UCLA

This dissertation tracks the operations of Hassan Jalloh, once a commander in Sierra Leone's devastating civil war, now self-proclaimed "King of West Africa Mystical Power and Culture." Jalloh served in the Civil Defense Forces, a pro-government militia that mobilized the imagery and practices of village hunter traditions in pursuit of local legitimacy and esoteric defense maneuvers including disappearance, metamorphosis, and bullet-proofing. Faced with disarmament and doubtful reintegration at the end of the decade-long war, Jalloh turned to Allah for guidance, then redeployed his troops as the touring Warrior Cultural and Mystical Power Dance Troupe. Through the virtuosic fusion of acts that might variously appear as fearsome masked dancing, military pageantry, bloody self-mutilation, and sleight-of-hand hocus-pocus, Jalloh publicly demonstrates the abilities he acquired in wartime and expounds on themes ranging from Islamic doctrine and cultural reconstruction to nationalism and HIV/AIDS prevention.

Building from more than eighteen months of research employing participant observation, oral histories, archival records, and critical videography, I follow Hassan Jalloh's Warriors and other troupes as they travel throughout the Mende regions of Sierra Leone and across numerous sites at which spectacle is used to manifest, marshal, and mitigate violence. I use Jalloh's program of acts as a thematic link between performances of militias, herbalists, subcultures, and initiatory societies, bringing their shared logics and aesthetics into focus. Each case exemplifies how Sierra Leonean individuals and institutions currently exploit public spectacle to navigate and influence unstable transitions between physical violence of open conflict, memories of violence, and the structural violence of consolidations of political power. Rather than unidirectional transmission from the spectated to the spectator, these performances hinge on a living interface, a relationship summed up in Jalloh's onstage axiom, "I am seeing you seeing me." Spectacles in Sierra Leone are events at which extraordinary visuality conjures crowds for many ends: to judge, to heal, to educate, to manifest invisible forces, and-most importantly in the postwar context-to effect personal and social transformations.