Identities: Sierra Leone and the Gambia

The British tried but failed to construct martial races in Sierra Leone and the Gambia. While robust and well-known martial identities and reputations emerged in colonial Nigeria and the Gold Coast, British officers in the two smaller West African territories struggled to find communities on which to impose similar designations. Despite a history of intense precolonial war-fare in the area, and after many colonial experiments and changing opinions about military recruiting, British authorities labeled all Sierra Leonean and Gambian men as lacking the inherent qualities needed to make good soldiers. At the same time, the need for military personnel to provide internal security in these territories and to fight wars in other places meant that the British still recruited many Sierra Leoneans and Gambians into the colonial army. During the Second World War, British officers in Sierra Leone and the Gambia admitted that colonial martial race theory represented a fantasy. Before colonial conquest, powerful military identities existed within the societies of both Sierra Leone and the Gambia. During the nineteenth century, Sierra Leone and the Gambia, where the British had already established the respective coastal enclaves of Freetown and Bathurst (Banjul), experienced intensive warfare. Central to the fighting of these wars were growing mercenary bands composed of armed young men, popularly called “war boys,” from various ethnic groups who wore magical amulets believed to protect them from bullets and received a share of loot from their cam-paigns. War boys fought with guns and swords, specialized in ambushes and raiding in the bush environment, and built defended stockades. In Sierra Leone, local powers fought a series of “trade wars” over control of commerce with the coast and in the Gambia, traditionalist communities and Jihadist Muslims waged war on each other. In the 1890s, during the so-called Scramble for Africa, the British pushed into the hinterland of both territories in a race with the French to secure the region. In Sierra Leone, in 1890, the British created the locally recruited Frontier Police that gradually extended colonial authority over the interior with the proclamation of a protectorate in 1896. However, in 1898, a widespread rebellion by both Mende and Temne peoples, the largest ethnic groups in the territory, against British rule broke out in Sierra Leone given oppression by the Frontier Police, abolition of the local slave trade, erosion of chiefly power, and in particular the imposition of colonial taxation.

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