupac T-shirts designed to intimidate. For example, one T-shirt worn by RUF combatants during the invasion featured the
word 2PAC flanked by piles of skulls.12 Much like the RUF titles ‘Commander Cut Hands’
or ‘Colonel Bloodshed’, the shirts were intended to incite fear since they represented a figure
renowned for his invincibility. One resident of Freetown recalled that the rebels took Tupac’s
words ‘very seriously’ and even tried ‘to apply the lyrics’. According to many eyewitnesses,
during breaks in the fighting AFRC/RUF combatants listened and danced to Tupac as well as
other rappers (Sommers 2003a; Sommers 2003b, 12– 13).
References to Tupac during the AFRC/RUF occupation of Freetown shed light on the
psychology of the invaders. For example, slogans the AFRC/RUF coalition painted on their
vehicles reflected the experiences and worldviews of the attackers, particularly if we accept
that they indeed took such lyrics seriously. After the 1997 ECOMOG counteroffensive the
concept of ‘Me Against the World’ had become apropos for the rebels. The actual lyrics of
the track demonstrate why it gained particular relevance.
witnessin’ killins
leavin dead bodies in abandoned buildings
cries the children
cause they’re illin’
addicted to killin’
a near appeal from the cap peelin’
what I’m feelin’
but will they last or be blasted?
hard headed bastard
maybe he’ll listen in his casket
the aftermath
more bodies being buried
Like many of Tupac’s other tracks, the lyrics offer a palimpsest of pain and a response in
violence. The verse continues:
the question is will I live?
no one in the world loves me
I’m headed for danger
Journal of African Cultural Studies 211
don’t trust strangers
put one in the chamber
whatever I’m feelin’ is anger
don’t wanna make excuses
cuz this is how it is
what’s the use
unless we’re shootin’
no one notices the youth
CHORUS: It’s just me against the world, baby.
(‘Me Against the World’, Me Against the World 1995)
Though the context and references of Tupac’s words were different from the readings young combatants brought to the track, the dual subjectivity of victim-perpetrator narrated in ‘Me Against
the World’ captures is psychology of many young rebels at the time of the 1999 invasion. Tupac,
it would seem, was a disembodied voice that offered a soundtrack to the war. He had become, to
borrow a verse from his 1996 track ‘Hail Mary’, a figurative ‘ghost in [the] killin’ fields’.
As the AFRC/RUF captured more of Freetown violence against civilians reached a fevered
pitch. The number of murders, rapes, and mutilations committed during the 1999 occupation of
Freetown surpassed that of any other period in the previous nine years of war. Rebel atrocities
made headlines around the world. The AFRC/RUF coalition targeted professionals, government
functionaries, journalists, and Nigerians. Anyone the rebels deemed to have supported the
Kabbah government was beaten or killed. As the AFRC/RUF became increasingly entrenched
in the city, ECOMOG turned to its tactical trump card: airpower. It began a bombing campaign
that forced the rebels into a handful of fortified locations. The tide quickly turned against the
rebels and within days ECOMOG pushed the AFRC/RUF out of Freetown once again.
In the summer of 2000 the intersections of the Sierra Leone civil war and the uses of Tupac
once again came into clear view. Instead of the horrors of murder, rape and mutilation that
gained the world’s attention during the 1999 invasion, the exploits of a motley faction of
AFRC soldiers became front-page news when they captured several British military advisors.
The faction called itself the West Side Boys in reference to Tupac’s identification with a
label and rappers on the West Coast, or the ‘West Side’ of the American hip-hop scene.
While the faction’s name was an unambiguous reference to Tupac, exactly where the WSB’s
allegiances laid was less clear. The liminality of the WSB had driven the faction to capture
the British advisors and it ultimately contributed to the group’s demise.
The origins of the WSB reach back to the tumultuous months following the 1998 AFRC/
RUF expulsion from Freetown.13 According to ex-WSB combatants interviewed by Mats
Utas and Magnus Jörgel, the West Side identity emerged among AFRC loyalists in Tumbodu,
Kono District. Junior Lion, the commander of the Dark Angel Battalion, was particularly
fond of Tupac and his enthusiasm for the American rapper spread among nearby units. Soon,
units based in Tumbodu regularly listened to Tupac’s music, repeated his lyrics, and began referring to themselves as the West Side Niggaz. AFRC soldiers camped at Tumbodu also began to
incorporate Tupac imagery into their shared narratives. They saw their push from the east of
Sierra Leone to the west as analogous to Tupac’s flight from America’s East Coast hip-hop
scene to the West Coast. According to Utas and Jörgel, from 1998 Tupac imagery helped
create a mythology that increased the cohesion of AFRC units near Tumbodu (Utas and
Jörgel 2008, 493 – 4, 498). Later, members of the group would paint the word 2PAC on their
rifle butts, wear Tupac T-shirts, and reportedly concentrate on the rap star’s more violent
lyrics (Phillips 2001). In early 1999, the West Side Boys emerged from the AFRC units near
Tumbodu as a distinct sub-faction.
212 Jeremy Prestholdt
In the weeks following the January 1999 AFRC/RUF defeat in Freetown some former
AFRC combatants established bases in Magbeni and Gberi Bana under the leadership of
Ibrahim Kamara. These camps became known as ‘West Side’ and people in the area began referring to the units as the West Side Boys. In 2000 the WSB joined forces with the SLA and CDF,
receiving weapons and support from the government in return. In May WSB forces successfully
repelled RUF units marching on Freetown. In recognition of this, and because of their stated
interest to be incorporated into the national army, the president’s Chief of Defense staff and
several SLA commanders continued to aid the WSB. Some WSB even acted as governmenthired mercenaries. Nonetheless the WSB maintained an autonomous base and served as a
virtual private militia for former AFRC junta leader Johnny Paul Koroma (Utas and Jörgel
2008, 495, 503; TRC 3A, ch.3, 121, 217 – 18, 250 –1; TRC 3A, ch.4, 71– 2; Reno 2003, 60 –1).
Soon after repelling the RUF in mid-2000 many WSB commanders joined the SLA or found
posts in Freetown. This both weakened the faction and drained its external support. Excluded
from the Lomé peace accords among the state, the RUF, and the AFRC, by the summer of
2000 the remaining WSB occupied an increasingly marginal political space. Surviving units
constructed checkpoints on the road to Masiaka, preyed on passing vehicles and took hostages.
To make matters worse, in negotiations with the government remaining WSB demanded both to
be integrated into the national army and allowed to retain the vainglorious ranks they had given
themselves, including Brigadier and Commander. Preserving such titles was important for the
WSB because these signified respect, the kind of respect they desperately wanted from the
SLA and from the broader society (Keen 2005, 234). When government forces refused to recognize the fictive ranks negotiations to absorb the militia foundered.
Frustrated by the government’s inflexibility, in late August of 2000 the WSB ambushed
eleven British military advisors to the SLA. The WSB then attempted to use the hostages to
leverage their demands. Their plan backfired. Humiliated by the hostage crisis – a ‘ragtag’
teenage militia holding British paratroopers did not sit well with the British public – in early
September a British strike force attacked the WSB base. In twenty minutes the hostages were
freed and the WSB had been dealt a deathblow. In a matter of days most of the remaining
West Side Boys capitulated (Keen 2005, 284–5). The rise of the West Side Boys would be the
most dramatic evocation of Tupac during the war, and their decline would help clear the path
towards peace. Though sporadic violence continued, UN-sponsored demobilization and disarmament programmes gained traction. In January of 2002 the war was officially declared over.
The defeat of the West Side Boys did not signal the end of Tupac’s prominence in Sierra
Leone. Years after the end of the war Tupac remained an important figure in the symbolic discourse of young Sierra Leoneans. When I arrived in Sierra Leone in 2004 I found Tupac’s tapes
and CDs on the streets of Freetown. Public transport minivans were decorated with references
such as ‘All Eyez on Me’ and ‘2PAC’. A local junior league football club had named themselves
‘Tupac’. Young people hawked Tupac posters on the street. ‘Americaz Most Wanted’ (see
Figure 3) read one gilded-framed image of Tupac for sale near the High Court. I spoke with a
group of Freetown boys aged eleven to fourteen who, on learning that I was from the US,
immediately beamed, ‘Tupac’. When I asked what they admired most about Tupac they
answered almost in unison: ‘His lifestyle’. Tupac’s defiant posture, personal extravagance,
and courage were as appealing to young men in post-war Sierra Leone as they had been in
the 1990s.
A few weeks after the defeat of the WSB a two-part article appeared in Freetown’s popular
newspaper, the Concord Times. A testament to the importance of Tupac to young Sierra
Leoneans, the series asked the pregnant question: is Tupac alive? (Sankoh 2000). The author’s
conclusion was an unequivocal, yes. This opinion was still common after the war. ‘I don’t
believe that he’s dead’, Amadu Seyah, a Freetown barber, told Spin magazine in 2004.
Journal of African Cultural Studies 213
Figure 3. Tupac poster for sale in Freetown. Freetown, Sierra Leone, 2004. (photo courtesy of the author)
‘We haven’t seen any proof. Biggie is dead, but Tupac? Never. Tupac will come back again!’
(Pape 2004, 97). Other young Freetowners were of a different mind. Ali, a teenage poster salesman, told me in 2004 that Tupac was indeed dead but that he would come back to life. ‘When he
comes back, do you think he’ll come to Freetown?’, I asked. Ali looked uncomfortable with the
idea. ‘I hope not’, he answered, ‘because we’ve seen enough violence here. If Tupac comes to
Sierra Leone the war might start again’. This was one way of seeing the pain and suffering of
the war, the aspirations of young people in postwar Sierra Leone and the multiple dimensions
of Tupac’s afterlives: Tupac was a popular icon that transcended the horrors of the war but
stood as a reminder of its atrocities and the potential for renewed violence. Two years after the
war Tupac was symbolically loaded with hope as much as danger.
5. Epilogue: Resurrections
Tupac has been ceaselessly revived to symbolize diverse circumstances, grievances and pains.
This perpetual resurrection is a testament to the complexity of Tupac’s messages as well as
the malleability of his image. It is also a barometer of the desire to derive meaning from a
globalized life and death that seemed much larger than life. Like other beliefs faith in his
resurrection lays bare young people’s visions, their hopes and aspirations. One of the reasons
why so many believe that Tupac is not dead is because he is a poignant screen for individual
214 Jeremy Prestholdt
desires. His life is intertwined with self-perceptions such that to accept his death is to accept,
in some small way, the end of one’s aspiration to the abilities and lifestyle he represented.
His death is the symbolic death of fearlessness and resilience, traits that so many young
people covet.
Perhaps because in life Tupac restlessly reinvented himself, in his afterlife young people
relentlessly fashion his meaning anew. For some he has even come to represent reconciliation.
The circumstances of Tupac’s death during a furious battle of words with Biggie Smalls might
make such a resurrection implausible. Yet, just before his murder Tupac had a change of heart.
The last video he made (from the final album he produced during his life, 7 Day Theory (1996b)),
offered imagery that departed from the ferocity of ‘Hit ‘em Up’. ‘I Ain’t Mad at “Cha”’, which
depicted an angelic Tupac mingling with famous personalities in heaven and then returning to
earth as an apparition, was conciliatory and forgiving. While this dimension of Tupac’s life
seemed to draw little interest during the war in Sierra Leone, the rapprochement gained relevance in the aftermath of the conflict. For instance, it was this message of reconciliation that
drew crowds to the Ris op Bak (Krio: resurrection) concert in Freetown in 2004, a convergence
of Sierra Leonean MCs timed to coincide with the world release of Resurrection, a high budget
American documentary about Tupac’s life. In death, both Tupac and Biggie – who was gunned
down only a few months after Shakur – became metaphors for reconciliation. In post-war Sierra
Leone young people bought T-shirts bearing complimentary images of the two MCs captioned
with the words ‘Stop the Violence’.14
More than anyone could have predicted during his life, Tupac’s iconography has gained profound meaning beyond the United States. In its global circulation we can discern comparable
rationales for attraction, which point to a broad community of sentiment. In the first decade
after the end of the Cold War Tupac offered a voice for experiences of alienation acutely felt
by many young people around the world, a voice made all the more accessible by a new
economy of images and replication. In war-torn Sierra Leone Tupac’s message resonated
with those looking for courage and meaning in the hopelessness of a violent world. In image
and word Tupac offered a compelling anchor for the frustrations and aspirations of young combatants who suffered horrible violence and, in turn, exercised extreme cruelty.
While the circumstances of everyday life always limit the depth of shared fields of meaning,
Tupac imagery has offered a symbolic language for the spectrum of human capabilities in and
beyond Sierra Leone. Across this spectrum, in the midst of atrocity as well as reconciliation, the
imagery of Tupac’s life has provided a frame for interpreting the world. Moreover, the desire to
resurrect Tupac reveals how profoundly individual lives are mediated by the shared references of
transnational popular culture. And it points to one dimension of a deeper structure of feeling that
emerged from the debris of the Cold War, a community of sentiment that we have yet to fully
comprehend.
Notes
1. Both Carolyn Nordstrom and Tarak Barkawi have demonstrated the importance of seemingly domestic
conflicts to the study of globalization (Nordstrom 2004; Barkawi 2004).
2. Mikal Gilmore described the violence of Tupac’s later lyrics as an ‘assertion of self-worth’ (Gilmore
2006, 104).
3. The conflict as a war ‘without rules’ in the words of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC) (TRC 3A, ch.4, 15). Lansana Gberie typified the RUF as an amorphous ‘mercenary
enterprise’ (Gberie 2006, 153).
4. As Yusuf Bangura put plainly, ‘[g]uns have an empowering effect on the socially estranged’ (Bangura
1997, 185).
5. In the TRC’s words a ‘new human’ was born of the initiation process (TRC 3A, ch.4, 120).
Journal of African Cultural Studies 215
6. This phenomenon of victim-turned-perpetrator creates a conundrum of analysis, as Slavoj Zizek has
suggested, since it denies the simple dichotomies that we are often more comfortable with: soldier/
civilian, victim/perpetrator, good child/bad child (Zizek 2000, 60; Mamdani 2002).
7. Michael Jackson explores this notion of aggressive violence as born of a defensive psychology in his
book, In Sierra Leone (Jackson 2004, 38).
8. See, for instance, commanders Boston Flomoh (RUF) and Idrissa Kamara (WSB) (TRC 3A, 3, 93). An
RUF base in Northern Province, near Mabang, Tonkolili District was also under the command of a man
nicknamed First Blood.
9. Before the war ‘Bob Marley Night’ was a common theme for dances (Beah 2005, 183). Throughout the
war Bob Marley continued to figure prominently in the RUF constellation of icons. In 2000 the RUF in
Kono celebrated May 10 as ‘Bob Marley Night’ (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs 2003). The RUF called its practice of chopping off all of a victim’s fingers save the thumb
‘one love’, the term for the thumbs-up gesture before the war (Beah 2005, 21). Reggae-related
imagery has more recently been used in the conflict in Congo. For instance, a militia in eastern
Congo called itself the Rastas.
10. The feedback loops are constant. Kanye West’s 2005 hit, ‘Diamonds from Sierra Leone’, is a recent
example. The video features an introduction in Krio as well as references to children as forced
labourers. The films Lord of War (2005) and Blood Diamond (2006) added Sierra Leone to the
archive of Hollywood imagery.
11. In 2000 Sommers interviewed refugees in the Gambia who had been in Freetown during Operation No
Living Thing. Residents also reported seeing the vehicles of the invaders painted with the words,
‘Missing in Action’, a reference to the famous Chuck Norris film (Missing in Action 1984).
12. See, for instance, photos taken in Freetown by A. Raffaelle Ciriello (1999) and S. Junger (2000).
13. David Keen suggests that the West Side Boys emerged from a coalition of AFRC/RUF combatants that
controlled Okra Hills immediately before the 1999 invasion of Freetown and, in fact, led the invasion
(Keen 2005, 222).
14. This design was popular in the US and Russia as well (Working 1998).
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(b) Discography
Kanye West. 2005. ‘Diamonds from Sierra Leone’ (Digital download single). New York: Roc-A-Fella/
Island Def Jam.
Tupac Shakur. 1991. 2Pacalypse Now (CD). Santa Monica, CA: Interscope Records.
———. 1994. Thug Life: Volume 1 (CD). Santa Monica, CA: Interscope Records.
———. 1995. Me Against the World (CD). Santa Monica, CA: Interscope Records.
———. 1996a. All Eyez on Me (CD). Los Angeles/Santa Monica, CA: Death Row/Interscope
Records.
———. 1996b. The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory (CD). Los Angeles/Santa Monica, CA: Death
Row/Interscope Records.
———. 1999. Still I Rise (CD). Atlanta/Los Angeles/Santa Monica, CA: Amaru/Death Row/Interscope
Records.
———. 2002. Better Dayz (CD). Altanta/Los Angeles: Amaru/Death Row Records.
218 Jeremy Prestholdt
(c) Filmography
Blood Diamond. 2006. Directed by Edward Zwick, Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures.
First Blood. 1982. Directed by Ted Kotcheff, Los Angeles: Anabasis N.V./Carolco.
Lord of War. 2005. Directed by Andrew Niccol, Santa Monica, CA: Lions Gate Entertainment.
Missing in Action. 1984. Directed by Joseph Zito, New York: Cannon Group.