ABSTRACT
Kayima is a small and remote rural town of 2,000 people situated in the far north-east of Sierra Leone in West Africa, some three hours of difficult driving from the nearest metalled road. One of the authors spent a year in Kayima in 1974 and then revisited 40 years later in January 2014. Virtually nothing had changed – the houses, the streets and the people seemed just the same. Except for some burnt-out houses on the main street – a legacy of the civil war – a new community bank and a cell phone mast, everything else seemed to be frozen in time. Houses built of mud bricks, no electricity, and water drawn from a few outside standpipes were just as they were in 1974. In the case of Kayima at least, it seemed that not much development had happened in four decades (Binns and Maconachie, 2005; Maconachie and Binns, 2007; Bateman et al., 2017).
