A ‘Province of Freedom’ was founded in Sierra Leone by the leaders of the Society for the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (hereafter the Society) in 1787. The expectation was that the resettled black Africans, backed by the philanthropy of the Society and, later, the Sierra Leone Company (hereafter, the Company) would transform this province into space in which they (the ‘Black Poor’ as the former enslaved Africans were called) "would be independent and self-sufcient" (Pybus 2006, 127). Independence was to be achieved through a political system called frankpledge. Under this system, the Black Poor were to ‘elect’ (with each man/woman having one vote) men of good Christian character to groups of ten, or tithings. The tithings, in turn, were to ‘select’ from among themselves a committee of hundredos. Those within this committee were responsible for the tithings, who were responsible for the day-to-day activities of the general com munity. Apart from overseeing the activities of the tithings, the hundredos were to ‘appoint’, from among themselves, a Shire-reeve, with powers equivalent to the combined authorities of a present-day county sherif and city mayor in the United States of America (Lahai 2018, 23). Frankpledge was to be the frst attempt to grant voting rights to the women of the Province of Freedom. However, this never came to pass. The year the frst tithing elections were to be held, the Sierra Leone Company became bankrupt. Unable to meet the social welfare demands of the people (due in part to the failings of the Company’s economic activities in the west of Africa and in part to bombardments of the settlement, renamed Freetown in 1791, by Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces during the Napoleonic wars), in 1808 the Company ceded the colony of Freetown to the British Imperial government of King George III.
The British government continued to govern the colony through a Christianized political framework, the Charter of Incorporation. This Charter guaranteed the Black Poor the right to be free from enslavement. However, all black Africans (men and women) were stripped of their voting rights when, in 1808, the question of political leadership ‘under the British Crown’ was subjected to racialized interpretations. Thus, between 1808 and 1844, the colony was governed by white British men.
During this time, with the right to economic empowerment guaranteed, a class of black African entrepreneurs emerged. The most prominent of these were Emmanuel Cline (a real estate tycoon), Thomas Macfoy (the largest shareholder of the Sierra Leone Steamship Company, and harbormaster of Freetown), William Pratt (the owner of one of the largest retail businesses in Freetown), W. T. Dove (the businessman who established trade links between Freetown and the Gold Coast, now Ghana), and John Ezzidio, who was a landowner, the largest supplier of uniforms and consumables to the British naval squadrons stationed in Freetown, and the biggest importer of women’s consumer items from Manchester, London, Liverpool, and Bristol (Fyfe 1955). To continue to ignore the grassroots political relevance of these men would have adversely afected the fedgling economy of the colony so, in 1844, Governor Fergusson co-opted John Ezzidio into the Freetown Town council; in 1845 he was appointed mayor and joined on the council by Thomas Macfoy. In 1850, these men angered the British colonial government in Freetown when they founded the country’s frst nationalist newspaper, the New Era. Soon after its founding, the level of protest against British colonial rule in Freetown increased tenfold. The educated few who formed its reading public became its proselytes, telling the uneducated what the British were not doing right. Soon thereafter the people, driven by an anti-colonial crowd psychology, began to petition the British administrators. Thomas Malfoy’s decision to dedicate a steamer to transport printed copies to all coastal communities between Murray Town and Claremont Creek further angered the British. With the reach of the newspaper now extending from Freetown to the micro-kingdoms of greater Sierra Leone, antagonism against the British began to take root even in kingdoms outside the British colony. The British colonial administration interpreted the actions of Ezzidio and Macfoy as acts of subversion against the British Crown and, in 1852, withdrew their political privileges and ejected them from the council (Lahai 2018, 55). This marked the end of the second attempt to politically empower the Freetownians.
The third attempt began in 1852. To clip the economic wings of the local elites, the British colonial administrators had imposed a land and house tax in Freetown in March 1851. To the African and European businessmen of the colony, this was a hostile tax regime and in protesting against it, they transcended their racial diferences to establish the Mercantile Association in October 1852. This Mercantile Association, as its name implies,
was, on the one hand, a chamber of commerce; the lifeline of the colony, after all, was business. To the entrepreneurs, however, the Association was also a platform to efectively challenge the politically motivated economic policies of the colonial administration. It was a proto-nationalistic political movement; politicians dominated its leadership, and their followers cut across the racial divide. There are those who, after many years researching the impact of the Mercantile Association, have concluded that it was the frst attempt towards representative democracy in colonial Freetown … [T]he composition of the Association and its strategy of resisting the house and land tax challenges the view that there was a chasm between the Associations leaders (businessmen, clergymen, and politicians) and the masses. [Instead], what those leaders were fghting to achieve aligned with the political aspirations of the ordinary people in Freetown (and in greater Sierra Leone) between 1863 and 1898.
These localized political aspirations were as personal as they were political and economic. For this reason, any tax on the land (which was primordially connected to the African identity of the African members of the Association) should come with its own political benefts in the form of political representation. After a series of back-and-forth communications between the Association and Colonial administrators and the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London, it was fnally agreed that a new constitution was necessary. Governor Samuel Wensley Blackhall adopted what became known as the Blackhall Constitution. This new constitu tion divided the Governor’s council into two: an Executive Council (reserved for Europeans) and a Legislative Council, open to a member of the Mercantile Association on the condition that, once elected, the successful candidate would work solely for the people of the colony, not the interests of the Association and its members. The efect of this condition was an internal division of members of the Association along racial lines, with John Ezzidio (an African) and Thomas Dove (a European businessman and reverend of the Wesleyan Church) nominated as candidates. In the election that followed, Ezzidio received 25 votes (representing 24 African and one Afro-Caribbean merchants) and Dove 14 votes (from the 14 white European merchants of the Association). Ezzidio thus became the frst black African to enter the Legislative Council (the forerunner of the Sierra Leone parliament). However, Ezzidio—who was seen as a representative by neither the people nor the Association—resigned after serving less than half his seven-year term.
The British Proclamation Act of 1896 declared a British protectorate over the micro-kingdoms of Sierra Leone. Two years later, in 1898, the people of these communities (hereafter the ‘Protectorate’) rebelled following the British imposition of a hut tax (similar to the land and house tax imposed on Freetown in 1851). The rebellion was crushed and puppets chiefs were installed in all the chiefdoms (no longer called kingdoms since there was only one king, the British Monarch) of the Protectorate (Hargreaves 1956). But agitation for political representation of the Protectorate continued, championed by a group called the Committee of Educated Aborigines (CEA). The conservative, racist male leaders of the Creoles of Freetown, Herbert Bankole-Bright, Ernest Samuel Beoku-Betts, and Albert Tuboku-Metzger were vehemently opposed to the CEA (and the people they represented) (Kandeh 1992, 87). The antagonism between Fretown Creoles and Protectorate Africans would persist until 1957. When the colonial administration foated the idea of a legislative assembly with representatives from both the Freetown and the Protectorate, these Creole leaders issued a statement in their newspaper, the Sierra Leone Weekly News, on 9 September 1922. In it, they argued that the Protectorate peoples were a social and political threat and warned that any form of political representation of the people of Sierra Leone should take into consideration the public appearance of the representatives and those they were to represent (Lahai 2018, 69).
To the Creoles, the people of Freetown should not be compelled to sufer the mass migration of the ‘unwashed’ people of the Protectorate into their community; using racially charged undertones, the Creole leaders also contended that the primitive people of the Protectorate, who did not understand administrative procedures, should also not be permitted to enter the Legislative Council (Kandeh 1992, 88). Despite their resistance, Governor Alexander Ransford Slater adopted a new constitution in 1924. This constitution created a 22-member Legislative Council. Of these 22 members, 12 were ofcial (reserved for Europeans) and 10 unofcial. Of these 10 unofcial members, three were to be selected (from among the ruling houses of the Protectorate) by the Governor in consultation with his Executive Council. These ‘selected’ Protectorate chiefs were Chief Kumba of Mande Chiefdom, Chief Tucker of Nangoba/Bullom chiefdom, and Bai Kompa of Koya Chiefdom (Wyse 1989, 100, fn. 23). The selection of Bai Kompa was strategic in that his chiefdom was the closest to Freetown and nearly half of his people had either resettled in Freetown or had relatives there. Three members were to be elected in the colony of Freetown by male electors; women, irrespective of their connections to infuential and afuent men, were disenfranchised.
To qualify to vote in the Freetown elections set for October 1924, an aspiring male was required be a Creole, aged 21 years and over, and own at least "£10 worth of property in central Freetown or £6 of property (house or farmland) in the Creole communities of rural Freetown" (Lahai 2018, 71). Of the 25,000 Freetownians, only 1,866 were enfranchised. Of these 1,926 were residents of the central business district of Freetown, 511 were domiciled in the peri-urban communities of the East and West ends of the city, and 399 were in the Creole villages in the mountainous villages of Regent, Sussex, Kent, and Russell. In the election that followed, Ernest Beoku-Betts won 607 votes in his Central Urban constituency (against his opponent’s 373 votes), Herbert Bankole-Bright won 562 votes in his peri-urban Freetown constituency (against 199 votes), and Albert Tuboku Metzger, who ran unopposed, won 173 votes (Wyse 2003, 57–58). The remaining 584 votes were invalidated on the grounds of rigging or improper marking (Sierra Leone Weekly News 1924, 3). This marked the frst, but not the only time, when allegations of rigging rendered ballots invalid.
In 1947, the question of whether the Protectorate representation in the Legislative Council was legitimate emerged. This time it took a violent turn, because the colonial administration of Governor Hubert Stevenson had adopted, in the same year, a new constitution which allowed for political representation based on population. Under this sytem, Freetown’s population of 25,000 would not be sufcient to give Bankole-Bright and his colleagues a majority in the Council when balanced against the Protectorate’s (male) population of 1.5 million (Banton 1957, 24). The Creoles could no longer rely on an appeal to the uncivility of the Protectorate people. Instead, they tried to persuade the Governor of the unconstitutionality of this arrangment.
(A) Legislative Council in the colony with a majority of foreigners, as British protected persons are in the Commonwealth, is contrary to the whole con ception of British citizens. British citizens have the right that they shall be governed only by such persons as are the same status as themselves. By the suggested set-up of Protectorate majority, persons who are not British would be empowered to make legislation that may seriously afect the rights of British subjects.
Stevenson ignored their objections and presented his proposal to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. The new constitution was approved and, in the elections that followed, the Creoles lost their majority in the house. Ten Legislative Council ‘ofcial’ seats were allocated to the Protectorate, with those occupying them indirectly elected by the people through the Protectorate Assembly—an assembly of all the paramount chiefs with its headquarters in Bo Town, Southern Sierra Leone. Seven seats (designated as ‘ofcial seats’) were reserved for white British members, and four ofcial seats for the Creoles (Cartwright 1970, 43). Though a reduction from the fve ofcial seats held by Creoles under the 1924 constitution, this was an improvement on the two seats they held after the 1939 Legislative Council election, which saw C. D. Hotobah-During, Otto Oyekan During, and Dr. W. Ojumiri Taylor (all candidates of the West African Youth League (WAYL)) winning the three unofcial seats for Freetown.
The 1947 elections had two main gender-based constitutional implications. First, it failed to address the allegations of sexualized forms of electoral violence between Creole males and the Protectorate people in Freetown.1 Second, and more positively, this was the second Legislative Council election in which some women were allowed to vote (the frst being the Legislative Council elections of 1939). The 1930 Ordinance granted the right to vote to all Creole women of Freetown who met the following requirements: (1) they were aged 21 years or over; (2) they were married to a non-Protectorate male; (3) they were gain fully employed or self-employed; (4) they had an annual income of at least £100; (5) for those living in rental properties, the rent should not be below £5 per month; (6) they were educated (able to read, write, and speak in the English language); and (7) they must have lived in Freetown for at least fve years prior to the elections (Lahai 2018, 124).
Although the 1947 elections gave some women what they have been fghting for since 1808, the same cannot be said for the conservative Creole nationalists and politicians. For them, the outcome of the elections—which gave 10 ofcial seats to the Protectorate and reduced the Freetown seats from fve to four—was an electoral disaster. In response, these conservatives joined forces under the leadership of Bankole-Bright to form the National Council of the Colony of Sierra Leone (NCSL) in 1951 (Wyse 2003). Their goal was "to oppose the dominance of the numerically stronger Protectorate people in the new political dispensation" (Fyle 2006, 139). They also sought to unify all Creoles under one political entity. In the 1930s, a Creole by the name of Isaac Wallace-Johnson had broken ranks and formed the West African Youth League (WAYL), a Marxist-Leninist political pressure group. Instead of supporting a united Creole front against the people of the Protectorate, Wallace-Johnson felded his own candidates—C. D. Hotobah
During, Otto Oyekan During, and Dr. W. Ojumiti Taylor—to challenge the Creole nationalists (W. S. Lapedon and S. Deen Alharazim). When the results of the 1947 elections were announced, the WAYL candidates prevailed, with Hotobah-During securing 504 votes, Oyekan During 445 votes, and Ojumiri 154 votes, against Lapedon’s 405 votes, and Alharazim’s 364 votes (Kilson 1966; cited in Lahai 2018, 84).
In addition, and judging by the way in which Constance Cumming-John was treated by the male-controlled NCSL and the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP; the party of the Protectorate male conservatives and chiefs) during the 1951 elections, one should add gender issues as a factor contributing to the emergence of the NCSL. These Creole nationalists intended to use their political party as a platform for the unifcation of all male politicians against the aspiring female politicians. With regards to the latter, they feared the worst: the loss of male political dominance should women aspire for political ofce. In the 1930s, Wallace-Johnson and his WAYL had begun the unimaginable, roaming the country organizing town hall meetings at which he called on the men to adopt a gender-responsive path in advocating for Sierra Leonean self-rule. When the conservatives—across the Freetown/Protectorate divide—refused to listen to him, Wallace-Johnson publicly denounced them for what he saw as political hypocrisy. For him, the suppression of women was a demonstration of the colo nial hegemonic masculinity; the exploitation of the bodies of women could be likened to the British imperial government’s exploitation of the land. It was also reported that
[i]mmediately after the [the founding of the WAYL] in Freetown, Wallace Johnson convened a special meeting to exhort women to take part in national afairs, pointing to the careers of illustrious female leaders in African history such as the Queen of Sheba, Yaa Asantewaa of Asante, and Princess Tsahai of Ethiopia who was campaigning for the cause of Ethiopia in London. Twisting the Adam’s rib analogy, so often used in West Africa to defend the subordin ation of women, he arrived at a completely diferent conclusion: "God did not take women from man’s crown because he did not want her to rule; he did not take her from his foot because he did not want her to be a slave; and so he took her from his side, because he wanted her to be equal."
According to LaRay Denzer, this was not a bluf. Soon after this statement, Wallace-Johnson appointed fve women to the central committee of the WAYL. They included Constance Cummings-John, Edna Elliott-Horton,2 Lorine E. Miller,3 Gladys Tyre, Lottie Black, Mrs Boyle, and Mrs Hotobah-During. These women, although they came from elite Creole families and were eloquent public speakers, understood the plight of the women of the Protectorate; they wanted economic and political opportunities for all women, and were opposed to the political and social uses of racism by the male politicians of Freetown and the Protectorate (Denzer 1987b, 443–44).
In response to the creation of the NCSL, the political hegemons of the Protectorate merged their political parties together to create the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) in April 1951. These minor parties were the People’s Party (led by Lamina Sankoh and M. S. Mustapha), the Sierra Leone Organizing Society (led by John Karefa-Smart), and the Protectorate Educational and Progressive Union (led by Milton Margai and H. E. B. John) (Kilson 1966, 229). This merger could not have gone ahead without the individual eforts of prominent paramount chiefs including Julius Momoh Gulama (of Kaiyamba chiefdom), Kai Tungi (of Kissi Tung chiefdom), Bai Koblo Pathbana (of Marampa chiefdom), Alikali Modu III (of Port Loko/Maforki chiefdom), Jaia Kaikai (of Pujehun), P. C. Bockari Samba (of Daru), Bai Farima Tass (of Kambia), and Bai Kurr (of Tonkolili) (Lahai 2018, 89). Their main political manifesto for the October 1951 elections stated that the goal of the SLPP was the "political unifcation of the two units in the dependency and self-government within the British Empire" (Wyse 2003, 159). However, in the process of unifying Freetown and the Protectorate, there were bound to be inter-party tensions. This was refective of Governor George Beresford-Stoke’s statement (after the elections of 1951) that Sierra Leone was not ready for electoral democracy:
Where there is a well-developed "party system" it is the practice of His Majesty the King or representative to send for the leader of the party which commands a majority and invite him to form a government. Here in Sierra Leone today I am not sure that the party system is yet quite sufciently developed for me to introduce a procedure modeled mutatis mutandis on that which I have described. I proposed therefore on this occasion to consult unofcial members [i.e., the paramount chiefs; and independent candidates] at a private and informal meeting on the choice of who are to be invited to join government. I want to make two points clear: (1) that this should not be regarded as establishing a precedent; (2) that in following this procedure this year, I am guided solely by the overriding necessity to ensure that the Executive Council has the support of a working majority in the Legislative Council.
Notwithstanding his misgivings, Governor Beresford-Stoke appointed the leader of the SLPP, Milton Margai, as Chief Minister and leader of government business (Kilson 1964; Cartwright 1970). In his government (between 1951 and 1954) only one woman, the Paramount Chief Madam Ella Koblo-Gulama, was made a minister (albeit without portfolio) (Lahai 2018, 93, fn. 2).
The assignment of the Ministry of Social Welfare (which oversaw women’s afairs) to Albert Margai—who, like his brother, Chief Minister Milton Margai, was a frm believer in the subordinate status of women—angered the women, especially Constance Cummings-John. Women’s gender-specifc needs and voting rights were at stake under this political arrangement. As a party, the SLPP saw women as an afterthought. In fact, its leadership was reliant on
such traditional institutions as paramount chiefs, tribal authorities, and Poro societies [the largest male-only mystic secret society in the country (see Little 1948; 1966)] to ensure its adequate political support. When political need [arose], these groups [were] called upon to gather audiences of chiefdoms subjects, to instruct peasants to vote for SLPP candidates, to distribute party membership card to peasants, and to perform other similar functions.
As a mitigation strategy, Cummings-John joined forces with Madam Ella Koblo-Gulama, Mrs Hannah Benka-Coker, Mrs Zainabu Kamara, and Haja Kai Dumbuya to establish an SLPP women’s wing. Within a few months of its creation, political rivalry and leadership struggles ensued between the men of the SLPP. Two factions emerged, one under Milton Margai (supported by the conservatives) and one under his brother Albert (supported by the party radicals). In the party leadership elections of 1954, the Albert Margai faction won the party leadership but was disenfranchised by the age requirement: even if he had won, Albert was the younger brother and was, therefore, required to concede to his elder brother, Milton. The schism—and, even more so, the later reconciliation— was to prove costly for the leaders of the SLPP women’s wing. Cummings-John’s biographer, LaRay Denzer, tells us that,
[a]lthough the women’s section favored the progressive faction, they decided to stay in the party when Albert Margai, in alliance with Siaka Stevens, broke away in 1958 to form the People’s National Party (PNP). Cummings-John stated that the women’s decision was based on their desire for a "united" stand to gain self-government as soon as possible. Later they [Cummings John and others] realized their folly, for when the confict was resolved, and the PNP re-joined the SLPP, neither side trusted the women politicians. Few were appointed to senior positions in government or public commissions; few received government contracts, few were nominated as candidates in local or national elections.
The sacrifce of the women on the altar of the unity of hegemonic masculinity was an eye-opener. Constance Cummings-John, Mabel Dove-Danquah, Nana Turay, Lerina Bright-Taylor, Ellen G. A. Caulker-Caulker, C. T. William, Lottie Hamilton-Hazeley, Etta Harris, Patience Richards, Lena Weber, Stella Ralph James, and Madam Ella Koblo-Gulama founded a feminist movement, the Sierra Leone Women’s Movement (SLWM) in 1954 (Cummings-John 1995). The goals of SLWM were "to improve the status of all Sierra Leonean women, whether born in the colony or in the Protectorate, and to seek female represen tation on government bodies concerned with education, social welfare and the economy" (Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2004, Vol. 3b, Ch. 3, para 44). A closer look at this stated purpose reveals that women were more interested in redirecting government’s policies from patriarchal militarism to an inclusive welfare-oriented system of governance. To a large extent, this supports the constructivist-essentialist feminist argument that women are by nur ture more concerned with the material benefts of all rather than the pursuit of power and militarism. The SLWM helped further the status of women by creating the country’s frst co-operative union in 1955. Between 1954 and 1960, through its own newspaper, the Ten Daily News (after 1960, Madora) the SLWM published its feminist philosophy, which inspired public debate on gender-equal political representation (Lahai 2010; Madora 1960; Cummings-John 1995).
On the political front, the resolve of the SLWM leadership was tested in the lead up to the Legislative Council elections of 1957. The SLWM sponsored Mrs C. T. William and Ms Ellen G. A. Caulker-Caulker as candidates from Cyril Rogers Wright’s United Progressive Party. It also supported Constance Cummings-John’s candidacy for the Legislative Council seat of Freetown under the SLPP banner. Another woman, Patience Richard, who sought to run for the Legislative Council seat of Freetown under the NCSL banner, was disqualifed for tendering her can didacy form to the NCSL leadership ten minutes late. She was, however, allowed to run as an independent but lost to Bankole-Bright, the leader of the NCSL. Cummings-John (who ran alongside R. G. O. King, also an SLPP candidate) received the highest number of votes (more than the combined vote for Bankole Bright and King) and was declared the winner.
What followed lends credence to my argument that "the coloniality of male political hegemony was representation of the travesty of women’s voting rights." Shortly after Cummings-John’s victory was announced, the (all-male) leaders of the NCSL and the SLPP challenged the results. To the NCSL and Bankole-Bright, Cummings-John’s win was a betrayal of her ‘Creole identity’; running under the banner of the SLPP, the party of the ‘unwashed’ people of the Protectorate, was a step too far. To the SLPP leadership, notwithstanding that it had provided her with a platform to contest the election, her win was a humiliation for what they understood as ‘manhood’. Any support it had provided to Cummings-John should be interpreted as an example of the criminality of the hegemonic masculine ten dencies of the male politicians, and their disrespect for women’s rights to vote, to be voted for and to control their own political destinies. It was an open secret that Cummings-John was preparing herself, after her electoral victory, for the position of Minister of Social Welfare, a role in which she could address the inequities—political, social, and economic—faced by the women of Sierra Leone. This fem inist ambition was not something the men were prepared to entertain; as soon as an "election petition was entered against her, Milton Margai let it be known that he favored one of the petitioners against her" (Denzer 1987b, 452). That petitioner was none other than her fellow SLPP candidate R. G. O. King, who would even tually (in 1957) become Minister of Development in the Margai government.
Women continued to try to run for parliament (in 1962, 1967, 1973, and 1977) but their candidate applications were denied. One noteworthy example was the attempt by Nancy Steele. She was not a fan of the feminist movement, the SLWM, which she saw as a movement attempting to promote ‘Europeanized’ ideals of feminism in Sierra Leone. This, for her, was the main reason the SLWM struggled to achieve legitimacy among the non-elite women of Sierra Leone. To bring to these women a type of feminism sensitive to their cultures (which were diametrically opposed to the ideals of western feminism) and identity (which spoke more about their ‘African-ness’ in a decolonized political space, Sierra Leone), in 1975 Steele founded the National Congress of Sierra Leone Women (NCSLW). The NCSLW was a pseudo-Marxist feminist movement that was more receptive to the Africanized interpretation of the causes of inequality in Sierra Leone. It understood the main cause of this problem (the neopatrimonial state created by the men of Sierra Leone) yet preferred to blame it on western eco nomic interests in the country. The NCSLW was of the view that, by projecting a militant profle, its members (notably its leaders, Steele, Haja Dankeh Kabia, Haja Fatmata Saso, and Kaindeh Bangura) stood a chance of gaining acceptance in politics more generally and from the single-party government (the All People’s Congress, APC) specifcally. In 1978, a one-party constitution was adopted by the APC-dominated parliament, issuing an ultimatum to all politicians of oppos ition parties in parliament:
Members of Parliament not members of the Recognized Party [the APC] who did not within a period of 24 days of the coming into efect of this Constitution make a declaration in writing to the Speaker that they have applied for mem bership of the Recognized Party or become accepted as members thereof, shall be presumed to have vacated their seats in Parliament on the 25th day after the coming into efect of this Constitution, and the Speaker shall so certify.
As the leader of the opposition party (the SLPP), Salia Jusu-Sherif, observed, this law required all Sierra Leoneans in the political space (men and women; enfranchised and disenfranchised) to declare allegiance to the APC. After a decade of opposing the creation of a one-party state, President Stevens had succeeded in creating one, with himself as leader-dictator (Hayward and Dumbuya 1985, 66). With the 1973 and 1977 electoral violence still fresh in the minds of the people, fear became the tool that sustained this autocratic system. To fnd acceptance in this environment, the NCSLW needed to demonstrate its support to the government’s politically motivated violence against its opponents. Ironically, those killed (if they were men) or raped (if they were women) were still, as defned by the new constitution, members (active or otherwise) of the sole legitimate political party, the APC. That notwithstanding, with violence being the rule, membership into the NCSLW was highly selective and only women with the temerity to commit (or at least readiness to approve) violence were selected. In recognition of their role in promoting the militancy of the one-party state of President Stevens, in 1973 Haja Dankeh Kabia, Haja Fatmata Saso, and Kaindeh Bangura were granted a retail monopoly over rice (Lahai 2010, 32) imported into the country by Jamil Said Mohamed, President Stevens’ right-hand man and leader of the Lebanese community in Sierra Leone (Luke and Riley 1989). Those who relied on this imported rice were required to "form queues every day in front of the houses of these women. It was no secret that [they] were very selective in their sales; con sequently, political opponents were deprived, amid the lack of sufcient locally produced alternatives" (Lahai 2010, 32). Despite this show of militant masculine tendencies, these women were still prevented from taking part in active pol itics as candidates for elections. Filomina Choima Steady tells us that, like all male politicians, Steele had "ambitions of attaining high political ofce." She worked "hard for the party and was responsible for much of the mobilization of women to the party." Her eforts did not cease after the elections. She continued to ensure that the party was enlarged. The National Congress of Sierra Leone Women provided "her with a means of mobilizing women, but in addition, it also [provided] her with a platform to assert her political stature" (Steady 1975, 78). This she achieved
through speeches, rallies, conventions, and inauguration of branches throughout the country. The backing of Congress [provided] her with enough support to attain her political goal, which [was] a seat in Parliament, and, if possible, a ministry. Mrs Steele, once regarded as a dead certainty on the ticket, was not given a party symbol. She stood as an independent and lost.
It is true that women colluded with men in some of the worse forms of politically motivated violence (both sexual and non-sexual). What is also true is that women were denied their right to be represented in parliament through direct elections until 1982, when the Hon. Amy Simbo was elected to parliament. Between 1980 and 1981, Simbo achieved the unimaginable, mobilizing women throughout the traditional opposition strongholds of the Southern and Eastern provinces. Ofcial membership of the women’s wing of the APC rose from its 1979 fgure of 16 to 32 (in its central committee) and its zonal support base 1212 in 1979 to 13,300 in 1982. This turn of events inspired fear among the male leaders of the Central Committee of the APC. Ordinary men allowing their wives to become polit ically active was a signal that the liberation of the political space was imminent; they could try to slow this process down, but they could not stop it. According to Fred M. Hayward and Ahmed R. Dumbuya, after the electoral violence of 1977 (during which hundreds of women were subjected to sexual assault), the leaders of the APC had come to fear that political repression was not sufcient to prevent change:
[The] top ofcials in the APC had come to fear that it might be impossible to hang onto power by [violence-ridden] electoral means no matter what was done. At the same time major party leaders feared that without elections the APC might be unable to continue to govern. The establishment of a one-party state following a referendum and legislative action had been an attempt to keep the APC in power in the face of a number of challenges. Yet the possibility of staying in power required some other mechanism which would demonstrate ongoing support, allow those in opposition a "safe" way to express their views, and provide for the legitimation of both the one-party state APC rule.
Debates on how to introduce limited form of electoral openness without risking the return of the banned opposition SLPP party dominated the agenda of the APC sub-committee on elections and people’s political participation between 1980 and 1981. The 1981 constitutional amendments allowing civil servants to vote also broadened the underground political space of the defunct SLPP. The dilemma was that allowing the men of the Southern Province (who had come to dominate the middle levels of the civil service) to vote in or contest elections risked reviving the SLPP, while not allowing them to do so would drive political agitation and the return of political tensions in an already volatile political space. To resolve this dilemma, in November 1981, the Central Committee of the APC introduced a constitutional amendment that disbanded the country’s electoral commission and transferred its functions to the Central Committee.
The Primary Elections Act 1981 No. 19’ … amended Section 38 of the Sierra Leone constitution by providing for the APC central committee’s supervision of primary elections. This change removed the electoral commission from the process by amending Section 35 of the Constitution which had been intended to guarantee that primary elections were run in a politically neutral fashion by a non-partisan electoral commission. The APC central committee had the power to intervene at several stages in the electoral process. Even candidates able to go through the primaries could be disqualifed if the central committee judged them unsuitable.
The APC’s second move, which was a test case for the Central Committee’s powers, was to endorse Ms Amy Simba and ensure that her popularity paid of within her constituency in Southern Sierra Leone. Setting Simbo against Chief Kallon—who was gradually becoming too much a political dissident—was a way to humiliate him. On the other hand, Simbo’s electoral victory exposed a weakness in the APC’s hardline hegemonic masculinity. Simbo represented an essentially pacifst belief system, one characteristic of what womanhood represented but also one that women like Nancy Steele, Haja Dankeh Kabia, Haja Fatmata Saso, and Kaindeh Bangura had sought to replace with an unrepresentative reading of women’s place in electoral politics. The Central Committee calculated that anti-government tension in the Southern Province could be defused by Simbo’s popularity, her productive role in the expansion of the female support base of the women’s wing of the APC and, above all, the impact of her election win in publicly ‘shaming’ the men she contested against. At the same time, however, what Sierra Leoneans perceived was the helplessness of the once-feared masculinized resistance to women in high ofce and, with it, to gender equality in politics. Hegemonic masculinity’s sour grapes of political excess against women were plunked and thrown away, at least temporarily.
The electoral victory of Ms. Simbo, though it lasted until 1987, was in itself a missed opportunity for national refection. Had the country followed up on her win and gradually apply a gender quota system, reason might have replaced the pathological culture of sexual and gender-based violence against women in politics. This quota system—even an imbalanced form—would have gone a long way to creating the space for a deeper understanding of the inherent connections between women’s empowerment and some of the intrinsic, or even ontological, features of economic development, political pluralism, and everything one can associate with human security.
Sierra Leone at this time was politically polarized; there was an ongoing civil war, and women were conspicuously absent in politics, and very visible in civil society advocacy for a return to democracy (during the Bintumani I and II conferences, of February and August 1995 respectively, in Freetown) and for an end to strategic use of sexual violence by the warring factions. Thus, a proportional representation system was necessary because, to use Arend Lijphart’s words, it produces "proportionality and minority representation" and "treats all groups—ethnic, racial, or even non-communal groups [and, in addendum, women]—in a completely equal and evenhanded fashion" (Lijphart 2008, 79). Critics are of the view that if this system treats all groups equally (i.e., focuses on party ideology and not the identity of individuals), women would have won more than fve seats in parliament in 1996. Two factors afected the outcomes. First, despite the higher number of women in the population of registered voters, the process did not efectively transform votes (women’s votes) into seats because the proportional representation system that was used was a semi-closed system, rather than open-ended. In that, while the process allowed for the representation of minorities (especially women), it was not intended to refect the ideological positions of the political parties that contested the elections. Thus, electoral district population did not infuence the gender of the candidates presented. Had it been an open-ended system, there was a greater likelihood of parties selecting or electing (in their primaries) more women, which would have increased the chances of women winning more than fve seats. Second, the civil war was still ongoing. As a result, combatants (of both the rebel forces and the outgoing mili tary junta, the Reformed National Provisional Ruling Council (RNPRC)) and non-combatants (civilian men) took advantage of the general level of insecurity to perpetrate acts of sexual and gender-based violence. One result of this was low voter turnout, especially among women. Thus, of the 17 women who contested the elections, only fve received the required number of votes. Why was rape used as a strategic instrument to dissuade women from active politics? The question is discussed in the next subsection.