TY - JOUR
AU1 - D'Angelo, Lorenzo
AB - Abstract This article briefly outlines the history of the colonial diamond industry of Sierra Leone from 1930 to 1961, highlighting its contingent aspects and the bonds guiding the decisions and actions taken by local social actors in different contexts and at different times. By drawing on colonial documents and memoirs of colonial officers, it shows how the colonial government of Sierra Leone and the mining company that exercised a monopoly on diamond extraction collaborated on the establishment of a series of legislative and disciplinary devices that encompassed forms of biopolitical expertise. Every historical reconstruction that traces events, directing them towards their known outcome – for example, certain political economic analyses describing the linear progress of predetermined modes of production – always carries the risk of assuming some form of determinism. To break this teleological linearity, this article will briefly outline the history of the colonial diamond industry of Sierra Leone,1 in particular from 1930, the year in which diamonds were discovered, to 1961, the year of Sierra Leone's independence from Britain. It will emphasize the contingent dimension of social interactions without neglecting the constraints, bonds and obligations guiding the decisions of and actions taken by the social actors in different contexts and at different moments. Indeed, the history of Sierra Leone diamond mining, like many other – probably all – histories, is replete with heterogeneous ‘encounters of contingencies’:2 between the discovery of diamonds in 1930 and the global monopoly of De Beers; between the inter-war economic crisis and the local concerns of colonial administrators to have cheap and indirect rule; between the Second World War, the anti-colonial protests of Sierra Leoneans and the strategic and material needs of the British military industry; between European events of 1956, such as the Hungarian revolution, and the distant paramilitary operations prepared by colonial administrators against illegal miners; and so on. What is worth stressing here is that: first, these encounters were neither aleatory nor predetermined, and therefore entirely predictable; and second, there was no subject leading such encounters, there was no teleological direction. In this regard Louis Althusser speaks of a ‘materialism of the encounter’, a materialism which is ‘not of a subject (be it God or the proletariat), but of a process, a process that has no subject, yet imposes on the subjects (individuals or others) which it dominates the order of its development, with no assignable end’.3 The specific goal of this article is to explore ‘the order of development’ of the forms of colonial government in the mining areas of Sierra Leone. A variety of devices and technologies of government were used, in particular with the intention of gaining full control over the territory and population of Sierra Leone. Yet, this intention was systematically frustrated when confronted with reality. It will be argued here that in order to prevent theft, deter smuggling, inhibit access to the diamantiferous areas and, in the process, regulate the local production of precious gems in accordance with the monopolistic interests of the global diamond industry, the colonial government made the mining population of the protectorate of Sierra Leone its target and, at the same time, its instrument. Since that mining population was neither passive nor defenceless against these governmental actions, and since the colonizers, for their part, manoeuvred in an environment of uncertainty with little – or limited – means and resources,4 the management of diamond mines gradually took on the oblique form of an art of governing. The use of the Foucauldian expression ‘art of governing’, or ‘art of government’,5 underscores two aspects which synthesize the author's interpretation of Althusser's ‘materialism of the encounter’. On the one hand, the strategies of colonial rule were not always the result of coherent economic and political calculations; on the other, these same strategies were not dictated simply by chance or serendipity. From several points of view, the diamond areas of Sierra Leone were a ‘colonial laboratory’ where techniques and technologies of government that had already been experimented with in other territories could be mimicked or combined in different ways, as in a bricolage. Taking into account the actual practices determined by the unpredictable interactions between social actors, with their past experiences, their idiosyncrasies and their career ambitions, we can argue that every act of government was, de facto, an invention. Therefore, in order to grasp this inventive variety it is useful to know some biographical details of the people under consideration. Luckily, we have at our disposal some memoirs written by British colonial officers, offering first-hand accounts of the colonial practices used to manage the population in the protectorate of Sierra Leone, particularly in the nineteen-fifties. These biographical materials are rarely cited, but they can offer another perspective and shed some light on the social colonial history of the diamond industry. The article is divided into six sections. In the first and second sections, it will show how the colonial government and the Sierra Leone Selection Trust (hereafter the S.L.S.T. or the company), the mining company which exercised a monopoly on diamond prospection and extraction, collaborated in the establishment of a series of legislative and disciplinary devices that encompassed rough-sketch forms of biopolitical expertise. Indeed, a competent and practical knowledge of the population – considered as a collective body in relation to an environment6 – was necessary to optimize the force and capacity of individuals and, subsequently, to manage the resources of the territory. Economists, geologists, missionaries, doctors and policemen played a pivotal role in informing and reshaping the colonial ‘regime of practices’7 by providing, for example, statistics on inhabitants, maps of the mining areas and fluctuating analytical categories for classifying and organizing groups of people in accordance with the variable needs of the colonial power. As will be emphasized, however, this assemblage of knowledge, force and expertise was not always harmonic and linear: there were tensions and rivalries among and between the S.L.S.T.'s personnel and colonial officers, as well as with the local population and its leaders. Following this analysis, the third section of the article will focus on the role played by a Sierra Leonean political activist, I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, in his attempt to unite forms of organized protest against the colonial power. From the outset, Wallace-Johnson represented a disturbing element for the political stability of Sierra Leone, in particular on the eve of the Second World War. He was imprisoned while he was trying to organize the new class of proletarian workers created mainly by the mining industry. It is therefore interesting to note the counter-response of the colonial office. In dealing with Wallace-Johnson's case, the government of Freetown realized that it had to elaborate a long-term strategy to cope with local protests, a strategy that required the collaboration of the emerging African elite. The fourth section introduces the problem of illegal miners. Rather than taking the colonial perspective on this phenomenon for granted, with its reports and statistics, the article aims to uncover the reality of the mining industry's accountability through the internal voice of an S.L.S.T. manager. What emerges here are a mass of inefficiencies which reveal employees' tendency to project internal problems and malfunctions onto external factors. Unsurprisingly, ‘illegal miners’, and in particular ‘strangers’, became easy targets for these projections. The fifth section of the article will show how, from the early nineteen-fifties, the colonial administrators gradually shifted away from a territory-centred policy aimed at strengthening and protecting the sovereign power and its economic interests, and focused on a more decisive biopolitical and racial concern for the mining population, based on the ambiguous definition of ‘stranger’. Finally, the last section will primarily be dedicated to a discussion of the experience of a young colonial British officer in the administration of justice. This testimony will highlight in detail effective population management practices from within, as opposed to focusing only on the theory and desires that oriented, in abstract terms, these same biopolitical practices. Every beginning is at once necessary and contingent.8 The history of the discovery of the first diamonds in Sierra Leone clearly shows this variable interweaving of necessity and contingency: ex post facto it could not have failed to exist because it happened, and when it happened, it happened in a certain way. But it might also not have happened at all, or it might have happened differently. What happens is, in other words, a particular ‘articulation of the necessary and the contingent’.9 The discovery of diamonds had been tangled with other local and transnational events, which were in turn part of short- and long-term historical processes. What might be considered as the beginning of the diamond industry in Sierra Leone, specifically the discovery of diamond deposits, was historically only a moment in which were condensed a multitude of missed encounters and others which instead took place or, to put it in Althusser's terms, ‘took hold’. In this light, it is worth noting that the geological investigation that led to the discovery of the first diamonds had been preceded by a ‘failed beginning’, a mineral survey carried out between 1919 and 1922. This mission was established under the auspices of Winston L. S. Churchill, minister of munitions between 1917 and 1919, and it encouraged the systematic exploration of the African colonies in search of raw materials with which to supply military industry.10 The governor of Sierra Leone promptly offered financial support for a mineral survey of three years.11 Second Lieutenant Frank Dixey,12 who had received the proposal from the colonial office when he was still on the western front in April 1918,13 was chosen for the job. During his years in Sierra Leone, Dixey was unable to produce results in line with the expectations of the colonial office. Yet, his work was not forgotten. The conditions that led to the ultimate discovery of diamonds would be created a few years later when Sir Albert E. Kitson, director of the Geological Survey of the Gold Coast, encountered Dixey's works. Kitson took the view that useful minerals could be found in Sierra Leone. For this reason, he persuaded Walter Long, secretary of state for the colonies, to send an experienced geologist to the country.14 Norman R. Junner was a major in the army and, like Kitson, had begun his geological career in Australia. Before arriving in Sierra Leone in 1926, Junner was working under Kitson's supervision.15 In the four years that followed, he identified the presence of iron, gold, platinum, chromite and rutile deposits.16 In 1930, in the wake of these events – which were in turn the causes and effects of an infinite series of other encounters – Junner and his assistant John D. Pollett discovered the first diamonds along the Gbobora river, Kono district. Neither of the two geologists, however, could then imagine the importance of their fortuitous discovery.17 That same year, Junner was promoted and replaced Kitson in the Gold Coast. Here, in early 1931,18 the new director of the Geological Survey mentioned the discovery of diamonds to the managers of the Consolidated African Selection Trust (C.A.S.T.), a company created by the mining tycoon Sir Alfred Chester Beatty in the early nineteen-twenties to extract diamonds at Akwatia in the Gold Coast. When the managers of C.A.S.T. sent a team of engineers and realized the potential of Sierra Leone's deposits, they asked for a special licence to explore and extract diamonds in the diamantiferous area that had been identified. Following the suggestion of the legal committee of the Imperial Mineral Resources Bureau,19 and the subsequent positive results from the geological engineers' tests, C.A.S.T. was officially granted a monopoly in 1933 after entering into a private agreement with the government of Sierra Leone. The following year C.A.S.T. created a subsidiary, the S.L.S.T., which obtained a ninety-nine-year exclusive licence.20 From that moment on, the diamantiferous areas in Sierra Leone were integrated into the complex global commercial network monopolized by De Beers.21 With the aim of reducing the risks and uncertainties caused by the fluctuations of a free market and exposure to the uncertainties of the years of the Great Depression, De Beers had created the Central Selling Organization (C.S.O.). The C.S.O.'s sales network system sought to impose strict control on the world's local production and on illegal international traffic. In itself, the discovery of diamond deposits in the protectorate of Sierra Leone brought into question the economic fiction created around these precious stones – they were considered ‘rare’, and hence ‘valuable’ regardless of their actual availability at world level. But the smuggling that developed shortly thereafter raised doubts about the feasibility of establishing orderly commodity flows from the production sites. From the point of view of the mining companies, the ability to maintain order in the world market for precious stones depended on their capacity to tackle illegal mining locally. The Sierra Leonean mines, however, presented specific difficulties. First, the deposits discovered in the nineteen-thirties were of an alluvial type. For several years their extent and value remained an uncertain variable. The Kimberlite sources were only identified after the Second World War, and the mining of this type of deposit began even later. Second, the alluvial diamonds were scattered over a large area, impossible to define and control with the methods and technologies used, for example, by De Beers in South Africa. Moreover, the ease with which it was possible to extract, conceal and transport the rough stones, and their high commercial value, encouraged smuggling with bordering countries, above all Guinea and Liberia. Diamantiferous areas also existed there, but the Sierra Leone diamonds were on average of superior quality. Last, the fact that the distribution and concentration of the diamonds was difficult to estimate made their extraction financially risky, above all for a large-scale company with high technological investment costs like S.L.S.T. With the passing of time, the exhaustion of the more productive deposits and the theft of the largest stones, mining inevitably became less worthwhile and more risky. To deal with the uncertainties of an aleatory space – that is, a space or a milieu22 in which ‘a series of uncertain elements unfold’23 (for example the number of migrants and illegal miners entering mining areas, possible epidemic outbreaks, rising food prices, and so on) – the S.L.S.T. managers initially adopted two different but complementary security technologies. Legal or juridical technologies acted in a ‘positive’ way by establishing an order which guided the organization of things and, consequently, gave shape to and classified arising colonial subjectivities. Disciplinary technologies, by contrast, were based on the negative logic of preventing everything which is forbidden24 and had the primary function of moulding society both at the level of individual bodies and of social or collective ones. This translated, for example, into the acquisition of machinery of a size and shape designed to prevent the theft of stones;25 in the demarcation and construction of security posts for the surveillance of mining areas;26 and in the modification of existing legal apparatus,27 with the introduction of new criminal offences.28 On the basis of a common economic interest, therefore, a close and collaborative relationship was consolidated,29 although not devoid of ambivalence and reciprocal mistrust among British administrators, police units and the managers of the S.L.S.T. In 1934, for example, the S.L.S.T. proposed a protection scheme which had already been experimented with in the Gold Coast. The scheme had been designed to limit the traffic of precious stones and metals among the employees of mining companies, but also to prevent miners from seeking better salary conditions by moving from one employer to another. Among other things, it also provided for the establishment of a special police force under a European officer charged with the tasks of patrolling, arresting and recording the fingerprints of diamond smugglers. The C.A.S.T. managers applied pressure to ensure the selection of a trustworthy individual, Captain C. E. Wingrove. The latter was a white official who had some experience in Africa, especially in the Gold Coast.30 The protection scheme took as its model those African mining contexts – in Angola, Northern Rhodesia and South Africa – where draconian legislation was enforced for the surveillance and disciplining of the labour force.31 The diamond company offered to bear the costs of the whole scheme,32 but despite this generous proposal, the colonial authorities could not accept that any territory under their administration might end up in the hands of a private security force.33 On the other hand, the funds available to the governor were limited. The policy of indirect rule imposed the highest possible degree of economic autonomy; and the diamond industry, even though it was still in its early stages, promised to industrialize the local rural economy and be the main source of revenue for the colonial government. In other words, the company needed the help of the colonial government, just as the latter had every incentive to ensure that the company could operate in a manner that would maximize its profits. This interdependence between the company and the colonial government created ambiguous situations and fuelled tensions which, over the years, became increasingly bitter. Personal aversions, career ambitions and professional rivalries are not to be underestimated in understanding relations within the colonial power system. In the early nineteen-fifties, for example, the men of the S.L.S.T. security force were still captained by Wingrove. Although they were officially only a force of observers, they did not confine themselves to monitoring the company's diamantiferous areas. They not only wore uniform but arrested and questioned trafficking suspects, thus acting like a police force under the command of the S.L.S.T. At one stage, Wingrove's home actually began to be used as a police station.34 It therefore comes as no surprise that the relationship between Wingrove and J. D. Doherty, captain of the Sierra Leone police force at Yengema, was openly hostile. The two police forces did not collaborate and this contributed to the deterioration of the already fragile security conditions in the Kono district.35 Instead of attempting to resolve this conflict, the S.L.S.T. managers were concerned to extend and legitimize the policing powers of security staff in the works and mining areas. For this reason, in 1953 the company management suggested that the colonial bureaucrats in Freetown should take as their model the Diamond Industry Protection Ordinance enforced in the Gold Coast. In this context the theft of diamonds was considered a ‘felony’, not just a simple ‘misdemeanour’ as in Sierra Leone. This distinction between ‘felony’ and ‘misdemeanour’ prevented the S.L.S.T.'s private security force from arresting suspects without breaking the law. In Sierra Leone, in fact, a private citizen could arrest another without charge only in cases when the latter was committing or strongly suspected of having committed a felony. As police force operations were limited to the colony, and police work in the protectorate was performed by the court messengers, only the latter36 – in the specific cases provided for by law – could arrest other private citizens without charge. The S.L.S.T.'s security force was therefore acting outside the law every time it held and arrested suspected traffickers or presumed illegal miners.37 Although a similar ordinance to that enforced in the Gold Coast might also have been approved in Sierra Leone, few seemed motivated voluntarily to assist the S.L.S.T. The company was seen by most of the members of the legislative assembly and the executive council as ‘a collection of bloodsuckers’.38 On the other hand, the then manager of the S.L.S.T., Leonard Leach, knowing that this was a crucial question, did not miss the opportunity to recount the alarming scale of the financial loss due to illegal diamond trafficking: millions of pounds sterling each year failed to flow into the coffers of the S.L.S.T. or those of the government.39 In response to criticisms raised by the colonial officers in Freetown, Leach therefore defended the legitimacy of the operations conducted by Wingrove's men and sought to play down the tensions existing at Yengema, ascribing a large part of the problem to a simple ‘clash of personalities’ between Doherty and Wingrove.40 What is worth underlining, however, to go back to the mid nineteen-thirties, is that the collaboration between the company and the colonial government went beyond a simple concern for physical control over the territory. In the late thirties, the lack of seasonal labour and the well-being of the miners employed by the S.L.S.T. were two interrelated concerns shared by the government. With regard to labour, in December 1934 the government passed an ordinance which targeted, in particular, the ‘vagrants’ or ‘native strangers’ located in a chiefdom other than the one to which they belonged, without regular employment or means of subsistence. The ordinance sought to prevent ‘petty crimes’ and the smuggling of diamonds, authorizing the native courts to repatriate or imprison these ‘idle’ and ‘disorderly’ persons.41 With this attempt to exclude ‘undesirable strangers’ and to bind the local population to the territory, the Kono people belonging to the diamantiferous chiefdoms inevitably became the ideal labour reserve for mining operations. Between 1935 and 1937 several attempts were made to recruit members of this ethno-linguistic group. The salaries offered by the company, however, were so low and the food demands so high that men preferred to harvest rice or sell palm kernels rather than take the strenuous, badly paid work in the mines. Unable, or unwilling, to increase production costs, the company bounced the problem of balancing its accounts back to the commissioner in charge of the Kono district. The latter faced a difficult task: on the one hand, to entice the Kono to the S.L.S.T.'s mining work; and, on the other, to preserve the social and economic stability of the entire district. From the paternalistic perspective of the colonial administrator, an excessive increase in the recruitment of labour for mining purposes was potentially harmful to the Kono: ‘birth rate’, ‘health or development of the population’ and ‘family unit’ were some of the socio-demographic variables kept under his strict control to maintain the ‘morality’ of social life in the district.42 Given its ‘puny size’,43 the colonial administration in Sierra Leone depended heavily on the local traditional authorities. Thus, it was through the mediation of the chiefs that the Kono were initially enticed to search for a job in the S.L.S.T. and to help its staff during the most intense phases of work. Indeed, the chiefs had full control over land and labour, although after their initial support some started to express discontent.44 The labourers given to the company were taken from the farming workforce and their jobs in the mines were not being repaid with tangible benefits shared by all.45 As soon as the chiefs became aware of the vast amount of money that the soil of their chiefdoms produced, they became part of a complex and ambivalent game played around the exploitation of mineral resources. The other major concern shared by colonial authorities and the managers of the S.L.S.T. was what one might call, to borrow an expression used by the colonial officers, the issue of the ‘well-being’ of the miners. In 1937, the diamond company was employing more than 1,700 people, of whom almost 60 per cent were Kono, while the remaining 40 per cent were men issuing from different ethnic groups in Sierra Leone and other African countries. For these people, in 1936 the S.L.S.T. had imported rice which it sold at a loss – a ‘gift’ offered to prevent a wage increase and compensate for the low levels of local production.46 Aside from this, at the direction of the British medical authorities the company had set up three major areas that could host the, mostly, young unmarried men that it employed. With the involvement of the government and the traditional authorities, new markets were opened to facilitate supplies of foodstuffs, and new native courts were charged not only with the task of indicting illegal diggers or unfaithful employees, but also with resolving personal disputes arising among the workers. Finally, in the village of Yengema – the site of its main plant – the S.L.S.T. built a hospital with twenty beds and a European medical staff equipped to deal with the injuries and illnesses of its employees. All of these interventions show how the management of mineral resources brought about an increasing ability to control and direct the economic and social life of the population. The protection of monopolistic interests contributed, in fact, to the extension and transformation of the sphere of intervention of the colonial political power, which thereby found moral arguments to justify its legitimacy. Official reports often describe chaotic local situations that are just waiting to be regulated: ‘mushroom townships’, ‘illicit buying’, ‘gambling’ and ‘sanitary problems’ are just some of the most common recurring terms indicating the anxiety of the rulers to impose their own moral and cosmological order on men and things. Indeed, the general picture that emerges is reassuring: the disorder and corruption of Africans will always be followed by colonial attempts to restore law and order or, less emphatically, to reorder individual and collective conduct. Thus, the actions of government were legitimated by offering well-being to the natives, who were ‘protected’ by the British rulers and made more efficient by the industrial production rationality of the international mining company. For a contrasting view of the deep discontent among the inhabitants of the protectorate during these years, it is useful to read the sharp letters of protest of a Sierra Leonean political activist named I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, who returned to Freetown after his exile ‘at the most opportune time’ in 1938.47 He was among the first publicly to express his criticism of the colonial power, denouncing its self-proclaimed legitimacy and suggesting an art of disobedience, or of refusing to be governed ‘comme ça et à ce prix’,48 which the colonizers could not tolerate. Isaac Theophilus Akunna Wallace-Johnson became notorious among British colonial officers as a ‘political agitator’ and a ‘troublemaker’ while undertaking activities and travelling in different West African colonies.49 After organizing the African Workers Union in Nigeria (1931), he was invited to study at the University of the People in Moscow. However, because of his militancy, he had to leave Nigeria in 1933. Thus, Wallace-Johnson went to the Gold Coast where he founded the West African Youth League (W.A.Y.L.) and published, under various pseudonyms, articles critical of the colonial regime. Despite his anonymity, he was forced once again to leave the colony where he had lived for almost five years. In April 1938, Wallace-Johnson returned to Sierra Leone, presumably with a view to transferring to the United States.50 However, at the customs centre in Freetown the authorities seized 2,000 copies of his journal, the African Sentinel, which he had intended to distribute in the colony.51 This probably gave the secretary of the W.A.Y.L. a reason to stay in Sierra Leone and fight to defend his case. A series of heterogeneous events and circumstances ‘took hold’: his encounter52 with the Freetown port authorities and Douglas James Jardine, the governor of Sierra Leone, intersected with the subterranean colonial protest in British West Africa, pan-African ideology, and colonial concerns about left-wing nationalist groups.53 As a result, favourable conditions had potentially been created for a change in the order of things. Wallace-Johnson took this opportunity54 for inaugurating a new branch of the W.A.Y.L., to found another journal (The African Standard), and to help with the organization and establishment of trade unions throughout the colony as well as the protectorate of Sierra Leone. Furthermore, he began holding public meetings and writing irreverent letters of protests, and in so doing gave voice to the discontent gathering in the streets of Freetown.55 In a memorandum sent to Governor Jardine in June 1938, for example, Wallace-Johnson complained about colonial attempts to censor the local press, the abuse of power, the exploitation of local resources and the alienation of natural rights; in short, he lamented the condition of subordination and exploitation from which many Africans suffered under British rule. He openly challenged the adoption of ordinances that were ‘dangerously [the] enemy of the inhabitants of the country’, like, for example, the Mineral Ordinance of 1927,56 defined as one of ‘the most oppressive forms of Legislation ever enacted in a British Colony’, in contravention of ‘one of the natural rights of humanity as also one of the fundamentals of British democracy’: the right to possession.57 The secretary of the league pointed out the hypocrisies and contradictions inherent in the colonial project and did not hesitate to denounce the forms of economic slavery to which the British had subjected the inhabitants of the colony of Freetown as well as the protectorate. By drawing attention to the violence inflicted on miners by the companies – they were poorly paid, often beaten and humiliated by their superiors, or even chained and flogged58 when accused of smuggling diamonds and gold59 – Wallace-Johnson pointed to the extra-economic means60 used by mining capital to accumulate wealth and dispossess people of their labour force and resources. Not surprisingly, in the 1938–9 reports of the British secret service, Wallace-Johnson's political activity was considered to be one of the factors that fuelled the protest movement among African workers.61 In particular, the ferocious criticism aimed at the mining companies' exploitative practices in the protectorate was a serious threat to colonial economic and political stability.62 As in other African regions, however, the beginning of the Second World War paralysed many of the workers' movements that were taking shape in the late nineteen-thirties. As a result of the conflict, the British adopted the Emergency Act on 1 September 1939. Governor Jardine took advantage of this to settle his scores with the Sierra Leonean activist.63 In retrospect, it can be said that the Second World War happened at the least opportune time for Wallace-Johnson.64 He was at the height of his popularity when he was arrested, but after a brief and controversial trial, the leader of the W.A.Y.L. was imprisoned on Sherbro Island, where he remained until 1944. When he was finally released, he was able to resume his political activity in a quite different political climate.65 During the Second World War the colonial office took the opportunity to establish proper order among the workers' trade unions. This meant ensuring that workers did not end up as the ‘prey of communist ideas’,66 and that they were organized in such a way as to prefer negotiations with the colonial authorities rather than the extreme weapon of the strike. The political activism of Wallace-Johnson had, in fact, suggested the idea that a class of workers led by a prepared trade union was preferable to a ‘misguided and irresponsible leadership’.67 The war in fact required full co-operation from all the colonies. Freetown was a British royal navy base, while the diamonds of the protectorate were a strategic mineral resource, useful both to military industry and as a form of payment and loan to the Allies.68 The administrators had to do everything possible to avoid unrest or strikes. For these reasons, in 1941, the colonial office pioneered an initiative to dispatch to some colonies British trade unionists capable of reorganizing the African workers in accordance with a model of ‘metropolitan unionism’,69 less aggressive and more closely matching the expectations of the rulers. In Sierra Leone, Edgar Parry played a central role in translating the British union experience into an industrial relations system acceptable from the point of view of the colonial administrators.70 Before arriving in Freetown, Parry had been a district organizer of the General and Municipal Workers' Union in the United Kingdom.71 From July 1942, he contributed to the organization of local Sierra Leonean unions, as well as to the constitution of the wages board (1946) and the joint industrial councils (1947).72 He also played an important role after the war in helping to form a new class of trade union leaders. It is well known that Parry had a poor opinion of Wallace-Johnson (‘the most objectionable and unscrupulous person I have met in political life … a megalomaniac’).73 On the other hand, he expressed esteem and sympathy, in particular, for Siaka Stevens, general secretary of the Mining Employees' Union up to the end of the Second World War,74 and the future first president of Sierra Leone. In 1947, with the support of the Trades Union Congress, Stevens had the opportunity to study industrial relations at Ruskin College, Oxford.75 When he came back to Africa he began his rapid rise through the ranks of Sierra Leonean political actors with the approval of the colonial authorities. In conjunction with the constitutional reforms that prepared the ‘Africanization’ of the political administration,76 Stevens became a member of the protectorate assembly. In 1953, he was the first minister of mines, lands and labour, alongside five other African ‘appointed members’ of the legislative council who obtained ministerial positions (Milton Margai, Albert Margai, A. G. Randle, M. S. Mustapha and Chief Bai Farima Tass II).77 A new local ruling class thus got ready to take over the government of Sierra Leone, an administration able to be autonomous, but which, at the same time, did not strictly oppose colonial rule by creating dangerous, unmanageable tensions. After the war, a growing number of farmers and waged workers were persuaded to enter the market economy. As the historian Christopher Fyfe points out, during this time ‘people began to realize that the real wealth of the country did not lie in agricultural produce but in minerals’.78 Diamond mining areas began to attract more and more groups of well-organized illegal miners able to work day and night in swamps and rivers simply by using spades, buckets and sieves, or by deploying mechanized equipment loaned by wealthy Lebanese diamond dealers. A series of investigations by policemen and secret agents, paid for by De Beers, were made in order to document and quantify these illegal activities.79 Quoting these and other police and S.L.S.T. reports in 1954, Milton Margai, minister for health, agriculture and forests, estimated that illicit digging revenue was around £1,400,000 a year. However, Chief R. B. S. Koker, representative in the legislative council of the Bo district, posited that the value of illegally mined diamonds was about £5,400,000, based on an estimated 30,000 illegal diggers (six times more than estimated a few years before). Two years later Governor Dorman adjusted the figure to £6,000,000 a year.80 As mentioned above, Leonard Leach, concerned about the profits of the company, appealed on the basis of these figures to implement increasingly harsh measures against African miners. It is interesting to note what is implied in the use of these numbers, namely, the calculability of a dangerously elusive phenomenon. Conversely, we would expect to find a colonial reality, so to speak, already tamed by the numbers. A glance at the management accountability of the company offers, instead, an embarrassing back story. In 1954, Chester Beatty Jr., chairman of the Selection Trust, asked Wharton-Tigar, future managing director of the S.L.S.T.,81 to visit the headquarters of the company in Yengema. Beatty was concerned about the local situation, given the news that he received from his managers abroad. In his autobiography, Wharton-Tigar recounted the impressions of his first visit to Yengema. It is worth quoting him at length: Everything seemed neat, orderly and efficient – until one began to probe behind the façade. My first shock came when I discovered that no books of diamond production were kept other than a daily statement and a monthly summary; no receipts were given, or records made, of diamonds handed in by the seven treatment plants in which very often the biggest and most valuable stones were picked off the conveyor belts by hand … In the mine store I found things in a state of utter chaos. The book value of the stores stood at just under half a million pounds, but there were no means of assessing the real value as no stock-taking sheets had been prepared … Out in the mining areas efficiencies were no better … A week in Yengema had been enough to cloud my first rosy impression of a thriving industry in the African wilderness.82 Looking back on this visit, the ex-manager of the S.L.S.T. found it unlikely that this ‘state of utter chaos’ was ‘part of a planned device for stealing diamonds’, and he believed that this system of established practices ‘had probably resulted in the loss of only a few stones over the years’. It spoke volumes about Chester Beatty's trust in his employees that when he again received Wharton-Tigar in London he seemed somewhat disappointed that ‘there was no evidence of a staff plot against the company’.83 Clearly, he suspected that some of the problems attributed to the local situation were due to other internal factors (that is, corrupt or incompetent personnel). Wharton-Tigar's analysis of the state of things in Yengema underlines the inefficiency and disorganization of the company prior to his arrival, but also subtly points to its internal psychological dynamics. In fact, he shows how the overseas managers sought to please, or at least to reassure senior executives of the company, ‘fearful that an expression of concern for any developing situation might be interpreted at London headquarters as a sign of weakness or inability’.84 In light of this, we can try to understand another revealing detail of the local company's accountability. During his first visit to Sierra Leone, Wharton-Tigar discovered that the chaotic management of the registers allowed the creation of hidden ‘reserves’ by putting aside handfuls of precious stones removed from production. The former manager of the S.L.S.T. did not clarify in his autobiography how staff could have used these ‘reserves’ and simply referred to the fact that ‘when a year earlier, there had been a “reserve” of some 4,000 carats – worth probably in the region of £50,000 – the mine manager had given instructions to liquidate the surplus by adding it gradually to current production’.85 Clearly, in this way, the production figures and estimates of the availability of mineral deposits were falsified. As a consequence, it was possible to manipulate external perceptions about the internal reality of the company.86 As a deformed mirror, the supposed ‘wild’ reality of ‘illegal’ African miners largely reflected the chaotic reality and illegal practices of the company itself. Thus, once again, the problems and concerns of the S.L.S.T.'s managers affected the local population, or the Freetown colonial authorities. The latter were under strong pressure on many fronts: the medical authorities were sending out warnings concerning the unhygienic conditions in the mining areas and the risk of epidemics; the Evangelical United Brethren Church was complaining about the danger of social and moral decay among the population;87 and some local leaders, such as the aforementioned Chief Koker88 or the Revd. P. S. Dunbar89 – who had an economic and political interest in diamond mining – were calling for the expulsion of all ‘non-Kono residents’.90 As we shall see, the colonial category of ‘stranger’ catalysed this set of interrelated and self-fuelled concerns to a significant degree. The resources at the disposal of the police, however, were completely inadequate to meet all of these requests. On the one hand, it was difficult to monitor a territory that could not be patrolled given its size and its complex environmental morphology.91 On the other hand, it was necessary to deal with a moving – and sometimes even armed92 – target that followed the unpredictable distribution of the alluvial diamonds, scattered randomly in the subsoil or in the river beds. Faced with these circumstances, in 1955, the managers of the S.L.S.T. came to an agreement with the government of Sierra Leone to give up the company's monopoly. In exchange for agreeing to waive its exclusive mining right, the company obtained sizeable compensation and the promise from the government of Freetown to commit fully to fighting illegal mining activity. While it gave up the monopoly, the S.L.S.T. retained the mineral rights to extract diamonds in some of the areas which had so far proven to be the most productive and promising in Kono and Kenema districts. Shortly afterwards, an ordinance of 1956 opened up the possibility for the ‘natives’ of Sierra Leone to engage in the small-scale and artisanal extraction of alluvial diamonds.93 Through a licensing system, which also involved traditional authorities, African miners could sell the stones to commercial offices recognized by the government. This radical change, however, did not modify the situation of ‘illegality’ in the mining areas. On the contrary, many people coming from different regions of West Africa were attracted by the opportunities of the new licensing system. In September 1956, the governor Sir Robert de Zouche Hall left Sierra Leone – officially for health reasons – and Maurice Henry Dorman, the last representative of the British crown before the independence of Sierra Leone (1961), was appointed in his place. Dorman belonged to a new generation of governors who, according to the historian Kirk-Greene, were characterized by ‘less fixed minds and more flexible attitudes towards the postwar changes’.94 The new governor had been a representative of the British monarchy in different regions of the world marked by complex social and political situations95 and he immediately proved to have clear ideas about how to tackle the vexing issue of illegal miners. Just a month after his investiture, made aware by the managers of the S.L.S.T. of a possible ‘foreign invasion’ in the mining areas around Yengema and Sefadu, the governor threatened to declare a state of emergency. However, the secretary of state for the colonies refused to give him special powers, even though, according to Dorman, the problem of illegal miners was assuming the character of a threat to ‘public security’.96 Indeed, in the colonial view, foreign and illegal miners contributed to ‘a general lawlessness and lack of regard for local institutions’; moreover, they represented ‘an even greater danger to the territory's wellbeing because of the diseases which they brought with them’.97 While the attention of the popular media in Europe was distracted by the Hungarian revolution and the Suez crisis,98 the governor planned a mass deportation of ‘undesirable persons’ to solve the ‘inflammable’ situation of Kono district.99 To this end, he used the Alien (Expulsion) Ordinance prepared by his predecessors.100 In his official speech before the Kono's native authorities on 27 October 1956, the governor said that it was time for the ‘Marakas’, ‘Mandingo’, ‘Fula’ and ‘Senegalese’ present in the mining areas to leave.101 Using a scapegoat strategy, Dorman attributed to them the faults of the colonizers: poverty, disease, lack of water supplies, filthiness and soaring prices. He gave three weeks' notice to the ‘foreigners’, and to all those who were not in possession of a regular travel certificate or a British passport, to collect their belongings, to sell the last gemstones they had found102 and to leave Sierra Leone definitively.103 Approaching the end of the three week period, the governor was pleased to inform the secretary of state of the ‘voluntary exodus’ of thousands of people who were leaving Kono on foot or by truck directly to the east and the north of the district, heading mainly for Guinea.104 With this operation – not by chance named Operation Parasite – legal, moral and health factors were welded into a single biopolitical device. In fact, Operation Parasite was not just intended to mobilize a ‘population’105 selected on a racial basis for the defence of the economic and political interests underlying the diamond monopoly. Many of those expelled from Kono district who reached Guinea were first sent to provisional hospitals, where they were fed and vaccinated against smallpox.106 Before the end of that year about 5,000 abandoned houses belonging to the exiled were destroyed or burned down by the officers of the health department. Similar actions were taken in Bo and Kenema districts. Thus, Operation Parasite was part of an important and pioneering large-scale medical operation. Inspired by the medieval model of social exclusion of lepers, this operation implemented a technology of marginalization meant to separate, reject and lead the excluded to their social ‘death’.107 While the French authorities in Guinea dealt with the expelled by mistreating them and driving them elsewhere,108 the local miners in Sierra Leone soon replaced those expelled and things continued as before. Protest and sabotage against the S.L.S.T. did not stop: security posts109 were attacked and destroyed by anonymous aggressors; nocturnal thefts were directed at the company's plants; and there remained a persistent state of tension between the personnel of the S.L.S.T. and the population, resulting in several micro-acts of resistance. In this respect, it is worth emphasizing that the opposition of the governed to the dominion of the colonizers did not only find expression in forms of indirect political action or, so to speak, through ‘the weapons of the weak’.110 Some members of the Kono elite began to organize politically, considering illegal extraction and stealing as forms of resistance against colonial domination.111 In 1957, Tamba Songu Mbriwa, a Kono member of the United Progressive Party (U.P.P.)112 in the house of representatives, exhorted his people to invade the mining areas of the S.L.S.T. after the government admitted that it wrongly granted some licences for artisanal miners in areas that were under the control of the S.L.S.T.113 Along with Edward Wilmot Blyden III, leader of the Sierra Leone Independence Movement, Mbriwa later tried to gather the support of the paramount chiefs who ruled in the Kono district. After obtaining poor results,114 he decided to found, along with his compatriots A. A. Mani and G. W. Mani, the Kono Progressive Movement, a radical ‘anti-imperialist’ political party that openly opposed colonial action and tried to expose the ambiguous relationship between the managers of the S.L.S.T., the paramount chiefs in the Kono's diamantiferous chiefdoms,115 and the Sierra Leone police force. As Michael Boorman, a British policeman, recalled regarding his experience in Kono in the mid nineteen-fifties: ‘It was difficult not to become part of the establishment of SLST. They include us in everything, whether tennis matches or [the] visit of their chairman when all drinks at the club were free for the whole weekend’.116 It is in this context that, during a period of absence of Sir Maurice Dorman, the acting governor Alexander Waddell117 organized a new expulsion operation co-ordinated with the military support of the Royal West African Frontier Force, Operation Digger. As in the case of the previous operation ‘drive strangers’,118 the results obtained in terms of ‘security’ and ‘legality’ were quite ephemeral. By contrast, the state of emergency created by these frequent paramilitary interventions conditioned people's daily lives, as reflected by the actions of sabotage promoted by Mbriwa and the letters of protest sent by Wallace-Johnson to the secretary of state for the colonies. In 1957 Wallace-Johnson highlighted the brutality of police action during the capture of African miners, pointed out the use of tear gas against the spontaneous protests of the population, and underlined that some civilians had been beaten and wounded by bullets fired from police weapons, with the result that, in general, it had become difficult for the inhabitants of the protectorate even to attend to farming activities or fetch water from the rivers.119 As the next section will show, just as the inhabitants of Sierra Leone were not totally subjugated and silent, so the system of colonial power was not a homogeneous entity that applied mechanically, univocally and without internal tensions the rules and procedures decided by superior officers. So far, the colonial history of the diamond industry in Sierra Leone can be read, on the one hand, as an attempt to find within the wide colonial bureaucratic repertoire of laws the devices best suited to achieve government control over a social reality which had to be shaped in accordance with the economic rationale of the diamond monopoly. On the other hand, this is the story of an insoluble conflict between the heterogeneous rulers' techniques of government, the aleatory elements of the environment, the contingencies of history, and the various practices of resistance of the dominated. The colonial attempt to develop legal categories that defined ‘foreignness’ to the mining areas exemplifies this tension. To delineate the figure of a ‘stranger’ more suited to the needs of the colonial administration, the legislators sought to interweave different criteria (cultural, spatial and temporal) that took into account a desire to maintain the commitments of the government to the S.L.S.T. and, at the same time, to respect the local governmental role of traditional authorities. However, as mentioned above, the effects of this hybridization, as experienced by the mining population, were paradoxical and unacceptable, and were considered ‘ridiculous’ or ‘bizarre’ by the colonial officers themselves.120 For example, according to the Diamond Industry Protection Ordinance of 1954, a person who belonged to a certain district in which there was a protection area, but who was not born or was not living in that particular area, was considered a ‘stranger’. Hence, a Kono born in a non-diamantiferous chiefdom belonging to Kono district became a ‘stranger’ as soon as he crossed the boundaries of an area within a chiefdom containing alluvial deposits of diamonds. More paradoxically, the inhabitants of a diamantiferous chiefdom could, in turn, be considered ‘strangers’ if they were not born in a village enclosed by the boundaries of the protected areas. The amendments that were made to this ordinance in later years neither produced greater legal clarity nor resolved its contradictions. Instead, these became even more evident when the ordinance was applied to situations on the ground. For example, the same ordinance assumed that there was close co-operation between colonial and native authorities, both in granting entry permits to the natives and in managing ‘public security’. Yet, chiefs and colonial officers rarely co-operated with each other, although they owed a debt of gratitude for favours or gifts they received from managers of the S.L.S.T. The ordinance, in fact, had not considered the relationships between native authorities and so-called ‘native strangers’. The latter, depending on the particular case, could be important allies, or even relatives or friends of the traditional rulers; or, more simply, sources of income in terms of taxes and tributes owed to them. Moreover, the chiefs could not tolerate the violent intervention of the police every time they showed up in villages where they thought that illegal miners were hiding. Often, traditional rulers had no economic or moral interest in expelling ‘strangers’ or in requiring police intervention, whereas the opposite was expected by the ordinances.121 The experience of Harry Mitchell, assistant district commissioner in Sierra Leone from 1954 to 1959, clearly illustrates the other side of the coin, namely, the banal reality of the problems facing the colonial power. In 1958, Mitchell was sent to Kono district, where the prisons were overcrowded with gem seekers. The visiting magistrate was not able to judge all of the cases on his own, and despite his inexperience – Mitchell had a degree in law, but he had never pursued any legal profession – the young colonial servant was asked to help and serve as a magistrate. In his memoirs Mitchell does not hide that ‘the laws governing diamond mining and restrictions on entry of persons into the diamond protection areas were complicated and understood by few people’.122 To complicate matters further, there was also the fact that neither the defence lawyers nor the prosecutors had at their disposal all of the resources necessary fairly to defend or prosecute each case. Mitchell did not have any law books with him to which he could refer, apart from an obsolete edition of Archibold's Criminal Pleading, Practice and Procedures. The court in which he attempted to administer colonial justice was a space normally used as a market or, alternatively, as the village's barri (local traditional court). In this multifunctional space there were only two tables and a dozen chairs. Consequently, ‘Witnesses, policemen, prisoners and wardens had to sit on the floor or stand by the barri wall’.123 The stationery was often insufficient, with the result that ‘Had it not been for the constant scrounging of stationery from [the] D[istrict] C[ommissioner]'s office I would have been forced to suspend all cases for want of paper on which to keep the court record’.124 In addition, there was no court stenographer and minutes had to be recorded manually by the magistrate during the audiences. With regard to defence lawyers, according to Mitchell, some were well paid – indeed, some came from Freetown to assist wealthy clients – but they were generally ill-prepared or entirely inadequate. Mitchell also acknowledged that he often ‘gave judgment in a rough-and-ready manner’ out of necessity.125 But this does not mean that he was not opposed to the ‘pragmatic but sometimes haphazard methods of British colonial administration’,126 or that he did not try to make impartial judgements, despite the pressure exerted by his superiors that he should issue verdicts ‘in the interests of improving the security situation in the district’.127 In this regard, Mitchell recounted having accepted the plea of a known defence lawyer, Berthan Macauley,128 who had argued that the definition of ‘stranger’ assumed by the Mineral Ordinance came into conflict with that of local by-laws. In short, through Mitchell, the case was brought before the supreme court of Freetown which rejected the defence's argument but recognized that the by-laws’ definition of ‘stranger’ was unworkable: to prove that ‘a man did not belong to or was not ordinarily resident in any particular chiefdom’ was impossible.129 Approximately 100 people who had been arrested in that legal case were subsequently released and Mitchell, having upset his superiors with his judgement that prompted the appeal in Freetown, apparently gained the sympathy of Sierra Leone's first prime minister, Sir Milton Margai. ‘It has all come about by accident; my whole working life has been completely unstructured and changes have occurred as if by chance’.130 These are the opening words of the aforementioned autobiography of Michael Boorman, assistant superintendent and then superintendent of the Sierra Leone police force between 1954 and 1958, and later Governor Dorman's aide-de-camp. Looking back on his career, Boorman asked on more than one occasion how things might have turned out if the dice had fallen differently, if at the crossroads of an important decision he had chosen one way rather than another: ‘What if? … ad infinitum’.131 This idea of chance thus translates into an idea of the possibility of individual action that should not, however, be confused with the form of contingency taken into consideration here. Contingency is not pure chance. It does not generate a space of action in which ‘everything is possible’, nothing is predictable and the overall sense of what happens – if there is any – is accessible only to an omniscient god. Historical events are the result of encounters that ‘take hold’.132 Thus, the possibility of an encounter is not enough. As Althusser reminds us in his later writings, the encounter must happen first. Moreover, it must last long enough to become an ‘accomplished fact’. In this process of structuring contingency, social actors play a key role with their agency. To say that things are a certain way, but that they could be otherwise, means focusing attention on the power of social actors, who certainly reproduce but at the same time modify the system of social relations in which they are embedded because they can often act otherwise. To emphasize the contingency of history is to allow us also to highlight the radical uniqueness of events and stories, stories in which the action of social actors is ‘finalizing’ but not ‘finalized’. In the concise reconstruction of the colonial history of the Sierra Leonean diamond industry above, it was suggested that the colonial administrators started but never brought to fulfilment a process of governmentalization of the colonial state, occurring in parallel with the processes of the accumulation of capital taking place throughout the diamond mining industry. These combined processes were designed to manage the exploitation of mineral resources. Different police devices were developed to discipline and acquire knowledge about the space and its uses, the population and its numbers, habits, origins and desires. Maps of the territory, geological surveys, security posts, mineral ordinances and colonial reports were among the devices employed to bring the economy within the political exercise of sovereignty so that it could become a model for governing.133 It is not by chance that, after the monopoly of the S.L.S.T. ended in 1956, the attention of colonial rulers turned almost entirely to the ‘foreign population’ which, at that point, was already at the heart of the colonial art of governing the mining areas. The monopoly required strict control of fluxes of things and people. Thus, paradoxically, the ‘population’ became the main target and, at the same time, the instrument to govern the ungovernable. The very existence of the diamond mining industry depended not only on the exploitation of African labour, but also on the non-mining modes of production that supported the miners (for example, agriculture, petty trade),134 as well as on the complex local and transnational societal networks that kept people and ideas circulating in ways that were not always entirely predictable and controllable. Footnotes 1 During the period examined here, Sierra Leone was divided into colony and protectorate for administrative purposes. The colony was considered a British territory and it consisted mainly of the Sierra Leone or Freetown peninsula and other islands (i.e., Sherbo, Tasso, Banana, Turtle, Plantain and York). The remaining part of the territory was administered as a British protectorate, divided into three provinces (administered by three provincial officers and a chief commissioner) containing different administrative districts (each in the charge of a district commissioner). In turn, each district was divided into several chiefdoms. The chiefdoms were the main administrative units of the protectorate. They were ruled by the paramount chiefs with the assistance of the ‘native’ or ‘tribal’ authorities, i.e., the section chiefs, sub-chiefs, headmen and elders of villages. 2 L. Althusser , Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87 (y), pp. 167 – 203 . 3 Althusser, p. 190. 4 M. Lange , Lineages of Despotism and Development: British Colonialism and State Power ( Chicago, Ill. , 2009 ). Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 5 M. Foucault , Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–8 ( New York , 2007 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC As Mitchell Dean notes, ‘To refer to the art of government is to suggest that governing is an activity which requires craft, imagination, shrewd fashioning, the use of tacit skills and practical know-how, the employment of intuition and so on’ ( M. Dean , Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society ( 1999 ), p. 18 ). 6 Foucault , Security , pp. 30 , 42 – 3 . 7 Dean, pp. 21–2. 8 F. Raimondi , Il custode del vuoto: contingenza e ideologia nel materialismo radicale di Louis Althusser ( Verona , 2011 ), p. 151 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 9 Raimondi, pp. 151–3. 10 Churchill's request focused in particular on chrome, manganese and mica, minerals necessary for the production of bullets and bombs (The National Archives of the U.K., WO 339/88277, the ministry of munitions of war to the secretary of the war office, 12 March 1918). 11 T.N.A., WO 339/88277, the under-secretary of state, colonial office, to the secretary of the war office, 5 March 1918. 12 In 1918, Frank Dixey was 2nd Lt. of the Royal Garrison Artillery but he had formerly been an assistant lecturer on geology in the University of South Wales (T.N.A., WO 339/88277, the under-secretary of state, colonial office, to the secretary of the war office, 5 March 1918). 13 T.N.A., WO 339/88277, war office to the under-secretary of state, colonial office, 30 Apr. 1918. 14 T.N.A., CO 267/617/7, confidential dispatch, governor of Sierra Leone to colonial office, 26 Oct. 1926. 15 T.N.A., CO 267/617/7, Kitson to the colonial office, 22 Oct. 1926. 16 T.N.A., CO 267/658/15, N. R. Junner, geological survey department, to W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, colonial secretary, 28 Oct. 1937. 17 Some years later, in 1938, Pollett admitted that: ‘neither he [Junner], nor I, imagined that deposits would prove as important as they have since been found to be’. Worthy of mention is that, according to Pollett, the discovery happened in an area that later proved not to be very productive. For this reason, he also stated that: ‘I do not think that our discovery … could be called impressive … The wonder is that we managed to find diamonds at all, especially when the facts that we washed so little gravel and had no special apparatus for diamond prospecting are considered’ (T.N.A., CO 267/658/15, enclosure II in Sierra Leone dispatch 14, dated 6 Jan. 1938). 18 T.N.A., CO 267/658/15, N. R. Junner , ‘Discovery of diamonds in Sierra Leone’ , African World , 13 Nov. 1937 . 19 The legal committee was composed of Sir Richard Redmayne, Hugh F. Marriott and Westgarth Forster-Brown. The recommendation to grant a monopoly was unanimous (T.N.A., CO 267/641/24, minutes, June 1933). 20 According to Edward Wharton-Tigar, former manager of the S.L.S.T. in the 1950s, the relationship between Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, owner of C.A.S.T., and Philip Cunliffe-Lister, secretary of state for the colonies between 1931 and 1935, was very close. This closeness seems to have had an influence in the decision to grant a monopoly to the S.L.S.T. for such an extended period of time. The extension of this concession came as a surprise even to experts in the diamond mining industry ( E. Wharton-Tigar , Burning Bright: the Autobiography of Edward Wharton-Tigar with A. J. Wilson ( Worcester Park , 1987 ), p. 161 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC William Reno offers a complementary, more sophisticated political-economic analysis of this decision which considers the concerns for the global uncertainties of the inter-war period and the security offered by the mining revenues ( W. Reno , Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone ( Cambridge , 1995 ), pp. 47 – 8 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 21 De Beers Consolidated Mines was the main diamond company of the 20th century. It was founded in 1888 by Cecil J. Rhodes in South Africa. The company established a monopoly on diamond production when Rhodes took control of the main South African mines and signed an exclusive sales agreement with the Diamond Syndicate, an alliance of firms based in London ( E. J. Epstein , The Death of the Diamond: the Coming Collapse in Diamond Prices ( 1983 ), p. 69 ). In 1929, Ernest Oppenheimer became chairman of the board of De Beers. In order further to strengthen the company's international monopoly by combining the interests of different producers into a ‘single selling channel’ ( C. Newbury , The Diamond Ring: Business, Politics, and Precious Stones in South Africa, 1867–1947 ( Oxford , 1989 )), he and his heirs created a series of subsidiaries and organizations, including the Diamond Corporation and the Diamond Trading Company. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC These were part of the Central Selling Organization, ‘the marketing arm’ of De Beers ( ‘De Beers is it’ , The Economist , 17 Dec. 1998 ). 22 Foucault defines a milieu as ‘a set of natural givens – rivers, marshes, hills – and a set of artificial givens – an agglomeration of individuals, of houses, etcetera. The milieu is a certain number of combined, overall effects bearing on all who live in it. It is an element in which a circular link is produced between effects and causes, since an effect from one point of view will be a cause from another … Finally, the milieu appears as a field of intervention in which, instead of affecting individuals as a set of legal subjects capable of voluntary actions … and instead of affecting them as a multiplicity of organisms … one tries to affect, precisely, a population. I mean a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live’ ( Foucault , Security , p. 21 ). 23 See Foucault , Security , p. 20 . 24 Foucault notes that: ‘Order is what remains when everything that is prohibited has in fact been prevented. I think this negative thought and technique is typical of a legal code’ ( Foucault , Security , p. 46 ). 25 M. Thomas , Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–40 ( Cambridge , 2012 ), p. 267 ; see also Wharton-Tigar, p. 170. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 26 In 1935, the S.L.S.T. obtained a permit ‘to demarcate and enclose with post and wire fences’ its mining areas (T.N.A., CO 267/649/11, ‘The Minerals (Enclosed Areas) Rules, 1935’, in ‘Enclosure in despatch, Sierra Leone, n. 53’, 7 Feb. 1935). 27 E.g., in Dec. 1934 the legislative council passed the Protectorate Vagrancy Ordinance (see also below, n. 41). This ordinance was introduced as a consequence of the development of the mining industry in the protectorate and it was considered a necessary measure to deal with the ‘migration of young men to the mining centres’. According to the then attorney-general, the bill was ‘to some extent the Protectorate counterpart of the Colony Repatriation of Convicted Native Ordinance of 1926’ (T.N.A., CO 267/648/14, ‘Report on the Protectorate Vagrancy Ordinance, 1934’). After the Second World War, the Immigration Restriction Ordinance, 1930 was also modified to regulate entrance to Sierra Leone ( Colonial Office , Annual Report on Sierra Leone for the Year 1946 ( 1947 )). Some of the new restrictions clearly aimed to prevent the smuggling of precious metals and stones. 28 E.g., from March 1954, it became illegal to possess diamond mining tools ( H. L. van der Laan , The Sierra Leone Diamonds: an Economic Study Covering the Years 1952–61 ( Oxford , 1965 ), p. 9 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 29 Thomas, pp. 257–8. 30 Thomas, p. 267. 31 I. Abdullah , ‘Profit versus social reproduction: labor protests in the Sierra Leonean iron-ore mines, 1933–8’ , African Studies Rev. , xxxv ( 1992 ), 13 – 41 , at p. 13 ; cf. Thomas, pp. 267–73. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat 32 T.N.A., CO 267/644/7, G. R. Nicolaus to the governor, 22 Apr. 1934. 33 When Sir Henry Monck-Mason Moore became the new governor in 1935, he refused to approve an ordinance along the lines of the Master and Servants Ordinance in force in the Gold Coast, as was requested by the director of C.A.S.T. and the managers of the S.L.S.T. If approved, this ordinance would have made it possible to collect fingerprints from employees of the company. Moore was sceptical about the usefulness of such an ordinance and feared being accused of introducing in Sierra Leone the notorious ‘kipande system’, known to have been used (and abused) by the colonial authorities in Tanganyika to control local labour (T.N.A., CO 267/649/4, Governor Moore to Fiddian, 8 March 1935). The ‘kipande system’ or ‘pass system’ was a method of recording the native working population employed in Kenya during the 1920s. Male workers with a minimum age of 16 years had to be accompanied by a passport with fingerprints, work permits and personal data (‘kipande’) in all their movements from one district to another. Criminal penalties were imposed on those who did not have the proper identity document (see F. Klose , Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: the Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria ( Philadelphia, Penn. , 2013 ), p. 63 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 34 T.N.A., CO 553/730, letter of chief commissioner to the colonial secretary, 5 Sept. 1952. 35 T.N.A., CO 554/730, Gorell-Barnes to Sir Beresford-Stooke, 7 Oct. 1952. 36 The court messenger force was established by ordinance in 1907 ( D. Killingray , ‘The maintenance of law and order in British colonial Africa’ , African Affairs , lxxxv ( 1986 ), 411 – 37 , at p. 427 ), using as a model the country police forces in England (Colonial Office, Report on Sierra Leone for the Year 1949 (1950), p. 40). Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat In Sierra Leone, the court messenger force was responsible for helping the chiefs in keeping ‘law and order’, but they worked under the district commissioners. In the diamond mining areas they were, in fact, paid by the S.L.S.T. until they were officially replaced by the Sierra Leone police force in 1952 ( Colonial Office , Report on Sierra Leone for the Year 1952 ( 1953 ), p. 60 ). Crossref Search ADS 37 T.N.A., CO 554/730, Rowland to Williamson, 26 March 1953. 38 T.N.A., CO 554/730, Rowland to Williamson, 26 March 1953. 39 T.N.A., CO 554/730, Gorell-Barnes to Sir Bresford-Stooke, 7 Oct. 1952. 40 T.N.A., CO 554/730, Gorell-Barnes to Sir Bresford-Stooke, 7 Oct. 1952. 41 The Protectorate Vagrancy Ordinance, 1934 was enacted with the aim of controlling ‘any native belonging by native law or custom to one chiefdom who remains in any part of another chiefdom without regular employment for more than twenty-one days’. As the ordinance further states, such a person ‘shall be deemed an idle and disorderly person and shall be liable on summary conviction by a native court to imprisonment for any period not exceeding one month’ ( T.N.A., CO 267/648/14 , An Ordinance to Control Vagrancy and to Provide for Repatriation to their own Chiefdoms of Natives convicted before Certain Courts in the Protectorate , n. 17 , 1934 ). 42 T.N.A., CO 267/661/17, enclosure to the dispatch of Sierra Leone, 4 Nov. 1937, Report by Mr. Burns on Recruitment of Native Labour in Kono District , 4 Nov. 1937 . 43 Lange, p. 104. 44 In 1934, Chief Foa Matturi of Nimikoro chiefdom was the first Kono to ask for compensation for the destruction of sacred sites located in the S.L.S.T.'s mining areas (see J. S. Conteh, ‘Diamond mining and Kono religious institutions: a study in social change’ (unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1979), p. 178). 45 T.N.A., CO 267/665/3, Sierra Leone confidential dispatch from governor to colonial office, 3 May 1938. 46 R. T. Parsons , Religion in an African Society ( Leiden , 1964 ), p. 221 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 47 D. F. Luke , Labour and Parastatal Politics in Sierra Leone: a Study of African Working-Class Ambivalence ( Lanham, Md. , 1984 ), p. 31 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 48 M. Foucault , ‘Qu'est-ce que la critique?’ , Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie , lxxxiv ( 1990 ), 35 – 63 , at p. 38 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat 49 I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson (1895–1965) was born into a poor Krio family that lived in the village of Wilberforce, colony of Sierra Leone. He worked as priest, sailor and clerk before leaving Sierra Leone ( L. Spitzer , The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Responses to Colonialism, 1870–1945 ( Madison, Wis. , 1974 )). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 50 L. Spitzer and L. Denzer, ‘I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson and the West African Youth League, pt. ii: the Sierra Leone period, 1938–45’ , International Jour. African Historical Stud. , vi ( 1973 ) 565 – 601 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat 51 L. Denzer , ‘Wallace-Johnson and the Sierra Leone labor crisis of 1939’ , African Studies Rev. , xxv ( 1982 ), 159 – 83 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat 52 Althusser. 53 M. Kilson , Political Change in a West African State: a Study of the Modernization Process in Sierra Leone ( Cambridge, Mass. , 1966 ), p. 145 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 54 On the Machiavellian notion of ‘opportunity’ (It. ‘occasione’), see V. Morfino , Il tempo della moltitudine: materialismo e politica prima e dopo Spinoza ( Rome , 2005 ), p. 112 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 55 Spitzer and Denzer; see also Luke. 56 The first Mineral Ordinance of Sierra Leone (1927) claimed that the mineral rights were vested in the colonial crown. It drew on a principle that Sir Frederick Lugard had stated in his well-known manual The Dual Mandate (1922): the natives were granted the possibility of usufruct of land resources, provided that they were able to demonstrate a common consolidated use over time. Since, as far as it was known, the population of the protectorate of Sierra Leone had never extracted minerals, the ordinance did not prevent the exercise of any vested native right ( L. D'Angelo , ‘L'economia occulta delle miniere di diamante della Sierra Leone’ (unpublished University of Milano-Bicocca Ph.D. thesis, 2011 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 57 T.N.A., CO 267/665/3, memorandum of the West Africa Youth League to Governor Jardine, 10 June 1938. 58 T.N.A., CO 267/665/3, letter of the West African Youth League to the secretary of state for the colonies, McDonald, 20 June 1938. 59 T.N.A., CO 267/665/3, Sierra Leone confidential dispatch from governor to the colonial office, 23 Nov. 1938. 60 J. Glassman , ‘Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, accumulation by “extra-economic” means’ , Progress in Human Geography , xxx ( 2006 ), 608 – 25 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat 61 Between Jan. and Feb. 1939 the coal workers and those employed by the war department went on strike. To make matters more complicated, in the same period, some soldiers of the Sierra Leone Heavy Battery Royal Artillery mutinied and, between Apr. and May, mine workers went on strike in the iron mines of Marampa and Lunsar ( T.N.A., CO 267/669/16 , Sierra Leone. Half-Yearly Intelligence Report for the Period Ending 30 June 1939 ( Freetown , 1939 )). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 62 Thomas, p. 274. 63 Similar actions against trade union leaders were taken in other British colonies: Michael Imoudu and Makhan Singh were respectively arrested in Nigeria and Kenya with the outbreak of war ( T. Oberst , ‘Transport workers, strikes and the “imperial response”: Africa and the post World War II conjuncture’ , African Studies Rev. , xxxi ( 1988 ), 117 – 33 ). Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat 64 As Denzer observes, Wallace-Johnson ‘was the right man in the wrong time’ (Denzer, pp. 177–8). 65 Spitzer and Denzer. 66 F. Cooper , Decolonization and African Society: the Labor Question in French and British Africa ( Cambridge , 1996 ), p. 238 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 67 J. D. Hargreaves , The End of Colonial Rule in West Africa: Essays in Contemporary History ( 1979 ), p. 65 . 68 R. Dummett , ‘Africa's strategic minerals during the Second World War’ , Jour. African Hist. , xxvi ( 1985 ), 381 – 408 ; Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat P. Greenhalgh , West African Diamonds 1919–83: an Economic History ( Manchester , 1985 ). Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 69 Cooper. 70 Hargreaves. 71 I. Abdullah , ‘The colonial state and wage labor in postwar Sierra Leone, 1945–60: attempts at remaking the working class’ , International Labor and Working-Class History , lii ( 1997 ), 87 – 105 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat 72 Hargreaves. 73 Cited in Luke, p. 39. 74 In March 1945, the Mining Employees' Union (registered in July 1940) and the Yengema Diamond Workers' Union (registered in Sept. 1940) were amalgamated to form the United Mineworkers' Union ( Colony of Sierra Leone , Report on the Labour Department for the Year 1945 ( Freetown , 1946 )). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Siaka Stevens was one of its founders and first general secretary ( Sierra Leone Year Book 1961 , p. 107 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 75 Hargreaves. 76 Kilson. 77 A. M. Lavalie , ‘The transfer of power in Sierra Leone: British colonial policy, nationalism and independence, 1945–61’ (unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1989 ), p. 400 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 78 C. Fyfe , A Short History of Sierra Leone ( 1979 ), p. 176 . 79 According to the Daily Mail, one of the main Freetown newspapers, the chief inspector of the City of London police was on tour in West Africa in 1954 to enquire about diamond smuggling ( ‘Diamond smuggling. 221 people arrested in 20 months’ , Daily Mail , 11 March 1954 ). Similarly, Sir Percy Sillitoe, formerly head of M.I.5, was hired by Ernest Oppenheimer, chairman of De Beers, to study the trafficking of diamonds in Africa. For this purpose Sillitoe traveled to the Union of South Africa, the Belgian Congo, Angola, Rhodesia, Tanganyika and Sierra Leone ( P. Sillitoe , Cloak without Dagger ( 1955 )). His investigation also inspired a book written by the famous novelist Ian Fleming ( The Diamond Smugglers ( 1957 )). In the view of a new mining agreement with the S.L.S.T., Siaka Stevens, minister of mines, land and labour, also made some trips to study other mining contexts. In 1955, for example, he went to the Gold Coast, accompanied by J. W. Lay, superintendent of the Sierra Leone police, who was interested in studying the methods used by his colleagues to combat illegal mining ( ‘Police will join in mining talks’ , Daily Mail , 4 Jan. 1955 ). See also M. Boorman , Diamonds are Trumps: a Colonial Reflects ( Sussex , 1996 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 80 Van der Laan. 81 Leonard Leach , by this time of retirement age, was officially replaced by Wharton-Tigar in March 1955 (Wharton-Tigar, p. 177 ). 82 Wharton-Tigar, pp. 168–71. 83 Wharton-Tigar, p. 171. 84 Wharton-Tigar, p. 167. 85 Wharton-Tigar, p. 168. 86 In line with the hypothesis about the good faith of the majority of the employees of the company, and the complacent attitude of managers overseas, it is possible to assume that such ‘reserves’ were added, especially during periods of low productivity or, more generally, when it was necessary to make a good impression in London, highlighting the supposed effectiveness of actions taken in the field. Thus, ‘a show of progressive development in the technical field or in an important aspect of employee or community relations, could cloak a neglect of good housekeeping in the basic running of the business’ (Wharton-Tigar, p. 167). 87 Van der Laan, p. 9. 88 Raymond Brima Sese Koker was elected paramount chief of Bagbo chiefdom, Bo district in 1943. Between 1930 and 1942 he had worked as assistant and draughtsman for C.A.S.T. and the S.L.S.T. In addition, he was general secretary of the Yengema Diamond Workers Union ( Sierra Leone Year Book 1961 ( Freetown , 1961 ), p. 91 ). 89 Paul S. Dunbar was the first to become Kono local elder of the Evangelical United Brethren Church (see Parsons). He was also a politician, a member of the Kono district council and, later, a representative of the Kono district in the protectorate assembly. According to Conteh, p. 163, he was a skilled ‘political broker’, i.e., a mediator between local and national policy. In Kono his main political rival was T. Mbriwa, who gathered around him some of the Kono disappointed by the results obtained by Dunbar in the negotiations to end the monopoly of the S.L.S.T. (Conteh, p. 168). 90 The request to expel all non-Kono residents from the mining areas was presented for the first time by the Revd. Dunbar in 1952, during a meeting of the Kono district council ( Daily Mail , 10 Oct. 1952 ). The motion was rejected but created concern among the inhabitants of the colony because of its discriminatory rationale ( Daily Mail , 26 Oct. 1952 ). 91 Killingray, p. 414. 92 Van der Laan, p. 9. 93 T.N.A., CO 554/797 , An Ordinance to Provide for and to Regulate the Prospecting for and Mining of, Dealing in and Exporting of Alluvial Diamonds and for other Purposes connected therewith , 4 Feb. 1956 , 94 A. Kirk-Greene , On Crown Service: a History of H.M. Colonial and Overseas Civil Service, 1837–1997 ( 1999 ), p. 60 . 95 In the troubled Tanganyika Territory, for example, Dorman (1912–93) had arrived in his early twenties to fill different office positions (1935–45). Later, he was called to serve in Malta (1945–7), Palestine (1947), the Gold Coast (1950–2) and, finally, shortly before receiving the important post in Sierra Leone, he was colonial secretary in the turbulent islands of Trinidad and Tobago (1952–6) ( R. Grey , ‘Obituary: Sir Maurice Dorman’ , The Independent , 10 Nov. 1993 ). 96 T.N.A., CO 554/799, telegram of M. H. Dorman to the secretary of state for the colonies, A. Lennox Boyd, 5 Oct. 1956. 97 Colonial Office , Sierra Leone: Report for the Year 1958 ( 1960 ), p. 5 . 98 As van der Laan, p. 22, notes, the Hungarian revolution and the Suez crisis overshadowed in Europe any other news coming from West Africa. For a panoramic view on other significant events in 1956, see 1956, and all That , ed. K. Flett ( Newcastle , 2007 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 99 T.N.A., CO 554/799, telegram of M. H. Dorman to the secretary of state for the colonies, A. Lennox Boyd, 5 Oct. 1956. 100 Lavalie. 101 As van der Laan, p. 23, observes, co-operation with the chiefs and traditional authorities of Kono was essential to expel strangers: they had the power to determine who was a ‘stranger’. Furthermore, some Sierra Leonean politicians actively collaborated in creating a climate unfavourable to their presence, like the above-mentioned Revd. Dunbar. 102 The Diamond Corporation was authorized to open a temporary centre to buy diamonds and to encourage evacuees to sell their stones before leaving Sierra Leone (T.N.A., CO 554/1507, dispatch no. 188 of Governor Sir M. H. Dorman, 20 Feb. 1957). 103 T.N.A., CO 554/1507, dispatch no. 188 of Governor Sir M. H. Dorman, 20 Feb. 1957. 104 The official estimates refer to an exodus of about 45,000 people ( Colonial Office , Sierra Leone: Report for the Year 1956 ( 1958 ), p. 6 ). Archival sources do not reveal known forms of active resistance by the population, or the use of violence to solicit this mobilization: it was, apparently, a success beyond all expectations (T.N.A., CO 554/1507, dispatch no. 188 of Governor Sir M. H. Dorman, 20 Feb. 1957). 105 Dean. 106 In early Dec. 1956 it was estimated that in the Kono district alone approximately 100,000 people had been vaccinated against smallpox since the beginning of the year (T.N.A., CO 554/1507, dispatch no. 188 of Governor Sir M. H. Dorman, 20 Feb. 1957). 107 M. Foucault , Les Anormaux: cours au Collège de France, 1974–5 ( Paris , 1999 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 108 Boorman, p. 110; see also S. Bredeloup , La Diams'pora du fleuve Sénégal: sociologie des migrations Africaines ( Toulouse , 2007 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 109 The security posts were simple structures that could be made of wood and palm leaves, but they had a very important role to play in controlling access because they were placed at strategic points on the boundaries of the S.L.S.T.'s mining areas. They were manned by security guards of the private company, which had the job of restricting access to designated areas and reporting the presence of illegal miners to the police. 110 J. C. Scott , Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance ( New Haven, Conn. , 1985 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 111 S. Van Bockstael and K. Vlassenroot, ‘From conflict to development diamonds: the Kimberley process, and Africa's artisanal diamond mines’ , Studia Diplomatica , lxii ( 2009 ), 79 – 98 , at p. 91 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat 112 The United Sierra Leone Progressive Party (U.S.L.P.P.) was founded in 1954 by Cyril Rogers-Wright and Wallace-Johnson. In 1957 Mbriwa abandoned this party to devote himself entirely to the Kono Progressive Movement, which become in every respect a political party ( F. M. Hayward , ‘The development of a radical political organization in the bush: a case study in Sierra Leone’ , Canadian Jour. African Stud./La Revue canadienne des études africaines , vi ( 1972 ), 1 – 28 ). Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat 113 T.N.A., CO 554/1508 , extract from Sierra Leone Intelligence Report , July 1957 ; CO 554/1501, Statement of the Government of Sierra Leone on the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Issue of Alluvial Diamond Mining Licences in the Gbambaiadu Area, Sando Chiefdom, Kono District, sessional paper no. 2 of 1957, Sierra Leone. 114 Mbriwa petitioned against the S.L.S.T. but he was only able to collect signatures from the rulers of non-diamond areas of Kono, i.e., the minority (T.N.A., CO 554/1508, telegram no. 45 of Governor M. H. Dorman to the secretary of state for the colonies, 21 Jan. 1958). 115 Hayward; Conteh, p. 170; D. M. Rosen , Diamonds, Diggers and Chiefs: the Politics of Fragmentation in a West African Country (unpublished University of Illinois Ph.D. thesis, 1973 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 116 Boorman, p. 93. It is also worth noting that Boorman's wife was hired by the S.L.S.T. for a sensitive job in the separator house (sorting out diamonds from other minerals). According to Boorman, the managers of the S.L.S.T. did not ask for any favours in exchange for their generous offers. However, Boorman and his wife were very grateful to the company: ‘their kindness and hospitality made our first tour of duty in Sierra Leone really enjoyable. In particular, the Company Secretary and the Chief Security Officer seemed to go out of their way to make us welcome, and we both owe them a debt of gratitude’ (Boorman, p. 92). 117 Alexander Nicol Anton Waddell (1913–99) was an ambitious officer, who was able to climb the ranks of the military and of colonial offices from simple navy cadet to the position of governor. During the Second World War, Waddell was sent to the Pacific where, among other things, he faced the harsh Japanese occupation and helped to restore order after the Japanese were expelled from the British Solomon Islands. After the war, he left the British navy and joined the Malayan civil service. In North Borneo he was given the task of rehabilitating the devastated territory's economy (1947). Before arriving in Sierra Leone, Waddell had been an official of the colonial secretary in the Gambia (1952–56) ( J. Smith , ‘Obituary: Sir Alexander Waddell’ , The Independent , 24 June 1999 ). 118 Rosen. 119 T.N.A., CO 554/1508, Wallace-Johnson to the acting governor, 28 Aug. 1957. Indirect confirmation of this state of permanent violence comes to us from the memoirs of a British policeman: Michael Boorman. The latter arrived in Sierra Leone in 1954, in his early twenties, after National Service experience in Tanganyika (1951–3). Here, the King's African Rifles, composed of askari and British military, worked with the civil power to calm the strikes organized by local unions to defend white farmers from the attacks of the nascent Mau-Mau movement. It was in this context that Boorman got his first command experience, becoming a lieutenant and learning from his superiors a principle of action that he always kept in mind, namely, that of using the ‘minimum force necessary’. Boorman recounts some of his experiences in Sierra Leone which show the ambiguity of this principle: mock executions to scare the miners in order to extract information about the gang leaders; young miners captured and released after being whipped; and, during the riots of 1955 in Rotifunk, the killing of two demonstrators (Boorman, pp. 98, 104, 105). 120 H. Mitchell , Remote Corners: a Sierra Leone Memoir ( 2002 ), pp. 234 – 7 . 121 Cf. Reno, p. 49. 122 Mitchell, p. 234. 123 Mitchell, p. 228. 124 Mitchell, p. 229. 125 Mitchell, p. 234. 126 Mitchell, p. 234. 127 Mitchell, p. 230. 128 Mitchell is probably referring to Berthan Macaulay (1929–2006), who went to England in 1951 to study law and returned to Freetown in 1957 to establish the law firm Macaulay & Co. (Sierra Connections, ‘Berthan Macauley QC: an intellectual and advocate’ <http://www.sierraconnection.com/biographies.htm> [accessed 18 July 2014 ]). 129 Mitchell, p. 239. 130 Boorman, p. 3. 131 Boorman, p. 60. 132 Althusser. 133 Foucault , Security . 134 See Cooper, p. 45 and A. Zack-Williams , Tributors, Supporters and Merchant Capital: Mining and Underdevelopment in Sierra Leone ( Aldershot , 1995 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC © 2015 Institute of Historical Research This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © 2015 Institute of Historical Research
TI - The art of governing contingency: rethinking the colonial history of diamond mining in Sierra Leone
JF - Historical Research
DO - 10.1111/1468-2281.12103
DA - 2016-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-art-of-governing-contingency-rethinking-the-colonial-history-of-vCENu3DMxD
SP - 136
EP - 157
VL - 89
IS - 243
DP - DeepDyve
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