Social Science Research Council

“Negotiating Patronage: Economic Survival and Comradeship among Former Liberian Child Soldiers in Cape Town”

The project is an ethnographic study of Liberian youth who were participants in the civil war in Liberia and who, following disarmament in 2004, migrated to Cape Town, South Africa. The study examines the economic activities of the young migrants in a fast-changing city recently characterized as hostile to foreign migrants. The aim is to understand the nature of the ties that hold Liberian youth as groups and allow them to operate within the informal economy. The ties denote alliances forged between the youth as child soldiers and reflect the trajectories they have created since leaving Liberia. The endurance of the ties over time and distance, coupled with rumors in Cape Town of the migrants as competent economic actors, augment perceptions of the youth as dangerous and otherworldly.

The study focuses on how young Liberians cultivate ties with patrons in the city to secure economic opportunity and the ways the youths share resources among each other to mark connections of loyalty, friendship, and continuing comradeship. I look at the ways West African formulations of patron-client relationships, which gained fresh meanings for child combatants in a context of war, are recreated in a different milieu. My project will take account of the agency of narratives (particularly the crafting of categories of friend, enemy, and comrade within that crucible), structural conditions (of being at an edge of economic success, even though that success is denigrated on grounds of a reliance upon occult powers), and a locality (how Liberian youth appear in the eyes of Cape Town, which speaks as much to the particularity of Cape Town in the post-Apartheid era as it does to Liberian experiences of it) in which to better theorize the conditions of possibility for agency in a situation of social and economic uncertainty.