" “The Monte Carlo of West Africa:” Tourist Investment and Economic Imaginaries in Post-Colonial Sierra Leone "

At Sierra Leone’s independence celebrations in 1961 visiting diplomats were accommodated in the brand-new Paramount Hotel located in central Freetown. In 1968 the larger and more luxurious Cape Sierra Hotel was opened nearby at Lumley, an idyllic sweep of sandy beach, in the wake of a series of military coups. Whilst I have previously excavated the Paramount Hotel, designed by British architects, built by British contractors and financed through the British Colonial Development Corporation, as a site of neocolonial investment in Sierra Leone, in this paper I will detail the planning of the Cape Sierra Hotel, to uncover the central importance of tourist-based development to the economic imaginary of Sierra Leone’s politicians in the years following independence. The Cape Sierra Hotel was a flagship project of the Sierra Leone People’s Party Government, which led Sierra Leone from independence to its overthrow in a 1967 military coup. The SLPP conceived of a state-owned luxury hotel as a tool in the decolonisation of Sierra Leone otherwise extractive economy, by concentrating ownership of productive capital in African hands. But it was also intended to secure inward investment from the former colonial metropole. Indeed, the language around the hotel’s planning is strongly suggestive of the “archipelago capitalism” of tax havens that emerged alongside the “dissolving” of European empires (Ogle, 2017). For the SLPP government, the luxury hotel sat alongside a liberal tax regime and a sterling-pegged currency, as part of a broad rapprochement with western capital. That the Cape Sierra Hotel was completed under the military’s National Reformation Council, which promised to reorientate the Sierra Leone economy away from western capital, reveals both the persistence but also the fragility of such tourist-based visions of economic decolonisation and development.