By Chernoh Alpha M. Bah
Five Sierra Leoneans have received doctorate degrees from Northwestern University since the mid-1960s. They include Enid Forde (1966, Geography), Josephus Olufemi Richards (1970, Art History), Gladys Harding (1971, Education), Augustine Stevens (1975, Political Science) and Cecil Magbaily Fyle (1976, History). I am the sixth doctoral graduate and the second historian to join this list. It has been 47 years since Professor Fyle, the only Sierra Leonean historian trained at Northwestern, completed his doctoral studies in Evanston. It has been an honor to count myself among these Sierra Leoneans who have been here before me. The half century between Professor Fyle’s time at Northwestern and my own is enough to illustrate the dire state of the history profession in Sierra Leone.
When I enrolled at Northwestern for a PhD in African history in 2017, it had been nearly a decade since the last Sierra Leonean had earned a PhD in history from any institution. The History Department at Fourah Bay College (FBC), where I received my undergraduate degree, had only one full-time faculty member with a PhD in history when I was there. By January of 2016, FBC’s leaders deliberately dismissed the only full-time tenured historian from the university, stripping the history department of its only historian. In other words, when I enrolled at Northwestern, the University of Sierra Leone had no full-time historian among all its faculty.
In some ways, the crisis of the history department also illustrates the general crisis bedeviling higher education in Sierra Leone at least since the 1970s when the country transitioned to a one-party dictatorship. Ethnic politics and entrenched central government control of the university system has affected academic freedom and knowledge production in the country. Hostile and oppressive conditions of service – including low wages and lack of research funding – also forced many of the country’s academics to abandon teaching and research in pursuit of political appointments and state-funded consultancies. The absence of trained faculty to staff many of the departments in the university has remained a perennial crisis of higher education for years now. So serious was the situation that The Economist highlighted on 8th April 2016 that FBC had only 7 academics at the rank of professor for a student population of about 8,000.
Today, FBC’s history department is staffed by historians who have either retired from teaching overseas and have gone home to teach at FBC, or those who have reached or are approaching the university’s age of retirement. Worse, the history department has not endeavored to build any serious graduate program to curate a succeeding generation of historians, even though many of the country’s historians, including those who have now retired from teaching overseas, recognize the existing vacuum in their profession.
The problem itself is not just at the level of the university. A few years ago, Professor Magbaily Fyle himself lamented the deliberate alterations in the basic education curriculum over the last 20 years that systematically and purposefully eliminated the teaching of history and geography at junior secondary school levels in Sierra Leone. With social studies as the replacement for history and geography, educational authorities created a curriculum that ensured many students from Sierra Leonean schools end up in higher education with little knowledge of the history and geography of their own country.
But besides this uncertain future that faces the production of a new generation of historians, there is also controversy among the country’s few historians regarding their research choices and the kinds of questions they have pursued in their scholarship since the 1960s. Much of the scholarship, and what Sierra Leonean historians have debated, has not gone beyond the ideas surrounding the “Province of Freedom,” and their own scholarly preoccupation with the agenda to populate the national ethnic register with the histories of their various ethnic groups. And beyond this epistemological limitation, the current generation of Sierra Leonean historians must also answer the question as to why they have so far failed to identify, train, and mentor a succeeding generation of historians to successfully replace them, especially now that many of them have approached the twilights of their own careers?
The failure to create social conditions that support uninterrupted generational succession and ensure continuity and institutional progress is a major part of the crisis of national development that Sierra Leone faces today in all aspects of national life: from party politics to business and the academic and professional disciplines.
It is in this context, and in response to such a dire situation, that I decided to pursue a PhD in African history at Northwestern: to receive the required training and return home to help build a strong history department for future generations. The ambitious task of filling this intellectual vacuum, and the enterprise to build an academic history department within Sierra Leone’s higher education system requires a new intellectual culture; one that includes raising novel historical questions and inaugurating a research agenda that goes beyond the familiar boundaries that conditioned how scholarship on Sierra Leone’s past, and how history writing in particular, has been carried out in the last 60 years. Addressing the problems of higher education in Sierra Leone suggests more than just closing a gap in the discipline of history, but it calls for knowledge production that crosses disciplinary boundaries, including literature, language studies, the classics, communication, and the social and experimental sciences. It requires a proper re-examination of the actual role and place of the university in society, and the responsibility of intellectuals to nation building and development.
In the last six years, while at Northwestern, I pursued a research project that reconstructs three intersecting histories. First, my work explores how officials of the Alfred Jones Research Laboratory – established by British medical researchers as Sierra Leone’s first tropical medical lab – came to conceive of “hard labor” as constitutive of good health for prisoners. Second, it considers how the prison itself became a unit of economic production in its own right within colonial Sierra Leone. Third, it examines the connections between prison labor and official public health and economic development projects between the First and the Second World Wars. It shows how tropical medical research served to accelerate and rationalize the use of convict labor to resolve the problems of colonial finance.
Thus, my work spotlights the role played by medical researchers and prisoners in the economic development history of Sierra Leone. It is a deliberate departure from the familiar ethnic histories that previously preoccupied most Sierra Leonean historians. In the Sierra Leone context, my work addresses an existing gap in the country’s historiography: the absence of convicts, their health, and their labor in the current scholarship on the labor and medical history of Sierra Leone. It is a challenge to document the presence of an ignored subaltern group into the historical record of Sierra Leone. Convicts represented – and they still represent – a historically marginalized and oppressed underclass whose contributions to histories of development have not been fully accounted for in much of the scholarship on African labor and economic history.
In Sierra Leone, the three extant studies on labor history, for instance, do not deal with issues of convict labor or their relationship to health or colonial economic development projects. For example, Hugh Conway’s work only addressed the setting up of an industrial relations machinery in Sierra Leone after 1945, while David Fashole Luke only focused on dockworkers in post-colonial Sierra Leone. Ibrahim Abdullah’s work, the first study on the development of a working class in colonial Sierra Leone, also does not address the question of convict laborers. My work, therefore, fills that gap in the historiography of Sierra Leone by foregrounding the Freetown Prison and its convict population as a site and agent of colonial economic production. Further, my work describes the creation and nucleus of a largescale colonial carceral arrangement that harnessed the productive labor of prisoners to enhance the revenue needs of the British colonial state in the early twentieth century.
A similar gap exists in the field of medical history where the work of Lelland Bell and Tara Dosumu, which focused only on psychiatry and gynecology, and dealing with two specific historical institutions — the mental home and the maternity children’s hospital – do not account for the Freetown Prison, an important site of medical activity and research; and an important institution, which along with the maternity hospital and the psychiatric home, were all intertwined with the work and operations of the Alfred Jones Laboratory and its medical researchers. Despite being central to the institutional history of Sierra Leone, the Freetown Prison, the Alfred Jones Research Lab, and the health of the convict population of Sierra Leone have all remained unexplored until now. My dissertation has, therefore, opened these two areas of intellectual discourse in labor and medical history that have been thoroughly neglected in Sierra Leone historiography.
In the last 20 years, and even before coming to graduate school, it was evident that my work, both as a journalist and public intellectual, was threatening to the preconceived status of Sierra Leone’s political elite. While pursuing my doctoral studies at Northwestern, I became the overt target of death threats and other attacks by known supporters of Sierra Leonean President, Julius Maada Bio, after I published financial and other public records showing how President Bio, the First Lady, and other senior officials in the Bio administration were looting and diverting public funds for their own private uses. Other leading opposition politicians in Sierra Leone have also joined this campaign of harassment against me, which has escalated since April 2021 to include calls for my extradition from the United States for prosecution in Sierra Leone.
My only crime is that I published financial and other public records showing how politicians and other professionals have used their public offices to steal public funds. In the process of investigating Sierra Leonean society, I came to realize that a full understanding of the rise of the current political structure in Sierra Leone requires a complete knowledge of the past and its many contexts and actors. Through the Africanist Press, my journalism, which has often been based in my fundamental understanding of African history, has exposed corruption at the highest levels of the Sierra Leonean government. In the process, my reporting affected the selfish, greed-driven economic and political interests of the ruling social and political elites – academics, lawyers, bankers, teachers, and other professionals – who have held Sierra Leone hostage for the past 60 years.
My insistence on seeking transparency and accountability in the way government officials have operated in the country has earned me more enemies among the elites in Sierra Leone. Last year, Sierra Leonean politicians and their allies went so far as to independently orchestrate violence, and to try to use such acts to convince foreign governments and media – falsely – that Africanist Press is an agent of instability and insurrection in Sierra Leone. Press freedom organizations outside Sierra Leone, including the Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ) in New York, issued statements condemning the death threats and harassments that I faced. Northwestern University likewise issued a statement expressing concerns for my safety and the History Department took steps to protect my right to free speech.
Back in Sierra Leone, many academics, civil society activists, and professionals have remained silent on the organized campaign against my life and my work. Despite these challenges, however, my commitment to Sierra Leone and its future remains unshaken.
From the start of my time at Northwestern in 2017, my goal has been to return home to help build a vibrant and intellectually strong history department for future generations. My commitment remains the same even though politicians and their allies have collectively decided to prevent me from returning home.
As a way of giving back to the country, I hereby publicly offer to teach at FBC and help train a generation of scholars who will understand the essence of history in nation building and development. I am willing to offer that service to the country without a monthly pay. I ask for no returns, or for any other benefit, for my service than the right to peacefully live and independently work in my country without death threats and the unnecessary harassment that I have faced for speaking against dictatorship and corruption.
The future of Sierra Leone is certainly not going to be without professional historians, and FBC’s history department must also not be a garage for retired historians. The current fading generation of historians cannot afford to pass on as their own legacy a future history department without professional historians. It will be their greatest professional sin to leave behind them a nation without historians.