The Emergence of Counseling in Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone has endured a turbulent history, including a decadelong civil war and the devastation of Ebola virus disease. Despite the psychological consequences of such events, only limited therapeutic services are available. The authors review mental health services in Sierra Leone and document the emergence of counseling as a profession in the face of challenges. They conclude by highlighting the multiple contributions that professional counselors can make to address critical mental health needs in Sierra Leone.     

From Liverpool to Freetown: West African Witchcraft,Conspiracy and the Occult

In this ethnography I examine the key features of occult discourses among middle-class Sierra Leoneans living in Britain, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Merseyside and Cheshire between 2001-2002. It is evident that the subjects of this study are quick to engage with the conspiracy-theorising besetting Euro-American popular culture in conveying their anxieties about the civil war, poverty and corruption that have ravaged Sierra Leone, coupled to the institutionalised racism and socio-economic problems that beset the black community in Liverpool. This despair has translated into a general trepidation about West African witchcraft that has become a global metaphor for the malcontents of modernity. In recent years these worries have been added to, fuelled by the heavy responsibility individuals experience to provide financial support and moral guidance to those relatives who have been forced to leave Sierra Leone during the years of civil strife. They are secretly mistrusted by the middle-class Sierra Leoneans living in Liverpool, who worry that their less-well-off relatives malign their good intentions through their accusations of witchcraft.     

The politics of humanitarian intervention: a critical analogy of the British response to end the slave trade and the civil war in Sierra Leone

A leading scholar of humanitarian intervention, Brown (2002) Brown, C. 2002. “Humanitarian intervention and international political theory”. In Human rights and military intervention, Edited by: Mosley, A. and Norman, R. 153–69. Aldershot: Ashgale Publishing.  [Google Scholar] refers to British internal politics to satisfy the influential church and other non-conformist libertarian community leaders, and above all ‘undermining Britain's competitors, such as Spain and Portugal, who were still reliant on slave labour to power their economies, as the principal motivation for calls to end the slave trade than any genuine humanitarian concerns of racial equality or global justice’. Drawing on an empirical exploration, this article seeks to draw a parallel between this politics of humanitarian intervention which characterised the abolition movement, albeit rarely recognised in the academic literature, and the British intervention to end the almost 11 year civil war in Sierra Leone. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of this politics of humanitarian intervention in the reconstruction of post-conflict Sierra Leone.     

Leone Ebreo in Tullia d’Aragona’s Dialogo. Between Varchi’s legacy and philosophical autonomy

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the impact of the philosophical structure of Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore on the construction of Tullia d’Aragona’s Dialogo della infinità di amore. Analysing both the explicit references to and the indirect citations of Leone’s Dialoghi, I aim to demonstrate how the reinterpretation of some fundamental topics of this work – such as the re-evaluation of the sensual aspect of human love and the distinction between honest and vulgar love – lies at the heart of Tullia’s dialogue. The article also intends to shed light on the complex role of Benedetto Varchi in the elaboration of these issues by d’Aragona, who for the final revision of her text could have relied – as she did for her poems – on his collaboration.