In Sierra Leone: A Political History, the historian David Harris asks whether nations should be defined by catastrophe. He has a good reason for this question. Catastrophe seems to be how people think of Sierra Leone if they think of the country at all. In the film Blood Diamond (2003), the former British colony is presented as a plaything for the regional powers and multinational companies vying for control of Sierra Leone’s diamond mines. Harris offers an alternative perspective. He considers the difficulties of Sierra Leone to be “what are effectively the birth pangs of a country” (2).
Harris offers two analytical approaches. The first advances a straightforward narrative of Sierra Leonean history between the establishment of the colony of Freetown by former North American slaves in 1787 and the present. The author examines long-term structural changes in public life, concentrating extensively upon the development of a client state. The second approach asks a series of theoretical questions about continuity and change that consider a “complex state-society relationship which has evolved and yet maintained many of its key features” (4). The author blends these approaches to make a critical intervention. This identifies a key continuity between colonial and post-colonial Sierra Leone: the use of patronage by political authorities in Freetown to gather support from rural or military elites.
The book can be divided into three distinct sections. The first three chapters show how patronage became embedded in Sierra Leonean public life under the British Empire. This was a consequence of policies of indirect rule through chiefly rulers, which led to the waning of the authority of the urban Krios, descendants of the freed North American slaves who founded Freetown in 1787. This process became more acute following the discovery of diamonds in the Sierra Leonean interior in 1931. Investments in infrastructure that would connect diamonds to export markets sparked a struggle between rural traditionalists and urban modernists for control of this process. By the eve of independence in 1961, Harris suggests that elder dominance had split the country into two patronage camps: those who supported the chiefs, and those who sought votes from groups marginalized by traditional leaders.
The client state provided short-term stability, but it also undermined colonial and post-colonial economic development projects and faltering efforts at democratization. The fourth and fifth chapters describe how this process unfolded. By the 1970s, Prime Minister Siaka Stevens had established a one-party state that used control over diamond mining and exports to win military support, and access to land and labour to gain backing from rural elites. This led to economic uncertainty and political repression, making civil war more likely. The final chapters of the book deal with the civil war that begun in 1991 and its aftermath. Chapters six and seven trace the outbreak of fighting and then examine the interventions by Economic Community of Western Africa States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) troops and British armed forces that brought the conflict to a close in 2000. Chapters eight and nine examine post-civil war nation-building in Sierra Leone. The conclusion finds Sierra Leone at a juncture. Although the civil war provided an opportunity to dismantle the patronage state, the institutions that arose from peace-building efforts in the 21st century are not yet fully formed. As the author writes in the final pages: “One outcome of the very national catastrophe that was the war paradoxically could be its contribution to the making of the nation, if not the state” (174).
Throughout the book, the author shows how different internal and external tensions exerted influence upon the Sierra Leonean state. Harris connects these pressures to the shifting loci of political authority. For instance, in colonial Sierra Leone, this internal and external struggle pitted Freetown and rural Sierra Leone against one another for access to colonial rule. Following independence, tensions circled around access to the emerging client state, and in the 1980s over unrest from those excluded from patronage networks. The author connects the slow resolution of the conflicts associated with the civil war to a gradually emerging national Sierra Leonean identity. Such arguments balance continuity and change in an effective manner, aligning the response of state authorities and institutions to events to the endemic client state. This is a key strength of the book. By studying patronage from a number of vantage points, the author shows how this problem created a multiplier effect that fanned out across Sierra Leonean public life, furthering state-society tensions.
Harris balances this theoretical approach with a series of questions examining the implications of international policy. He pursues this line of analysis most effectively when addressing the civil war of the 1990s. Harris rejects the assumption that the international diamond trade and internal corruption laid the foundation for the civil war. Instead, he argues persuasively that the conflict reflected broader patterns seen earlier in Liberia, or later in Rwanda and Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo: war erupting as a result of tensions created by the widespread availability of small arms and a decline in international aid following the end of the Cold War. Diamonds and the client state simply determined the contours of the conflict in Sierra Leone. In his discussions of the conclusion of the war, Harris persuasively shows how Sierra Leone served as a fulcrum for rising regional powers to assert themselves, and for European powers to experiment with post-Cold War understandings of foreign policy and conflict resolution. Nigeria, the largest supplier of troops to ECOMOG, saw Sierra Leone as a platform to assert itself as an African power, while the British saw the country as a space upon which to enact their vision of liberal internationalism—an ethical foreign policy that supported democratically elected governments with military force if necessary.
Harris sees the influence of international policy in post-civil war conflict resolution as well. But rather than view Sierra Leone as a country peripheral to world events, he suggests that it reflects global and regional affairs in distinctive local forms. In particular, the book balances the measured approach of Sierra Leonean authorities in regards to democratization and the dismantling of patronage networks with international demands for swifter reform. In making this argument, he shows the agency of Sierra Leoneans in navigating global currents.
Harris has written a thoughtful study of Sierra Leone. The book is rich in source material. The author maintains a careful balance between narrative and theoretical discussions of policy and conflict resolution. Sierra Leone: A Political History provides an effective demonstration of the ways in which historians work with concepts of continuity and change. This book will appeal to several different audiences: historians of Sierra Leone, sub-Saharan Africa, and decolonization, as well as world historians. Those studying International Relations or economic development will find much of interest in Harris’ study of policy limitations and successes as well.
