ABSTRACT
By far one of the most difficult campaigns the British fought during the occupation of their West African possessions was against the Temne of northern Sierra Leone from January to November 1898. Bai Bureh’s war, as the 1898 Hut Tax war in northern Sierra Leone was popularly known, was not strictly speaking a war against colonial occupation. Technically speaking Temneland had been under a British Protectorate for fifteen months when its people took up arms against the British. Bai Bureh’s war presented a well organised, disciplined resistance to the establishment of colonial rule in the Sierra Leone Protectorate. It occurred in an area which had been little affected by Western institutions such as education and Christianity, and was the culmination of many attempts on the part of the Temne chiefs to retain through peaceful means their traditional institutions of authority.
