ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Temne stewardship in the propagation and Africanization of Islam in colonial Freetown. It addresses the socio-religious dynamics in one of the oldest colonies in British Africa and certainly the oldest in West Africa-the Sierra Leone colony. It challenges the extant literature, which gives major agency to the role played by Yoruba descendants, popularly known as Aku, in the propagation of Islam and the entrenchment of its tenets in colonial Freetown. The principal proponents of this view include Sa’ifu Deen Alharazim, L. Proudfoot, and Lamin Sanneh, among many others. While David Skinner (1976) has argued that the Temne, Aku, Mandingo, and others played a role in entrenching Islam as an alternate religion to Christianity, Alharazim (1939) and others privilege the Aku over non-Aku ethnic groups as major propagators of the faith. That is, the works of these scholars downplay the signifi cant role played by the Temne, also referred to as Theimne, in all of this (Alharazim 1939; Sanneh 1997).1 In addition, Alharazim and others also fail to fully recognize the role played by Temne agents in the Africanization of religion in the colony. Whereas Aku Muslims played a signifi cant role in the spread of the religion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their infl uence and gravitas as Muslim missionaries gradually eroded or faded by the middle of the twentieth century, surpassed largely by the role of Temne agents. I argue the Temne role in entrenching and Africanizing Islam in the Sierra Leone colony was bigger than has been acknowledged.
