At the heart of British colonialism in Africa was a promise. Those who consented to join the empire would give up some measure of their sovereignty, and what they would get in return was peace and security—a promise the British glossed as “protection.” That promise was a lie. It was also, as an important new book by Trina Leah Hogg frames it, a paradox: African societies that accepted British “protection” became more vulnerable to violence as time went on, not less. In places like Sierra Leone, colonial protection was more like a protection racket. In the same way that a local mafioso creates danger and then offers to shield you from it, the main threat to African societies was often the British themselves.
The Paradox of Protection describes how “indirect rule,” the principle of governing colonies through existing power structures, emerged in the late nineteenth century. She tells this as a legal history, and Sierra Leone offers her an especially deep archive of cases. Many of those cases are about a decades-long string of killings staged to look like they had been done by leopards. Human-leopard murders are well-known in African history, but Hogg provides a new and provocative interpretation of what they mean. These and other cases allow her to describe “protection” as it appeared from many angles. Different types of people understood the legal and political concepts that structured their lives differently. “Protection” meant one thing to the British and something very different to the wealthy Krio traders, old guard village elders, and upstart Big Men who were being “protected” by British rule.
Protected from what, exactly? The answer was often the British themselves, which is one of colonialism’s great ironies. Other times the threat was not the British per se, but the power vacuum that opened up around them. The late nineteenth century was a tumultuous time in West Africa, driven by an economic transition from slavery to a “legitimate” trade in cash crops. In all this diffidence there were opportunities for the bold or the reckless, like Betsy Gaye, a savvy trader-cum-queen who crops up every fifty pages or so, each time having clawed her way up a notch higher in the social order. This is a dynamic little world, but dynamism is not necessarily a good thing. For every enterprising leader who parlayed the chaos into power, there are thousands of others who lost everything. Many other accounts of Sierra Leonean history focus on the suppression of slavery, which was the main reason the British offered for why their protection was necessary. Hogg cuts through this flimsy alibi from the start, going straight into the gritty details of what was happening in the villages, trading posts, and war camps of Sierra Leone as British rule solidified. She finds a pattern that repeats in different places. First, the British presence disrupts the local order of things; next, they offer some judicial remedy that makes the problem worse. By the time the pattern is complete, life is more insecure, and the British are more in charge.
The best, most sustained example of Hogg’s argument about protection revolves around the Human Leopard Society, a “sodality” that emerged in the 1880s as the palm-produce trade boomed and tensions mounted between old leaders and the new, warlord-like “Big Men” who got rich from it. There were many unnatural deaths and disappearances during this unruly time, which local people blamed on wrongdoers who could shape-shift into leopards. It’s pointless to quibble about what leopard murder really was—the violence was real whether or not the people who caused it had transformed themselves into animals. The prevailing explanations for leopard murder may have been supernatural, but we can surmise plenty of earthly ones too: there were too many people on not enough land, many of them unattached and unprotected. To solve the leopard murders, local leaders hired ritual specialists known as Tongo, whose preferred way to unmask human leopards was trial by ordeal. The British found this practice “repugnant,” and they banned the Tongo. This was a real power grab, Hogg argues, and one that ended up making conditions in the region less secure, not more. What led the British to ban the Tongo wasn’t just their methods, though they did find them excessive (one dramatic account describes seventy accused man-leopards burned on a giant pyre). It wasn’t coincidental that many of the men accused of being human leopards were also palm traders, and their business lay at the center of the colonial economy.
As the British clamped down on the Tongo, they replaced it with a form of justice of their own design. But British law didn’t work well against leopard murder. It was too new and inchoate, too locally illegitimate, and, in the eyes of the public, too soft against the very problem people felt threatened by. This, Hogg shows, is how British colonialism became real in places like Sherbro. Conquest happened not (just) in a blaze of gunfire but through the quieter violence of replacing one form of law with another. Hogg shows many ways this happened. It could mean strong-arming people into signing treaties of protection, redrawing the boundaries of who was responsible for what kinds of crime, or changing how truth was ascertained by administrative fiat. Colonial ideologues would later argue that colonialism worked best when it left traditional political and legal systems in place and governed through them. But as Hogg shows, in the nineteenth century, British protection could be very disruptive, and it created widespread disorder. What this adds up to is an extended refutation of the ideology of the Pax Britannica.
The Paradox of Protection is a subtle and well-told story. It shows a deep appreciation not just of British colonialism’s tensions, which fifty years of historiography have made it easy to see, but also of its mechanics. Overly general accounts of colonialism often gloss over how it worked, and Hogg’s greatest strength is her close-to-the-bone description of what it looked like in this village, or in that courtroom. She has other insights too, some of which will have meaning mostly for historians of Africa—pushing us to think about indirect rule earlier than we typically do, decentering Lord Frederick Lugard in imperial historiography, and settling some local debates about secret societies, Poro, and chieftaincy. Legal historians of other parts of the world might find all this a little obtuse. The natural and supernatural blur here, even though Hogg describes the arcana of crime and punishment as clearly as she possibly can. Those who work in more settled legal traditions might struggle to see all this as law. Familiar figures—lawyers, clearly defined litigants and defendants, and judges—are often absent or too blurry to see clearly. This is no less a problem for British law than for African custom; British law was a sloppy and ill-defined thing in the hardscrabble places where this book is set. But make no mistake: this is an elemental kind of legal history. It is about what the promise of orderly justice can conceal. British protection created a roiling chaos that was in many ways more dangerous than what it promised to shield people from.
