Abstract
This chapter is about evictions, in a double sense. By telling the story of a real eviction affecting one of the polio-houses, Its objective is to shed light on the logic of expulsions, the tendency of late capitalism to conquest and occupy older forms of human and natural life spaces, producing in this way masses of superfluous populations as well as vast stretches of dead land, made unsuitable for living. Disabled beggars and squatters are easy prays for this form of spatialised oppression, against which disability theory offers little protection. In a quest for new theories to be combined with disability theory suitable to respond to the very real challenges faced by the polio-disabled squatters, the concept of the ‘right to the city’ is proposed, which annuls the original antagonism between the abled and disabled bodies, creating space for new alliances without denying the specificity of the disabled experience.
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Notes
- 1.
As explained in Chap. 3, The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was only fully domesticated in March 2011, with the enactment of the Persons with Disabilities Act.
- 2.
I use ‘ghettoes’ here to refer to poor neighbourhoods, and more specifically to their characterisation by a high visibility of (male) youth culture. These ghettoes are by no means the replica of United Statesean ghettoes.
- 3.
See: ‘De Pa don really woke’: How President Koroma has transformed Sierra Leone to a land of beauty http://www.cocorioko.net/?p=33834.
- 4.
Because Kroobay is in an urban area, it has no actual chief. It has an elected headman, but in the local parlance he is addressed respectfully as ‘chief’.
- 5.
The term ‘patrimonial politics’ refers to the existence of patrimonial chains (or networks), in which mutual obligations and expectations link people of upper and lower statuses. In such chains, ‘patrons’ are expected to (re)distribute wealth or economic advantages to ‘clients’ who owe political allegiance and loyalty in exchange. While ‘patrimonialism’ and ‘neo-patrimonialism’ often serve as shorthand for corruption, the political form is not new. It has its roots in the precolonial political system, well before the advent of the modern state. In this historic system, power was concentrated in the hands of big men or elders. The prestige and power of individual elders grew with the size of the patrimonial network they controlled, and the system was maintained by the reciprocal advantages it offered to the parties. Further discussion of how this pattern functioned on the Upper Guinea Coast, including in Sierra Leone, appears in Murphy, W. P. (2010). Patrimonial Logic of Centrifugal Forces in the Political History of the Upper Guinea Coast. The Powerful Presence of the Past. Integration and Conflict along the Upper Guinea Coast. J. W. T. F. Knörr. Leiden, Boston, Brill. Volume 24.
- 6.
Source: World Population Review http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-by-density/.
- 7.
In some African cities, from Lagos to Dar el Salaam neoliberal urban development has been surprisingly fast pushing the poor out of the city centres which had to be liberated and modernised to receive those who can afford it. The same process is under way in other developing countries and even in the so-called developed world, where most popular- or upcoming neighbourhoods and even whole cities are being gentrified.
- 8.
In the post-war years, overall national poverty was on a decline, dropping from 78.7 per cent in 2003 to 66.1 per cent in 2011. In the same period, however, it increased in the capital: 13.6 per cent in 2003, 20.7 per cent in 2011 and then 28 per cent in 2014 (World Bank and Statistics of Sierra Leone, 2014).
- 9.
- 10.
The Act says disabled people should have free medical services. See Persons with Disability Act: http://www.sierra-leone.org/Laws/2011-03.pdf.
- 11.
In Sierra Leone, too, a deracialised form of apartheid has been practised from the beginning, separating the rights-bearing citizens of the colony from the supposedly not-yet-totally civilised subjects of the protectorate. Amongst the many phrases and expressions that invoke this physical and legal separation, it is telling that village people in Mende refer to Freetown as ‘Salone’ (the affectionate name for Sierra Leone), as if the capital comprised the whole country and they were outside of it.
- 12.
Sometimes the gaps are so large that it is impossible not to think of project society as producing an institutionalised schizophrenia. I remember in particular a young and energetic expert who came to evaluate the strength of the DPOs in Sierra Leone. We sat on the beach after his third day in the country and I curiously asked him what he thought. He was desperate. The DPOs he had visited clearly did not confirm to the project’s expectations. Their financial system was messy, their work ill-documented and his interlocutors frequently expressed frustration or open hostility towards their funders. He also offered a very sharp analysis of what he had seen: the DPOs are weak, he said, not because of their natural lack of capacity but because they are made dependent by project funding. I did not expect him to put all his negative feelings into his report, still I was flabbergasted when I saw that his paper contained none of his voiced observations; it only praised both the DPOs and the project for their performance.
- 13.
According to the annual Global State of Emotions report. of Gallup, Sierra Leone was the third most negative country in the world in 2018.
- 14.
On the paradoxes of neoliberal urban development in Africa see Goodfellow, T. and A. Smith (2013). ‘From Urban Catastrophe to ‘Model’ City? Politics, Security and Development in Post-conflict Kigali’. Urban Studies 50(15) and De Boeck (2011). De Boeck, F. (2011). Inhabiting Ocular Ground: Kinshasa’s Future in the Light of Congo’s Spectral Urban Politics. Cultural Anthropology, 26 (2).
- 15.
Emphasise by me.
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Szántó, D. (2020). Expulsions: Disability, Power, Land and Citizen’s Rights. In: Politicising Polio. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6111-1_7
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