This chapter explores the role of non-Western-educated Temne market women in shaping the social and economic history of the colony. It addresses the neglect of women’s participation in the economy, and highlights the cultural foundations of Temne women’s activism. The previous chapters note that the Temne organized around various institutions to strengthen their influence in the colony. This chapter shows that Temne women traders organized around commercial institutions, the leadership of powerful market women, and the TTA. In conjunction with women’s groups, Temne women used commercial institutions to simultaneously enhance their profile and Temne influence in this British colony.

This chapter assesses the contextual relevance and significance of the TTA, and its role in mobilizing ethnic identity for political and social gain. Supporters of the TTA believed it played a big role in uplifting Temne catchet, and providing local services for constituents, such as giving financial assistance to indigent subjects, providing temporal accommodation for impecunious immigrants and impoverished subjects, and performing juridical functions. In spite of this, like other tribal administrations, the TTA failed to provide tangible benefits for the Temne community. Clearly, the TTA failed to provide educational opportunities, such as elementary and middle schools, vocational or tertiary training centers, and institutionalized healthcare facilities and community centers. Despite the fundamental weakness of the TTA and other tribal administrations, it is reasonable to note that local administrations in the colony served as auxiliaries to the colonial establishment, and they all engaged in activities that promoted colonial governance.

The initial impetus in the historiography of the colony was nationalist. Fyfe, Porter, Spitzer, Wyse, White, Denzer, and others focused on Freetonian accomplishments to make the case that African agency, as well as colonial initiative, became important in the making of the British colony. The extant historiography consigned non-Freetonian groups to the background and grouped them as “non-colony peoples” or “interior peoples.” Even when other groups came under inquiry, such as women, non-Freetonians, and Muslims, the Freetonian focus remained.

This chapter argues that the successful entrenchment and propagation of Islam and Muslim practices in a colony proclaimed as Christian in its root and orientation was a multiethnic effort, contrary to the assertion of the dominant literature. The collective efforts of Muslim clerics, agents, and missionary activists from diverse ethnic communities contributed greatly to the acceptance of Islam as a major force in the colony by “Christian Creoles” and the colonial administration. The prevailing Temne Islamic Community (TIC) and the numerous Islamic institutions it established undergirded this multiethnic enterprise. On this basis, this chapter shows the growing influence of the Temne community in the social formation of the colony. It also argues that the Temne Islamic Community, including those who identified themselves as Temne Islamic missionaries and elites, played a much bigger role in the propagation, popularization and/or Sierra Leonization of Islam than acknowledged in the historical literature. Like the TTA and cultural associations, Islam also became a symbol of pan-Temne unity.

The West African territory of Sierra Leone became Britain’s first colony in West Africa, in the eighteenth century. A majority of the indigenous ethnic communities of this territory lived in the interior, while a few occupied the coast. British philanthropists in 1787 and later the British government in 1808 largely restricted their relationship with Sierra Leone to the coastal area where it later established a colony for freed slaves and their descendants.

The previous chapter shows that the TTA became one of the most influential local authorities between 1890 and 1961. As a matter of fact, the TTA offered such services to its subjects as the provision of temporal housing for new immigrants, the provision of employment opportunities, and funding for Temne candidates in municipal elections, which to some extent cushioned the challenges faced by underemployed members of the Temne community. Ergo, the TTA became a symbol of authority and influence in a multiethnic environment. It contributed significantly to the establishment of other Temne institutions, such as cultural associations and Temne Islamic institutions.

The chapter explores the agency of the Temne in local administration, and how they organized themselves around various symbols of authority in the colony. This aspect of the colony’s history is significant, because the history of local administration is extensively viewed through the prism of the Municipal Council, or Freetown Corporation/Freetown City Council, run by Freetonians. By equating local or native administration with the Municipal Council, the historical literature downplays the role indigenous ethnic communities played in fostering local governance in this hodgepodge British territory. The chapter shows that local administration and community governance in the colony contributed to the success of the British colonial project in Sierra Leone.