The Mende of Sierra Leone: A West African People in Transition

Kenneth Little's The Mende of Sierra Leone, A West African People in Transition, published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1951, is an early scholarly ethnography of the Mende people, examining their social organization and religious institutions, including the Poro and Sande initiation societies, during a period of colonial-era social change. Little conducted fieldwork among Mende communities in Sierra Leone. Its strength is that direct mid-twentieth century ethnographic observation of institutions that have since changed considerably, giving it lasting value as a documentary snapshot. Its limit is its age and colonial-era framing, published while Sierra Leone was still under British colonial administration and reflecting some of that period's anthropological assumptions, so a claim about Mende religious practice today needs a more recent ethnographic source alongside this foundational study.