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Mende Political Institutions in Transition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2012

K. L. Little
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Extract

The Mende people occupy an area of something like 10,000 square miles in the central and south-eastern part of the Sierra Leone Protectorate. Comprising nearly 70 chiefdoms, they numbered, at the time of the last official census (1931), some 580,000 persons, including about 10,000 resident in the Colony. Available statistics suggest that their numbers are on the increase, and may be in the neighbour-hood to-day of one-third of the whole population of the Protectorate, which is estimated at some 2 millions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 1947 , pp. 8 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1947

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References

page 8 note 1 It is still rare for ‘towns’ of this kind to comprise many more than 100 houses.

page 8 note 2 During the ‘tribal’ wars, such villages were built sometimes to serve as outposts in the defence of the ‘parent’ town.

page 9 note 1 In pre-Protectorate days, many towns which, with their outlying villages, now form part of a Mende chiefdom, constituted, to all intents and purposes, small or ‘sub’-chiefdoms in their own right. They were independent to a greater or lesser degree of outside authority, and their political organization recapitulated in miniature that of a modern chiefdom. Important examples of this are the present-day section towns of Serabu, Tanineihun, and Walihun of the Bumpe chiefdom. It is significant that many of the so-called ‘tribal’ wars were not fought out between ‘tribes’ or even chiefdoms, but between towns.

page 9 note 2 I have used ndehun, literally ‘in the blood’, somewhat arbitrarily as the most appropriate synonym for the type of extended family, or ‘lineage’, which is the fundamental unit in the political structure of Mende society. It has both cognatic and agnatic aspects, and in the former sense may be thought of as a kindred.

page 9 note 3 Domestic slavery was not officially abolished in Sierra Leone until 1928.

page 9 note 4 The term includes for present purposes ‘big women’ whose position, when based on family connexions and the ownership of land, is analogous to that of their male counterparts. A literal translation of one Mende expression for the term ‘big man’ is ‘one who scatters money’, and this is an apt allusion to the social role of the latter, and to one of the main criteria of status in Mende society.

page 9 note 5 This refers to many village people who, as exslaves or strangers, &c, have not yet acquired an actual ‘title’ to land, though they have a right to apply for the use of it. Their position is somewhat analogous to that of the feudal serf. An informant advises that ‘they look upon their big man as their over-lord and … to keep up his good reputation and to assure him of their loyalty willingly answer the call to work on (his) town farm without the hope of any reward …’.

page 10 note 1 I shall use the term ‘chief’ (mahei) throughout instead of paramount chief, which is the official title of the ruler of a chiefdom as applied to him by the Government. The term mahei is used more often by the Mende themselves.

page 10 note 2 This is the practice in Tikonko chiefdom.

page 10 note 3 For example, Momo Gbotor, a powerful warrior, acted as regent during the minority of Hotagua, the son of the previous chief, who subsequently became Chief of Kakua chiefdom and signed a treaty with the British in the 1880's.

page 10 note 4 He is to be regarded, therefore, as a kind of ‘chief of staff’ rather than in the sense of the Akan Linguist, which his official title suggests and to whose role bis own minor duties approximate. Chiefs nowadays sometimes like to have a person of wealth as their speaker and preferably one who is a stranger to the chiefdom. The latter is less likely to be able to command a rival following in the chiefdom.

page 11 note 1 Sub-chiefs, like speakers, are accorded the title of address mahei (chief).

page 11 note 2 Literally, ‘in whose hands the compound is’, from kuwui, ‘compound’. The kulokuhui is a semipolitical figure about mid-way in the social hierarchy, who represents the members of a number of adjacent and closely related individual families in local ‘palavers’, and collects tax from them.

page 12 note 1 For example, the leaders of the Mende Rising in 1898 called warriors to arms over a wide area by sending round the Poro sign of war–a burned palm-leaf.

page 12 note 2 More exactly the ‘senior Poro’, a small inner group composed of the higher officials and chiefs. Junior members have no voice in the executive.

page 12 note 3 The connexion between the chief and the Poro is still very important, and is illustrated strikingly in certain public ceremonies. For example, one of the few occasions on which the Gbeni, the principal ‘devil’ of the society, ‘comes out’ is at the death or accession of a paramount chief. On the former occasion the Gbeni proceeds to the dead man's grave and bows over it. He has to be ‘bought off’ by a sum of money from the deceased's family.

page 12 note 4 To have had a father or grandfather who was a ‘big warrior’ is still one of the proudest claims a Mende man can make.

page 12 note 5 It is said that the mere appearance of certain warriors of great renown, like Ndawa, was enough to cause the immediate surrender of a town.

page 13 note 1 Except in a negative sense. For example, as early as 1897 the Poro Ordinance forbade the placing of the Poro sign on palm trees, &c, on the grounds that the chiefs were using it to hold up trade.

page 13 note 2 Cf. C. B. Wallis, ‘In the Courts of the Native Chiefs in Mendiland’, J.R.A.S., vol. iv, pp. 379–404.Google Scholar

page 13 note 3 The chiefdom, or as it is termed officially and somewhat inaccurately, ‘Tribal’ Authority, is the assembly of chiefdom officials to which allusion is made in an earlier paragraph. It contains, or is supposed to contain, representatives of all the leading families in the chiefdom.

page 13 note 4 Apparently the Government also regards the ownership of all land in the chiefdom as vested in the Tribal Authority on the grounds that land is ‘communal’. This interpretation of land tenure is not in accordance with the native conception of the matter.

page 14 note 1 The following by-laws, enacted in an Upper Mende chiefdom, illustrate some of the newer stresses and forms of disruption in native life, resulting largely from war-time conditions. ‘Women are noticed to be in the habit of leaving their husbands for months and years in many cases; the husband makes no movements of seeing his wife's return. Except in ill-health:

(a) no woman with a husband will in future be allowed to stay with her parents for over a month;

(b) a man allowing his wife to stay over a month with her parents will be fined 5's. before any complaint …’, &c.

page 15 note 1 The boys' and girls' initiation societies.

page 15 note 2 The filing of teeth appears to be an indigenous custom among the Mendes, but has fallen into desuetude in some districts.

page 15 note 3 Sometimes the royal house concerned put forward a literate member of the family who was recognized by the British as chief.

page 16 note 1 Madam Yoko, who subsequently gained control over the well-known and extensive Kpaa, Mende chiefdom, owed her success very largely to the support which she received from the frontier police.

page 16 note 2 Possibly further confusion arose more latterly out of the opening of Bo School for the training of the sons and nominees of paramount chiefs. A number of chiefs who were apprehensive of the Government's intentions sent boys who had no connexion with the ‘royal’ house, but who subsequently, and perhaps not unnaturally, claimed the honour which had been thrust upon them.

page 16 note 3 Actually, the role of the administrative officer is rather more than supervisory in that he hears the candidates' statements in open court before deciding whether or not their claims shall be allowed to proceed to the Tribal Authority. As a rule he does not accept the choice of the latter unless it is practically unanimous.

page 16 note 4 Family houses or mawei are important social, not political, units, and if their heads claim membership of the Tribal Authority it is only by virtue of their seniority in the larger and inclusive kindred, or ndehun.

page 16 note 5 For present purposes an ndehun, or even a branch of an ndehun, which either continuously or at some time in the past has supplied a ruler of the chiefdom.

page 16 note 6 Candidates pay as much as £50, and more, for the various ‘medicines’, charms, &c, which fetish and mori (Moslem) men supply in this connexion. See Hofstra's, S. description of this feature in Africa, vol. x, 1937, pp. 436–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar , ‘Personality and Differentiation in the Political Life of the Mendi’.

page 17 note 1 A number of minor amalgamations have been effected, but against them must be put the ‘splitting up’ of the large Kpaa Mende chiefdom which conlisted of more than a dozen of the present-day chiefdoms of the Moyamba District.

page 17 note 2 The latest development in this respect is announced in a recent sessional paper of the S.L. Government. Chiefs' conferences are to be recognized officially as district councils. They will consist of two representatives from each of the chiefdoms making up an administrative district of the Protectorate. One representative is normally to be the chief and the other is to be appointed by a full meeting of the Tribal Authority. He need not necessarily be a member of that body. The district council is to function in an advisory capacity to the Government and to a (senior) protectorate assembly.

page 17 note 3 It does not appear that chiefs are encouraged to meet together except at these official conferences, and they are obliged, in any case, to obtain their administrative officer's consent before visiting another chiefdom.

page 18 note 1 Out of some 300 members of Tribal Authorities, comprising 6 Mende chiefdoms, only 14 had attended elementary schools. According to the latest official returns, the average attendance at schools in the Protectorate in 1936, when the N.A. scheme was introduced, was about 7,500. In 1942 it was roughly the same. This represents about 3 per cent, of the estimated total number of children of school-going age. The southern division, in which all the Mende chiefdoms are situated, has many more schools than the northern division, and about 5 per cent, of such children attend schools in the former area.

page 18 note 2 In moving around villages, the writer found little evidence that the new position as expressed, for example, over questions like chiefdom labour, was properly understood.

page 18 note 3 Institutional resistance to change is, not surprisingly, offered mainly by the Poro.

page 18 note 4 The chiefdom estimates are subject, in any case, to the approval of the administrative officer, and in many cases are substantially revised, or even virtually constructed, by him. This point, in the circumstances, robs the idea of most of the educational and psychological importance it is supposed to possess, and creates in the minds of some a feeling that the estimates are merely an attempt at so much ‘window-dressing’ on the part of the Government.

page 18 note 5 Exemplified, in some instances, by the appropriation of money intended for the payment of chiefdom labour on chiefdom swamp farms.

page 18 note 6 The duties of chiefdom clerk consist in keeping court and other chiefdom records, in supervising the assessment and collection of house tax, in collecting court fees and fines, in acting as the chief's secretary and general intermediary between him and the administrative officer, and in a great number of miscellaneous tasks, the significance of which depends on the relative literacy or otherwise of the chief and chiefdom authorities. In more extreme cases, he is virtually the ‘manager’ of the chiefdom, so far as the machinery of the N.A. system is concerned, and, in terms of the amount and responsibility of the work he does, is, at a salary of between £20 and £40 per annum, easily its most poorly paid official.

page 19 note 1 The Poro still seems to exercise considerable influence ‘behind the scenes’, usually in support of the chief. In return, it would appear that he is expected to uphold Poro interests in the face of extraneous and opposing forces, such as Islam and Christianity.

page 19 note 2 The average salary of Mende chiefs is about £240 per annum. Rather less than half the total number of Mende chiefs–a far greater proportion than in any other ‘tribal’ group–have received an elementary education, and a few have also attended secondary schools. Out of 37 chiefs, mainly but not exclusively Mende, 14 were in clerical employment, mainly government, before their election as chiefs; 10 were ‘farmers’; 3 were traders; and 3 more were chiefdom speakers; the remainder followed a wide variety of occupations, such as carpenter, goldsmith, hammock boy, vaccinator, catechist, motor boy, &c.

page 19 note 3 Preaching to a chief and his court on the danger of disobeying the will of Allah, a Moslem ‘Alfa’ exemplified his point as follows: ‘When you disobey a Chief and fall into his grip, you feel you are in the grip of a District Commissioner, and not a District Commissioner but a Divisional Commissioner, and not a Divisional Commissioner but the Governor, and not the Governor but the great King of England …’

page 19 note 4 An informant expressed this point as follows: ‘In the olden days, the Paramount Chief was a recognized Tribal Head of his people … the D.C. being an Adviser. But … since the introduction of the N.A. the power of the Paramount Chief has passed on to the D.C. The majority of the people have been misled into the belief that the Paramount Chief is no longer the Traditional Head, but merely a paid figure-head whose word could not stand against that of the D.C, even though the latter's idea of the Native traditional law is nil ….’

page 20 note 1 One chief put this point as follows: ‘Since it was explained to the people that under the N.A. system the Chief could no longer exact chiefdom labour from them, they can no longer be persuaded to undertake any improvements for themselves. If I try to encourage education in the chiefdom, either the D.C. will not approve the expenditure in the Estimates, or if I ask the people to build a school on their own account, the D.C. will say that I am using forced labour.’

page 20 note 2 It is believed fairly generally among the chiefs and literate people that administrative officers are in the habit of encouraging malcontents in a chiefdom to bring forward complaints, such as charges of extortion, against any chief who is not sufficiently complaisant in his response to official ‘advice’.

page 20 note 3 Many chiefdom estimates contain an allowance for entertainment of important visitors. In largersized chiefdoms it amounts to about £20.

page 20 note 4 Cf. Fenton, J. S., in the ‘Report on his Visit o t Nigeria’ in Sessional Paper, no. 3 of 1935Google Scholar , which describes the basis on which this commutation was estimated and provides an excellent account of the native system of administration in the Protectorate. In regard to the commutation of labour service, it should perhaps be pointed out that services which the chief could obtain at 6d. per day in 1936 now cost him 1s. per day. By the native method of ‘relieving’ want and poverty, I mean the custom whereby a person who is in need presents himself to the chief or his ‘big man’ with a small present and receives, in return, a gift whose value is at least three times as much. It is not necessary to add that in customary exchanges, such as funerals, the contribution of the chief or ‘big man’ is expected to be much larger than that of anyone else.

page 20 note 5 Court fees and fines comprise, on the average, nearly one-third of chiefdom revenue.

page 20 note 6 One chief attributed many of these ‘underground’ actions to the gradual decrease in the salaries of succeeding chiefs since the introduction of the N.A. scheme. In many cases it has been the practice at an ‘election’ to state the salary of the new chief at a lower rate than that of his predecessor, and to ask the candidates if they will agree to accept it, if elected.

page 20 note 7 I certainly do not wish to imply by this that all chiefdom Poros are the subject of extortionate practices, but simply to indicate that so-called native customs are sometimes used, and indeed are the main remaining cloak, for the exercise of illegal practices.

page 21 note 1 For example, a temporarily successful ‘house’ may attempt to ‘break’ and put its rivals out of the running for subsequent purposes by raising old ‘palavers’ and court cases with them.

page 21 note 2 Such selection and training should include subchiefs who, particularly in larger chiefdoms, might be re-allocated a greater measure of the local responsibility which they previously enjoyed. The difficulty about undue ‘centralization’ at the present stage is that so much in Mende everyday life is bound up with the close and local ties of kinship-note the brief analysis above of the role of the ‘big man’.

page 21 note 3 It is hardly necessary to add that this point will be greatly strengthened by the return of the exsoldiers to the Protectorate. A more subtle result of war-time circumstances is that many of the women have become used to fairly regular payments of cash, for example, through allotments as soldiers' wives. This means, as one informant pointed out to the writer, that ‘they are much less willing to stay with a man who cannot give them regular money’. The growing nature and seriousness of this problem is illustrated in by-laws enacted in various chiefdoms (see note 1, page 14).

page 21 note 4 One of the main objects of the recent proposal of district councils is to provide a solution for this difficulty (see note 2, page 17).

page 22 note 1 On an estimate, necessarily very rough indeed, of the ages of members of the 6 Tribal Authorities quoted above, it appeared that about 10 per cent, were under 40 years of age; about 57 per cent, were between the ages of 40 and 60, and about 33 per cent, were over 60 years old.

page 22 note 2 Out of 59 boys leaving Bo School (the only secondary school in the Protectorate) between the years 1939 and 1943, and about whose subsequent employment there is information, 21 entered government service as clerks; 7 became clerks in the service of mercantile firms. 34 boys now at this school were asked by the writer to do essays on their hopes and ambitions for the future. 17 boys wished to become doctors or lawyers; 3 to become teachers, 4 to become either journalists or agricultural instructors, Among other and miscellaneous ambitions expressed, 6 boys wished to ‘serve their country’.

page 22 note 3 The present scale of pay for a second-grade government clerk is from £160 to £200. Incidentally one of the difficulties of ‘running as candidate’ for a chiefdom is the financial outlay which the individual incurs, not only at the actual time of the election, but in ‘nursing his constituency’ in terms of his own family and a great variety of hangers-on, A prospective candidate confessed to the writer that he was trying hard to obtain a job away from his own town, in order to escape the continuous nature of these obligations.

page 22 note 4 Group feeling between Creoles and Mende (as well as other natives of the Protectorate) is acute in many cases. The Creole ‘habit’ which is deplored most greatly is that of expressing ‘superiority’ towards the ‘native’.

page 22 note 5 One very simple reason for this is that the official jobs of the literate class very often necessitate their living in other areas than their own chiefdoms. In any case, as government servants they are automatically debarred from taking any official part in chiefdom affairs.

page 23 note 1 A certain amount of ‘stabilization’ has, in fact, been brought about in some instances by the Government and the ‘ruling houses’ concerned agreeing that the chiefdom should rotate in turn among the latter.

‘Elections’ are a subject for social satire among the literate section. The writer attended a stage performance entitled ‘The Election of a Paramount Chief’ in which the roles of the government commissioner, assessor chiefs, candidates, fetish men, &c., and the by-play of charms, bribes, &c, were enacted with considerable realism by a group of Mende, Creole, and other literate persons.

page 23 note 2 The implications of this comment are social, to Protectorate literate people to be identified closely with Britain. It is exemplified in the lively interest shown in institutions like Empire Day.

page 23 note 3 ‘Education’, in the present context, as to a large extent in Britain also, is regarded as the panacea for all social ills.

page 23 note 4 On the other hand, individual Mende parents with ambitions outside native life complain, not unreasonably, that unless their children are taught English at an early age, they (the children) will stand no chance in competition with children from the colony for jobs in the clerical service and elsewhere.