‘A Game of Pain’: youth marginalisation and the gangs of Freetown

Within two decades, Sierra Leone's ‘cliques’ have transformed from peripheral social clubs to warring Crips, Bloods, and Black street gangs at the heart of criminal and political violence. Nevertheless, they remain severely under-studied, with scholarship on Sierra Leonean youth marginality heavily focused on ex-combatants. Drawing on extended fieldwork with Freetown's cliques as they played the ‘game’ – the daily hustle to survive and resist the ‘system’ – this article offers two main contributions. First, it addresses the knowledge gap by charting the origins, evolution and contemporary organisation of these new urban players. Second, it argues that although this history reveals continuity in perennial forms of youth marginalisation, it also shows that the game itself has changed. Cycles of escalating violence and growth are hardwired into this new game. Exacerbated by a political system that sustains and exploits them, cliques present a far greater challenge to everyday peace than has hitherto been recognised.