Walter Rodney is both everywhere and nowhere in Sierra Leonean historiography. His shadow falls across the most vital questions about the country’s past, yet he has never been placed at the center of its historical reflection. This is not merely an omission. It is a refusal.
Rodney’s doctoral dissertation, later published as A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800, was far more than a narrow local study. It was a bold intervention into how African history should be written. He stretched his gaze across the Upper Guinea Coast, from The Gambia down to Cape Mount, and within that space Sierra Leone was not marginal. It was central to the historical processes he reconstructed: migration, warfare, political formation, trade, slavery, social stratification, African agency, and the long violence of Atlantic incorporation.
Rodney did not begin Sierra Leone’s history with Freetown. He did not start with British humanitarianism, the Province of Freedom, the Nova Scotians, the Maroons, or the colonial state. He began before the colonial archive had drawn its boundaries. He began with African societies in motion, with the Mani invasions, with the encounter between coastal communities and incoming military-political forces, with older structures of power and production, and with the gradual intrusion of European commerce into already dynamic African historical worlds.
That choice alone marks him as a major figure. For if Sierra Leonean history is allowed to begin only with Freetown, the country’s past is already colonized before the historian writes a word. The categories are inherited from empire: Colony and Protectorate, settler and native, Creole and provincial, civilized and customary. Rodney broke that frame. He insisted that the territory later called Sierra Leone had histories before Sierra Leone; that its peoples were not waiting for incorporation into the British Empire to become historical; that the Atlantic world entered a region already marked by political experiment, violence, exchange, hierarchy, and struggle.
His treatment of the Mani invasions is a powerful example of this method. For Rodney, the Mani were not simply an ethnic-origin story or a convenient explanation for later cultural formations. They were a historical problem through which one could examine conquest, class formation, military innovation, political consolidation, social reorganization, and the making of new ruling groups. The Mani invasion was not folklore to be domesticated into identity. It was a window into power.
That is what made Rodney’s work so different. He was not content with listing events. He wanted to know what those events did to society. Who ruled? Who labored? Who fought? Who was captured? Who traded? Who accumulated? Who mediated between African communities and foreign merchants? Who lost autonomy? Who gained power? What forms of exploitation predated European rule, and how were they transformed by the Atlantic slave trade? These were not antiquarian questions. They were questions about the making and remaking of social relations.
This is why Rodney must be placed at the center of a people-centered historiography of Sierra Leone, even if he has not been institutionally recognized as such. His interest was not in rulers alone, nor in ethnic origins as static inheritances, nor in colonial institutions as the natural containers of history. He was interested in social formations. He wanted to understand how communities produced, exchanged, fought, ruled, absorbed outsiders, generated dependents, and responded to the pressures of long-distance trade. His was a history of ordinary people, but not in a sentimental sense. He did not romanticize “the people” as an innocent mass outside history. He placed them within structures of production, violence, domination, and resistance.
That was what made his historiography combative. Its combativeness was not a matter of rhetorical aggression. It came from its emancipatory intent. Rodney wrote African history against the imperial archive, against colonial common sense, and against the idea that Europe was the author of African historical movement. But he also wrote against simple nationalist consolation. He did not merely replace European heroes with African heroes. He asked harder questions. He asked how African ruling classes participated in the slave trade. He asked how external demand changed internal hierarchies. He asked how African sovereignty could coexist with growing dependency.
The link between A History of the Upper Guinea Coast and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is therefore not incidental. The later book was the theoretical and political expansion of questions Rodney had already explored in the Upper Guinea material. The dissertation gave him the concrete historical anatomy: coastal trade, slave raiding, brokerage, ruling groups, European merchants, African intermediaries, shifting forms of production, and the social consequences of external demand. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa turned that anatomy into a continental and world-historical argument.
And yet, this inheritance has not been properly claimed. No Sierra Leonean scholar has meaningfully built a sustained historiographical project around Rodney’s findings. His work is cited, perhaps, but not wrestled with. It is acknowledged, sometimes, but not made generative. His contribution has been dwarfed, neglected, or treated as external to the Sierra Leonean historical canon.
This neglect is revealing. Sierra Leone historiography has often been organized around certain familiar axes: the founding of Freetown, the emergence of Creole society, missionary education, colonial administration, the Hut Tax War, paramount chiefs, party politics, diamonds, civil war, corruption, and state collapse. These are important themes. But they can produce a fragmented history if they are not connected to deeper structures. Rodney’s work offered precisely such a connection.
The refusal to engage Rodney is therefore not simply a gap in scholarship. It is a symptom of a larger problem: the weakness of a radical Sierra Leonean historiography capable of linking historical knowledge to emancipatory politics. Rodney’s work was dangerous because it refused innocence. It denied Europe the innocence of civilization. It denied colonialism the innocence of order. It denied African elites the innocence of victimhood. It denied nationalism the comfort of shallow origins.
To take Rodney seriously would mean rewriting Sierra Leone’s past from below and from the outside in at the same time. From below, because the laboring, captured, displaced, taxed, conscripted, and governed would have to become central historical subjects. From the outside in, because Sierra Leone’s history cannot be understood apart from the Atlantic slave trade, European capitalism, imperial rivalry, colonial extraction, and Third World struggles against domination.
The tragedy is that Sierra Leonean historiography has not fully developed this possibility. Rodney should have provoked a school. He should have forced generations of historians to ask how the precolonial social formations of the Upper Guinea Coast shaped the later colonial order. Instead, his work remains like a buried foundation: load-bearing, but unseen.
To recover Rodney is not to canonize him uncritically. His conclusions can and should be debated. But meaningful engagement requires more than citation. It requires argument. It requires entering the terrain Rodney opened and asking whether his questions still illuminate the Sierra Leonean past.
Rodney’s great contribution was to show that Sierra Leone’s past was never small. It was never merely local. It was never simply colonial. It was part of the making of the modern world. And that is precisely why the refusal to engage him matters. To neglect Rodney is to shrink Sierra Leone’s history. To recover him is to restore its scale, its conflict, its people, and its unfinished emancipatory meaning.
Walter Rodney, tagged Brother Wally by the Guyanese working people, was murdered on 13 June 1980 in Georgetown, Guyana.
Ibrahim Abdullah is a professor of history at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone.
