Sierra Leone People's Party

The Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP) was the principal party of Sierra Leone’s south and east at independence. Led first by Sir Milton Margai and then by his brother Sir Albert Margai, it narrowly lost the closely contested 1967 election to Siaka Stevens’s All People’s Congress Party (APC). The SLPP’s electoral strength in Mendeland and its connection to the region’s export economy made it a political opponent whose fortunes were bound to the railway Stevens chose to destroy.

Independence and Electoral Base

When Sierra Leone became independent in 1961, the British transferred power to Sir Milton Margai and the SLPP. The party’s support came primarily from the south, particularly Mendeland, and the east. Sir Milton remained prime minister until his brother Sir Albert succeeded him in 1964.

The SLPP narrowly lost the hotly contested 1967 election to the APC, led by Siaka Stevens, a Limba from the north. The APC’s support was concentrated among northern ethnic groups, including the Limba, Temne, and Loko. The result set a regional political contrast: Mendeland had voted heavily for Albert Margai, while Stevens’s governing base lay elsewhere.

The Railway and the Struggle for Power

The railway to the south had begun as an instrument of British rule. After the 1898 rebellion, the British altered its route to run south through Rotifunk and onward to Bo, giving them quicker access to Mendeland and other potentially disruptive parts of the hinterland. By 1967, however, the railway had become an economic artery, carrying most of the country’s coffee, cocoa, and diamond exports. Mende farmers grew the coffee and cocoa, and the railway served as Mendeland’s connection to wider markets.

Stevens treated that economic role as a political liability. His reasoning, as the account presents it, was that what benefited the Mende benefited the SLPP and therefore worked against him. He pulled up the line to Mendeland and sold the track and rolling stock, making the destruction harder to reverse. The decision damaged some of Sierra Leone’s most vibrant economic sectors. The stations at Hastings and Waterloo remained visible as dilapidated reminders of a railway that no longer ran to Bo.

Repression and Political Aftermath

Stevens’s conflict with the SLPP extended beyond the railway. He remained in power in 1985 not through popular reelection but through a dictatorship established after the 1967 contest, in which political opponents—particularly SLPP members—were killed or harassed. He made himself president in 1971, and from 1978 Sierra Leone had only one legal political party, Stevens’s APC.

The SLPP thus faced both the destruction of an economic connection central to its southern base and the suppression of its political organization. The book presents Stevens’s choices as a case in which a ruler sacrificed growth to weaken potential challengers: consolidating his power took precedence over promoting the exports of Mendeland. In this account, the party’s treatment also reveals a continuity between colonial extraction and post-independence rule, even as the railway’s purpose shifted from British control to moving the country’s exports.