The Emergence of the Mende
The Mende, Sierra Leone’s largest population group at Independence in the 1961, did not make an appearance as such until after the end of the eighteenth century. Some have suggested that they were a product of the Mani invasions, a result of amalgamations of Mani and local peoples. One historian, P.E.H.Hair, argued that linguistic evidence and fragmentary manuscripts of early writers indicate that the ancestors of the Mende were in place but were known by other names. Like other Mande-speaking peoples, however, their ultimate point of origin probably was the middle Niger region.
Whatever their real origin, when the people identified as Mende began to advance into the regions near the coast in the early nineteenth century — thus coming into contact with European observers and their allies — they had no unifying structure. Some came as peaceful family groups, others as small war parties. In many cases they apparently gained control of an area simply by gradually outnumbering the earlier inhabitants. The major reason for the speed of their movement was the chaotic nature of the society in the region after more than two centuries of nearly constant warfare, the results of the earlier Mani invasions and the slave trade.
The Mende found ready acceptance as hired warriors for the belea- guered chiefs and kings among the Bullom and their inland neighbors. Thus they came to form a warrior caste among the other groups. Because the basis of the dominant Mani political order was the personal military power of the ruler, the Mende eventually controlled and absorbed much of the existing society, at least beyond the coastal districts.
Settlement defenses are known as ‘tatana’ in the north and ‘gwehsia’ in the Mende-speaking south. While many oral traditions survive regarding these ‘war towns’ and the warriors who occupied them, very little work has been done to examine the trace of these features in the landscape, which consist of often substantial earthworks and rows of large cotton trees that have grown from palisades.
One of the most interesting features of the cultural landscape of Sierra Leone is the very large number of settlements which still bear the marks of the long period of anarchy which preceded the colonial era. This is reflected both in the choice of sites and in the internal structures of settlements. Such influences are still to be found despite the impermanence of mud and wattle building. There are probably more than a thousand defensive villages in the country, an average of one for every twenty-eight square miles, and reaching a maximum density of one for every four square miles in parts of Mendeland in the south. Most of them have populations of between two hundred and a thousand inhabitants.
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