What is it about?
This article details what 'disability' means in post-conflict Sierra Leone, how such conceptions are not fixed and furthermore became linked to 'victimhood'.
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Why is it important?
In this article, we compare conceptions of disability in Sierra Leone using the theoretical category of ““victimhood.”” We show how it intersects with how: 1) traditional perceptions of disability locate a person within a moral economy of blame and social remedies, 2) how disability discourses within a segregated setting are being affected by multiple postconflict ideas around victims and victimization, and 3) how dependency and success are created as disabled people internalize or reject the victimization. In these ethnographic snapshots of the everyday, we hope to show how people reinterpret discourses around disability to suit their own needs in fluid, multilayered, and sometimes even contradictory ways.
Perspectives
Is there something like 'disability' in Sierra Leone or is it a Western construct? What does it mean if you have an impairment? Does it have a meaning or implications for how you live your life? How did the post-conflict environment change or affect these definitions and understandings? Myriam and myself tried to answer some of these questions.
Dr Maria Berghs
De Montfort University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Comparative Analysis: Everyday Experiences of Disability in Sierra Leone, Africa Today, December 2011, Indiana University Press,
DOI: 10.2979/africatoday.58.2.19.
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