Chapter 5 - Diamonds, Greed and ‘San-San Boys’

Summary

A history of Sierra Leone relevant to the 1990s war might begin with ruling relations and trade among Mende, Temne, Limba, Fula and other ethnic groups in the region well before Portuguese sailor Pedro da Cintra first mapped the area in 1462 (Hirsch, 2001). It probably should discuss the slave trade, which devastated many West African communities and strengthened others as they gained weapons in exchange for the people they captured and traded, first to the Portuguese and later, by the 18th century, to the British (Shaw, 2002). These relations and the ways in which people organized to protect themselves must have influenced the recent war but are outside the scope of this book. I begin instead with British colonial practices of indirect rule that entrenched a rigid, patrimonial system of governance, undermining traditional checks and balances within indigenous governing structures and enabling power abuses by elites.

COLONIALISM, PATRIMONIALISM AND THE ENTRENCHMENT OF CLIENTALIST RULE

In 1787, the British government banned slavery on British soil and founded the port and settlement of Freetown, to which it could ‘repatriate’ freed slaves from its settler colonies. Freetown also provided an administrative and trading base through which resources from the hinterland could be channelled. The ethnically diverse descendants of these repatriated slaves, known as Krios, tended to embrace British culture and valued high levels of education. They formed a vibrant commercial and administrative core of the colony of Freetown throughout the 19th century (Reno, 1995; Hirsch, 2001).

The British colonial government might have taken advantage of the ability and willingness of Krios and other African entrepreneurs to fill commercial and administrative positions in the interior. Instead, they restricted control of these informal markets to allied regional chiefs, fearing that an African entrepreneurial class might threaten the administrative status quo (Reno, 1995). Reno argues that indirect rule through local chiefs set the stage for the Sierra Leone state's later collapse. The colonial state was continuously short of revenues and officials had to find inexpensive and politically viable ways of controlling the interior.