Abstract
This chapter examines the experiences of workers at a sugar plantation in Sierra Leone as the starting point for a broader view of Sino-African relations and the ambivalently localized forms of Chinese state capitalism. While shifting relations between China and Sierra Leone have increasingly relied upon idioms of friendship and reciprocity (layered on existing narratives of expertise and development), this chapter explores how projects of foreign direct investment in Sierra Leone increasingly took hold alongside aid-oriented projects and the expansion of finance capital throughout the 1980s, revealing troubled questions of sovereignty particular to the plantation form. As land and communities of labor accrue new value through the technological assemblages of plantation life with foreign capital, with its particular forms of future-orientated temporality, the chapter questions how such scenes suggest the longer historical entanglements of extractivism and coloniality as it is felt in Sierra Leone.
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Notes
- 1.
“COMPLANT Launched Ukraine Agriculture Package Project,” Sinomach, 14 May 2013.
- 2.
By contrast, Taiwanese agricultural training projects in Africa (particularly Taiwanese rice techniques) have been understood as an embattled medium of recognition in the context of long-term effacement owing to the PRC’s One China policy in which Taiwan is increasingly a geopolitical proxy. See “Building on Past Achievements and Joining Hands to Make an Even Brighter Future of China-Sierra Leone Friendship,” Chinese Ambassador Zhao Yanbo (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China), 1 Aug 2016.
- 3.
While collaborative projects of development have shaped both urban skylines and rural landscapes in Sierra Leone, these spectacular infrastructures have served ambivalent purposes if they are to be understood beyond the act of giving as an end in itself. As Mariane Ferme and Cheryl Schmitz (2014) have written, a focus that extends beyond the more obvious monumental projects instantiated by the PRC in Sierra Leone may enrich our understanding of Chinese–African engagements over time.
- 4.
“Sierra Leone—FAO Cooperation and Development,” October 1985, FAO and Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
- 5.
Once a net exporter of the crop, by 1980 Sierra Leone was a net importer of rice, accentuated by a severe imbalance of payments. Persistent failures to meet obligations to the International Monetary Fund caused the devaluation of the Leone from its near 1:1 parity with the US Dollar in 1980 to a state of massive inflation by the end of the decade.
- 6.
Daily Report: People's Republic of China, United States Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 20 December 1978.
- 7.
“China and the World in the New Era,” The State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China, September 2019.
- 8.
Complant Magbass Sugar Complex Co. Ltd., Memorandum of Understanding, 2013.
- 9.
Lease Contract on Magbass Sugar Complex of Sierra Leone. 23 January 2003. Freetown, Sierra Leone.
- 10.
For the contentious rendering of idioms for social elevation in Chinese-language sources, see Rob Schmitz, “Who’s Lifting Chinese People Out Of Poverty?,” NPR, January 17, 2017.
- 11.
All names used are pseudonyms.
- 12.
“Build a Prosperous Country Energetically, Diligently, and Thriftily.” People’s Daily. Peking New China News Agency, 1 Oct, 1963.
- 13.
Distinguished in the popular imagination for the willful destruction of the built environment and an exceptional brutality toward the civilian population, at least 70 thousand people were killed in the conflict. This violence remained visible in the landscape of burned villages and abandoned farms. Over half the total population—at least two million people—were displaced from their homes. In Koidu, the capital of Kono District, 90 percent of the buildings were damaged or destroyed following the retreat of AFRC and RUF fighters from the diamond-rich East of the country. “IRIN Update 999 of events in West Africa,” United Nations (OCHA) Network for West Africa. 19 June 2001. Online: https://reliefweb.int/report/chad/irin-update-999-events-west-africa.
- 14.
“Case Study: Sierra Leone, Evaluation of Assistance to Conflict-Affected Countries.” New York: United Nations Development Program, 2006. 4. Online: http://web.undp.org/evaluation/documents/thematic/conflict/SierraLeone.pdf.
- 15.
Compelled by the evidentiary power of the camera image as a mode of natural representation, scholars have argued that photography can function as an archive or appendage to ethnography, but with reservations about its efficacy as a tool for gleaning historical information.
- 16.
Lease Contract on Magbass Sugar Complex of Sierra Leone. 23 January 2003. Freetown, Sierra Leone.
- 17.
“SiLNORF & PS North Mediate in Magbass land dispute,” Awoko, 8 August 2012.
- 18.
Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Food Security; FAO representative in Sierra Leone, direct communication, 11 October 2010. Quoted in “Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa—Country Report: Sierra Leone,” Oakland, CA: Oakland Institute.
- 19.
In 2018, a story broke in French newspaper Le Monde accusing China of systematically hacking the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, a building funded by Beijing and constructed by state-owned contractors. Ghalia Kadiri and Joan Tilouine, “A Addis-Abeba, le siège de l’Union africaine espionné par Pékin,” Le Monde Afrique, 26 January 2018. Richard Poplak, “The new scramble for Africa: how China became the partner of choice,” The Guardian, 22 December 2016, Alexis Okeowo, “China in Africa: The New Imperialists?,” New Yorker, June 12 2013.
- 20.
“COMPLANT wasting no time,” The Gleaner, August 16 2011.
- 21.
Thanks to Rosalind C. Morris for the observation that war between India and China broke out soon after Bandung, and China’s anti-Indian stance is not unrelated to its “pro-Africanism.”
- 22.
Synthesized and manufactured by the Philadelphia company, FMC Corporation, since 1967, the widespread use and attendant harms of Furadan first drew wide attention in 1985, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service noted the acute toxicity posed by the chemical to aquatic life and birds. It reported on the prevalence of bird deaths and the contamination of drinking water near farmlands where it had been applied extensively on food crops destined for the domestic market. Reports claimed the kills of egrets in Louisiana and the extensive poisoning of river fish. See Carbofuran; Proposed Tolerance Revocations, Environmental Protection Agency, Jul 31, 2008.
- 23.
According to regulatory systems in the European Union, notions of chemical tolerance are measured by “maximum residue levels”—the highest possible amount that can be present in trace amounts.
- 24.
This was under President Momoh who ruled from 1985–1991, the terminal years of what is termed in the literature of the period as a “shadow state.” Also observable in the discourse of Sierra Leone’s Green Revolution is a brand of anti-elite sentiment that would be echoed in the discourse of economic populism during the rebel war, particularly in the imagery of the peasant masses conjured by the ideology of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), and for whom a “revolutionary” critique of foreign exploitation appeared fully embedded in resource nationalism. As the newsletter notes: “For the urban privileged sitting in the comfort of their homes or place of work, the Green Revolution may not have started…”.
- 25.
I borrow this term from Christopher Pinney (2002) whose argument about the material traces of cultural forms is particularly germane here.
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Davies, N. (2023). “Sweet Mother”: The Neoliberal Plantation in Sierra Leone. In: Le Petitcorps, C., Macedo, M., Peano, I. (eds) Global Plantations in the Modern World. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08537-6_10
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