Sierra Leone - Early Political Parties
The historically given differences between the Colony and the Protectorate continued to prevail until after World War II. It was only slowly and spasmodically that, in anticipation of independence, the Creoles and the colonial government began to adapt to the likelihood that the Colony and the Protectorate would have to be integrated politically. The Creoles, with their very substantial lead in education, government experience, and wealth, had great difficulty in acknowledging their minority status (under 2 percent of the population) and in accepting a limited political role.
Despite these changes the disparities in modes of life and in law between the Creoles of the Western Area and the peoples of the provinces persisted in the mid-1970s. Moreover the Creoles had by no means relinquished their important role in the professions and in the civil service.
Of the eighteen ethnic groups distinguished in census reports and other sources, the Mende and Temne, nearly equal in number, constituted more than 60 percent of the population. The Limba came to less than 9 percent; the rest were much smaller. None of the seventeen indigenous groups (often called tribes in official documents) had been characterized in precolonial times or later by well-organized, large-scale polities encompassing the whole or even large portions of any ethnic group, although some chiefdoms may have assumed a short-lived hegemony over others in the same or a different ethnic group.
In some ethnic groups secret societies, although locally organized, provided a bond and a mode of politically significant communication across chiefdom and sometimes across ethnic boundaries. In the mid-1970s these societies were still of considerable importance in local politics and on the national scene, but in modern as in earlier times they played a conservative role.
Beginning in the early 1950s, as Sierra Leone moved toward a degree of self-rule and ultimately independence, the indigenous peoples, seeking access to power and its rewards, began to challenge the political primacy of the Creoles. The organizational expression of this challenge was the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP). Although the SLPP had some support in its early days from Sierra Leoneans of varied indigenous ethnic backgrounds, the Mende provided the core of its leaders and followers.
It was never a mass party, relying instead on an alliance between a small number of well-educated leaders on the one hand and Mende chiefs, essentially traditional in mode of selection and orientation, on the other. In the absence of strong, organized opposition from other parties, the SLPP came to power in 1951 and managed to stay in power through independence (in 1961) until 1967. Little by little, however, it had lost whatever non-Mende support it had. In any case at no time did the SLPP obtain an absolute majority of the votes in an election.
The challenge to SLPP (and Mende) control came from the All People's Congress (APC) led by Siaka Stevens, a trade union leader and former member of the SLPP. Stevens was a member of a small northern ethnic group, the Limba, but the APC relied heavily for its support on the Temne, a people occupying much of the northwestern quadrant of the country. Initially at least, the APC also drew support from the small segment of the Sierra Leonean population consisting of urban dwellers, whatever their ethnic origin, who considered the SLPP excessively conservative. The Creoles, although not enamored of the SLPP, were reluctant to jeopardize their positions in the civil service by overt opposition to the ruling party, but Stevens had ties with many of them and gained their support in time.
The APC’s link with the Temne differed from that of the SLPP with the Mende. The SLPP had relied upon a community of interests with the chiefs, who with the Poro, the men’s secret society, were expect- ed to control ordinary Mende for elections and other purposes. In the Temne case substantial numbers of commoners had been alienated from the chiefs, who, responsible to the colonial authorities rather than to their own people, had tended to aggrandize themselves and to insist upon prerogatives that had not been traditionally theirs. At least in the period before it came to power, the APC sought and gained the support of these commoners.
But the APC's victory at the polls in March 1967 (despite SLPP rigging and intimidation) did not immediately give the party the fruits of power. The army under Brigadier David Lansana, a Mende, took over in the first in a series of coups, countercoups, and alleged threats of coups that were to mark Sierra Leonean politics for several years and were still perceived as possibilities in the 1970s. In any case the junta (the self-styled National Reformation Council — NRC) that took over from Lansana was overthrown in a countercoup by noncommissioned officers and others, and Stevens came to power as prime minister in mid-1%8. He remained in power (as president after the establishment of the republic in 1971.
The military, or segments of it, played a role in politics despite its small size — 1,500 in the mid-1960s, a little more than 2,000 by the mid-1970s. In part it was able to play so decisive — if temporary or sporadic — a role because ordinary political groups had neither mass bases nor well-constructed national organizations. In part it could do so because it represented or was allied with factions of existing political groups. At no point, despite some of the rhetoric of the NRC, did the army present itself as, or represent, a putatively detached protector of the public weal.
By the mid-1970s Stevens had been in power for seven years, and the APC had become the only significant political party in Sierra Leone, although a single-party state had not been formally instituted and the SLPP continued to exist. The SLPP had sought to contest by-elections (in 1972, for example) and the general election of 1973, but the obstacles put in its way by officials controlled by the APC and intimidation by APC party members and the militia had discouraged the SLPP to the point that it finally boycotted the 1973 election.
Given its position as the ruling party, the APC had attracted a diverse membership and had under its umbrella a varied lot of politically ambitious persons. At the same time, however, it had alienated some of its leading figures and a number of its followers. Some of these left the APC in the early 1970s and attempted to form another party, but it was soon outlawed after a spate of violence and its leaders jailed. Perhaps more important in the long run was the fact that the APC had accommodated itself to chieftainship and that Stevens made an effort to gain the support of the Mende, a process that put off many earlier APC members and others who had looked forward to significant changes in the local sociopolitical structure.
After the 1973 elections Sierra Leone’s House of Representatives (its unicameral legislature) consisted of 100 seats — ninety-nine of them filled by APC members, the other vacant. In the circumstances of single-party dominance such political conflicts as there were took place within the party. Given the lack of close analysis of the Sierra Leonean political situation in the 1970s, it was, however, difficult to discern the nature of these conflicts or the directions they took.
In the early 1970s a number of dissenters formed the ephemeral National Democratic Party (NPD), which later merged into the United Democratic Party (UDP); the leaders claimed to object to Stevens' alleged assumption of dictatorial powers and his lack of leadership. Some also argued that the APC had become too friendly to communist states. Stevens countered that the UDP was financed by foreign interests opposed to his proposal to take over a major interest in foreign-owned companies. Despite this stress on policy matters the UDP did not attempt to gain universal support through an ideological appeal but concentrated on gaining the support of the Temne, who had been the major source of the APC's strength. The UDP leaders were clearly not left-oriented radicals, but beyond this negative assessment it is not possible to say exactly what they were.
By the mid-1970s some observers distinguished between a more conservative and a less conservative wing of the party, a distinction corresponding more or less to age, but there was no indication of important substantive differences between the wings. The president himself was over seventy years of age, but he was not necessarily aligned with the elders of the party. Radicals, within or outside the party, appeared to be few in number.
Sierra Leonean political leaders, whatever their party, were not given to strong ideological positions. For that matter they rarely offered clear policy statements coupled with reasoned pragmatism. Instead they responded to intermittent pressures from various elements in the society, usually but not always ethnically defined, or to multilateral lending agencies when the latter have urged development-oriented reforms or have required restraints on expansionary spending as assurance that loans would be repaid. The willingness to accept aid from communist states, begun under the SLPP regime and continued under the APC, was a consequence of attempts to cope with immediate economic problems rather than an ideologically motivated act.
Perhaps the clearest indication of the often haphazard approach of Sierra Leonean governments to policy matters can be seen in their handling of the country's economic situation and problems. Before Siaka Stevens took power in April 1968, an organized approach to a specific issue or set of issues was only occasionally and reluctantly undertaken under pressure from international lending agencies. In 1969 the APC government did enunciate a set of economic policies, but systematic inplementation of those policies was delayed until 1973 and 1974 (when the 1975-79 development plan was published). The delay was in part a consequence of the requirements of international lending agencies for careful project preparation, a process that the government took some time to effect. Perhaps as important was the government's inability effectively and consistently to curb its current consumption expenditure to provide more resources for development.
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