Mendeland. He then went ahead and sold off the track and
rolling stock to make the change as irreversible as
possible. Now, as you drive out of Freetown to the east, you
pass the dilapidated railway stations of Hastings and
Waterloo. There are no more trains to Bo. Of course,
Stevens’s drastic action fatally damaged some of the most
vibrant sectors of Sierra Leone’s economy. But like many
of Africa’s postindependence leaders, when the choice
was between consolidating power and encouraging
economic growth, Stevens chose consolidating his power,
and he never looked back. Today you can’t take the train to
Bo anymore, because like Tsar Nicholas I, who feared that
the railways would bring revolution to Russia, Stevens
believed the railways would strengthen his opponents. Like
so many other rulers in control of extractive institutions, he
was afraid of challenges to his political power and was
willing to sacrifice economic growth to thwart those
challenges.
Stevens’s strategy at first glance contrasts with that of the
British. But in fact, there was a significant amount of
continuity between British rule and Stevens’s regime that
illustrates the logic of vicious circles. Stevens ruled Sierra
Leone by extracting resources from its people using similar
methods. He was still in power in 1985 not because he had
been popularly reelected, but because after 1967 he set up
a violent dictatorship, killing and harassing his political
opponents, particularly the members of the SLPP. He
made himself president in 1971, and after 1978, Sierra
Leone had only one political party, Stevens’s APC. Stevens
thus successfully consolidated his power, even if the cost
was impoverishing much of the hinterland.
During the colonial period, the British used a system of
indirect rule to govern Sierra Leone, as they did with most
of their African colonies. At the base of this system were
the paramount chiefs, who collected taxes, distributed
justice, and kept order. The British dealt with the cocoa and
coffee farmers not by isolating them, but by forcing them to
sell all their produce to a marketing board developed by the
colonial office purportedly to help the farmers. Prices for
agricultural commodities fluctuated wildly over time. Cocoa
prices might be high one year but low the next. The
incomes of farmers fluctuated in tandem. The justification