Liberia and Sierra Leone: An Essay in Comparative Politics (African Studies)

165 Pages·2009·4.95 MB·English

by  Christopher Clapham

AFRICAN STUDIES SERIES
Editorial board
JOHN DUNN, Lecturer in Political Science and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge
DAVID M.G. NEWBERY, Lecturer in Economics and Fellow of Churchill College,
Cambridge
J.M. LONSDALE, Assistant Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge
A.F. ROBERTSON, Director of the African Studies Centre and Fellow of Darwin
College, Cambridge
The African Studies Series is a collection of monographs and general studies which
reflect the interdisciplinary interests of the African Studies Centre at Cambridge.
Volumes to date have combined historical, anthropological, economic, political and
other perspectives. Each contribution has assumed that such broad approaches can
contribute much to our understanding of Africa, and that this may in turn be of
advantage to specific disciplines.
LIBERIA AND SIERRA LEONE
An Essay in Comparative Politics
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2 Studies in Rural Capitalism in West Africa - POLLY HILL
3 Land Policy in Buganda - HENRY W. WEST
4 The Nigerian Military: A Sociological Analysis of Authority and
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6 Labour in the South African Gold Mines - FRANCIS WILSON
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8 Subsistence to Commercial Farming in Present Day Buganda: An Econ-
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11 Islam and Tribal Art in West Africa - RENE A. BRAVMANN
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14 Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel -
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18 Muslim Brotherhoods in Nineteenth Century Africa - B.S. MARTIN
19 Warfare in the So koto Caliphate: Historical and Sociological Perspectives
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20 Liberia and Sierra Leone: An Essay in Comparative Politics —
CHRISTOPHER CLAPHAM
LIBERIA AND
SIERRA LEONE
AN ESSAY IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS
CHRISTOPHER CLAPHAM
Senior Lecturer in Politics
University of Lancaster
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE
LONDON • NEW YORK • MELBOURNE
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www. Cambridge. org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521210959
© Cambridge University Press 1976
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1976
This digitally printed version 2008
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Clapham, Christopher S.
Liberia and Sierra Leone
(African studies series ; 20)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Liberia - Politics and government. 2. Sierra Leone - Politics and government.
3. Political sociology. I. Title. II. Series.
JO3929.A15C58 301.5'92'09664 75-32447
ISBN 978-0-521-21095-9 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-09980-6 paperback
To the memory of Anthony Clapham
1910-1973
CONTENTS
List of maps, tables and figures vi
Preface vii
1 Political Comparison 1
2 Historical Summary 6
3 Resources 17
4 Rules 33
5 Political Allocation at the Centre 46
6 Centre and Periphery 71
7 Aspects of Political Economy 100
8 Concluding Review 120
Statistical Appendix 130
Area and Population 130
Economic Indices 132
Bibliographical Note 136
Notes 138
Index 149
MAPS, TABLES AND FIGURES
Maps
A Liberia and Sierra Leone in West Africa viii
B Liberia and Sierra Leone: Administrative Boundaries 22
C Liberia and Sierra Leone: Principal Tribal Groups 23
Tables
1 Cabinet Ministers, by Province/County, Ethnic Group, Education, Age 48
2 Members of the Legislature 50
3 Senior Central Government Officials 51
4 Officially Recognised Payments to Paramount Chiefs 79
5 Senior Provincial Government Officials 92
Figures
1 The Formal Hierarchy of Local Administration 72
2 Producer Prices for Cocoa, 1966-74 116
3 Producer Prices for Coffee, 1966-74 116
4 Producer Prices for Palm Kernels, 1966-74 117
VI
PREFACE
This study has been in my mind since I paid a first visit to Sierra Leone and
Liberia in 1969, and was struck by the possibilities which they offered for politi-
cal comparison. I should like to thank the Department of Government at
Manchester for making that visit possible, the Department of Politics at
Lancaster for giving me leave of absence for a longer visit in 1973, and the Social
Science Research Council, London, for meeting travelling expenses for both. I
have benefited greatly from discussions with colleagues and friends at both
Manchester and Lancaster, at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, at the University
of Liberia in Monrovia, and at Cuttington College, Gbarnga, Liberia; seminar dis-
cussions at Oxford, London, Edinburgh, and the University of the West Indies,
Jamaica, have also been most helpful. Dennis Austin, Bill Tordoff, Caroline
Tutton, and CUP's anonymous reader made very useful comments on the draft.
I greatly appreciate the amount of help which I received from many Liberians
and Sierra Leoneans: Ministers, Representatives, Paramount Chiefs, government
officials, village schoolmasters, journalists and many more. I can remember none
who were not friendly and courteous, and few who did not go out of their way
to provide me with information and enlightenment. I should also like to record
my debt to that neglected band of scholars, the writers of unpublished theses,
and in particular to Walter Barrows for his work on Kenema, Victor Minikin for
that on Kono, and Martin Lowenkopf for that on Liberian central politics; these
and other obligations are more fully recorded in the notes. Finally, I wish to
thank Lyn Hunter for typing successive drafts of the manuscript.
Lancaster C.S.C.
June 1975
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Map A. Liberia and Sierra Leone in West Africa.
CHAPTER 1
POLITICAL COMPARISON
Political comparison is an activity more preached than practised. Despite the
centrality of comparison to the study of politics, despite the number of com-
parative frameworks which various authors have produced, and despite the
amount of material on individual political systems which is now available, the
number of studies which compare in any detail the ways in which politics works
in two or more polities remains astonishingly small.1 Yet if political comparison
is to improve our understanding of the particular, rather than merely piling up
generalisations, this is precisely the kind of task which it should be able to
undertake. This is what the present study tries to do, in comparing the politics
of two neighbouring West African states, Liberia and Sierra Leone. I hope to be
able to show how (and, in a limited way, to explain why) some aspects of poli-
tics are very similar in the two countries, whereas others are notably different.
More especially, I am concerned with the relationship in each country between
political activities directed towards controlling the coercive and distributive ap-
paratus of the state, and the social and economic features of the society on
which that state is built. This relationship in turn has implications for many
critical issues in the politics of underdeveloped countries — the colonial legacy,
control of the economy, regime stability and institutionalisation, the role of
elites — though in an essay such as this, such implications can only be sketched
in a highly tentative manner.
There is a lot to be said for comparing entities which are fairly similar to one
another. It is perfectly possible to compare an elephant and a bedbug, and any
discoverable similarities between the two will tell you a certain amount about
the properties common to living organisms. They are unlikely, though, to tell
you anything very interesting about elephants or bedbugs which you did not
already know from looking at these creatures on their own. Much the same con-
sequences are likely to follow from comparing, say, the politics of the USSR
with those of a Bergdama band.2 But Liberia and Sierra Leone have already so
much in common that it is plausible to suppose that the experiences of each may
help to illuminate the other. They share the peculiar legacy of Creoledom, and
the late nineteenth-century expansion from the coastal settlements into a hinter-
land itself divided between numerous ethnic groups; they have analogous admin-
istrative hierarchies, and distributions of educational and professional skills; and
they have similar economies, based principally on the export of primary ma-
terials — especially minerals — by foreign-managed corporations, and only relying