for marketing boards was that they, not the farmers, would absorb the price fluctuations. When world prices were high, the board would pay the farmers in Sierra Leone less than the world price, but when world prices were low, they would do the opposite. It seemed a good idea in principle. The reality was very different, however. The Sierra Leone Produce Marketing Board was set up in 1949. Of course the board needed a source of revenues to function. The natural way to attain these was by paying farmers just a little less than they should have received either in good or bad years. These funds could then be used for overhead expenditures and administration. Soon the little less became a lot less. The colonial state was using the marketing board as a way of heavily taxing farmers.
Many expected the worst practices of colonial rule in sub- Saharan Africa to stop after independence, and the use of marketing boards to excessively tax farmers to come to an end. But neither happened. In fact, the extraction of farmers using marketing boards got much worse. By the mid- 1960s, the farmers of palm kernels were getting 56 percent of the world price from the marketing board; cocoa farmers, 48 percent; and coffee farmers, 49 percent. By the time Stevens left office in 1985, resigning to allow his handpicked successor, Joseph Momoh, to become president, these numbers were 37, 19, and 27 percent, respectively. As pitiful as this might sound, it was better than what the farmers were getting during Stevens’ s reign, which had often been as low as 10 percent— that is, 90 percent of the income of the farmers was extracted by Stevens’ s government, and not to provide public services, such as roads or education, but to enrich himself and his cronies and to buy political support.
As part of their indirect rule, the British had also stipulated that the office of the paramount chief would be held for life. To be eligible to be a chief, one had to be a member of a recognized“ ruling house.” The identity of the ruling houses in a chieftaincy developed over time, but it was essentially based on the lineage of the kings in a particular area and of the elite families who signed treaties with the British in the late nineteenth century. Chiefs were elected, but not democratically. A body called the Tribal Authority, whose members were lesser village chiefs or