Re-thinking burgeoning political consciousness: Student activists, the class of '99' and political intent in Sierra Leone

Abstract

This article uses interviews with former student activists in Sierra Leone to explore what ideals motivate students to participate in political action. In sierra Leone, students used the military as a cover for their own democratic programme, initially by encouraging a coup that they wanted to partake in, later by joining the officer corps themselves. I challenge the notion that student interactions with the urban lumpenproletariat and 'militariat' serve as evidence for their desire to cloak a lack of ideals in popular violence; rather I argue that coalitions are built as needs must to push a particular agenda, whether or not the agenda is known to all participants. In this case, that agenda was to ensure that an idealistic intelligentsia has economic and political futures that they had been denied under a paternalistic dictatorship. In essence student activism was elitist, not popular.