West African City

A Study of Tribal Life in Freetown

Michael Banton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138487680
• eBook ISBN: 9781351042284
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Originally published in 1957 this volume deals with the issue of large scale immigration into Freetown, Sierra Leone from the rural areas in the 1950s and the problems which arose as a result. It analyzes the way traditional social systems had to adjust to the demands of urban life and charts the growth of Freetown from its foundation in the 18th Century. The ethnic composition of its population and the character of the rural districts from which the migrants come are also discussed, along with the motives for migration, the nature of housing and employment.

PART ONE

THE GROWTH OF FREETOWN

CHAPTER I

TRIBAL SETTLEMENT IN A CREOLE CITY

ACCORDING to the Portuguese writers Valentin Fernandez and A Andrée Alvarez d’Alamada, who were acquainted with Sierra A Leone at the beginning and at the end, respectively, of the sixteenth century, the coastal regions were then occupied by the Sapez and Bulom (Sherbro). The Temne inhabited the interior regions to the north-east, with a powerful centre in the neighbourhood of Kase. Probably they had migrated from the north. At the same time the migration of the Mende—and their outlying vanguard the Loko—from the east and south-east of the present protectorate must have been well under way. In subsequent centuries the Temne came into conflict with the Mende and drove the Loko northwards; they occupied the northern coasts and took over control of the Sierra Leone peninsula.

In 1787 there arrived some 300 colonists from London, for the most part destitute Negroes repatriated under a scheme of Granville Sharp’s for resettling them in a more suitable environment. Territory twenty miles square was purchased from the local Temne chief.¹ Mortality among the colonists was high and they were on several occasions attacked by the natives, but a second party of over 1,000 Negroes was brought from Nova Scotia in 1792 and in that year Freetown was founded. In 1800 a further 550 Negroes, who had earlier been involved in rebellion in Jamaica and were known as Maroons, were brought to swell the colony’s numbers.

Much of the Colony peninsula consists of a mountainous range. Freetown lies on a narrow coastal platform with the hills rising behind it: two miles away is Leicester Peak (1,952 feet) and five miles away the Sugar Loaf (2,494 feet). The slopes of the hills cannot be cultivated without causing rapid erosion. Freetown, however, has a large and sheltered harbour which has made it possible for the city to develop as a commercial centre.

Consequent upon the passing of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, a Vice-Admiralty Court was constituted in 1808 in Freetown, and vessels captured with slaves on board were taken there for trial and adjudication. The number of recaptured slaves landed in Freetown varied from year to year, reaching a maximum of 4,857 in 1829, and totalling 39,936 between 1808 and 1833. The majority of them were settled in villages established for this purpose round the rocky peninsula. An official return of 1833 gives the civilian population of Freetown as 9,937 and that of seventeen villages in the rural areas as 21,604; the great majority of those in Freetown, and almost all of those in the villages, must have been liberated Africans. Census data regarding the natives are less adequate, but it appears that Temne, Sherbro, and Loko villages were to be found in several parts of the Colony in varying degrees of association with the non-native population. In 1807 the Temne were forbidden to settle any nearer to Freetown than the site of the present-day Hastings, eleven miles down the eastern coast. The census of 1844 gives a total of 2,971 natives in the Colony area, which by this time comprised all the peninsula. The settling of liberated Africans in Sierra Leone continued on a diminishing scale until as late as 1877, by which time roughly 74,000 ex-slaves had passed through the Freetown courts.¹ The population of Freetown grew from 18,190 (of whom 1,170 were aliens and resident strangers) in 1848 to 21,974 (1,947 strangers) in 1886 and to 21,823 (1,084 strangers) in 1891. However, the Census returns of this period indicate some rather improbable fluctuations in the size of Freetown’s population.

The Colony was divided into parishes under the superintendence of European officials, many of them Anglican missionaries. The Church Missionary Society concentrated many of its endeavours in Sierra Leone, playing a vital part in the instruction of liberated Africans and in building up village communities. But for one generation at least the varied groups constituting the Colony’s motley population retained many of their distinctive characteristics. The quarter of Freetown where the Nova Scotians had built their houses was known as Settler Town, the Maroons’ quarter was Maroon Town; liberated Africans of a Congo tribe were to be found in Congo Town and those of Mende origin in Kosso Town, Kosso being the Temne name for the Mende. The names of Fula Town, Bambara Town, and Kru Town indicate the existence of separate immigrant settlements.

The liberated Africans included men, women, and children from many different parts of West Africa, but in some cases appreciable numbers of people from the same tribe were able to reassemble in Freetown. Some descendants of liberated Africans still describe themselves as Yoruba, Ibo, Ejesa, Ijebu, Popo, Egba, Tarkpa, etc., but Yoruba is the only language to survive out of the multitude which were once to be heard among the liberated Africans. The Yoruba succeeded in maintaining considerable cohesion amongst the minority of their group who were, or who became, Muslims, and these, being closer to the native population of Freetown, have exerted their influence over them in several respects later to be mentioned. The Yoruba liberated Africans were at first scattered up and down the eastern side of the peninsula, and during the 1820s became known to others as ‘Akus’, from the first syllable of the greeting they used in their own tongue. According to their verbal traditions, there was about this time a European lawyer named Savage who lived in Fourah Bay and who had an Aku as a servant. This man used to ask his employer on Fridays for leave to go and visit his friends. Savage inquired after these people, so his servant brought some of them to meet him; these men formed an association known as arota—the friends—who held meetings in part of Savage’s property known to this day as ‘Yardee’. Some of them, it is said, were already Muslims. When visiting the prison, Savage found a number of Muslims there who had been committed for following the practices of their religion; he had them released and they took his name in gratitude. Many Yoruba settled in the neighbourhood of his house, where one of the principal streets is now named Savage Square. Their numbers were probably increased by fellow countrymen who may have fled there from Koya after the Government, in 1832, had carried out a punitive expedition against a band of Akus who had settled at Cobolo on the northern bank of the Ribbi River and were plundering native traders. Shortly afterwards a mosque was built in this neighbourhood and another by a group of Akus residing in Fula Town. It is unlikely that many had adopted Islam before being taken captive, but quite probable that many were attracted to it because through the mosque they could preserve a sense of their identity as a tribe. In 1839 Christian missionaries protested against the ostentatious practice of Muslim rites in a Christian settlement. They received the support of the Governor, who in turn obtained approval from the Secretary of State for a plan to move the Muslims to a more distant part of the Colony. This was never put into effect, but the Muslim Akus are still very conscious of the religious discrimination from which they suffered in the last century. Those who were converted to Christianity tended to move closer to the other liberated Africans, and it was only the Muslim minority which maintained any solidarity as a tribe and kept the language alive. Within the Aku community there were many faction fights and antagonisms which found expression in disputes connected with the mosques. Dissatisfied parties emigrated to Aberdeen and Hastings, where they tried to maintain a separate group life.

Another important group was that of the Kru. They are members of a sea-faring tribe inhabiting part of what is now the Liberian coast. Before the end of the eighteenth century bands of Krumen used to come to Freetown in search of work on board ship. Being notably hard-working, they were encouraged by the Government who wished them to settle in Freetown, but the men preferred to return home with their savings. It was not until the 1860s that they began to settle in the town¹ and not before the 1880s that Kru women joined them in any numbers. The Kru were the most exclusive of all the tribal groups in Freetown: their tongue is very different from the languages spoken in Sierra Leone and their society is divided into small groups, with a marked decentralization of authority that contrasts with the chief-centred organization of the tribes in Sierra Leone. From the earliest times they have displayed a tradition of intense solidarity and, though they themselves were active agents in the slave trade, they would never allow any of their members to be made captive. In Freetown the Krumen have until recent times nearly all sought employment at sea, being but little seduced by the rewards of education.

Children of liberated Africans and the later descendants of Settlers and Maroons came to be known as ‘Creoles’, though in official documents they have always been referred to as non-natives. During the latter half of the nineteenth century this group slowly acquired a common culture and a feeling of solidarity in opposition to Europeans and natives from the hinterland. The Creoles tended to build their society round ideals and practices they had learnt from European administrators and missionaries. Lacking any common factor in their African heritage, the Creoles built up their churches, chapels and ecclesiastical associations as important integrative institutions. The churches provided leadership and positions for would-be leaders; they were also an important medium of social control. Among the different Christian churches there existed a hierarchy of prestige corresponding to the social strata of the population. Mr. A. T. Porter writes of the middle years of the century: ‘many families were moving, as their material position improved, from a smaller to a larger church, and from the Wesleyan to the cathedral’.² The Creoles wore European clothes and adopted many of the values of Victorian society in their public life. They developed a distinctive dialect version of the English language, known as Krio, which incorporates Portuguese, African, and other loan words, has an African rather than a European syntax, and is incomprehensible to the untrained English ear. Krio is to be distinguished from the native pidgin, which is more restricted in its range of expression but which at the higher levels shades imperceptibly into Krio. With the passage of time Creole unity came to outweigh the class distinctions that used to be drawn between the various groups. By contrast with that of the native tribes, Creole society has always appeared highly individualistic and its solidarity has seemed to be induced by social opposition rather than to derive spontaneously from the identification of members with the larger group.

At the end of the nineteenth century Islam began to make great strides among the native population both of the interior and of Freetown, where Muslims were lent the intellectual support of Dr. E. W. Blyden. Blyden was a Negro West Indian of great learning and ability who was sympathetic towards Islam and for a time held the honorary post of Director of Mohammedan Education. Just as the Christian Creoles in the Colony constituted a westernized type of society that was imitated in some respects by the natives, so the Akus built up an alternative Muslim model. As exemplars of the Prophet’s religion and as better educated groups on equal terms with the Christian Creoles, the Akus were accorded marked respect by the tribal immigrants; and so, especially in matters of religion, they became a superior class. The term ‘Aku Creole’ is sometimes heard amongst the tribal people but the two groups are usually regarded as separate. The term ‘Aku’ (which has now been almost universally debased to ‘Oku’) is used to describe Muslim descendants of liberated Africans of Yoruba origin. The term ‘Creole’ is generally applied to all non-natives of Sierra Leone extraction other than Muslims. This is the sense in which the terms will be used in this book.

The Colony’s revenue came primarily from customs duties upon its export trade in the palm kernels, kola-nuts, ginger, and other agricultural products of its hinterland. A number of Sierra Leone Africans built up prosperous merchant houses, some undertaking trading missions in the interior, but for the most part native traders were encouraged to bring their goods to the warehouses in Freetown for purchase there. Trade was frequently hindered by tribal warfare and from the early 1880s prominent Creoles insisted on the necessity for the extension of British jurisdiction so as to keep trade routes open and check the growing ambitions of the French. In one of the best trading years, 1884, Dr. Blyden told a Freetown audience:

The trade of the colony has seldom, within recent years, presented so encouraging an aspect as during the current season. The influx of ‘gold and hide strangers’ has been almost unprecedented. In the months of January, February, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Tables
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Part One: The Growth of Freetown
• I. Tribal Settlement in a Creole City
• II. Problems of Administration
• Part Two: Internal Migration
• III. The Background to Rural Emigration
• IV. Migration and Employment
• Part Three: Urban Structure and Tribal Institutions
• V. Freetown’s Population
• VI. Ethnic Groups and their Relations
• VII. Tribal Groups and Religious Alignments
• VIII. Tribal Headmen
• IX. Young Men’s Companies Among the Temne
• X. Other Voluntary Associations
• XI. The Household
• XII. Summary and Conclusions
• Appendices
• II. Texts of Selected Temne Company Songs
• Index