ABSTRACT
A distinctive feature of these West African militias is the links that they articulate between youth, secret societies and contemporary conflict. In West Africa, notably in the conflicts in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire we are reminded of the ways in which the past plays out in the post-colonial present, and the way in which hunter militias on the Guinea coast have reemerged as combatants in the fragmented spaces of West Africa’s collapsed states (Leach 2004; Bassett, 2003; Richards 1996; Ellis 1999). In this context masquerades and warrior cults have become rich repositories of idioms of youth initiation, modes of collective covert action, and of the aesthetics of violence. The various movements of protest and resistance to the oil companies and the national government in the Niger Delta area have captured something of this process in the emergence of the Egbesu ‘secret cult’ which provides local youth
with a collective means of organization that cuts across the complex mosaic of identities found in the Delta. Egbesu is a resistance movement through which youth define an identity that challenges the state and the oil companies.2 Consequently the Egbesu Boys have been branded as ‘pirates’ by state authorities because of their alliances and activities. Commentators have argued, however, that this recourse to the past in the present therefore provides a key context for situating counter-narratives to economic marginalization and environmental exploitation. The choice of representing claims to a pre-colonial legitimacy over rights to land and resource ownership in this form and in opposition to the state is significant. Egbesu constructs a moral community, it is argued, with the physical and spiritual security that this entails, and hence it determines when there is a just cause to use the force of the Egbesu deity for ‘the good and protection of the community’.3
