Kenneth Little - The Mende of Sierra Leone

THE MENDE OF SIERRA LEONE

Founded by KARL MANNHEIM

THE SOCIOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT
In 18 Volumes

West African People in Transition

by

KENNETH LITTLE

First published in 1951
by Routledge

Reprinted in 1998, 2000, 2002
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
or
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

First issued in paperback 2010

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

1967 Kenneth Little

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders of the works reprinted in The International Library of Sociology. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies we have been unable to trace.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Mende of Sierra Leone
ISBN 978-0-415-17575-3 (hbk)
ISBN 978-0-415-60550-2 (pbk)

The Sociology of Development: 18 Volumes
ISBN 978-0-415-17822-8

The International Library of Sociology: 274 Volumes
ISBN 978-0-415-17838-9

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

PREFACE

By Raymond Firth

P EOPLE in Britain know very little about people in West Africa. Yet now that one West African colony, the Gold Coast, is well set on the road to self-government and others may follow, it behoves the outside world to pay more attention to what manner of men they are who live there. This book about the Mende helps to fill a need. For, backward as Sierra Leone may have been since the philanthropic impulses which established Freetown as a home for liberated slaves in the early nineteenth century spent themselves, its people are sharing in the social and political awakening of West Africa. The Mende of the Sierra Leone Protectorate are a numerous and proud people, likely to make themselves felt with increasing force in the affairs of the region. The fact, too, that they share a common culture with their neighbours across the Liberian border may come to be of significance if their group consciousness should take the form of a political nationalism.

This book does not really need a preface. Dr. Little is no novice who has to have an introduction to his public. Already he is the Head of a University Department of Anthropology, and is widely known as the author of an important and authoritative work, Negroes in Britain, based largely on his own field study of the coloured community in Cardiff nearly ten years ago. He has asked me to write these few opening words here, I take it, mainly as a gesture of friendshipespecially recalling, perhaps, that for a few days I shared with him his field experiences in the heart of Mendeland. There I was witness to his amicable relations with the people, to his wide knowledge of their affairs, and to the enthusiasm and care with which he was collecting his data. Under his guidance I visited chiefs compounds, mosques, mission schools, administrators offices and traders stores. I saw African soap being made from palm oil and wood ash, and marvelled at the virtues of cleansing clothes and giving smoothness to the skin said to be possessed by the resulting black round balls. Doubtless a psychoanalyst could explain how soap even in this guise can stimulate lyrical advertisement ! He also showed me men weaving on the narrow loom, making strips of cotton fabric no more than six inches wide, and helped me to bargain for some of the Mende country cloth. I took down samples of the curious Vai script, and tested its value for communication. I was taken inside Mende households, and was shown from the outside a round Njayei cult building, with its speckling of red and blue dots on a white wall. As we went round together on foot and by motor-lorry on this ethnographic Cooks tour, I was given a glimpse beneath the surface into current social and economic problems: attempts to prevent soil erosion in upland agriculture; improvement of methods of tax collection; the burden of peasant indebtedness to the Syrian trader; rle of girls initiation rites; promotion of Mende literacy; relations between Muslim, Christian and Pagan; efficiency of administration in the chiefdoms. But in particular I could appreciate the magnitude and complexity of the field task that Dr. Little had set himself, and the success with which he was grappling with it.

Dr. Little had his headquarters for much of the time at Bo, the principal town of the Mende country. When Mr. Graham Greene set off for Liberia on his Journey without Maps, he stopped a night at Bo. In his account, he says he was happy there, despite the usual tough dry tasteless chicken of the rest-house, the lack of medical equipment and of any mosquito rods for his bed, the presence of a large cockroach in the bathroom, and of a native standing and complaining about something outside all night with folded hands. In similar circumstances, an anthropologist would have taken less notice of the cockroach and more of the native. But Mr. Greene was happy because he had at last left behind something he distrustedthe Protectorate was different from the Colony of Sierra Leone, he felt; he was with the real African at last.