Walter Rodney's overlooked legacy reshapes Sierra Leone's historical narrative
Walter Rodney's seminal work, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800, placed Sierra Leone at the heart of Upper Guinea Coast history, emphasizing social formations over rulers or colonial boundaries. Yet Sierra Leonean historiography has largely overlooked his framework, focusing instead on Freetown‑centric narratives like the Colony, Creole society, and colonial administration. The article argues that Rodney's approach—examining migration, warfare, trade, slavery, and African agency—offers a way to connect precolonial, colonial and post‑colonial periods without treating them as sealed compartments. By centering ordinary people and the structures of power, exploitation and dependency, Rodney's historiography links local history to Atlantic capitalism and global capitalism, showing Sierra Leone's past as part of the making of the modern world. The neglect of his work reflects a broader weakness in radical Sierra Leonean scholarship that avoids unsettling questions about class, exploitation and collaboration. To truly recover Rodney's legacy, historians must engage his arguments critically, integrate his longue durée perspective into studies of labour, women, trade, and resistance, and write Sierra Leone's history from below and from the outside in, linking local processes to global capitalism.