Indirect rule

Indirect rule was a form of colonial government that used local authorities to administer territory and population. In British-ruled Sierra Leone, paramount chiefs collected taxes, administered justice, and maintained order, while marketing boards controlled the sale of farmers’ produce. These arrangements did more than extend colonial administration: they altered local political authority and helped establish extractive practices that independent governments later maintained.

Governing Through Local Authorities

The British used indirect rule in many African colonies, but its workings depended on the institutions they encountered. In Sierra Leone, colonial administrators built on existing Indigenous authorities rather than creating chiefs as they did among the Igbo in eastern Nigeria, where British officials appointed warrant chiefs. The choice of local intermediaries did not mean that Sierra Leone’s political arrangements remained intact: colonial rule changed the power attached to chiefly office and the relationship between rulers and the people they governed.

Chiefs, Ruling Houses, and Accountability

The British stipulated that paramount chiefs would hold office for life and restricted eligibility to members of recognized ruling houses. A Tribal Authority selected the chief; its members could be lesser village chiefs or people appointed by paramount chiefs, village chiefs, or British officials. The process was elective but not democratic, and its restricted candidate pool tied chiefly succession to lineages and elite families associated with local kings and treaties made with the British in the late nineteenth century.

This arrangement introduced a system of social stratification where the book describes an earlier, more fluid political order in which chiefs had needed popular support. A hereditary aristocracy replaced that more accountable structure: chiefs held office for life and depended more on patrons in Freetown or Britain than on the people they ruled. The British could also replace chiefs they regarded as uncooperative. In Lower Banta, the Margai family rose to chiefly power by siding with the British during the Hut Tax Rebellion against the reigning chief, Nyama; the Margais then held the position until 2010. The family later supplied the first two prime ministers of independent Sierra Leone.

Taxation and Marketing Boards

Indirect rule worked alongside colonial control over agricultural trade. The British directed cocoa and coffee farmers to sell their produce through a marketing board presented as a way to cushion farmers against fluctuations in world prices. When prices were high, the board would pay less than the world price; when prices were low, it would pay more. In practice, the board also needed revenue for its operations, and the gap between what farmers earned and what their crops were worth became a means of taxing them.

After independence, this extractive function persisted and intensified. By the mid-1960s, palm-kernel farmers received 56 percent of the world price, cocoa farmers 48 percent, and coffee farmers 49 percent. By the time Siaka Stevens left office in 1985, those shares were 37, 19, and 27 percent, respectively. During his rule, farmers’ returns had often fallen as low as 10 percent of the world price. The book emphasizes that the extracted income enriched Stevens and his associates and secured political support rather than financing public services such as roads or education.

Colonial Continuity After Independence

The postindependence government did not abolish the colonial system of indirect rule or its marketing boards. Paramount chiefs continued to collect taxes, now in the form of a poll tax rather than a hut tax. In 2005, Sandor’s Tribal Authority elected a new paramount chief, but only candidates from the Fasuluku ruling house, the area’s sole ruling house, could stand. The winner, Sheku Fasuluku, was a great-great-grandson of King Suluku. The surviving rules show how colonial restrictions on chiefly office could remain embedded in local government long after colonial rule ended.

The book places this continuity within a broader pattern: colonial governments created institutions that extracted from farmers and governed through chiefs, and postcolonial rulers took over those same mechanisms, often using them more aggressively. It distinguishes a change in who held power from a transformation in the institutions through which power was exercised. In Sierra Leone, indirect rule left a durable administrative framework for governing the countryside, taxing its population, and limiting accountability to those governed.

Contrast with Tswana Institutions

The account also distinguishes British indirect rule from the political arrangements the Tswana sought to defend. Tswana states had relatively centralized institutions and collective decision-making through the kgotla, where adult men could discuss disputes, levies, public works, and a chief’s decrees. The assembly could overrule the chief, and people could voice grievances directly. Although British indirect rule threatened this autonomy, the Tswana chiefs sought to preserve their institutions and limit British intervention. Their example underscores the book’s central distinction: governing through local leaders could entrench colonial control, while local political institutions that constrained chiefs could sustain participation and resistance to outside authority.