Crowning the work of Wilberforce? While past British abolitionist endeavours in Sierra Leone were praised at Westminster during the debates on African independence at the turn of the s, they led to intense divisions in Sierra Leone itself. Negotiations were influenced by the links between abolitionism and decolonisation, by the diverging interpretations of emancipation and liberation, and the ambiguous status of settlers in the African context.
Briefly active in the early twentieth century after the creation of the Protectorate, the Union came into being again in , as it became clear that at independence, the Colony would be subsumed under a larger state, dominated, at least geographically, by the Protectorate, that was over times bigger and almost fifteen times more populated. After a public campaign in Sierra Leone and petitions to Britain failed to influence the Colonial Office and stop the Constitutional Conference of from planning the independence of a united Sierra Leone, members of the Union turned to the British courts in the summer of But equally influential were political fears of racial bias: as the shadow of white settlers haunted British policies in East and Southern Africa.
By , they were aged between forty-five and sixty-six. Zizer, and its secretary, E. Macaulay, but Buck, who was elected Deputy Leader of the Union in early , gained prominence after the deaths of Macaulay and Zizer in , becoming leader of the Union in July Led by a small number of elite Krios, the Union extended mem-.
As a press campaign was organised in April , the Union explicitly welcomed all the descendants of six different groups of early settlers, regardless of their current residence or their place of birth. What mattered was that they should have some relation to:.
The Novo [sic] Scotians who arrived in March The Maroons who set on shore between September and October, Paul Coffee -an African shipowner and members of his group-who disembarked in Freetown from America in Some Africans from Barbadoes [sic] who entered the Settlement in January The Union argued that the right to separate independence for the Colony lay in the original Sierra Leone scheme and in the Treaty signed with King Naimbana on 22 August Petitions and letters.
