Makeni

Makeni grew from a Temne settlement on the plain below the granite outcrops of the northern interior, in a country of rice farms, palm groves and chiefdom villages. The place was a modest market centre when Britain declared a protectorate over the hinterland in 1896, and the new house tax sparked the Hut Tax War of 1898, in which the Temne leader Bai Bureh fought British forces around Port Loko for months. Colonial administration followed, with a district headquarters, a court and a school.

What made the modern town was transport. A railway branch from Bauya Junction reached Makeni in 1914 and ran until the line closed in 1968, and the paved highway from Freetown later did the same work: Makeni became the point where produce from Bombali, Tonkolili and Koinadugu was gathered and sold on: rice, groundnuts, palm oil and cattle from the Fula herders. Catholic missions built schools and a hospital, and the town became the seat of a diocese.

The civil war of 1991–2002 reached much of the country, and Makeni, like other provincial towns, was badly affected. Recovery brought iron-ore mining at Tonkolili and near Lunsar, road rebuilding, and the university the diocese founded in 2005, which grew quickly and changed the character of the place. The Ebola epidemic of 2014–16 closed the university between 2014 and 2016.

Makeni is the cultural capital of Temne country, and Temne is the language of the street, with Krio used for trade and English in offices and lecture halls. Islam is the dominant faith and the mosques set the rhythm of the week, while a substantial Catholic community, the legacy of long mission activity, runs schools and the cathedral; the two coexist easily, sharing celebrations and often the same families.

Chiefdom institutions remain part of daily life. Paramount chiefs and section chiefs settle disputes over land and family matters in the countryside around the town, and the Poro and Bondo societies still initiate young people in rural communities, with masked performances at ceremonies that visitors are unlikely to see and should not photograph uninvited.

Politically the north is the heartland of the All People's Congress, and Makeni has been closely associated with national politics — it is the home town of a former president — which makes election seasons loud and occasionally tense. The university has given the town a student culture of debate, music and small bars, and football is followed with the same seriousness as everywhere in Sierra Leone, played on any open ground and watched in video clubs wired to a generator.

About 85,000 people lived in Makeni at the 2021 census, making it the largest city of the Northern Province and the fifth largest in the country. The day begins before dawn with prayer, sweeping and the first traders setting up, and the heat of the early afternoon empties the streets until trade picks up again towards evening, when the grilled meat stands and tea stalls light up.

The economy is trade. Produce comes in from the villages to be bought, bulked and sent down the highway to Freetown, and manufactured goods come back the other way. Around that sit the university, the diocese with its schools and hospital, government offices, transport, construction and the mining companies working the iron ore at Tonkolili, whose fortunes rise and fall with world prices and are felt directly in town. Okada riding employs a great many young men.

Most families live in compounds of concrete or mud-brick houses with tin roofs, sharing a yard, a cooking area and often a well. Electricity is intermittent and many households rely on solar panels and generators; water comes from wells and standpipes. Youth unemployment, the cost of rice and fuel, and the spread of the synthetic drug known as kush are the concerns people raise, alongside the state of the feeder roads that connect the villages to the market.

Makeni eats the food of the northern plain, built on rice grown in the swamps and uplands around the town. The everyday plate is rice with plasas — a thick leaf sauce cooked with red palm oil — most often cassava leaf pounded fine with groundnut paste and smoked fish, or potato leaf, krain krain from jute leaf, or okra. Groundnut stew is more prominent here than on the coast, since groundnuts are a major crop of the north, and pepper soup is eaten when someone is unwell or simply cold after rain.

Cattle-keeping Fula families bring beef, milk and sour milk to the markets, and grilled meat on skewers is the evening street food, sold beside fried fish, akara bean fritters, roasted groundnuts, fried plantain and cassava. Fufu and gari made from cassava are eaten with soups, and rice bread and fried dough are sold in the morning.

Drink is mostly tea and poyo. Strong green tea brewed with condensed milk, known across the region and sold at roadside stalls, is drunk from early morning; palm wine comes in fresh from the villages; ginger beer is made at home and sold in bags; and Star beer and soft drinks are sold in the bars around the centre. Mangoes, oranges, pineapples and bananas fill the market in season, and kola nuts are exchanged as a gesture of welcome and respect.