Political Parties - Pre-Independence
Spurred by the expressed desire of the new Labour Party government in London to move toward the establishment of self-governing colonies, in October 1947 Governor Hubert Stevenson submitted a set of recommendations to the Colonial Office for changes that would give considerable power and an unofficial majority to the Legislative Council. The proposals became the first major political issue debated in the country as a whole. The three politically active forces — the Creoles, the chiefs, and the educated Protectorate minority — sought to gain what they felt to be their share of the political power the new legislative seats would provide. Stevenson had proposed that the legislature be composed of fourteen Sierra Leonean members. Four of these were to be elected from the Colony. The other ten were to be chosen by the Protectorate Assembly. Such a division would clearly place most of the power in the hands of the traditional chiefs through their domination of the assembly.
Although the Protectorate intellectuals would be disadvantaged by this, the major objections to the plan came from the Creoles, who made quite clear their objection to being ruled by what they regarded as less advanced people and accused them of being foreigners attempting to steal the Creoles’ country. The manner and tone in which the issues were raised by the volatile Creole press was to em- bitter relations between the Protectorate and the Colony for a long time. This helped the two Protectorate groups to gloss over their own differences and to combine their political forces.
The result was the formation of a two-way division as political parties were formed. The major Creole group was the National Council of the Colony of Sierra Leone (NCSL). In the Protectorate the SOS, led by the educated minority, aligned itself with the chiefs to form the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) under the leadership of Margai.
The intellectuals served as leaders of the party, the chiefs preferring to stay in the background as long as educated men supported them in issues that affected their interests. Little attention was paid to the common people in the Protectorate — it was presumed that they would vote as their chiefs told them. The workers in Freetown, largely Temne, were the only commoners who had any clear political interests of their own. In the face of the Creoles' provocative language and tone, they too aligned with the SLPP.
Despite the great and continuing Creole outcry the government finally adopted a constitution in 1951. The new Legislative Council consisted of thirty members: seven officials, that is, men appointed by the governor as heads of departments; seven people popularly elected in the Colony; and fourteen people chosen by the Protectorate Assembly and the district councils, two from the assembly and one from each council. Another two seats were reserved for members appointed to represent business interests. The governor’s Executive Council was to have four official members in addition to the governor and at least four other members drawn from the ranks of the legislature. The constitution provided that these men could eventually be appointed to head government departments.
The SLPP won a clear victory. It took two of the seats in the Colony as well as both seats decided by the assembly. In addition eleven of the twelve legislators chosen by the district councils were SLPP supporters; a majority of the eleven were chiefs. This gave the SLPP a majority of fifteen seats to the six held by the NCSL’s supporters.
The governor then appointed Margai, SLPP’s leader, to sit on the Executive Council and allowed him to select five others to sit with him. His choices represented a deliberate balance of regional and ethnic interests. Among those he selected were his half brother, Albert Margai, and Siaka Stevens. In April 1953 Milton Margai was given the title of chief minister, and his associates became the first heads of ministries.
The Creole NCSL remained unreconciled to Protectorate domination. In July 1952 it went so far as to request formally that the Colony be granted its independence alone. The request was promptly denied. This effort was perhaps the last burst of a separate Creole nationalism. In the next election the NCSL was resoundingly defeated by large majorities in every district, having lost out to more moderate interests.
As the SLPP solidified its hold and took responsibility for government, it began to be attacked from a different direction. The fourth element in Sierra Leone’s society, the Protectorate commoners, had begun to realize that their interests and those of their chiefs did not coincide. Their needs were consistently ignored by the SLPP. They reacted with widespread rioting in 1955 and 1956, which began in Freetown among those recently arrived from the Protectorate. The riots were followed by strikes by the Freetown labor unions. Next much of the northern countryside erupted in a lengthy series of riots against the excesses of the chiefs, who were accused of corrupt practices and unfair application of the tax laws. In the city the SLPP was blamed for allowing prices to rise rapidly while wages remained frozen; in the countryside the SLPP was held responsible for the rioting over taxes, because it had been the central government, not the chiefs, who had decided to raise the burden. Some major leaders within the SLPP, notably Stevens but also Albert Margai, spoke out against the party’s policies, including its very close ties with the chiefs, and strove to bring about changes.
In 1956 some of the younger SLPP leaders joined with the more flexible members of the Creole community and representatives of the dissatisfied Protectorate elements to form the United Progressive Party (UPP). Although the party did not have the ability to create a national organization and suffered from accusations in the Protectorate that it was a Creole front, it had some successes in the 1957 elections to the newly expanded legislature.
Great Britain had abolished the Protectorate Assembly and had agreed to an expansion of the size and authority of the Legislative Council. The new council was to have fifty-one elected members. In addition an impartial speaker was to be selected by the members, and the governor could name four officials and two people not employed in the government as members. The elected members were to include fourteen popularly elected from the Colony and twelve paramount chiefs, one from each district council. The rest were to be elected by the Protectorate citizens.
The recently formed UPP managed to win five seats, and an allied party took one. The SLPP, however, swept the other seats, including eleven of those in the Colony. All of the paramount chiefs elected again aligned themselves with the SLPP. The link between the party and the chiefs was further strengthened by the fact that, although the great majority of the Protectorate’s popularly elected members were educated, at least half of them were members of chiefly families.
Shortly after the elections, however, major splits appeared in the SLPP, or rather in the ranks of its executive and among its legislators, since little in the way of a party organization existed and mobilization of the electorate outside the urban centers was left to the traditional chiefs. Those leaving the party included Albert Margai and Stevens, who formed the People’s National Party (PNP), which had younger and more westernized leaders than the SLPP. The UPP also continued to exist, but it had become simply an ineffective parliamentary group. The PNP was therefore able to attract portions of the UPP's former supporters, including some of the Creoles. It was, however, a party dominated by Mende and close to the chiefs. Stevens was the most important non-Mende leader. He was of Limba and mixed origin and became generally known as the leader of the Temne commoners. Divisions along regional ethnic lines were important among the chiefs and their supporters in the PNP and elsewhere, hut the division between chief and commoner was becoming more acute in the north. The developing interests of the northern commoners had no spokesman in the SLPP, and Stevens was their only spokesman in the PNP.
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