Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-jbqgn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-05T12:29:34.306Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Removing the Blinders and Adjusting the View: A Case Study from Early Colonial Sierra Leone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Daniel R. Magaziner
Daniel R. Magaziner*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Mende raiders caught Mr. Goodman, “an educated young Sierra Leonean clerk,” at Mocolong, where he “was first tortured by having his tongue cut out, and then being decapitated.” His was a brutal fate, not unlike those which befell scores of his fellow Sierra Leoneans in the spring of 1898. Others were stripped of their Europeanstyle clothes and systematically dismembered, leaving only mutilated bodies strewn across forest paths or cast into rivers. Stories of harrowing escapes and near-death encounters circulated widely. Missionary stations burned and trading factories lost their stocks to plunder. Desperate cries were heard in Freetown. Send help. Send gun-boats. Send the West India Regiment. Almost two years after the British had legally extended their control beyond the colony of Sierra Leone, Mende locals demonstrated that colonial law had yet to win popular assent.

In 1898 Great Britain fought a war of conquest in the West African interior. To the northeast of the Colony, armed divisions pursued the Temne chief Bai Bureh's guerrilla fighters through the hot summer months, while in the south the forest ran with Mende “war-boys,” small bands of fighters who emerged onto mission stations and trading factories, attacked, and then vanished. Mr. Goodman had had the misfortune to pursue his living among the latter. In the north, Bai Bureh fought a more easily definable ‘war,’ a struggle which pitted his supporters against imperial troops and other easily identified representatives of the colonial government. No reports of brutalities done to civilians ensued. In the south, however, Sierra Leoneans and missionaries, both men and women, joined British troops and officials on the casualty rolls.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 34 , 2007 , pp. 169 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Wallis, C. Braithwaite, The Advance of Our West African Empire (London, 1903), 137Google Scholar.

2 In the context of the 1898 rising the terms “Sierra Leonean” or “Creole” refer to residents of the Colony of Sierra Leone, which was composed of the Sierra Leone peninsula and various coastal enclaves. The current-day national boundaries of Sierra Leone the nation combine Sierra Leone the colony and what, after 1894, was known as the “Protectorate.” Using late-nineteenth-century definitions, Sierra Leone means Colony, Protectorate means everything else, and wherever Sierra Leone the nation is used the meaning will be made apparent. Sierra Leoneans or Creoles are understood to be the descendants of repatriated slaves brought to the Colony by Great Britain beginning in the late eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century many of these settled throughout the future Protectorate as traders and missionaries.

3 See Fyfe, Christopher, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford, 1962), 570–90Google Scholar, for his account of the rising and the response from London and Freetown.

4 A word of explanation might help clarify what I mean when writing “Mende.” Alhough scholars elsewhere in Africa have demonstrated the historical construction—and therefore mutable nature—of ethnic and other identities, no one has done the same with Mende identity. So for my purposes “Mende” are defined as people who shared five characteristics: people who spoke languages commonly glossed as Mende; people inhabiting the forested lowlands of south-eastern Sierra Leone—the state, not the colony; people who practiced mixed forest agriculture in that region; people who shared certain social, political, and cultural structures; those people referred to by the historical record in 1898 as “Mende.” I do not suggest that these people knew themselves or identified themselves as “Mende;” only that that is how scholars have identified them. The same holds true with “Temne,” which, like “Mende,” certainly glosses over differences among the Protectorate's peoples.

5 In the words of the Parliamentary report on the wars: in the north “there were missionary and trading stations absolutely at their mercy; but there were no plundering raids and not a trader or missionary was killed.” Report by Her Majesty's Commissioner and Correspondence on the subject of the Insurrection in the Sierra Leone Protectorate 1898. British Sessional Papers, House of Commons. PP 1899 LX, Vol. I, 39 (hereafter PP I) For the story of the “Bai Bureh War,” as the war in the north was also called, see Denzer, LaRay, “Bai Bureh” in Crowder, Michael, West African Resistance: The Military Response to Colonial Occupation (New York, 1971)Google Scholar, and Wylie, Kenneth, The Political Kingdoms of the Temne (New York, 1977)Google Scholar.

6 English, in this context, meant not only imperial forces, but especially English-speaking Sierra Leoneans. Hence, the quotation marks qualifying “English.”

7 Times, 30 April 1898, 7

8 Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone.

9 Abraham, Arthur, Mende Government and Politics Under Colonial Rule (Freetown, 1978)Google Scholar and Grace, John, Domestic Slavery in West Africa (New York, 1975)Google Scholar.

10 Reeck, Darrell, “A Socio-Historical Analysis of Modernization and Related Mission Influences in two Chiefdoms in West Africa, 1875-1940” (PhD., Boston University), 1970Google Scholar; Caulker, Patrick, “The Autochthonous People, British Colonial Policies and the Creoles in Sierra Leone” (Ph.D. Temple, 1975)Google Scholar; Davidson, John, “Trade and Politics in the Sherbro Hinterland” (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1969)Google Scholar; Lipschutz, Mark, “Northest Sierra Leone after 1884” (PhD. UCLA, 1974)Google Scholar.

11 Feierman, Steven, “Colonizers, Scholars and the Creation of Invisible Histories” in Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berkeley, 1999), 186Google Scholar.

12 Times, 8 August 1899, 9.

13 Ibid.

14 Times, 30 April 1898, 7.

15 Fyfe, , History of Sierra Leone, 589Google Scholar.

16 British Sessional Papers, House of Commons, Parliamentary Paper 1899 LX, Vol. I and II (hereafter PP I and PP II).

17 Abraham, , Mende Govcernment, 117Google Scholar.

18 Burroughs, Peter, “Imperial Institutions and the Government of Empire” in Porter, Andrew, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, (Oxford, 1999), Vol. 3, 190–91Google Scholar.

19 Abraham, , Mende Government, 117Google Scholar.

20 PP I, 10 See as well Caulker, , “Autochthonous People,” 83–85Google Scholar.

21 Abraham, , Mende Government, 116Google Scholar. For more on the trade wars and the decision to establish the Protectorate, see Caulker, , “Autochthonous People,” 100Google Scholar.

22 Newbury, Colin, “Great Britain and the Partition of Africa” in Porter, Oxford History, Vol. 3, 641Google Scholar.

23 E.H.H. Green, “The Political Economy of Empire, 1860-1914” in ibid., 350; see also Kubicek, Robert, The Administration of Imperialism (Durham, NC, 1969) esp. chapter 1Google Scholar, “The Colonial Secretary: Political Style and Imperial Ideals.”

24 Porter, Andrew, “Introduction: Britain and the Empire in the 19th century,” in Oxford History, 26Google Scholar.

25 Reeck, , “Socio-Historical Analysis,” 192Google Scholar, for the railroad. On metropolitan and local development plans, especially regarding rail, see Fyfe, , History ofSierra Leone, 527–30Google Scholar.

26 Wallis, , Advance, 44Google Scholar.

27 Fyfe, , History of Sierra Leone, 523Google Scholar.

28 Phillips, Anne, The Enigma of Colonialism: British Policy in West Africa (London, 1989), 66Google Scholar.

29 Times, 6 May 1898, 5.

30 Times, 6 May 1898, 6.

31 Ibid.

32 Times, 9 May 1898, 12.

33 Times, 10 May, 1898, 8.

34 Cooper, Fredericket al.Beyond Slavery (Chapel Hill, 2000)Google Scholar.

35 Times, 27 May, 1898, 13.

36 Times, 12 May, 1898, 7.

37 Edward Wingfield to Chalmers, 20 June 1898; Fyfe, , History of Sierra Leone, 589Google Scholar; Times, 15 June, 1898, 8.

38 Times, 19 July, 1898, 5.

39 Times, 27 June 1898, 4.

40 Times, 23 November 1898, 5.

41 Times, 25 October 1898, 13.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid., Unfortunately he could not prove the charge, as they were killed by the very people he accused them of inciting.

44 Ibid.

45 Times, 5 November 1898, 5.

46 Ibid.

47 Times, 18 November 1898, p. 6

48 Kingsley, Mary, Travels in West Africa (New York, 1965[1891]), xviiiGoogle Scholar.

49 Kingsley, Mary, West African Studies (London, 1964[1899]), 331–32Google Scholar.

50 Kingsley, , Travels, 20, 611Google Scholar.

51 Kingsley, , West African Studies, 329Google Scholar. Beyond a site of colonial debate, Sierra Leone in the 1890s was also the site of a great deal of colonial fantasizing. The historical record resounds with white fascination and excitement at the physical specimens they encountered.

52 Grace, , Domestic Slavery, 137Google Scholar.

53 Cited in ibid.

54 Ibid., 137-38.

55 Fyfe, , History of Sierra Leone, 589Google Scholar.

56 PP I, 17.

57 Grace, , Domestic Slavery, 137Google Scholar.

58 PP I, 17.

59 Ibid., 66.

60 Ibid., 49.

61 Ibid., 49.

62 Ibid., 58.

63 Ibid., 51.

64 Ibid., 73.

65 Ibid., 87.

66 Grace, , Domestic Slavery, 142Google Scholar.

67 Ibid., 144-47.

68 PP I, 92.

69 Ibid., 90.

70 Ibid., 104.

71 Ibid., 105.

72 Ibid., 94.

73 Ibid., 102.

74 Ibid.,93.

75 Ibid., 133.

76 Recall Bishop Ingham's support of the Governor, cited above.

77 Vivian, William, Mendliland Memories (London, 1926), 126–27Google Scholar.

78 PP I, 128.

79 Ibid., 104.

80 Ibid., 122.

81 Ibid., 115.

82 Ibid., 133.

83 Kingsley, , West African Studies, 331–32Google Scholar.

84 Grace, , Domestic Slavery, 147Google Scholar.

85 Chamberlain, , quoted in Times, 8 08 1899, 9Google Scholar.

86 PP I, 162.

87 Ibid.

88 Ibid., 170.

89 Ibid.

90 Ibid.

91 Robinson, Ronald, “European Imperialism and Indigenous Reactions in British West Africa, 1880-1914,” in Wesseling, H. L., ed., Expansion and Reaction (Leiden, 1978), esp. 156–63Google Scholar.

92 Grace, , Domestic Slavery, 149Google Scholar.

93 Times, 8 August 1899, 9.

94 Grace, , Domestic Slavery, 149Google Scholar.

95 Wallis, , Advance, 2Google Scholar.

96 Wallis, , Advance, 5Google Scholar.

97 Marriott, H. P. Fitzgerald, “The Secret Societies of West Africa.” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 29(1899), 21–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 Ibid., 21; Wallis, C. Braithwaite, “The Poro of the Mendi,” Journal of the Royal African Society 4(1905), 183Google Scholar.

99 Matthews, John, A Voyage to the River Sierra Leone (London, 1966[1788]), 82Google Scholar.

100 See Magaziner, Daniel, One Word: Listening to Violence in Early Colonial Sierra Leone (Madison, 2006)Google Scholar.

101 E.g., Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore, 1993), 27, 45–46, 49Google Scholar.