Research Methods for Memory Studies Edited by Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd iii 07/05/2013 13:49 ch apter 7 Memoryscapes and Multi-Sited Methods Paul Basu A s David Lowenthal has observed, ‘the locus of memory lies more readily in place than in time’ (1997: 180). From Halbwachs’ foundational work on the ‘spatial frameworks’ of collective memory ([1925] 1941), through Yates’ explorations of the architectural ‘arts of memory’ in the middle ages (1966), to Nora’s highly inluential project charting the ‘lieux de mémoire’ of the French nation (1984–92), the relationship between ‘mental spaces’ of memory and the ‘material milieu that surrounds us’ has been a dominant theme in memory studies (Connerton 1989: 37; Schama 1995). Indeed, après Nora, the concept of the site of memory has become the dominant metaphor for exploring cultural memory. However, despite its wide inluence, the notion of lieux de mémoire has also been criticised as being ‘one of the most inchoate and under theorized concepts of cultural memory studies’ (Erll 2010: 1). And yet, its apparent limitlessness – its ability, for example, to encompass material and immaterial ‘sites’ as diverse as La Marseillaise, the tricolore, Lascaux and Joan of Arc – provides its very strength. Perhaps, as Peter Carrier suggests, Nora’s contribution is, above all, a methodological one (2000: 37): a framework for exploring the cultural construction of collective identities through the tangible sites at which shared historical consciousness is inculcated . . . and contested. Whereas the nation is foregrounded in Nora’s and many other studies of public memory and commemoration (e.g. Gillis 1994; Koshar 1998; Olick 2003), there are, of course, other ‘social frameworks’ which both shape historical consciousness and are shaped by it. Halbwachs, for example, discusses the intersecting communities of language, family, religion and social class that provide some of the speciic group contexts through which individuals remember or recreate the past (Halbwachs 1925; Coser 1992: 22). Such social frameworks inluence both what is remembered and how it is remembered, binding group members together in a shared ‘community of memory’ and contributing to an individual’s sense of belonging to the group. While there are numerous debates regarding the boundaries between public and private forms KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 115 07/05/2013 13:49 116 pau l ba s u of remembering, I favour the term ‘cultural memory’, since, as Erll argues, it ‘allows for an inclusion of a broad spectrum of phenomena . . . ranging from individual acts of remembering in a social context to group memory . . . to national memory with its “invented traditions”’ and beyond to accommodate transnational and diasporic contexts (2010: 2; see Basu 2007a for an investigation of the latter). These are neither discrete phenomena, nor necessarily continuous or consistent. Pursuing the spatial metaphor, we might conceive of this varied mnemonic terrain as a ‘landscape of memory’ – or, better, a ‘cultural memoryscape’. cu lt u ra l m e m o r ysc a p e s a n d mu l t i-sit ed m e t ho d s Cultural memoryscapes accommodate not only diferent sites and social frameworks of memory, but also what Radstone and Hodgkin term diferent ‘regimes of memory’ (2003). Rather than a dichotomised world of authentic ‘milieux de mémoire’ and self-consciously commemorative ‘lieux de mémoire’ (Nora 1989), the memoryscape is comprised of a multiplicity of diferent forms of remembering: those that are intentional and communicable through language, narrative or material form, as well as those which are unintentional and ‘inherently non-narrative’, such as embodied forms of memory (Erll 2010: 2). These diferent forms are not necessarily temporally or spatially distant, but interact with one another, cohering into new creolised forms, or accumulating at speciic sites to form palimpsest-like accretions (Basu 2007b). The idea of the memoryscape also invokes Arjun Appadurai’s characterisation of the shifting, perspectival and disjunctive dimensions of contemporary global dynamics (1990). Rather than inhabiting neatly bounded communities of memory (as invoked above), in which all citizens share in a common imagining of the nation’s past, for example, individuals actually negotiate a plurality of allegiances and identiications (national, ethnic, linguistic, religious, etc.), which transgress group boundaries and are not necessarily isomorphic. Appadurai describes such entities as ‘ethnoscapes’, ‘mediascapes’, ‘ideoscapes’, and so on, using the common ‘-scape’ suix to indicate that ‘these are not objectively given relations which look the same from every angle of vision, but rather that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inlected by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of diferent sorts of actors’ (including nation-states, diasporic communities, sub-national groupings, villages, families, etc.) (Appadurai 1990: 7). To these -scapes, we might add the memoryscape, an inhabited ‘medium for’ and ‘outcome of’ conscious and unconscious mnemonic practices (Tilley 1994: 23), and another important dimension of ‘the multiple worlds . . . constituted by the his- KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 116 07/05/2013 13:49 me mo rysca p e s a nd m u l t i - s i t e d m e t h o ds 117 torically situated imaginings of persons and groups spread around the globe’ (Appadurai 1990: 7). The location of the ‘Sierra Leonean’ memoryscape with which I shall be concerned in this chapter, is not, therefore, only to be found by searching for authentically ‘indigenous’ memory practices and oral traditions among rural communities in the country’s interior (e.g. Ferme 2001; Shaw 2002), nor even by identifying hybridised sites of memory and commemoration within the borders of the modern Sierra Leonean nation-state. Rather, this memoryscape also extends to the cultural imaginings and practices of second generation diasporic communities in Washington DC (D’Alisera 2004), to Pentecostal church congregations in South London, to collections of Sierra Leonean objects dispersed in museums throughout Europe and North America (Basu 2011), and, for that matter, to the CO 267 series of colonial records held in the UK’s National Archives at Kew. The objective in surveying such an array of sites – what marks this as an exercise in memory studies rather than historical research, for example – is not so much to facilitate the triangulation of data to arrive at a closer approximation of ‘historical truth’, but rather to investigate how people both shape and are shaped by this landscape of memory, how they inhabit it and transform it, how they negotiate its consistencies and inconsistencies, and what this tells us of the nature of historical and mnemonic consciousness in particular socio-cultural contexts. These, at least, are some of the objectives of my ongoing research concerning the Sierra Leonean memoryscape, and it is this work that I should like to draw upon here to consider some of the methodological dimensions of exploring such a fragmented and dispersed mnemonic milieu. This has been a long-term research project in which I have engaged with sites as diverse as speciic species of trees, historical personalities, sites of resistance against colonialism, sites of diasporic return, masquerade traditions, ancestral relics, as well as regimes of memory introduced in the colonial and postcolonial era such as Sierra Leone’s National Museum, its Monuments and Relics Commission, and National Dance Troupe. Since this chapter is primarily intended as a methodological contribution, I shall not attempt to provide a detailed account of such sites (see, however, Basu 2007b, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2013). Rather, I restrict myself to a couple of case examples, which are intended partly to illustrate the difering material qualities of diferent sites of memory (archival traces, deserted settlement remains, ancestral objects), partly to emphasise some of the relational dimensions of my approach (how such sites relate with one another, for example, or how they relate to oral traditions), and partly to introduce some of the ways in which the pasts remembered at such sites are ‘active’ in the present (for example, explaining a town’s failure to ‘develop’, or establishing the legitimacy of a lineage’s claim to chiely status). KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 117 07/05/2013 13:49 118 pau l ba s u Before turning to these case examples I should state that my disciplinary orientation is primarily that of an anthropologist, and given the dispersed and mobile character of the sites and practices that make up the cultural memoryscape, the methodological framework I employ is largely grounded in recent debates concerning the development of ‘multi-sited’ approaches to ethnographic ieldwork (Marcus 1995; Amit 2000; Coleman and von Hellermann 2011). Since many of the social groups and practices that contemporary anthropologists investigate are often ‘no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogenous’ (Appadurai 1991: 191), the classic ethnographic method of long-term ‘participant-observation’ in a single ield site has become increasingly inadequate and researchers have had to develop more agile and adaptive methods of tracing the ‘circulations of cultural meanings, objects and identities in difuse time-space’ (Marcus 1995: 95). In his well-known essay, ‘Ethnography in/of the World System’, George Marcus proposes a framework for multi-locational research which acknowledges that the posited objects of study may themselves be emergent and discontinuous, and this shifts the researcher’s role to that of discerning the ‘logics of relationship, translation, and association’ between these mobile and multiply-situated objects (ibid.: 102). Marcus summarises this approach as follows: Multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact deines the argument of the ethnography. (ibid.: 105) Such an approach can be efectively employed to investigate the associations and connections between the distributed sites of memory (whether embodied practices, oral histories, monuments, commemorative rituals, archival traces, etc.) that make up the cultural memoryscape and with which the researcher can physically engage. The task then becomes one of ‘following’ a particular ‘memory’, which may itself follow the migrations of people, or things, or narratives, or aesthetic motifs, or predispositions, or forms of record keeping, for example (ibid.: 106–10). In order to discern these logics of association, one might say that the researcher is called to follow the mnemonic trace from site to site, acknowledging that each site may require quite diferent sets of research skills. I shall return to this point in due course. In the meanwhile, rather than pursuing this in the abstract, it is perhaps more helpful to examine examples of these paths, threads, and juxtapositions in a speciic context. And so, let us turn to the Sierra Leonean memoryscape. KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 118 07/05/2013 13:49 me mo rysca p e s a nd m u l t i - s i t e d m e t h o ds 119 a r c hi v e s, l a n d sc a p e s, o r a l t r a d i t i o n s – r e m e m b e r i n g c ol on ia l v iol en c e Governor HAY to LORD KNUTSFORD, January 5, 1889 (Telegraphic) Mackiah’s Town Fanima taken and burnt down 2nd January, in 1 hour 20 minutes; 668 captives have been recovered, principally those taken from Sulymah. Oicial list of casualties, three constables wounded; native contingent, two killed in action, 10 wounded. Could not ascertain enemy’s loss, as town was burnt down. Mackiah’s capital, Largo, taken 3rd January, without resistance. Mackiah said to have escaped to Manoh on the way to Nyagwah. Active operations will close. I leave for Jehomah 6th January. LORD KNUTSFORD to Governor HAY, January 9, 1889 (Telegraphic) Referring to your telegram of 5th January, it gives me much pleasure to congratulate you on your very successful military operations. In the 1880s, prior to the declaration of the Sierra Leone Protectorate, as the British were extending their interests in the region, there was a great deal of unrest in the hinterland of Sierra Leone. With little apparent awareness of how their own activities were destabilising the region, the British perceived the local inhabitants to be a ‘wild savage people, continually at war amongst themselves’ (Abraham 1978: 4). The British method of expansion in the area was to form treaties with ‘friendly’ local rulers, and to protect the interests of these rulers against the incursions of others who resisted the entreaties of the British crown. This process went hand in hand with the development of British economic interests in the region and with a ‘civilizing mission’, which sought above all to stamp out local slavery practices. Local elites were often reliant on slave labour to maintain their status, and slave raiding was widespread throughout the region. The above quoted exchange of telegrams between Sir James Shaw Hay, who served three terms as Governor of Sierra Leone between 1886 and 1891, and Lord Knutsford, Secretary of State for the Colonies between 1887 and 1892, recalls one of the many British military interventions in these so-called ‘tribal wars’. These slips of paper are to be found among the several hundred volumes of Colonial Oice correspondence concerning Sierra Leone held by the UK’s National Archives, and their text was also reproduced in a Parliamentary report of 1889 concerning the ‘disturbances in the native territories adjacent to Sierra Leone’ (House of Commons 1889: 52). Unusually, on this occasion, the military expedition, which was led by Captain Robert Copland Crawford, was KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 119 07/05/2013 13:49 120 pau l ba s u Figure 7.1 Remembering the destruction of Largo. The archival photograph as site of memory. Photograph by Captain H. B. Mackay, Royal Engineers, 1889. The National Archives CO 1069/89. accompanied by a photographer (actually Captain H. B. Mackay of the Royal Engineers, who, according to Fyfe (1963: 481) ‘came along for fun’), and so, in addition to the written correspondence and reports, there is also a surviving visual record of the events. Figure 7.1, for example, shows the charred remains of Largo photographed just two days after the town was ‘taken’. The extent of the devastation is shocking. The destruction of the towns of Fanima and Largo was provoked by the aggressive actions of a mercenary named Mackiah, described by the Sierra Leonean historian C. Magbaily Fyle as ‘the terror of Mende country in the second half of the nineteenth century’ (1981: 78). Mackiah was a notorious warrior and, from his headquarters at Largo, he and his followers attacked towns and villages throughout the Gallinas region (in what is now southeastern Sierra Leone), capturing slaves and plundering the lands of chiefs who were on friendly terms with the British. Snubbing the colonialists’ invitations to make a treaty, it was generally agreed among the British that ‘paciication of the country’ would only be achieved by the ‘removal of Mackiah’ (CO 879/27/2). In 1887 Mackiah had attacked the British trading post at Sulymah KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 120 07/05/2013 13:49 me mo rysca p e s a nd m u l t i - s i t e d m e t h o ds 121 and, in late 1888, hostilities intensiied again when he captured the friendly towns of Jehomah and Bandajuma. While there was little appetite at the Colonial Oice for launching a full-scale – and expensive – punitive expedition to remove Mackiah, Crawford, who was in charge of a troop of Frontier Police at Sulymah, proposed leading an ofensive of his own. Although Crawford had no mandate to undertake such operations, he had the backing of Governor Hay, who left Freetown with reinforcements to support the endeavour. Hay was also accompanied by the aforementioned Captain Mackay, who was equipped with Hale rockets, which – from the British perspective – proved a highly efective weapon against local defences. On the morning of 2 January 1889, Crawford led the march from Bandajuma, which he had previously recaptured from Mackiah, to Fanima. In addition to the Frontier Police force, he was joined by a large contingent of local ‘warboys’, led by the friendly chiefs Momoh Jah of Pujehun and Gbanah Gumbo of Sahn. They arrived at Fanima before noon. The town was surrounded by a mudbrick wall and stockade. Crawford takes up the narrative of his assault in a report of 7 January 1889: At 11.50 a.m. I formed up the police for attack and opened ire with rockets upon the town, at a range of 250 yards. The advanced guard worked round to the left, whilst the rocket party after having set ire to the town passed round to the Largo gate and cut of the enemy’s retreat in that direction. The rear guard supported this movement. The Native levies encouraged by the noise of the rocket quickly surrounded the town. Half-a-dozen rockets were discharged from the north side of the town when the Native contingent tore down the stockades and the place was entered over the mud wall. The western portion of the town was taken about the same time by the advanced guard. The whole of Fanima was in our hands at 1.10 p.m. [. . .] Mackiah was himself present early in the day, but he efected his escape before the place was surrounded. [. . .] The enemy’s loss could not be accurately ascertained, as the greater part of the town was in lames; 85 bodies, however, were counted, one being that of Fonie Kimbo, the lead warrior of the town. (House of Commons 1889: 66–7) Crawford goes on to detail the number of captives that were recovered, including a large number who had been taken during Mackiah’s raid of Sulymah in 1887. His report then describes the advance on Mackiah’s headquarters at Largo on 3 January. The town – which was actually a cluster of six stockaded KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 121 07/05/2013 13:49 122 pau l ba s u settlements and three open villages – had been abandoned and was taken without resistance. As Captain Mackay notes in his own report, ‘We subsequently ascertained that after the ight at Fanima, Makiah was deserted by most of his people, who felt that they could not hold Largo against us. They were in great dread of the rockets, which they had seen for the irst time’ (House of Commons 1889: 69). Over the next days, all nine of Largo’s settlements were torched. Mackiah led inland and remained at large for a further three months before being handed over to the British. He was eventually deported to the Gold Coast. The colonial archive, from which this account can be reassembled, is a signiicant site of memory in the Sierra Leonean memoryscape. While episodes such as the attacks on Fanima and Largo have not entered national historical consciousness in modern Sierra Leone, the ‘memory’ of these events is lodged in the vast accumulations of telegrams, letters and reports that were once crucial instruments of colonial governance (Stoler 2009). These mnemonic traces, materialised in ink, typescript and occasional photographs, are important because what they reveal goes beyond the textbook narrative of colonial expansion to reveal the complex workings of power relations. The British attack on Mackiah was only possible through collaboration with friendly chiefs such as Momoh Jah and Gbanah Gumbo. Yet, as Jones argues, their alliance with the British against common enemies ‘was not a token of submission to foreign rule, but a positive efort to manipulate outside forces in propping up their own power’ (1983: 159). At the same time, there is no doubt that such alliances, together with the removal of non-compliant chiefs, hastened the progress of British indirect rule throughout Sierra Leone. Within weeks of the attacks on Fanima and Largo, for example, a police barracks had been established at Bandajuma, and, when the Sierra Leone Protectorate was declared in 1896, the town became the district headquarters and thus the seat of colonial administration in the region. But, of course, the colonial archive is not the only site at which these events are recalled. Following the story ‘remembered’ in the colonial archive to the localities of present-day Fanima and Largo – to oral traditions of the attacks, or to the landscapes in which the attacks took place – raises a host of fascinating issues, both concerning consistencies and inconsistencies in the story itself, and relating to the signiicance of these past events in the present. In Largo, many stories are told about Mackiah himself. He was not a native of the place, but came ‘as a stranger’ from Gorahun and was allowed to settle in a new section of the town, which was called Ngukpebu. He had twelve wives, and if he suspected any man of cuckolding him he would cut his throat. If a pregnant woman set eyes upon Mackiah when he wore his warrior’s gown, she would miscarry. He is said to have owned a dog named Banbangleh, which he carried under his arm and for which he cared more than any person. He is even said KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 122 07/05/2013 13:49 me mo rysca p e s a nd m u l t i - s i t e d m e t h o ds 123 to have challenged the authority of the omnipotent Poro society, threatening to cut the GObOi (a masquerade igure representing the powerful spirit of the society) in two. Stories are also told about Mackiah’s response to British attempts to make a treaty with him: Queen Victoria sent a message to Mackiah that if he stopped ighting she would make him king of Sierra Leone. She also lattered him that she would make him her husband. He was deiant. The messenger was hesitant because he knew this would make Mackiah angry. He said ‘go tell them!’ and he gave a statement to the messenger to take back to the white people, which made them angry. The account of the attack on Largo is consistent with Crawford’s account: ‘When the town was attacked, everyone ran away. People left and the white man came in and burnt the town’. The remains of the various settlements that made up the historic town (the six stockaded settlements and three open villages described by Crawford) are still discernible as undulating earthworks and house mounds in the surrounding forest loor. None but the main settlement of Largo itself was repopulated after Crawford’s attack, but their names are still remembered – Njomorwihun, Ngiehun, Bendu Tomboihun, Tigbesse, Njegor, Koribundo, Ngukpebu – and they, too, function as powerful sites of memory in the landscape. The attack on Fanima, which preceded the taking of Largo, also survives in cultural memory through stories passed down from grandparents and greatgrandparents. This is more complicated since it was not in fact Fanima that was attacked, but nearby Yanihun. Fonie Kimbo was indeed a warrior and ally of Mackiah who hailed from Fanima. According to local tradition, with the coming of the whites, Mackiah invited Fonie Kimbo and other local warriors to join forces to repel the invaders. At this time Fonie Kimbo left Fanima to establish a new settlement at the more strategic location of Yanihun. Mackiah and Fonie Kimbo were repeatedly invited to meet with the white men, the ‘colonial masters’, but they refused to comply with their terms. Locally, it is felt that those who sided with the British did so as a way of getting revenge on their enemies. According to the oral tradition, on the day that Crawford’s attack came, the townspeople of Yanihun were rethatching their houses and singing as they did so. When the whites arrived, they inquired what was going on and the Frontier Police and native war-boys of Momoh Jah and Gbanah Gumbo who accompanied them told them, ‘They are laughing at you’. With that, the white men ordered those with the cannons to ire on Yanihun. The bullet hit one of the cotton trees and the top of the tree fell to the ground, causing KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 123 07/05/2013 13:49 124 pau l ba s u the thatch to catch ire. The top of the tree fell on Fonie Kimbo, killing him and the town itself caught ire. When people heard that Fonie Kimbo was dead they all ran away to Mackiah in Largo. The same story of the cotton tree being hit and the crown of the tree falling onto the town is repeated in other local accounts, but this also resonates with a much more widespread tradition, which associates the cotton tree (a magniicent species that towers above the surrounding forest) with chiefs and elders. When a branch of a cotton tree falls, it is reckoned that an elder will die (Basu 2007b). Thus, there is a symbolic association between the destruction of the cotton tree and the destruction of Fonie Kimbo (in one account I have collected, it was said that the ‘head of the cotton tree was severed’ by the cannon ire). It is interesting to note the vividness with which the rocket attack, in particular, is remembered in oral tradition. This is certainly consistent with Captain Mackay’s view that the spectacle of rocket ire had not been encountered before and was so dreaded that Largo was given up without resistance. Although they are described as ‘cannon’ or ‘tracers’ in local accounts, there is no doubt this refers to the rockets. One informant explained that the ‘whole sky was lit up with tracers’. It is common throughout Sierra Leone to ind that the location of a particular settlement has moved around the physical landscape as one site has been abandoned and another established. As Ferme argues, the naming of later settlements after an original settlement may itself be understood as an act of memorialisation (2001: 42). Yanihun, for example, moved to its present location in 1957. This is the fourth location that Yanihun has occupied, and the sites of the three earlier phases of the settlement are still known and still visible in the surrounding bush. Like the deserted settlements of Largo, the remains of Fonie Kimbo’s original Yanihun survive as clusters of overgrown house platforms and concentric earthworks that mark the lines of the mudbrick wall and stockades that once formed its defences. It was not reinhabited after Crawford’s attack. Although such sites are not necessarily the locations of explicit commemorative rituals, they continue to be part of the community’s ‘mental landscape’ and actively presence the past in everyday life. Indeed, in contrast to Fonie Kimbo’s Yanihun, it could be said that the site of Mackiah’s settlement, Ngukpebu, at Largo has been actively abandoned and allowed to be taken over by the forest. Rather than perpetuating the remembrance of a hero, one suspects this is a conscious strategy for hastening cultural forgetting: an attempt to erase the memory of a igure who is felt to have brought shame on the town. It is, say the people of Largo, thanks to the wickedness of Mackiah that the town has been unable to modernise and develop. The town has been cursed by its past. KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 124 07/05/2013 13:49 me mo rysca p e s a nd m u l t i - s i t e d m e t h o ds 125 mat e r i a l c ul t ur e a n d m e m or y – r ememb er in g a nc e s tr a l p o w e r In most societies material culture plays an important role in the transmission of cultural memory. In Sierra Leone, this is particularly true of objects associated with prominent hunters or warriors, founding ancestors, and powerful chiefs, whose ‘relics’ are often endowed with the potency of the ancestors themselves, and are usually subject to strict rules prohibiting access. This is perhaps most powerfully expressed in the customary rituals that accompany the installation of paramount chiefs in Temne chiefdoms in the north of Sierra Leone. These installation rituals are regulated by members of the Ragbenle society and include the transference of a basket or box – the akuma ka məsəm – containing the ‘sacred things’ of chieftaincy, which are passed from one ruler to the next (Dorjahn 1960: 118; Hart 1986: 41–2). Through acquiring the right to possess the chiefdom’s sacred objects, the person of the paramount chief becomes an important site of memory himself – an embodiment of the chiefdom’s cultural memory – and a site of continuity between past, present and future (Dorjahn 1960: 119). Researching such aspects of the Sierra Leonean memoryscape is extremely diicult since access is highly restricted and, indeed, part of the power of these objects and associated knowledges is derived from their being ‘secret’ (Murphy 1980; Bellman 1984; Ferme 2001). There are, however, occasions when it is possible to gain insight into the potency of particular objects as media that connect past with present, and carry the memory – and the power – of ancestral igures into the future. At Madina, on the Mabole River in northern Sierra Leone, for example, I was privileged to be shown the sword of the town’s founder, a warrior named Kemoh Yiraman Touray. The sword, which carries the Mandingo name ‘Jawoo-faa’ (faa = to kill; jawoo = enemy), is in the possession of the current section chief, a direct descendant of Kemoh (Figure 7.2). The holder of the sword is the holder of this chiely oice, and both are hereditary within the founding ancestor’s lineage. The production of the sword during my visit to Madina occasioned the telling of the story of the founding of the settlement, which in turn relates to the wider narrative of Mandingo migration into what is now Sierra Leone in the mid-nineteenth century. The story is a good example of what Elizabeth Tonkin describes as ‘geochronology’, the narration of the past in terms of a sequential movement in space (1992: 34), and it tracks the Mandingo settlers’ journey southwards over a number of generations, establishing settlements as they progressed. Kemoh emerged as a powerful warrior at this time and split away from the main group with a number of followers. He founded the settlement of Madina beside the Mabole River and defended it against the local Loko population by enclosing it within a high mudbrick wall with a ditch KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 125 07/05/2013 13:49 126 pau l ba s u Figure 7.2 Ali Turay, son of Section Chief Alhaji Almamy Bangalia Turay, bearing the sword of his ancestor. The sword carries not only the history of Madina and its founder, but tells of the coming of Islam to the region. Paul Basu. surrounding it. The settlement grew as people from the surrounding area took refuge in the town under Kemoh’s protection. A photograph of Madina’s impressive gatehouse survives in the UK’s National Archives and, as with Largo, it was this archival site of memory that initially prompted my visit. Stories are told about the failed attempts of the Loko warrior, Kobaawa, to expel the Mandingo settlers. According to one tradition, Kemoh’s men were aided by a woman named Mammy Janneh Bah, who was gifted with second sight. The Mandingo warriors would consult her before a ight and, through divination, she would tell them whether or not they would be victorious in battle. If anyone went against her advice, they would be defeated. Mammy Bah also had a piece of iron out of which she could squeeze water. The warriors would wash in this water before going into battle and they would be protected by its magical properties. The Mandingoes were Muslim, and Kemoh’s sword and its many stories therefore also ‘remember’ the spread of Islam into this region. Indeed, the use of the Arabic toponym, madīnah (town), testiies to this, and it is likely that the settlement was named after the holy city of al-Madīnah al-Munawwarah, the home and burial place of the Prophet Muhammad. (Among the families that established Madina with Kemoh were KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 126 07/05/2013 13:49 me mo rysca p e s a nd m u l t i - s i t e d m e t h o ds 127 the Sillahs, who were and continue to be the hereditary ‘Alpha-men’ or Islamic scholars and scribes of the community.) Another fascinating example of such a portable site in the Sierra Leonean memoryscape is the iron and bronze staf held at RoPonka in the coastal chiefdom of Kafu Bullom. Similar igural stafs are known throughout the wider Mande region and, as Patrick McNaughton argues, their signiicance and potency is rooted in the ‘rich interface between Mande beliefs about the world and the powers [black]smiths possess to manipulate it’ (1988: 121). According to McNaughton these stafs had overlapping political and spiritual uses: they were employed, for example, in initiation ceremonies, funeral rites, and as chiely insignia. Supernaturally powerful devices, they might be placed in sacred groves and shrine houses, or stuck in the ground to demarcate the grave of a town’s founding ancestor; they have protective powers and could be used to ward of attack by enemies (ibid.: 123–5). Among the Fula, in coastal Guinea and Guinea Bissau, the stafs are known as sonoje (singular sono) (Bassani 1979). They are said to have been brought to these coastal regions from the inland Mali Empire, and have since served ‘as emblems of political authority and religious objects within . . . non-Muslim cults’ (McNaughton 1988: 128). According to tradition, the sono at RoPonka was given to the local ruler, Bai Kumaka, by the Portuguese some time in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century (Koroma 1939: 25). At this time there was a thriving kola nut trade along the West African coast, and it is suggested that the staf was brought to Kafu Bullom from Farim in present-day Guinea Bissau by Portuguese traders as a sign of friendship and in recognition of Bai Kumaka’s authority (ibid.; McNaughton 1988: 128–9). In this way, the staf became part of the insignia of the rulers of Kafu Bullom. Oral tradition relating to the RoPonka staf was irst collected in the 1930s by a Sierra Leonean from the region named U. H. Koroma. His account was published in 1939 in the journal Sierra Leone Studies, which was edited and published by the colonial government in Freetown (Koroma 1939). It is interesting to note that an of-print of Koroma’s article is now kept with the staf itself and together they form this important site of cultural memory. While the oral tradition relating to the staf survives, the hereditary guardians of the staf now refer to their grandfathers’ earlier oral account, as published in Sierra Leone Studies, for the iner details. This reminds us that oral and written accounts are often complexly interfused (e.g. Goody 1987). Aside from its more ancient history relating to the Mali Empire and interaction with Portuguese traders, the staf tells a fascinating local story regarding the chieftaincy of Kafu Bullom. Bai Kumaka, the chief who was given the staf, ruled for many years, but on his death no successor was immediately crowned. Instead, Kumaka’s cousin, Bai Shera of RoGbane Bana became Regent. Since KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 127 07/05/2013 13:49 128 pau l ba s u Bai Shera was not crowned, he did not have the right to take custodianship of the staf, and it was left in the keeping of Kumaka’s heirs at RoPonka. On the death of Bai Shera, a powerful man named Bai Sherbro Gbere of Yongro assumed the chieftaincy. While Bai Sherbo Gbere was widely recognised as the new ruler, Kumaka’s descendants refused to acknowledge him as such, claiming that their lineage alone had the right to the chieftaincy. And so the story continues down two centuries, with the descendants of Kumaka using the staf, which remains in their possession, to contest the chieftaincy and assert the legitimacy of their own claim to the Kafu Bullom crown. In 1918, for example, Koroma records that a member of the RoPonka house made a strong bid for the chieftaincy and on this occasion the staf was ‘brought to light and exhibited in evidence before the Assessor Chiefs and Political Oicer who presided over the election’ (1939: 27). Alas, the crown returned to Yongro, but to this day, as hereditary keepers of the staf, Bai Kumaka’s descendants insist that the chieftaincy rightfully belongs with them. The site of memory is the site of power. m u lt i - s i t e d a n d m ul t i -d isc ip l in a r y met h ods My intention in outlining these examples is not to provide an exhaustive account of Sierra Leone’s cultural memoryscape, but merely to illustrate something of its multi-sited character. Even in these few cases, one can begin to discern the ‘logics of relationship, translation, and association’ discussed by Marcus (1995: 102). At each site – textual and photographic archival traces, landscapes, objects, oral traditions – one encounters a diferent form of remembering, and, as Young evocatively phrases it, each form ‘generates a diferent meaning in memory’ (1993: viii). This diversity of mnemonic form and meaning requires considerable methodological dexterity on the part of the researcher, not least since the memory studies scholar may approach these ‘sources’ in quite diferent ways to other researchers. By bringing an ‘ethnographic sensibility’ to the colonial archive, for example, Ann Stoler is led to ask ‘how oral and vernacular histories cut across the strictures of archival production’ and how this reigures ‘what makes up the archival terrain’ (Stoler 2009: 33–4). Such sensibilities open the way for new approaches to researching the archival trace, both following the complex circuits of colonial bureaucracies and their paper trails (paying as much attention to unoicial marginalia as oicial inscriptions), but also following the narrative out into ‘the ield’. Similarly, in the ield, there is a clear correspondence between the methods one uses and the understanding one gains. A two-hour oral history recording session produces one kind of knowledge, while the sustained presence of the ethnographer, cautious of relying on explicit narrations of cultural memory, KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 128 07/05/2013 13:49 me mo rysca p e s a nd m u l t i - s i t e d m e t h o ds 129 may produce knowledge of an entirely diferent order (see Argenti 2007, for example). But even in oral history collection there is an art to elicitation based on developing a trusting relationship with participants, as well as thorough prior preparation, so as to know both what to ask and how to inquire. Where images exist, photo-elicitation can be a powerful tool, but must be carefully handled, since, as we know, photographs are not objective representations of reality any more than written accounts (or oral traditions), and the ‘reading’ of images is also culturally-speciic (Niessen 1991; Harper 2002). As I have tried to illustrate in the Sierra Leonean context, it is equally important to engage with material sites of memory, including portable objects and the landscapes in which events occurred. How are such sites regarded? How are their stories told? Are they maintained or protected in some way? Are they visited? Do they form part of explicit commemorative practices? How do they live in the minds and everyday activities of people? As the diversity of academic traditions represented in this book attests, the study of memory is a multi-disciplinary endeavour. Given the wide variety of individual and social forms of memory, the range of media through which remembering – and forgetting – take place, and the numerous explicit and implicit ways in which memory can be active in the present, this multidisciplinary perspective is not only a strength, it is a necessity. In many respects, researchers concerned with memory are called upon to synthesise these diferent academic traditions and their respective methodological practices. This is especially true if the object of study is as expansive as the cultural memoryscape, which embraces a plurality of mnemonic phenomena. Even in the few instances I have outlined in this chapter, a high degree of multi-disciplinary luency and methodological adaptability is required. How much more so if one extends the scope to include those less obvious sites where memory is not explicit or verbalised, but is ‘embedded in habits, social practices, ritual processes, and embodied experiences’ (Shaw 2002: 7). To accomplish this would seem to require an act of disciplinary bricolage, with the researcher borrowing the tools of the historian, the oral historian, the art historian, the ethnographer, the linguist, the archaeologist, or whatever, as the context dictates. On the one hand, such an approach might attract accusations of methodological dilettantism, with researchers working beyond the limits of their core disciplinary training or expertise. On the other hand, however, researchers must be free to innovate their methods in response to the changing objects of their study, and not be forced to restrict their analytical purview by cleaving to methodological orthodoxies (Amit 2000: 17). In a widely-cited contribution to a qualitative research methods handbook, Valerie Janesick cautions against a tendency towards ‘methodolatry’, which she deines as a ‘slavish attachment and devotion to method’ (Janesick 1994: 215). A preoccupation with particular methodological conventions, she argues, KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 129 07/05/2013 13:49 130 pau l ba s u ultimately distances the researcher ‘from understanding the actual experience of participants in the research project’ (ibid.). Instead, Janesick likens the research process to a dance: something that requires skill, practice, careful choreography, and indeed creativity and imagination (see also Emke 1996). Rather than forging new methodological orthodoxies for the ield of memory studies, therefore, I suggest we not only follow the ‘paths, threads, conjunctions [and] juxtapositions’ between the multiple sites of the cultural memoryscape (Marcus 1995: 105), but also that we learn to dance between our multiple disciplines and their various methodologies. s u m mar y: ke y p o i n t s • Pursuing the spatial metaphors that dominate memory studies, the ‘cultural memoryscape’ may be understood as comprising multiple sites of memory connected by a particular associational logic (e.g. national, ethnic, religious, village, etc.). • Memoryscapes include a plurality of diferent forms of mnemonic phenomena, ranging from individual acts of remembrance to transnational contexts. As well as diferent ‘sites of memory’, they may include diferent ‘regimes of memory’ and both explicit and implicit (embodied) forms. Examples explored in the chapter include written and photographic archival traces, oral traditions, landscapes and portable objects. • Due to the pluralistic and dispersed character of the memoryscape, multisited research methods are particularly useful. These involve discerning ‘logics of relationship, translation, and association’ between multiple sites of memory. • Researching cultural memoryscapes is a multi-disciplinary endeavour. Rather than forging new methodological orthodoxies, an argument is made for retaining a pluralistic approach. f u rt he r r e a d i n g On ethnographic methods and the development of multi-sited ethnography see Amit (2000), Atkinson et al. (2001), Coleman and von Hellermann (2011), and Marcus (1995). For an example of the application of multi-sited ethnographic methods in the context of memory/heritage studies see Basu (2007a); this includes an extended methodological discussion. For an introduction to visual research methods and photo-elicitation see Niessen (1991) and Harper (2002); for an introduction to material culture studies see Tilley et al. (2006). Recent ethnographic monographs exploring cultural memory in West African KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 130 07/05/2013 13:49 me mo rysca p e s a nd m u l t i - s i t e d m e t h o ds 131 contexts include Argenti (2007), Ferme (2001), Shaw (2002), Stoller (1995), and Tonkin (1992). For more detailed discussions of particular sites in the Sierra Leonean cultural memoryscape see Basu (2007b, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2013). KEIGHTLEY 9780748645961 PRINT.indd 131 07/05/2013 13:49