ABSTRACT
The decades between the years 1967 and 1992—the period when the autocratic all people’s congress governed Sierra Leone—can best be described as the decades of impossibility in terms of the attainment of a gender-equal society in the postcolonial state. With regards to economic rights, the regime was only concerned about its pseudo-Marxist rights to control, on the one hand, the economic modes of production—land, labor, and capital—and, on the other hand, the economic functions of the family. The amended Act gave the state’s security apparatuses the powers to crack down on women who attempted to exercise their self-proclaimed reproductive rights. Women were in the majority in Sierra Leone, but it was common practice for men to dictate who their wives’ vote for during elections. The expectation that women would choose to marry Sierra Leonean men; but if, as a result of love or lust for wealth they married “outsiders,” they should be ready to face the consequences.
