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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | The Dissolution of Freetown City Council in 1926: A Negative Example of Political Apprenticeship in Colonial Sierra Leone |
Author: | Wyse, Akintola J.G. |
Year: | 1987 |
Periodical: | Africa: Journal of the International African Institute |
Volume: | 57 |
Issue: | 4 |
Pages: | 422-438 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Sierra Leone |
Subjects: | political conditions 1926 local councils Politics and Government colonialism History and Exploration |
External links: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/1159892 https://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pao:&rft_dat=xri:pao:article:4011-1987-057-00-000024 |
Abstract: | Freetown City Council, established in 1893, was the victim of a colonial government which concentrated authority in white hands and resented the survival of a municipality run by Africans. Successive governors regularly presented it as a scapegoat, along with the whole Krio community, for disturbances in Freetown, notably the 1919 anti-Syrian riots and the 1926 railway strike. In 1925 financial malpractices in the council were disclosed and some officials were prosecuted. The following year, on the recommendation of a Commission of Inquiry, the City Council was dissolved and replaced by a Municipal Board. This article argues that whatever shortcomings there were in the performance of the City Council they were not unrelated to the constraints immanent in the political atmosphere of colonial Sierra Leone. Despite the claims made by Britain to have trained her subjects, her attitudes on this matter were at best ambivalent. In this regard, any failure on the part of the African apprentice must partly be attributed to British policy. Notes, ref., sum. in French. |