TY  - BOOK
AU  - Rashid,Ishamail
TI  - Subaltern reactions: Lumpen,students, and the left
SN  - 08503907
AV  - HC501 AFR 
PY  - 1997///
CY  - Dakar
PB  - CODESRIA
KW  - Protest
KW  - Students
KW  - Politics and government
KW  - Sierra Leone
KW  - Politics
KW  - Radicalism
KW  - Social groups
KW  - Political crisis
KW  - Political ideologies
N2  - As the State in Sierra Leone repressed dissent in the mid-1970s, students and 'lumpen youths' took the leading role in challenging its legitimacy. This article focuses on the political activities of Fourah Bay College students and Freetown's 'lumpen youth' between 1977 and 1992. Their actions provoked reform and eventually a military coup, which was dubbed a 'revolution', in 1991-1992. The weakening of the APC (All Peoples Congress) regime by the persistent economic crisis and the ongoing corruption within the administration created the opportunity for a section of the student and lumpen youth to become a 'ruling group'. On 29 April 1992, a group of young unpaid soldiers toppled the Momoh regime and instituted the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC), a regime of largely twenty-year-olds under the leadership of Captain Valentine Strasser. But the alliance between the NPRC, radical students and other youths lasted only briefly. The NPRC continued fighting the RUF (Revolutionary United Front), which had its roots in the same militant youth culture, and eventually became mired in the corruption that it avowed to curtail. If the empowerment of the NPRC and the RUF failed to bear positive fruits, it was because their political culture had little time to develop beyond its anti-establishment content
UR  - https://www.jstor.org/stable/43658003
ER  -