Abstract
Chieftaincy is a key institutional feature in Upper West Africa. We discuss how various levels of chiefs serve as brokers between all four of elementary institutional orderings. Especially, chieftaincy links the formal government hierarchy and the village enclave. We provide both a historical and contemporary account of chiefs and delve into their role in the success (or failure) of development projects, look at attempts to transform chieftaincy through attempts to make chiefs more inclusive and democratic, and their important role in helping communities cope with shocks, such as the Ebola virus crisis of 2014–2015.
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Notes
- 1.
Chieftaincy was institutionalized as part of British colonial indirect rule in Sierra Leone from about 1904. Liberia under the presidency of Arthur Barclay adopted the British arrangements in Sierra Leone from about 1910. The French in Guinea appointed chefs de canton as the lowest levels of a single administrative system of direct rule, without pretence that they were working with a “traditional” institution. But these low-level rural officials had to seek local legitimacy, and historians have tended to conclude that the differences between the approaches of the British and French can be exaggerated, at least at the local level (Crowder 1968).
- 2.
Some “amalgamated” chiefdoms were dis-amalgamated in the later years of the All Peoples Congress government of President Koroma, 2007–2018. Whether these changes will be preserved by the Sierra Leone Peoples Party government of President Maada Bio elected in early 2018 remains to be seen.
- 3.
Go bifo is Krio for “to progress.”
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Bulte, E., Richards, P., Voors, M. (2018). Chiefs and Chieftaincy. In: Institutions and Agrarian Development. Palgrave Studies in Agricultural Economics and Food Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98500-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98500-8_5
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