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

I

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."¹ His was a brutal fate, not unlike those which befell scores of his fellow Sierra Leoneans in the spring of 1898.² Others were stripped of their European-style 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.³ 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.⁴ 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.⁵ In the south, however, Sierra Leoneans and missionaries, both men and women, joined British troops and officials on the casualty rolls.

Mende had risen without warning on 27 April and struck across a wide area, moving through the forest that linked places as distant as the United Brethren in Christ mission at Rotifunk, near the Colony, and Panguma, far to the interior, nearer to the highlands and the Liberian border. The rising's targets and breadth evinced efforts to remove any and all "English" elements from the region, but the British hit back hard, and by the following fall, they had subdued, by force of arms, the entire territory of the future state of Sierra Leone.⁶ Colonial administrators then turned their attention to making the territory functional, yet for a moment the peoples of the Sierra Leone hinterland had thrown a wrench into the imperial machine.

II

This brief moment of early colonial violence opens a narrow window on the transition between Africa's precolonial and colonial eras. During the few months of their rising, Mende fought to preserve a political, economic and social system that European power was effectively challenging for the first time. And although we might try to interrupt the easy narrative between independence and conquest, we cannot deny that Mende fighters lost that battle. Moreover, as they settled into a relatively peaceful existence in an inconsequential outpost of the empire, history gradually took others battles from them. The spectacle and surprise of the rising conspired to put Mende actions on the front page during the months that followed 27 April 1898. Once there, interested parties arguing over Britain's appropriate role in West Africa seized the story and twisted it to fit their competing narratives. To some, it was proof beyond doubt that the government had overstepped its bounds, that colonial taxation represented an imposition greater than, in the words of one MP, "the flesh and blood of even the negro could endure."⁷

Others disagreed, blaming not the excesses of European government, but instead the continued barbarism of native societies—and especially their attachment to slavery—for the conflict. Within months, reports and eyewitness accounts that purported to explain the Mende and their rising instead wove tales thoroughly involved in European debates, but only tangentially focused on African history. Generations later historians returned to these sources in hope of subverting the triumphant colonial story, but often failed to interrogate the interests and biases hidden therein. This failure led to twentieth-century histories that...