The Challenge of Constructing Citizenship in a Multiracial Society in Postcolonial Sierra Leone

Abstract

Abstract Sixty-one years after Sierra Leone regained its independence from Britain in April 1961, the issue of citizenship remains divisive and fraught with negative political implications for persons seeking elective and appointive political offices. John Joseph Akar, born in the then Protectorate of a Lebanese father who was himself born in Senegal and a Sierra Leonean mother, challenged the constitutionality of amendments to the Independence Constitution that altered the criterion for citizenship from one based on birth (jus soli) to one based on “Negro African descent” (jus sanguinis). Enacted less than a year after independence, the new constitutional provisions appealed to a kind of xenophobic nationalism that undercut the country's multicultural character. In this article I argue that the economic success, in particular that of the Lebanese in the colonial period, put them at odds with Sierra Leone's emerging political elites. Prior to independence these elites used restrictive immigration laws to limit the entry and participation of the Lebanese and other non-indigenes in the country's political and economic affairs. After independence there was no better place to institutionalize such limitations and discrimination than in the postcolonial constitution, which the British helped construct to unify the Colony and Protectorate of Sierra Leone.