Gemdev
  |
 Dear colleagues, We are pleased to share the latest publication in CODESRIA Bulletin Online (No. 5, June 2026): ‘Walter Rodney and the Unclaimed Past: Sierra Leone Historiography’s Refusal of a Radical Inheritance‘ by Ibrahim Abdullah, Department of History and African Studies, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone. Ibrahim Abdullah begins from a paradox that is as striking as it is revealing: Walter Rodney is everywhere in Sierra Leone’s historiography, and nowhere. His work shadows some of the most important questions that can be asked about Sierra Leone’s past, yet he has rarely been placed at the centre of Sierra Leonean historical reflection. His presence is foundational, but his reception has been faint. This is more than an omission, Abdullah argues. It is a refusal. The article is built around a careful engagement with Rodney’s doctoral dissertation, published as A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800 — a work that was not a narrow local study but an intervention into how African history should be written. Rodney did not begin Sierra Leone’s history with Freetown, British humanitarianism, the Nova Scotians, the Liberated Africans, or the colonial state. He began before the colonial archive had established the boundaries of the thinkable — with African societies in motion, with migration, warfare, political formation, trade, slavery, social stratification, African agency, and the long violence of Atlantic incorporation. Abdullah shows that the link between A History of the Upper Guinea Coast and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is not incidental. The later book did not emerge from nowhere. It was the theoretical and political expansion of questions Rodney had already explored in the Upper Guinea material. Sierra Leone and the Upper Guinea Coast were not merely examples illustrating a theory formed elsewhere. They were part of the ground from which the theory grew. The article then turns to the question of why this inheritance has remained unclaimed. Rodney’s work demands too much of a comfortable historiography. It demands that Sierra Leonean historians interrogate African ruling classes, not only colonisers. It demands that the history of Freetown be read not only as a story of liberation but also as one of imperial humanitarianism, labour discipline, and colonial mediation. It demands that the postcolonial crisis be traced not merely to bad leadership or ethnic politics, but to a longer history of underdevelopment, external extraction, and local collaboration. To take Rodney seriously would mean rewriting Sierra Leone’s past from below and from the outside in simultaneously. The article concludes with a call for engagement rather than commemoration: « 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. » We invite you to read, share, and engage with this important contribution. Best regards,Read the full paper here |