When writing about war and the transition to peace it is tempting to relate the basic ‘facts’ of the war – key players, the political and economic circumstances that led to the conflict, the nature of the divisions – as if one size fits all. We might mention that the war targeted certain groups in different ways, and that children, women and men may have played different roles in the conflict. But this still is not enough. The routes to war and peace were shaped by the patrimonial social structures – entrenched in law – that pervade Sierra Leone. To understand the experiences of men, women and children during and after the war, we need a sense of the social structures that shaped their existence.

Mariane Ferme's (2001) ethnographic research in a Mende community helps explain the hierarchical, interdependent and communitarian social structures that exist, with variations, in much of Sierra Leone. Although Krio and Lebanese communities are more individualistic, they still need to operate within this dominant, interdependent system, especially outside the capital.

Ferme (2001) writes that in Mende society, “everyone must be accounted for by someone else –… everyone must be linked in a relationship of patronage or clientship” (p. 106). Unattached people (such as strangers) or those not ruled by traditional, male-dominated power mechanisms (women without husbands) are viewed as “elusive and noncompliant agents” (p. 107) and thus potentially dangerous. These dependency relations are rooted in “the emergent legacy of (domestic) slavery” (p. 82), which colonial officials banned in the protectorate in 1926 and 1927. With the ban, slavery evolved into other forms of dependency as masters married slave women, incorporating them and their relatives into polygamous families. This created a complex network of clientship and patronage that transformed slaves into “‘cousins’ through the politics of marriage” (p. 81). Ferme writes: