BAD HABITES

It seemed as if Shorunkeh-Sawyerr was busy counting the stars in the sky in a bright night. The Governor's mind was fixed. He had thought of reconstitution and its course before arriving in Sierra Leone and his mind was almost closed. Maybe he erroneously thought that the Chiefs in the Protectorate region were on a par with their Gold Coast counterparts. This over simplication was too misleading. According to official opinion, the Protectorate inhabitants could take the Oath of Allegiance which is the main precedent to be a member of the Council. However, it would appear as if official policy wanted to delay the idea of annexation since Governor Slater observed that such a request must come from Protectorate inhabitants themselves.

A close look at the Great Debate shows that even the British were not too sure whether it was really correct to have the Protectorate representatives in the Legislative Council. It really magnified the attitude of the colonial administration. One sees traces of racism. The idea of race is tied up with the pseudo-scientific conception of the inequality of the races or worse still, the superiority of European culture. Since the blackman was believed to be at the foot of the human tree of evolution, he must accept the 'fact' that the whiteman is very clever and always right. There was therefore that typical 'jumble obstinacy' not to yield to the brilliant and legitimate argument of the Africans during this Great Debate.

The colonial administration gave a blind eye to the validity of Shorunkeh-Sawyerr's plea for annexation and rather found all sorts of 'rationalization' to justify their policy.

Unfortunately, the Committee of Educated Aborigines (a Protectorate Organization) gullibly accepted Governor Slater's position of though which unrealistically attributed the relative backwardness of the Protectorate to the selfishness of the Colony. Such tendencious statements were not only stupid or gratuitously provocative but were also a hotchpotch of throroughly evil nonsense. Newspaper reports show that - if anything- there were cries for Protectorate representation in the Legislative Council. In the nineteenth century, Sir David Chalmers turned down Samuel (later Sir Samuel) Lewis' cry for Protectorate representation in the Legislative Council. The statement therefore that the colony people were totally against Protectorate representation must not be in a blind manner. Shorunkeh-Sawyerr cleared this point in one of his speeches. He was not against protectorate representation. The colony raised eyebrows because of the manner of Protectorate representation. It was clear that by 1924, the Paramount Chiefs were all yes men of the government. As stated above, this situation was carved after the end of the Bai Bureh Rebellion (1898) when so-called 'disloyal' chiefs were either exiled or deposed and loyal ones retained or installed.

It was clear that the members of the Committee of Education Aborigines who felt that the 'anomaly' must be corrected represented only a portion of the Protectorate. They were all northerners and their main motive was to foster protectorate issues.

It was therefore clear that the policy of the colonial government was bias and once it had been laid down, no amount of objective analysis by colony Africans in Sierra Leone could alter it. It is therefore not surprising that at the suggestion of Governor Slater, the moot question was withdrawn. Deveneaux's comment on colonial policy was an accurate one.