The Emergence of Chiefs

During a turbulent late nineteenth and early twentieth century in what is now known as Kono District in Sierra Leone, local warriors fought continuously over trade routes, control of land, and the accumulation of dependent populations of clients and slaves. The power of precolonial authorities in Sierra Leone was predicated on a mix of biological legitimacy, patrimonial largesse, and military strength. In turn, popular allegiance was tempered by tensions between the ruling and nonruling houses of powerful lineages, between free men and slaves, and between the advantages of “going it alone” and forming alliances with rival strongmen (Abraham Reference Abraham1978; Kup Reference Kup1962).

The epitome of a powerful Kono man in this period was a successful warrior, a man capable of controlling people and resources and of clearing space and establishing new habitable settlements. Such men achieved their positions of power and leadership by manipulating patron–client relationships, often along kinship lines, in which clients exchanged allegiance for resources such as land and communal privileges (Hardin Reference Hardin1993). In Kono, and Sierra Leone more broadly, warrior chiefs became integral to the colonial policy of indirect rule. Understanding the evolution of these warrior chiefs is vital to understanding the foundation from which the contemporary hybrid authority of paramount and lesser chiefs has emerged.

During the nineteenth century warrior chiefs were given the opportunity to reinvent themselves as a chiefly land-owning class, while maintaining hegemony over the descendants of their former slaves and subordinates through tributary demands, agricultural corveés, polygyny, and other “customary” claims upon their labor and resources. This was not a simple top-down process led by a colonial center, but an evolving process of hybridization. Berry (1993:34) captures this general dynamic well: while colonial administrators sought “to apply customary rules in governing colonial peoples[,] . . . African colonial subjects renegotiated rules and social identities in order to cope with or take advantage of colonial rule and commercialization.” This mutual influence was inevitable in large part because of the nature of the organization of the colonial administration.

Minimal efforts were made in the colonial period to establish bureaucratic practices outside Freetown and the Western Area. The colonists did not attempt to build a democratic political culture or a central political entity through the seizing or development of alternative deliberative assemblies. Instead, as in Ghana (Berry Reference Berry1998), Nigeria (Olumuyiwa & Olutayo 2007), Botswana (Vaughan Reference Vaughan2003), and other British colonial territories (Berry Reference Berry1993), administrators sought information on traditional social structures and identities in order to render indirect rule more efficient. In short, this was colonialism-on-the-cheap. Between 1896 and 1921 in Sierra Leone, a population of 1.2 million people was governed by only five district commissioners and one circuit court (Kilson Reference Kilson1966). Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century British administration was primarily confined to Freetown and its environs, known as the Colony, which governed rural Sierra Leone, known as the Protectorate (Sesay Reference Sesay1995; Hirsch Reference Hirsch2001).

The development of indirect rule was an attempt to identify and prop up interlocutors between colonial administrators and the population in the hinterland, in part to facilitate tax collection (Cooper Reference Cooper2002; Fanthorpe Reference Fanthorpe1998; van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal 1996). In Sierra Leone and elsewhere across sub-Saharan Africa, this led to the emergence of semi-autonomous administrative units, or chieftaincies, which became and have remained the historic focus of the struggle for political control over the countryside (Tangri Reference Tangri1978; Allen Reference Allen1968).

The Chiefdom and the Consolidation of Hybridity

By the time separation of the Protectorate from the Colony was announced in 1898, British colonial authorities had granted chiefs a variety of financial incentives to participate in the administration of their subjects, including permission to accrue personal fees and fines from native courts. Despite their minimal administrative presence in Sierra Leone’s hinterland, the British authorities were instrumental in making the chieftaincy a lifetime inheritable position (for a discussion of sub-Saharan Africa in general, see Berry Reference Berry1993). They assisted in suppressing local rivals to incumbent chiefs, reduced the option of seceding from a chiefdom, and prohibited the withholding of payments or compulsory labor from a chief. Scholars who study Sierra Leone (e.g., Fanthorpe Reference Fanthorpe1998; Richards Reference Richards1996; Reno Reference Reno1995; Peters Reference Peters2006; Jackson Reference Jackson2005) commonly accept that the position of paramount chiefs is the definitive figure of authority outside Freetown as the consequence of a legacy of colonial indirect rule that is “particularly strong in Sierra Leone” (Fanthorpe Reference Fanthorpe2005:28). However, while Anwyl noted in the early twentieth century that “the office of the paramount chief seems to be of recent origin,” he was also clear that the emergence of chiefs cannot be explained by reference to colonial bureaucratic practices alone. Rather, it was seen as the product of “the wealthy status” of the person who became the chief, “a man who was rich enough to stop the contentions of opponents by gifts” (1916:37).

There is indeed little doubt that the institutions of paramount (and lesser) chiefs fundamentally shaped how colonial administrators could exercise and extend colonial authority, a point that is worth emphasizing because much contemporary analysis tends to see African chieftaincy as the direct product of colonial manipulation through policy and practice (Herbst Reference Herbst2000; Jordan 1997; Mbembe Reference Mbembe2001; Ntsebeza Reference Ntsebeza1999). Alternatively, however, Ray (1996:184) suggests, based on work in Ghana, that the legitimacy of chiefs “comes (mainly) from the sacred and political order that existed before the imposition of the colonial state.” And indeed, these categorical assumptions themselves are called into question if one thinks of the chieftaincy as a hybrid institution in which chiefly authority does not emanate exclusively from either state-based practices or local custom, but rather from multiple sources, all of which are reflected simultaneously in acts of order-making (Albrecht & Moe Reference Albrecht and Moe2015).

Chiefs certainly preexisted colonialism, and they were not simply incorporated into colonial regimes. Rather, as warriors metamorphosed into chiefs, their role was expanded by the new registers of authority, which now encompassed the products of centrally governed institutions such as legal texts and financial resources. In regard to Sierra Leone in the 1930s, Keen (2005:10) notes that development programs “were a threat to chiefs if they offered new choices and new sources of loans and patronage” to the general population. Chiefs, therefore, made considerable efforts to capture such programs, although these efforts largely “undermined the capacity of Native Administrations to undertake modern social services for the local populace” (Kilson Reference Kilson1966:26). In other words, establishment and recognition of the institution of chiefs occurred in a manner that denied colonial rulers direct control over them with the result, in turn, that the reach of the colonial administration was stymied.

As Cooper (2002:18) notes, in the decades before World War II “attempts of colonial rulers to remake African societies . . . had petered out, as colonial governments realized the limits of their own power.” Certainly, in the case of Sierra Leone, the administrative and financial advantages afforded to the colonial administration by indirect rule were offset by the rather large claims that chiefs were permitted to make upon local resources. These claims were instituted at the foundation of the Sierra Leone Protectorate and were carried forward under the 1937 Native Administration Scheme, the colony’s first concerted attempt at local government reform (Fanthorpe Reference Fanthorpe2001). The main objective of the Scheme was to devolve the considerable economic and juridical powers formerly vested in paramount chiefs to a local assembly called the Tribal Authority (later the Chiefdom Council) funded by, and directly representative of, local taxpayers. The assumption was that chiefs could be incorporated into the colonial regime to perform the new state-sanctioned administrative tasks but without any significant loss of chiefly authority (Kilson Reference Kilson1966; also see Vaughan Reference Vaughan2003 on Botswana). Yet these two goals were inherently contradictory. And while both the paramount and lesser chiefs strongly criticized the Scheme when it was introduced, little was done in practice to prevent them from continuing to collect payments for political and juridical services and appropriating tax revenue for private use. Indeed, attempts to closely supervise the administration of chieftaincy waned in the late 1940s, a development that in turn contributed to and solidified the chiefs’ power during the colonial and, as we shall see in the next section, postcolonial eras.

The notion of hybridity as it is developed in this article thus takes inspiration from, but also moves beyond, the articulations of Mac Ginty (2010, 2011) and Richmond (Reference Richmond2011). Here hybridity is conceptualized as a historical process of assembling different sources of authority simultaneously. On the one hand, the diversity that marked political orders across Africa in precolonial times was transformed and subsumed by the colonial state into a unifying administrative structure (Trotha 1996). On the other hand, chiefs in the colonial and postcolonial eras drew their authority both from their autochthon status and from their role as intermediaries between the local population and alien rulers. These different forms of authority assembled different logics, practices, and forms of power to establish hybrid orders that were embedded in the very foundation of Sierra Leone as a political entity.

Postcolonial Sierra Leone

As was common across colonial Africa, the transition of Sierra Leone in 1961 from a colony to an independent state was an elite affair. Led by Sir Milton Margai, the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) won the first general elections in 1962 (Barrows Reference Barrows1976; Sesay Reference Sesay1995). The new Sierra Leonean rulers, however, took an uncommon approach in their treatment of traditional leaders, who were considered by other postcolonial governments to be “repressive collaborators of the colonial masters” (Kyed & Buur Reference Kyed, Buur, Kyed and Buur2007; see also Englebert Reference Englebert2002; Oomen 2005; Skalník 2005). In Ghana, for example, this anti–traditional leader approach was the main reason that the Nkrumah government revoked the judicial powers and abolished the relative political autonomy of traditional authorities in the late 1950s and early 1960s (see Boone 2003; Kludzie 2000). In Nigeria, a “vocal anti-chieftaincy lobby, consisting mainly of radical intellectuals,” contended that chieftaincy institutions were “vestiges of an oppressive past, . . . anachronistic and dysfunctional in a rapidly changing and complex country.” This remains the case today in Nigeria, where chieftaincy, “although firmly rooted in kinship and community structures, still lacks access to formal political authority” (Vaughan Reference Vaughan1995:512; see also Vaughan Reference Vaughan2003 on Botswana). Had the SLPP in Sierra Leone pursued a similar line, this could have constituted an important break, symbolically if not necessarily in practice, from the principles of indirect rule that were part and parcel of the emergence and preservation (and also perceived corruption) of the chiefdom. Instead, chiefs became integral to political party formation in Freetown, while remaining the primary gatekeepers to the localities over which they ruled. Indeed, in the first decade after independence, national politicians often found it necessary to engage in factional rivalries at the chiefdom level in order to obtain electoral support (Minikin Reference Minikin1973).

As the SLPP assumed power in postcolonial Sierra Leone, the party emerged as a mix of “chiefs and educated protectorate Africans” (Hayward & Dumbuya Reference Hayward and Dumbuya1984:64), with the chiefs playing a crucial role in strengthening the party. Indeed, political parties throughout the country relied on chieftaincies to solidify their power base (Minikin Reference Minikin1973). In general their goal was to increase the local power and wealth of chiefs while subordinating them nationally: a simultaneous—and contradictory—approach of subordination and fortification that to a large extent accounts for the localization of political organization in rural Sierra Leone and the long-established emphasis on identity and belonging (Allen Reference Allen1968; Fanthorpe Reference Fanthorpe2001).

Irrespective of which political party has governed in Freetown, a majority of party politicians who have been elected to the central legislature have been members of chiefly families. By 1967, when the All Peoples’ Congress (APC) came to power, the party was confronted with a relatively autonomous local political network of chiefs in Kono, where 75 percent of the district’s parliamentarians claimed chiefly lineages (Reno Reference Reno1995). Siaka Stevens, the APC leader and president of Sierra Leone from 1968 to 1985, concluded that if interests of the state that fueled his authority were to resist challenges from strong chiefly interests, he had to either banish or co-opt the chiefs in order to assert his position as a preeminent political force. He ended up pursuing the latter strategy and deepening patrimonial networks, an approach that had the effect, however, not of strengthening state power, but of confirming the role of paramount and lesser chiefs. Thus state formation in Sierra Leone was constituted by connections and mutual influence between colonial and postcolonial government agents and local leaders; in the postcolonial state there is no clear line of separation between chiefs and government institutions. Fanthorpe (1998:116) argues that paramount chiefs continue to have the somewhat “paradoxical role” of being “state agents commissioned to exercise ‘traditional’ authority.” This article suggests, by contrast, that paramount and lesser chiefs of today stand at the center of processes of hybridization, and that the conception of the state in Sierra Leone, as well as its functioning as a system, are both sources and outcomes of that order.

The Legal Background of Today’s Chiefs

Sierra Leone’s 149 chiefdoms, each subdivided into a number of sections, were established by a series of legal documents. Some date from before or just after independence in 1961, including the Tribal Authorities Ordinance (1938), the Chiefdom Treasuries Act (1938), and the Tribal Authorities (Amendment) Act (1964). Other more recent pieces of legislation include the Local Government Act (2004) and the Chieftaincy Act (2009).

The 1991 Constitution of Sierra Leone (Article 72 [1]) ratifies the official position of paramount chiefs, stating that “the institution of the Chieftaincy, as established by customary law and usage” and “its non-abolition by law” are to be “guaranteed and preserved.” This provision distinguishes Sierra Leone from many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including Ghana, where both the 1971 Chieftaincy Act and 1992 Constitution put considerable limitations on the judicial functions of the chiefs. In Sierra Leone the government has an obligation to maintain the “traditional role” of paramount chiefs, including their administrative and customary judicial responsibilities. This is accomplished on the basis of the Ruling Houses that existed at independence in 1961, of which there are from one to three in each chiefdom; paramount chiefs can only be drawn from these families. ^{Footnote 5}

That chiefs in Sierra Leone are partly the expression of a “state effect,” to borrow a term from Mitchell (Reference Mitchell, Sharma and Gupta2006), is therefore not in question. Indeed, in this respect Sierra Leone is no different from many countries across sub-Saharan Africa, reflecting the integral role of colonial regimes in the continent’s state formation processes (Berry Reference Berry1993; Cooper Reference Cooper2002). This circumstance often leads to the drawing of somewhat artificial boundaries between state and society, which makes the former appear as an “inert ‘structure’” (Mitchell Reference Mitchell, Sharma and Gupta2006) that somehow stands apart from individuals (including chiefs), contains them, and provides a framework to their lives and authority. The authority of chiefs continues to be based on their symbolic representations in state legislation, which gives the impression that they are produced and given authority by the state rather than being co-constitutive of the state. ^{Footnote 6}

In Sierra Leone the chiefdom constitutes the basic unit of local government, and paramount chiefs sit on District and Town Councils across the country. The 2004 Local Government Act stipulates that chiefs have a “traditional function,” for instance, in preventing illegal offenses in their areas, prohibiting illegal gambling, making and enforcing by-laws, and so forth. ^{Footnote 7} At the core of their state-sanctioned power lies their legal mandate to hold the land in trust for the people of the chiefdom, which in rural areas of Sierra Leone, including Kono, means that they hold almost exclusive power over distribution of the most important source of income generation—land for farming and mining. Nationally, paramount chiefs are Members of Parliament and advisers through the National Council of Paramount Chiefs.

Understanding the dynamics of how a large-scale political entity such as Sierra Leone developed and was recognized internationally as a sovereign state in 1961 is fundamental to understanding how the production of hybridity occurred in Sierra Leone. The way in which authority is produced, reproduced, and manifested in localities across the nation is equally fundamental to this hybridity. Indeed, it is the ability of chiefs to incorporate, if not always smoothly reconcile, a wide variety of sources of authority from different domains and origins that gives them the flexibility to claim a stake in national-level politics and power while at the same time expressing extreme localization as “sons of the soil.”

Origins and the Owning of Authority in Peyima

The emergence of chiefs in Sierra Leone was a result of long-term processes of hybridization rather than of specific policies of the colonial state (including colonial military and administrative complexes) per se. The agency of the colonized was therefore extremely important in shaping the encounter between the colonized population and the state (Comaroff & Comaroff Reference Comaroff, Comaroff, Comaroff and Comaroff1993; Cooper Reference Cooper1994). Since the position of the chieftaincy in rural Sierra Leone is based largely on oral tradition and local interpretations and manifestations (Albrecht Reference Albrecht2012), an understanding of how this agency is structured needs to take account of local sources of authority as revealed by ethnographic fieldwork.

This article challenges the notion that the enduring position of chiefs in rural Sierra Leone can be attributed to the “lack of state” (see, e.g., Sesay Reference Sesay1995), and examines instead the kinds of hybrid organizational formations that can effectively create order. In this context Fanthorpe’s (2001) notion of “extreme localization” is helpful in conceptualizing how authority is distributed, as is Hardin’s (1993) description of the way in which identity formation in a small town in Kono relies on ritual actions that “locate individuals in particular spaces by giving them rights, as well as obligations, to others who share those spaces” (1993:93). A common ordering principle across West Africa, for example, has to do with important distinctions between “natives” and “strangers” of a locality (see Berry Reference Berry1993), which allows local communities to draw boundaries, establish local sources of authority, and defend these institutions with local rituals. In fact, it is these principles of localization that define a community’s very existence as a habitable space that needs to be defended from external challenges and interference.

Historically, the Guinea Coast was the site of early intersections of trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic systems that generated intense interactions within and among large and ethnolinguistically diverse and migrating populations (Fanthorpe Reference Fanthorpe2001; Fulton Reference Fulton1972). Slave trading had begun by the eighth century with western Sudan and continued under European control from the mid-fifteenth century. Out of these developments grew a keen sense of insiders and outsiders—natives and strangers—that was institutionalized, for instance, in locally organized secret societies (Bledsoe Reference Bledsoe1984; Ellis Reference Ellis, Knörr and Filho2010; Højbjerg Reference Højbjerg2007; Albrecht Reference Albrecht2016). Migration continued to mark Sierra Leone’s Kono District into the modern era through diamond mining, which began in the 1930s and boomed in the 1950s (Sesay Reference Sesay1967), attracting miners and overseas companies from across Sierra Leone and West Africa into the twenty-first century (see Keen Reference Keen2005; Reno Reference Reno1995; Albrecht Reference Albrecht2012).

The distinction between strangers and natives was therefore part and parcel of Peyima’s—and the Guinea Coast’s—long-term history well before the colonial and postcolonial eras. In Peyima today a stranger, or allochthon, is viewed mostly as an individual who has moved to the town in the pursuit of personal gain. Because this person is not “a son of the soil” tied genealogically and therefore ritually to the locale, he is seen as someone who will appropriate its riches and then leave (Albrecht Reference Albrecht2016).

A stark example of the native–stranger dichotomy derives from the civil war and contrasts rebel fighters from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), which captured Peyima in the late 1990s, with donsos, a locally recruited Civil Defence Force (CDF) of hunter militias (see Ferme & Hoffman Reference Ferme and Hoffman2004; Hoffman Reference Hoffman2007). “The level of destruction done to this town, the way I saw the town cannot be compared to anywhere,” said Ibrahim “Kalilu” Kamara, a man in his thirties at the time of the interview (in 2009), who had been a refugee in Guinea in the late 1990s. “It was a ghost town, everything completely destroyed.” As strangers, the RUF stood against the CDF, the sons of the soil:

Kamara’s statement describes how strangers are perceived in Sierra Leone: by definition, they are considered to “neither understand nor respect local precedents” and to “represent a threat to the rights and properties of all” (Fanthorpe Reference Fanthorpe2001:383).

However, a successful claim to “own the authority” is not a fixed status—it must be reproduced continuously. While the names of paramount chiefs and section chiefs are recorded as “ruling houses” in the Government Gazette, town chiefs do not appear there, and in general being a son of the soil and articulating a forceful right to this claim is open to manipulation across Sierra Leone. It is a status that is constantly challenged and invoked in symbolic and physical struggles. Autochthon status cannot be fixed in written text (Connerton Reference Connerton1989; Herzfeld Reference Herzfeld1992), and therefore the question of who occupies what positions vis-à-vis other contenders at any given time is a deeply political and contested matter. In Peyima, then, claiming to be a son of the soil is not only important in terms of mining and farming rights, but it is also central to defining the authority and legitimacy of a chief.

At the time of the fieldwork in 2009 Peyima’s town chief, Gborie, was regarded by the Tankos—the other chiefly family in town—as having taken over the position illegitimately. An elder named Pa Kongue who had close ties to the Tankos and was also considered by many to be an important town historian explained the matter to me. Gborie, Pa Kongue explained, had not been elected on the basis of the list of ruling houses contained in the Government Gazette. His ascent, therefore, had been determined partly by party politics and partly by the mobilization of his family’s patronage networks, rather than the patrilineal line of descent or a true status as a son of the soil. Through alleged external political pressure from the APC, Gborie had taken over leadership of Peyima in 1985, at a young age. Even though by 2009 he was a supporter of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), not the APC, which won the general elections in 2007, very few measures could be taken against him once he was installed as a chief. Another source of Gborie’s power was his close alliance with the Kamara chiefdom’s paramount chief, Melvin Ngekia, whom he had supported in Ngekia’s bid a few years earlier. This alliance had paid off for Gborie, who also held the lucrative position within the state system of mining chairman and was responsible for signing off on all mining licenses in the chiefdom. One argument that was used to prove Gborie’s outsider status was that he was mining excessively for diamonds in more than a dozen pits on the outskirts of Peyima while doing little to develop the town for everyone’s benefit. He was acting, in other words, as if he were a stranger.

Other events that were occurring around this time were also seen as an indication of Gborie’s preoccupation with making money rather than working for the best interests of the town. In the eyes of the inhabitants of Peyima, the centrality of land as a source of cosmological-ancestral authority is in turn confirmed and reproduced by numerous ritual procedures for its clearance and enclosure, which are overseen by the chief. Central to the local belief system, and in Sierra Leone more generally, is the notion that ancestral spirits and devils zealously guard the land and demand attention and sacrifice. Spirits have the power to both give and take, so sacrifices, or Kwaebonda (meaning to “pour liberation for your forefathers”), must be made. Yet a number of recent events suggested that Gborie was ignoring his sacrificial responsibilities on behalf of the town.

One day a boy had a seizure while he was crossing a narrow path through the swamp to reach his father’s farm. He fell into the water and drowned. Nobody witnessed the accident, but as news of it spread across town everyone was drawn to the place, shocked and in mourning. He was the second child in two months who had drowned. Peyima’s residents believed that the devil had taken the boy and lured him down to the river and into the water. “We cannot see him,” one of the spectators said about the devil, “but he looks like you and me and is hungry for small children.” A few days later a woman doing laundry by the river also had a seizure, collapsed on the river bank, and died.

Events and accidents such as these may seem coincidental to an outsider. But the people of Peyima did not recognize coincidence, and indeed, they connected such events to other occurrences. For example, diamonds were scarce, and investors who are needed to inject cash and prosperity into the town from outside were not forthcoming. The local interpretation was that the town’s ancestors were punishing their descendants for not giving them appropriate attention and that offerings were required. In corroboration, people cited a dream reported by a local woman. She was informed that in order to please the ancestors a rope needed to be tied from one end of the town to the other. After discussions among the elders led by Gborie, Pa Kongue staged a ritual with a few prominent young men in Peyima, all descendants from the main families of the town. A small hut was built down by the water where the epileptic boy had died. Rice was boiled and fowl were killed, blood was dripped, and the spirits of the ancestors were invoked. Some of the food was eaten by those who conducted the ritual, but the rest was left in the hut for the ancestors.

Although Gborie was pressured to behave appropriately in this circumstance, the general struggle over his legitimacy did not lessen. The Tankos claim to power was based on a historical and localized fact—namely that the Tankos, not the Gbories, were among the original founders of Peyima. This had not been recorded by colonial or postcolonial governments as it was not considered relevant to governing Kamara chiefdom, let alone Peyima. The state had been responsible for delineating the chiefdom geographically in the first place—that is, determining the physical space that was being fought over. The state also “owned” the title of “mining chairman” that had been given to Gborie by the paramount chief. However, the local struggle was not articulated by the symbolic language of the state or based in any legal document (Hansen & Stepputat Reference Hansen and Stepputat2001). Nevertheless, the Tankos first-comer status was a locally recognized piece of history that was central to struggles over power. Pa Kongue narrated the following story about Peyima; while it is set at an unspecified time, it reflects historical records from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when warrior chiefs ruled the area.

Thus Pa Kongue explained who had founded Peyima and who could legitimately count themselves among its leaders today as original sons of the soil. The Gborie family was not among them. When Gborie spoke to me directly about the founding of Peyima he stated as a matter of fact that he was a direct descendant of those who originally settled there, but he did not justify this claim with an elaborate historical narrative. Rather, he insisted that the material evidence of the considerable land he controlled for the purposes of mining and farming was itself the justification of his position as town chief. He also had garnered considerable support from the majority of the town elders, many of whom benefited from Gborie’s patronage. It is clear, therefore, that the basis of Gborie’s power was drawn from numerous mutually reinforcing sources. He embodied authority that emanated from the physical space of Peyima, its history, and his position as mining chairman. And yet he and his family were being challenged by words, if not in practice, by the Tankos, who according to Pa Kongue simply had to wait until Gborie either died or stepped down and then “replace him with the correct person that is entitled” (interview, Peyima, 2009). These people, in other words, were waiting until such a time when they could reclaim a formal position of authority and thus control over the township’s land. Certainly, when a new town chief was to be found, local oral history, and how it was presented and interpreted by local elders, would be central to the search for a legitimate successor.

The Constitution of Hybridity and the Sierra Leonean Civil War

Roger Mac Ginty argues that in peacebuilding processes, both international and local actors “are likely to be the product of significant prior mixing of peoples, ideas, and norms concerning the exercise of power, the distribution of resources and the organization of society” (2011:72). This article suggests that from a historical and ethnographic perspective, the influence of “significant prior mixing” in the emergence of Sierra Leone’s chiefs has in fact always been the case. The “state” and “tradition” do not exist independently of each other in a dichotomous relationship. Authority emanates simultaneously from multiple sources, including sacred and spiritual powers, kinship, and secret society membership, as well as from an operative decision-making center of government, bureaucracy, and legislation (Albrecht & Moe Reference Albrecht and Moe2015). The paramount and lesser chiefs in Kamara Chiefdom and chiefs in general across sub-Saharan Africa cannot, therefore, be characterized as institutions that assert authority because they are formally recognized in state legislation. The assertion of authority is inevitably intertwined with notions of locally embedded autochthony, spiritual beliefs, and rituals. At the same time, the involvement of chiefs and their relatives in governing Sierra Leone since independence in 1961 means that they have remained closely involved in almost all aspects of everyday life in rural areas of the country (Minikin Reference Minikin1973; Fanthorpe Reference Fanthorpe2005). The state did not create the chiefs, just as chiefs did not create the state; these entities were and remain mutually constitutive of one another, shaped by and shaping each other’s sources of authority. It is the simultaneity and mutuality of this relationship between the state and tradition, and the fact that they cannot be divided into two (or more) pure forms, that is constitutive of the hybrid order in Sierra Leone. And while the authority wielded by paramount and lesser chiefs in rural Sierra Leone played an important part in creating the animosities that led to civil war in 1991, they were able to reestablish themselves after the conflict in positions similar to those they held before the war precisely because of the historically generated hybrid order that constitutes chiefly authority.

Analyses that emerged in the early 2000s as well as reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established in the aftermath of the war centered on the role of “custom” as an instrument of oppression. As Sesay and Hughes state, “Customary rule, in varying degrees, was simply a dictatorship of rural gerontocrats. . . . Forced labour, arbitrary fines, banishments, and discrimination against women and young people were part of everyday life” (2005:55; see also Sawyer Reference Sawyer2008). Krijn Peters, who conducted extensive fieldwork among former combatants, concluded that “traditional gerontocratic and patriarchal principles were despised” (2006:71). According to both Peters and Paul Richards, the motivation of the RUF was grievance rather than greed: the demands of the “chieftaincy [as well as those of] ‘customary’ courts and traditional bride service” bore down unfairly upon impoverished youth, who could not control the fruits of their own labor because of chiefly levies and arbitrary fines (Richards Reference Richards2005:580). Richards remarks that the civil war is thus best understood as an ongoing rural “class” conflict, a revolt of former slaves and subordinate classes against customary authority.

Kono District was a stronghold of the RUF from 1996 to 2001 (see Peters Reference Peters2006). From the beginning of the war, most paramount and lesser chiefs were either killed or fled into exile in Guinea and Freetown. The RUF replaced the chiefdom authorities with their own leaders, so-called “caretaker chiefs,” thus replicating the system of paramount and lesser chiefs that they had opposed. To the RUF, pre-war chiefs symbolized a land-owning elite that, like the central government, was corrupt and unaccountable and therefore a legitimate target. Benjamin Kamara, who originated from Kailahun District, worked in Kono for the United Nations in the late 1990s, and in 2009 was running a hotel in Koidu, told me that “everybody that was in authority had to run away. Otherwise they [the RUF] will see you as an element of the old regime that destroyed the land” (interview, Koidu, 2009). Gborie had fled to Freetown and in Peyima a “caretaker chief” was selected among the remaining villagers. While this person was not a fighter himself, he was chosen by the RUF because of his knowledge of the town and surrounding areas, including where diamond deposits might be found. He was beaten by the RUF and then given the choice of being killed or taking on the caretaker position. The residents of Peyima understood that his service was involuntary, and he remained a central elder in town.

When the war ended, the Government of Sierra Leone, with support from the United Kingdom, reestablished the administrative system of paramount chiefs through the 2000–2002 Chiefdom Governance Reform Programme (Albrecht Reference Albrecht2005). Some observers considered this reconstitution of the chiefly system to be a re-creation of the conditions that had led to war in the first place—that is, allowing a rural elite to recapture a position from which to use local resources and tax the local population for personal enrichment (Jackson Reference Jackson2005; Sawyer Reference Sawyer2008). At the same time, consultations carried out by the NGO Conciliation Resources (CR) just prior to the official end of the conflict reported that “chiefs have a vital role to play in restoring stability; there is no other institution capable of replacing them at this stage in the Sierra Leone polity” (CR 2000). In a number of speeches delivered in 2003 to newly elected paramount chiefs in Kenema, Bo, Makeni, and Port Loko, President Ahmad Kabbah admitted that “breakdown in traditional order” had occurred (quoted in Fanthorpe Reference Fanthorpe2005), but the Government of Sierra Leone pledged to restore dignity to the chiefdoms of the country. Benjamin Kamara’s explanation of the situation summarized well how this was possible. In a discussion about the current importance of paramount and lesser chiefs and why they had been able to recapture a position of power after the war, he talked about “tradition,” a source of authority that is different from, and therefore cannot be reduced to, references to the state.

Thus, despite the role of the chiefs in the grievances that fueled the war, and despite the RUF’s animosity toward them during the war, paramount and lesser chiefs were able to reconstitute themselves as local leaders in rural Sierra Leone after the war. As Rosalind Shaw said in regard to the TRC and the politics of memory in Sierra Leone, “healing and reconciliation,” generally speaking, “depend on forgetting rather than truth-telling” (2007:184). Chiefs benefited from a genuine urge to “forgive and forget” (Shaw Reference Shaw2007:184), and as Fanthorpe (2005:45) concluded in 2006, “Many continue to find chiefs preferable to elected politicians and bureaucrats because, according to their calculations, chiefs are predisposed to defend the customary property and citizenship regimes that establish their own authority.”