Rally Day

March 5, 2018, was the final rally day for the Sierra Leone People's Party prior to that country's national elections. The SLPP held its last day of public demonstrations in Bo, the country's second largest city and primary urban center in the Mende-dominant southeast. As was true of other political parties in other cities and other elections in Sierra Leone's turbulent past, violence played a key role in structuring rally day events and participants’ experiences of them. And yet this violence has not always been the same. In 2018 the beating of a young man by a rally crowd was in some ways unexceptional, both in Sierra Leonean politics and in the postcolonial response to urban crime. And yet it marked a subtle shift in both Sierra Leonean electoral politics and in the way such vigilante justice in African cities is interpreted. Contrasting the ethnographic elements of this single day with other representations of crowd violence in West Africa, the article explores an urban landscape that complicates the distinction between political and nonpolitical violence and between the presence and absence of the postcolonial state.