Abstract
To understand the past involves two very different operations, and to synthesize them is a severe test of historical scholarship. On the one hand historians study change over an extended period of time, and try to discern in what underlying direction the twisting course of events was leading; at the same time they must immerse themselves in the detailed evidence for those events, seeking to do justice to the thoughts and purposes of men whose own conceptions of what they were doing, and where they were going, may now seem to have been ironically mistaken. Both operations present peculiar difficulties in studying events so near in time, and so contentious, as the termination of colonial rule in Africa.
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Notes
J. F. Ade Ajayi, “The continuity of African institutions under colonialism” in T. O. Ranger (ed.), Emerging Themes of African History (1968), p. 194.
K. E. Robinson, The Dilemmas of Trusteeship (1965), p. 7.
On Creole history generally, see John Peterson, Province of Freetown (1961)
L. Spitzer, The Creoles of Sierra Leone (Madison, 1974)
A. T. Porter, Creoledom (1963). All these important studies derive initially from the fundamental work of Christopher Fyfe.
See J. A. Langley, Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900–1945 (Oxford 1973), pp. 153–63.
M. H. Y. Kaniki, “The Economic and Social History of Sierra Leone, 1929–1939” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1972 ).
C. K. Meek, W. M. Macmillan and E. R. J. Hussey, Europe and West Africa (1940), pp. 76–7; Kaniki, op. cit., pp. 328–9, 334, 352–3.
Cf. F. D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate (1929 ed.), pp. 85–6.
J. R. Cartwright, Politics in Sierra Leone 1947–1967 (Toronto, 1970)
M. Kilson, Political Change in an African State: A Study of the Modernisation Process in Sierra Leone (Cambridge, Mass., 1966).
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© 1979 John D. Hargreaves
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Hargreaves, J.D. (1979). Approaches to Decolonization in Sierra Leone. In: The End of Colonial Rule in West Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04178-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04178-7_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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