Experiencia social – experiencia perceptual – event place [72]

A turbulent late 19th _{and early 20}th _{century in the Kono District saw local warriors, also}

referred to as warlords in Peyima during my fieldwork, who fought over trade routes,

thesis, however, the central role of paramount and lesser chiefs is not so much that they are an instrument of the state, but that they are constitutive of the political entity of Sierra Leone, and therefore inseparable from ‘the state’.

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According to Mamdani (1996), “conservative regimes” – a category that includes Sierra Leone – preserved the rule of the chief and customary authority over ethnically-delineated realms. In these cases, the authoritarian nature of state power persisted because rule continued to be based on the customary and despotic power of the chief. Mamdani refers to the resulting post-independence constellation as “decentralized despotism.”

control of land and the accumulation of dependent populations of clients and slaves.69 The power of pre-colonial authorities in rural Sierra Leone was predicated on a mix of biological legitimacy, patrimonial largesse and military strength. In turn, popular allegiance was tempered by tensions between ruling and non-ruling houses of powerful lineages, between free men and slaves and between the potential advantages of ‘going it alone’ and forming alliances with rival strongmen (Abraham 1978; Kup 1962).70

The epitome of a powerful Kono man was a successful warrior, a man capable of controlling people and resources and of clearing space and establishing new settlements. Such men achieved their positions of power and leadership by manipulating patron-client relationships, often along kinship lines, in which clients exchanged allegiance for resources and privileges (Hardin 1993:45). These warrior chiefs became integral to the colonial policy of indirect rule and are thus vital in understanding the foundation from which contemporary hybridity of paramount and lesser chiefs has emerged.

During the 19th _{century, warrior chiefs were furnished with the opportunity to re-invent}

themselves as a chiefly land-owning class and to maintain hegemony over the descendants of their former slaves and subordinates through tributary demands, agricultural corveés, polygyny and other ‘customary’ claims upon their labor and resources. In short, the type of authority that in the early 1990s made them a target of the RUF, lies at the heart of how state formation evolved in Sierra Leone. The British, like other empires, relied heavily, indeed primarily, on these chiefly forces that were neither ‘national’ nor ‘public’ but nonetheless central to the wielding of force and the maintenance of imperial authority (see Abrahamsen and Williams 2011:11). As such, the Freetown-based administration pursued

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The significance of the warrior has survived to this day, and was explained to me during my fieldwork in the village of Peyima as hierarchically above and separate from the chiefs. He is tied to the strength of ‘black magic’, which during the conflict in the 1990s was used as a defense against bullets. One informant in Peyima explained: “The Kamajors, how they got the power from the descendants of the warriors before, they left some medicine, some black magic that stayed for quite a long time and they used it on people to wash them. We have some laws that guide you. You should follow a female. You should not rape. You should not eat some types of food. If you do that, you’ve spoilt the medicine, the black magic. But if you keep to the rules, you will be protected from gun, knife, whatever instrument. You’ll be protected from that” (Taylor Kondeh, interview, February 2009).

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Relatively little is known about the early history of Sierra Leone. According to Opala (1996) its early history can best be understood in terms of waves of in-migration. Before the Portuguese ‘discovered’ Sierra Leone in 1462, the indigenous people on the coast of Sierra Leone already had important trade links with the inland people, and through them with the peoples of early empires of the Western Sudan, Ghana and Mali (Buah 1986).

stability in order to minimize the risk of disorder that could bring unpleasant enquiries from the Colonial Office back in London.

Minimal efforts were made to establish bureaucratic practices outside Freetown and the Western Area. The colonists did not attempt to build a democratic political culture or a central political entity through the expropriation of alternative deliberative assemblies.71 It was colonialism-on-the-cheap and in this regard, Sierra Leone was not an exception to British practices elsewhere in Africa. Between 1896 and 1921, Sierra Leone’s population of 1.2 million people was governed by only five District Commissioners and one circuit court (Kilson 1966:25).72 Throughout the 19th century, paramount chiefs in rural Sierra Leone were managed by colonial officers; British administration was primarily confined to Freetown and its environs, known as the Colony, which governed rural Sierra Leone, known as the Protectorate (Sesay 1995:166; Hirsch 2001:23).73

The development of indirect rule by the colonists was an attempt to identify and fixate interlocutors between colonial administrators and the population in the hinterland, in part to facilitate tax collection (Fanthorpe 1998:116; van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal 1996:42). The process led to the emergence of semi-autonomous administrative units, chieftaincies, which became and have remained the historic focus of the struggle for political control over Sierra Leone’s countryside (Tangri 1978; Allen 1968; see van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal 1996:42).

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Since, as Reno notes (1995:30), “the colony’s reputation as the “Whiteman’s Grave” did not enhance its attraction to able colonial officers,” Sierra Leone became a training ground for young civil servants. The risk of dying, and being “the dumping-ground for freed slaves,” the “Land of Freedom” (Hayward and Dumbuya 1985:63), were the two best known characteristics of Sierra Leone in the early 20th century (Anwyl 1916:36; Hirsch 2001:23).

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According to Kilson (1966:24), in the 1920s, for example, the average British colony in Africa used one administrator to every three used in a French colony. In 1926, Nigeria had one British administrator for every 100,000 persons in the Northern Province and one for every 70,000 in the Southern Province.

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In August 1895 an Order-in-Council was issued in Britain, authorizing the Colony to make laws for the territory around it, extending out to the agreed-upon boundary, which corresponds closely to that of present- day Sierra Leone. On 3 August 1896, a Proclamation was issued in the Colony declaring that territory to be a British ‘Protectorate’. The Colony remained a distinct political entity and the Protectorate was governed from it. Most of the Chiefs whose territories the Protectorate subsumed did not enter into it voluntarily. Many had signed treaties of friendship with Britain, but these were expressed as between sovereign powers contracting with each other, i.e., chiefs were not subordinate to colonialists. Only a handful of Chiefs had signed treaties of cession and in remote areas no treaties had been obtained at all. Strictly speaking, a protectorate does not exist unless the people in it have agreed be protected. The Sierra Leone Protectorate was more in the nature of a unilateral acquisition of territory by Britain (Fyfe 1962:541).

6.2.1 The chiefdom and the consolidation of hybridity

Even with their light administrative presence in Sierra Leone’s hinterland, the British were instrumental in making the chieftaincy a lifetime and inheritable position. They assisted in suppressing local rivals to incumbent chiefs, reduced the option of seceding from a chiefdom and prohibited withholding payments or compulsory labor from a chief. While Anwyl (1916:37) noted in the early 20th century that “the office of the paramount chief seems to be of recent origin,” their emergence is not explained by reference to colonial bureaucratic practices alone. They are also considered the product of “the wealthy status” of the person who became the chief, “a man who was rich enough to stop the contentions of opponents by gifts” (ibid.).

There is little doubt, however, that chiefs consolidated their authority with British aid and through colonial bureaucratic means. However, they were not simply incorporated as an extension of colonial regimes, as is suggested by some authors, including Mamdani (1996) and Mbembe (2001). First, the metamorphosis of warriors into chiefs strengthened the role of chiefs by expanding the register of sources of authority that could be drawn upon. Indeed, as Keen (2005:10) notes of Sierra Leone in the 1930s, “Development programs were a threat to chiefs if they offered new choices and new sources of loans and patronage.” Chiefs made considerable efforts to capture such programs, and largely “undermined the capacity of Native Administrations to undertake modern social services for the local populace” (Kilson 1966:26). Establishment and recognition of the institution of the chief occurred in a manner that denied colonial rulers direct control over them; in turn, colonial rulers were never willing to pursue alternatives to the authority of chiefs, for instance by expanding the colonial administration.

The hybridity of paramount and lesser chiefs thus stems from the assembling of different sources of authority. On the one hand, as Trotha (1995) argues, diversity that marked political orders across Africa was transformed and subsumed into a unifying administrative structure set up by the colonial rulers as part of state formation in the long-term. On the other hand, chiefs also drew authority first, from their autochthon status, and second, from their role as intermediaries against alien rulers, including colonial and post-colonial

imposition.74 These different forms of authority assembled different logics, sets of knowledges, practices and forms of power to form hybrid orders that were embedded into the foundation of the political entity of Sierra Leone.

The institutions of paramount and lesser chiefs fundamentally shaped how colonial administrators could exercise and extend British authority. The administrative and financial advantages that indirect rule afforded the colonial administration were offset, however, by the rather large claims that chiefs were permitted to make upon local resources. These claims were instituted at the foundation of the Sierra Leone Protectorate and were carried forward under the 1937 Native Administration Scheme established in the 1930s in the colony’s first concerted attempt at local government reform (Fanthorpe 2001:380). The main objective of the Scheme was to devolve the considerable economic and juridical powers formerly invested in paramount chiefs to a local assembly called the Tribal Authority (later called Chiefdom Council) directly represented and funded by local taxpayers. Yet, while the chiefs strongly criticized the scheme when it was introduced, little was done in practice to prevent paramount and lesser chiefs from continuing to collect payments for political and juridical services and appropriating tax revenue for private use. When separation of the Protectorate from the Colony was announced in 1898, British colonial authorities had granted chiefs a variety of financial incentives to participate in the administration of their subjects, including permission to accrue personal fees and fines from Native Courts. The approach of the Native Administration Scheme thus became an inherently contradictory one of seeking to fit administration through chiefs to new state- sanctioned tasks, but without causing any significant diminution of chiefly authority (Kilson 1966:26-27). This approach is indicative of the entire colonial and post-colonial era, in which successive governments have continued to recognize the authority and central role of chiefdoms.75 Indeed, attempts to closely supervise the administration of chieftaincy

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This double role of chiefs is suggested by many, including Reno (1995:38), who notes that “chiefs became agents of colonial rule while exercising a parallel authority.”

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To date, while all adult citizens are entitled to vote in parliamentary elections, many rural people remain unknown to the state except as chiefdom taxpayers and their dependants. Accordingly, government officials must rely upon the chiefdom Councils to supply them with the information necessary to compile the electoral register. Parliamentary candidates are obliged to ally with local political factions in order to win votes.

waned in the late 1940s, which in turn contributed to and solidified their position of power.76