The West Side Boys, also known as the West Side Niggaz or the West Side Junglers, was an armed group in Sierra Leone, sometimes described as a splinter faction of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council.
It captured and held peacekeepers from the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) and, in August 2000, captured a group of British soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment and its Sierra Leone Army liaison officer. The group disintegrated shortly after Operation Barras.
The group was influenced to some extent by American rap and gangsta rap music, especially Tupac Shakur, and the "gangsta" culture portrayed therein. Since the title 'West Side Niggaz' would have been an unacceptable phrase to be regularly used on news programmes concerning the group, the title was amended to render it to the innocuous 'West Side Boys'. Prior to its destruction, the group's size had expanded to around 600 but later suffered about 200 defections.
A 2008 article published in the Journal of Modern African Studies offers an alternative view of the West Side Boys as an effective military unit employing military and political techniques to achieve defined goals, as opposed to a criminal gang with no political purpose engendered by the perpetual lawlessness and social breakdown of the country.
References
Bibliography
- Operation Certain Death, Damien Lewis, Arrow Books, 2005,