The Oath, the Upper State, and the Kin-State: Ritual, Legitimacy, and Accountability in Sierra Leone

This article examines oath-taking in Sierra Leone as a diagnostic ritual through which an African state's postcolonial legitimacy is revealed and contested. Drawing on multisite qualitative research involving 102 individuals across formal courts and customary settings, it compares the distant, standardised, bureaucratic upper state with the kin-state, where authority is embedded in social proximity, ancestral cosmology, and communal memory. Courtroom oaths remain legally valid but often lose moral force through scripted repetition, linguistic distance, and detachment from credible consequences. Customary oaths generate stronger affective and relational pressure, although they may be manipulated. The analysis develops three concepts: oath ambivalence, the formal state's unease with cosmologically potent rituals; cosmological silencing, its suppression of alternative spiritual logics; and affective dispossession, the erosion of ritual seriousness when stripped of temporal, spatial, and narrative grounding. The article reframes state legitimacy as an everyday ritual practice through which symbolic orders are enacted, contested, and unsettled.