“…Recently, there has been no shortage of academic criticism of chiefs, denigrating them as agents of 'decentralized despotism', and it is true that chiefs have often played a predatory role (Grischow, 2008;Mamdani, 1996). 21 In some parts of Africa, even though the chief might sit on a bedrock of traditional legitimacy, links to a central state will have divorced his interests from those of his subjects, as probably in Sierra Leone, where post-war consultations revealed the abuse of chieftancy as one of the driving 19.…”