*Sierra Leone and the Unfinished Work of Nationhood*

*Sierra Leone and the Unfinished Work of Nationhood*

By Oumar Farouk Sesay

Since the beginning of time, human beings have told stories not merely to remember who they were, but to decide who they belonged to. Around fires, within clans, and eventually across kingdoms and civilizations, communities crafted narratives of origin, ancestry, triumph, suffering, and destiny. These stories gave people more than memory. They gave them identity, obligation, and a sense of their place in the world.

As societies grew more complex, their stories evolved alongside them. The myths of the clan became the histories of peoples; the histories of peoples became the political narratives of states. Religion, economics, conquest, culture, ideology, and collective memory were gradually woven into broader explanations of who “we” are and what future “we” ought to pursue.

Nation-building, in this sense, has never been merely the construction of institutions, the drawing of borders, or the writing of constitutions. It is also an act of imagination. A nation must develop a story powerful enough to persuade people with different histories, languages, regions, and loyalties that they belong to a common moral and political community.

That remains one of Sierra Leone’s most important unfinished tasks.

The country unmistakably exists as a state. It has borders, institutions, laws, elections, ministries, political parties, a capital, a flag, and international recognition. But statehood and nationhood are not identical.

A state can be constructed administratively.

A nation must be imagined collectively.

That distinction may explain much of Sierra Leone’s ongoing political difficulty. More than six decades after independence, we have inherited and maintained the machinery of statehood without fully developing a national narrative that can transcend older, often stronger loyalties to ethnicity, region, family, community, and political party.

These identities are not defects to be eliminated. They are part of the human richness from which a nation must be built. No serious project of nationhood should require a Temne to become less Temne, a Mende less Mende, a Limba less Limba, a Krio less Krio, or any other Sierra Leonean to surrender their language, history, ancestry, or cultural memory.

The problem arises when these identities become the outer boundary of political obligation—when the village matters more than the republic, when the region matters more than the country, and when political loyalty becomes an extension of communal belonging rather than a judgment on competing visions of the national interest.

A nation cannot be built by erasing difference.

But it cannot endure when difference becomes the principal language through which citizens understand political power.

This deeper crisis underlies many of Sierra Leone’s recurring political tensions. What appears on the surface as an electoral problem may, in fact, be a narrative problem. We have not yet constructed a sufficiently compelling story of Sierra Leonean belonging to rival the smaller stories that preceded the nation and often command deeper emotional loyalty.

The question, therefore, is not simply why Sierra Leoneans divide politically.

It is why the idea of Sierra Leone has not yet become strong enough to overcome those divisions consistently.

Nowhere is the weakness of a shared national narrative more visible than in electoral politics.

Elections should ordinarily offer citizens competing programs for governing the same country. Political parties should disagree on taxation, development, education, agriculture, infrastructure, foreign policy, decentralization, employment, and the distribution of public resources.

Yet when political identity overlaps heavily with region, ethnicity, history, and patronage, an election can become more than a contest over policy.

It can become a referendum on belonging.

Understandably, Sierra Leoneans searching for a way beyond political division should turn toward institutional reform.

No democratic model—liberal, deliberative, consensual, parliamentary, presidential, or otherwise—can permanently stabilize a society in which citizens have not developed a sufficiently strong sense of common belonging.

Every durable nation develops what might be called a national narrative: an evolving account of where its people have come from, what they have endured, what they value, and what they hope to become.

The strongest national narratives are capacious enough to hold contradiction. They acknowledge triumph and failure, dignity and shame, unity and conflict. They create belonging not by pretending that everyone has experienced history the same way, but by persuading people that their different experiences nonetheless belong within a common story.

Sierra Leone urgently needs such a narrative.

Our history contains extraordinary material from which to build: indigenous societies with long political and cultural histories; encounters among communities through migration, commerce, marriage, religion, and conflict; the rise of Freetown; the histories of liberated Africans and the Krio community; colonial expansion into the interior; resistance and accommodation; independence; political upheaval; civil war; peacebuilding; epidemics; democratic experimentation; cultural creativity; economic struggle; and the everyday resilience of ordinary people.

Yet these histories too often remain fragmented.

Different communities remember different wounds.

Different regions possess different heroes.

Different political traditions tell different versions of the republic.

What is missing is not history itself, but a sufficiently shared interpretation of that history.

We possess many Sierra Leonean stories.

We have not yet fully woven them into a Sierra Leonean story.

The project of nationhood must therefore become, in part, a project of narrative construction.

We must ask: What do we teach children about the country before we teach them which political party their parents support? Which national figures’ lives belong to all of us rather than to one region or community? Which moments of courage, injustice, sacrifice, invention, suffering, and reconciliation should shape our collective memory? Which civic virtues should a Sierra Leonean recognize as distinctly ours?

If we cannot answer these questions, our children will inherit a country but not necessarily a nation.

The central challenge facing Sierra Leone, then, is not merely managing diversity.

It is how to convert diversity into solidarity.

That requires a national narrative powerful enough to make a Temne child, a Mende farmer, a Limba trader, a Krio professional, a Kono miner, a Fulani entrepreneur, a Sherbro fisherman, and every other citizen understand that no one can build a secure future in permanent isolation from the others.

Their histories need not become identical.

Their futures already are interconnected.

This is the civic truth upon which a durable Sierra Leone must be built.

The country’s next national project should therefore be larger than another electoral cycle, another manifesto, another constitutional review, or another struggle for political succession.

It should be the deliberate construction of a civic nation.

Such a project would ask schools to teach belonging.

It would ask political parties to compete nationally rather than retreat into regional certainties.

It would ask institutions to demonstrate that citizenship matters more than affiliation.

It would ask artists and writers to enlarge our collective imagination.

It would ask citizens to defend justice even when injustice benefits their own side.

And it would ask leaders to treat the republic as something borrowed from generations yet unborn.

That may sound idealistic.

But every nation is, at some level, an act of collective imagination.

The danger lies not in imagining too much.

It lies in imagining too little.

For too long, Sierra Leone’s political imagination has been confined to the immediate: the next election, the next appointment, the next party victory, the next regional grievance, the next distribution of state resources.

Nationhood demands a longer horizon.

It asks what kind of country should exist fifty years from now.

It asks whether a child born in 2075 will inherit the same political suspicions we inherited, or whether we will have bequeathed something larger.

It asks whether our descendants will still experience Sierra Leone as a fragile arrangement among competing communities or as a mature civic nation in which diversity has ceased to be a threat to belonging.

That is ultimately why national narrative matters.

Human beings organize their political worlds through the stories they believe.

If our dominant stories tell us that politics is tribal competition, we will reproduce tribal competition.

If our stories tell us that the state belongs to whichever party captures it, we will continue fighting to possess it.

If our stories tell us that some regions are permanent winners and others permanent losers, every election will reopen the same wound.

But if we begin telling a larger story—one in which Sierra Leone belongs equally to all its citizens, in which public office is stewardship, in which difference does not cancel fraternity, and in which national success requires the flourishing of communities beyond our own—we may gradually create the political culture such a story describes.

The great unfinished work of Sierra Leone may therefore be neither purely constitutional nor electoral.

It may be narrative.

We must weave our memories, wounds, migrations, achievements, languages, failures, aspirations, and identities into a sufficiently compelling vision of a common destiny.

We do not need to become the same people.

We need to become people capable of imagining the same country. Perhaps that is what Lamina Sankoh meant when he said one country, one people, or what Siaka Stevens intended when he proposed a congress of all people. Both visions were truncated for ephemeral gains.

The decisive question of this century, then, may not be which political party governs Sierra Leone, nor even which political system we ultimately perfect.

It may be something more fundamental:

What national narrative can persuade us that Sierra Leone’s future belongs to all of us—and that none of us can inherit it securely without the others?

Until we answer that question, we may continue to possess a state without fully becoming a nation.

Answer it well, and we may finally begin writing the country we have yet to become.