Qualla: Mabilafu

Mabilafu: Introduction

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fabian Käser, CC BY-SA 4.0. Four families own the land at Mabilafu, but for generations that ownership has meant something closer to stewardship than possession. Under customary law, the families who hold the soil are obliged to share it with those who do not, so that anyone in the village can plant, harvest, and feed a household. Land here behaves less like private property and more like a commons. Then, in 2010, a sugarcane company arrived, and the old arrangement began to come apart.

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Image: Fabian Käser | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mabilafu: Where the Road Meets the River

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley, Public domain. Mabilafu sits about 110 kilometers east of Freetown and 30 kilometers southwest of Makeni, on the bank of the Rokel, the longest river in Sierra Leone. A single dead-end dirt road runs down toward the water at roughly a right angle, then splits as it nears the riverbank. The lowe...

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Image: David Stanley | Public domain

Mabilafu: Four Quarters, Four Families

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fabian Käser, CC BY-SA 4.0. The village divides into roughly four quarters, one for each of the landowning families. This is not just geography; it is the architecture of belonging. Customary law, developed locally and woven into the culture, governs who may use the land and on what terms. The owning famili...

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Image: Fabian Käser | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mabilafu: When the Sugarcane Came

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fabian Käser, CC BY-SA 4.0. Mabilafu lies inside the boundaries of the Addax Bioenergy Project, a large-scale land deal that broke ground in 2010 and built an agro-ethanol factory that began operating in 2014 just beyond the village. Land was acquired for the plant, its infrastructure, and the sugarcane pla...

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Image: Fabian Käser | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mabilafu: The Promise and the Reckoning

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fabian Käser, CC BY-SA 4.0. The company offered remedies. A Farmer Development Program promised to modernize agriculture and raise food production, and new wage jobs promised cash to replace what the fields had given. Both faltered. Harvests under the new methods were poor, and the program failed to take ro...

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Image: Fabian Käser | CC BY-SA 4.0