Removing the blinders and adjusting the view: a case study from early colonial Sierra Leone

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Periodical article

Title:	Removing the blinders and adjusting the view: a case study from early colonial Sierra Leone
Author:	Magaziner, Daniel R.
Year:	2007
Periodical:	History in Africa
Volume:	34
Pages:	169-188
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Sierra Leone
Subjects:	colonial conquest Mende rebellions 1898 historiography
External link:	http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/history_in_africa/v034/34.1magaziner.pdf
Abstract:	In 1898, Great Britain fought a war of conquest in the West African interior. Mende had risen without warning on 27 April and struck across a wide area. The rising's targets and breadth evinced efforts to remove any and all 'English' elements from the region, but the British hit back hard, and by the following fall, they had subdued, by force of arms, the entire territory of the future State of Sierra Leone. During the few months of their rising, Mende fought to preserve a political, economic and social system that European power was effectively challenging for the first time. Interested parties arguing over Britain's appropriate role in West Africa seized the story and twisted it to fit their competing narratives. This essay unpacks the politics and debates that have conditioned accounts of the Mende rising to suggest a broader historiographical point about the possibility of recovering these alternative histories. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]