A
fairly innocuous article from Imodale
Caulker-Burnett (https://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/spip.php?article6930
) on face value centered on the Annie Walsh issue (a proposal to convert the
present location of Annie Walsh School, the oldest girls secondary school
south of the Sahara into a market) but designed primarily to build bridges
between the Western Area and the Provinces, draws a savage rebuttal from
Anthony Kamara ( https://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/spip.php?article6933
) writing from Canada. Both writers use the Annie Walsh controversy only as
an entreé into the wider issues of Sierra Leone.
But where Caulker-Burnett (who freely reveals she is of mixed, Krio/Provincial parentage) attempts to be reconciliatory,
Kamara is fiercely partisan, in favour
of the the Provincial side. In doing so he reveals
one of the major fault lines running through Sierra Leone.
Kamara’s rejoinder could perhaps only have come from the diaspora. Within Sierra Leone, the issues he
raises are more or less taboo, whispered in conversations among clan members,
but almost never brought out in public. It is as though the society
generally, including media practitioners, commentators and politicians have
decided that these are matters too delicate to be brought out into the open,
too dangerous to discuss even 200 years after their origins.
Freetown
Stolen?
To
get to the nub of it, what Kamara is saying is that
Freetown
really belongs to the Temnes and was stolen from
them 200 years ago. A significant number (no one knows quite what number) of
Sierra Leoneans of Northern extraction believe this
and resent the erstwhile (some would say continuing) dominance of Krios in Freetown.
Krios on the other hand firmly believe that in a
just world, Freetownshould belong to them, purchased
for their freed-slave ancestors and their progeny all those years ago.
However, Krios long ago acquiesced in the idea that
Freetown
belongs to whoever can buy it, which means a free-market, capitalist,
free-hold system of land tenure. This effectively means that Freetown belongs to no
one and everyone. Land purchase, development and rental has
been one of the main vehicles of economic development in Freetown since the earliest days of the
Colony. Fyfe, the doyen of Sierra Leonean historians, (who Kamara rubbishes in his piece) gives many instances of
early settlers acquiring land, using their labour
and craftsmanship to build good houses on it, and then renting these houses
to wealthy British officials and businessmen. A flourishing land market has
been and continues to be probably the premier means of wealth generation in Freetown. The Mendes, Temnes and all the other tribes love this idea, because
it means they have an opportunity to own a piece of Freetown,
but many of them detest the thought that this same idea should be applied to
‘their’ areas outside Freetown.
Restrictive Land Laws
The
Temne have ’their’ areas, the Mende
‘their’ areas, the Limba ‘their areas’ and so on
and so on and none of them want to give ‘their’ areas up. This effectively
has kept land use within tribes and clans, and stifled entrepreneurial
development. Land laws have been retained by the ruling class since Independence (and by the
British before that)which effectively prevent freehold access to land in the
Provinces. Given the alacrity with which land in the Western Area has been
acquired (purchased, claimed, stolen etc) by all classes of Sierra Leoneans, given
the property-owning culture that is so readily embraced by the Sierra
Leonean, one doubts whether these restrictive land laws would survive a free
and fair debate and democratic process. In the past however, attempts at
genuine reform have been stifled by the ruling elite.
Sierra Leone History
Kamara displays a great deal of resentment towards the
events surrounding the transfer of land to the Colony of Sierra Leone in
1787. He actually goes so far as to blame the colonialists not only for
recording the history of the country, as they saw it, but also for the
African (including Krio) failure to record their own history. We
have no records of our own because we never wrote our history down, let alone
kept our writings. This is largely our own responsibility. And
one fears that in Sierra
Leone this situation continues till this
day. Historically, of course, Kamara is entirely
wrong. The historians, who unlike Kamara have done
a great deal of patient research, tell us that the earliest inhabitants of
the Western Area were the Bullom,now virtually a lost tribe. They
were supplanted over the centuries by other tribes, including the Sherbro and the Temne. The fact
that a favored tactic for acquiring land in those days was brute force and
war fatally undermines the argument of any
tribe in Sierra Leone
to a permanent right to any
particular parcel of land within the country.