Sierra Leone

• 1. Introduction

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  Sierra Leone is named for a line of mountains that Portuguese sailors saw from the water in 1462. The explorer Pedro de Sintra mapped that stretch of the West African coast and called the heights Serra Leoa, which means lioness mountains. The spelling used today is the Venetian form, introduced by the explorer Alvise Cadamosto and then copied by other European mapmakers. Those peaks, known as the Lion Mountains, stand near Freetown, the capital and largest city of a nation that counted 8,460,512 people in its 2023 census.

  A name handed down by outsiders is a fitting way into this country, because so much of its story involves people who arrived from elsewhere. Why did Britain choose this coast as a place to resettle Africans after the abolition of the slave trade? How did those newcomers come to share the land with peoples who had lived there for generations? What turned a newly independent state into a place of repeated coups, and then into a war that lasted 11 years? And why does a land with diamonds and gold still struggle to lift its people out of poverty?

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• 2. Settlers From Three Shores

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  In January 1787, two ships named the Atlantic and the Belisarius set out for Sierra Leone and were forced back to Plymouth by bad weather. About 50 passengers died during the delay. Another 24 were discharged and 23 ran away. When the voyage resumed in April 1787, 411 people sailed, and 96 of them died before reaching the coast.

  These travellers belonged to London's Black Poor, a group that included African Americans who had fought for the British Crown in the American Revolutionary War. Many had been slaves who escaped to join the British, lured by promises of freedom. Pro-slavery writers blamed them for a large share of crime in 18th-century London. The group seems to have been made up of men, and 29 European girlfriends and wives sailed with them from Plymouth.

  The scheme had unlikely allies. The entomologist Henry Smeathman proposed it, and the humanitarian Granville Sharp supported it as a way to show the pro-slavery lobby that black people could help run a colony. Government officials liked it for a blunter reason, because it would send a large group of poor citizens elsewhere. Prime minister William Pitt the Younger saw it as a means of returning the Black Poor to Africa.

  About 400 black and 60 white colonists reached Sierra Leone on the 15th of May 1787, and the Crown named the settlement the "Province of Freedom". They built Granville Town, but disease and war with the Temne, who resisted their arrival, killed most of that first group. When the ships left in September, 276 people remained: 212 black men, 30 black women, five white men and 29 white women. The settlers seized land from a local chieftain, who attacked in return. Some black settlers were captured by traders and sold into slavery, and the colony shrank to 64 people, who founded a second Granville Town.

  More than 3,000 Black Loyalists had settled in Nova Scotia after the American Revolution, but they met harsh winters and racial discrimination. Thomas Peters pressed British authorities for relief, and together with the abolitionist John Clarkson he helped bring about the Sierra Leone Company. Nearly 1,200 people crossed the Atlantic in 1792 and founded Freetown on the 11th of March 1792. They became known as the Nova Scotian Settlers. Clarkson at first banned the survivors of Granville Town from joining them, blaming those survivors for the collapse of the earlier settlement.

  The Settlers built Freetown in the styles they remembered from the American South, and they kept its fashions and manners. Many continued to practise Methodism. In 1792, the heads of all households were given the vote, and a third of those households were headed by women. The settlers also elected tithingmen, who represented each dozen settlers, and hundreders, who spoke for larger groups. That kind of representation was not available to them in Nova Scotia. Even so, the Crown did not send enough supplies, and illegal slave traders threatened them with re-enslavement.

  In 1799, some settlers revolted after the Sierra Leone Company, controlled by London investors, refused to let them hold land freehold. More than 500 Jamaican Maroons arrived in 1800 from Cudjoe's Town, also called Trelawny Town, by way of Nova Scotia. Led by Colonel Montague James, they helped the colonial forces crush the revolt. In return, the Maroons secured the best houses and farms.

  On the 1st of January 1808, Thomas Ludlam, governor of the company and a leading abolitionist, surrendered its charter after 16 years of running the colony. The Crown reorganised the company as the African Institution. Around the same time, following the Slave Trade Act 1807, Royal Navy crews began delivering thousands of formerly enslaved Africans to Freetown after freeing them from illegal slave ships. These Liberated Africans were sold for $20 a head as apprentices to the white settlers, the Nova Scotians and the Maroons. Many were treated poorly, because some settlers regarded them as property.

  Cut off from their homelands, the Liberated Africans took on the customs of the Nova Scotians, the Maroons and the Europeans while keeping some of their own traditions. They became successful traders, spread Christianity across West Africa and intermarried with the older settler groups. Freed African Americans and other Afro-Caribbean arrivals joined them over the following decades. Together these peoples formed the Creole or Krio ethnic group and an English-based language, also called Krio.

  Each recaptive received a registration number and a physical description in the Register of Liberated Africans. The entries were often subjective, and many are hard to match to real people today.

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• 3. Colony And Protectorate

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  Fourah Bay College opened in 1827, and Samuel Ajayi Crowther was its first enrolled student. For more than a century it was the only European-style university in west Sub-Saharan Africa. It drew English-speaking Africans from Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast and beyond, especially to study theology and education. Freetown became known as the "Athens of Africa" because of its many excellent schools. The governor who lived there also administered the Gold Coast, now Ghana, and the Gambia settlements.

  Two missionaries from the Church Missionary Society, Peter Hartwig and Melchior Renner, had arrived in 1804. They were meant to bring Western education and healthcare, and they founded schools for West African children. The schools aimed to convert local people, and their lessons did not relate to local needs. In Freetown, the British dealt mostly with the Krio, who did much of the trading with peoples of the interior. Educated Krio held well-paid government posts that gave them status.

  The Berlin Conference of 1884-85 changed that arrangement. To satisfy what European powers called effective occupation, the British annexed the inland areas in 1896 and declared them the Sierra Leone Protectorate. They recruited British citizens into administrative jobs and pushed Krio people out of government posts and out of desirable parts of Freetown.

  Madam Yoko persuaded the British to give her control of the Kpaa Mende chiefdom. Because she supported the British, some sub-chiefs rebelled, and she took refuge in the police barracks. She ruled as a paramount chief until 1906. The annexation overall cut into the sovereignty of local chiefs, whom the British now treated as units of local government instead of dealing with each one separately. Even longtime allies such as Bai Bureh lost their standing.

  Colonel Frederic Cardew, the Protectorate's military governor, imposed a tax on dwellings in 1898 and ordered chiefs to use their people to maintain roads. The tax often exceeded the value of the house, and 24 chiefs signed a petition saying that their people could not leave their subsistence farming. Resistance to payment, along with suspicion of the chiefs, led to the Hut Tax War. The British fired first. Bai Bureh led the northern front, made up mainly of Temne fighters, and the Mende of the south joined later for their own reasons.

  For several months Bureh's fighters held the advantage over the far stronger British forces, though both sides lost hundreds of people. Bureh surrendered on the 11th of November 1898 to end the destruction of his people's land and homes. The British government recommended leniency, but Cardew insisted on exiling Bureh and two allies to the Gold Coast, and his government hanged 96 of Bureh's warriors. Bureh was allowed back in 1905 and resumed his chieftaincy of Kasseh. Unfairly, history later cast him as the chief instigator of the war.

  The defeat ended mass resistance, but rioting and labour unrest continued through the colonial era. Riots in 1955 and 1956 drew tens of thousands of people in the Protectorate. Domestic slavery, which local elites still practised, was abolished in 1928. In 1924 the UK split the administration into a Colony, meaning Freetown and its coast, and a Protectorate, meaning the chief-dominated hinterland. In 1935 the Sierra Leone Selection Trust, run by De Beers, was granted a mineral mining monopoly that was scheduled to last 98 years.

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• 4. Independence And Coups

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  In 1947, proposals to give the Colony and the Protectorate a single political system set off a heated debate. Most of the proposals came from Protectorate leaders, whose population far outnumbered that of the Colony. Isaac Wallace-Johnson led the Krio opposition, since the plan would shrink Krio political power in the Colony. In 1951, Lamina Sankoh worked with educated Protectorate leaders to form the Sierra Leone People's Party, the SLPP, as the party of the Protectorate.

  Milton Margai led the SLPP in negotiations with the British and with the Krio-dominated Colony. He joined educated Protectorate elites with the paramount chiefs, and later used the same skills to win over opposition leaders and moderate Krio. In November 1951 he oversaw a constitution that merged the two legislatures. Margai became Chief Minister in 1953 and was re-elected by a landslide after the first parliamentary election in May 1957.

  On the 27th of April 1961, Margai led Sierra Leone to independence and became its first prime minister. The country remained a Dominion, like Canada and Australia, with Queen Elizabeth as its monarch. Siaka Stevens, leader of the opposition All People's Congress, the APC, and Wallace-Johnson were placed under house arrest in Freetown. Even so, Margai was popular. He was not corrupt, he avoided lavish displays of status, and he shared power with parties and interest groups, especially the paramount chiefs, who were his key allies.

  Margai died unexpectedly in 1964, and parliament appointed his younger half-brother, Sir Albert Margai, as prime minister. Albert fired senior officials from his brother's government, including Foreign Minister John Karefa-Smart, who had questioned his succession. He passed laws against the APC and tried to build a one-party state. He appointed many non-Creoles to the civil service, which lost him Creole support. He was also accused of trying to make the army homogeneously Mende, his own ethnic group, and riots in Freetown in 1967 led him to declare a state of emergency.

  The APC narrowly won the 1967 general election, and Stevens was sworn in as prime minister on the 21st of March 1967. Within hours, Brigadier General David Lansana, the army commander and a close ally of Albert Margai, ousted him in a bloodless coup. Stevens was placed under house arrest and later fled to Guinea. On the 23rd of March, officers led by Brigadier General Andrew Juxon-Smith staged a counter-coup, arrested Lansana, suspended the constitution and formed the National Reformation Council.

  On the 18th of April 1968, low-ranking soldiers calling themselves the Anti-Corruption Revolutionary Movement overthrew that junta. Led by Brigadier General John Amadu Bangura, they arrested many senior council members, restored the constitution and handed power back to Stevens. Lansana was later tried for treason and sentenced to death in 1975. The man who had returned Stevens to office would not be rewarded for it.

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• 5. One-Party Rule

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  On the 29th of March 1970, Brigadier General Bangura was hanged in Freetown. He had been arrested that January and convicted of plotting a coup against Stevens, even though his own actions had put Stevens back in power. Soldiers loyal to him mutinied in Freetown and elsewhere, and dozens were convicted by a court martial. Among those arrested was a little-known army corporal named Foday Sankoh, who was jailed for seven years at Pademba Road Prison in Freetown. Sankoh would later form the Revolutionary United Front, the RUF.

  A republican constitution took effect in April 1971, and Stevens became president. Stevens had campaigned on socialist principles but abandoned them in favour of authoritarian rule. He built roads and hospitals in the provinces, which brought paramount chiefs and provincial peoples into greater prominence in Freetown. He also reorganised an oil refinery, a hotel and a cement factory. Critics say he removed the SLPP from competitive politics through violence and intimidation.

  The SLPP boycotted the 1973 general election, citing intimidation by the APC and its militia, and the APC won 84 of the 85 elected seats. An alleged plot to overthrow Stevens failed in 1974, and its leaders were executed. Guinean soldiers were stationed in the country at his request that year. On the 19th of July 1975-14 senior army and government officials were executed for attempting a coup.

  Stevens kept power through the Special Security Division, a heavily armed paramilitary force he created to protect himself. In 1977 the force and the army put down a nationwide student demonstration. In 1978 the APC-dominated parliament approved a constitution that made the APC the only legal party, which prompted more demonstrations that were also put down. Stevens is widely criticised for dictatorial methods and corruption. Yet he kept the country from collapsing into civil war, brought members of various ethnic groups into his government and created institutions still in use today.

  Stevens retired in November 1985, and Major General Joseph Saidu Momoh, head of the armed forces, was elected without opposition. He was sworn in on the 28th of November 1985 in Freetown. Like Stevens, Momoh belonged to the minority Limba ethnic group. Momoh folded the Special Security Division into the police, ending its role as a personal force. He announced a Code of Conduct for Political Leaders and Public Servants. Many still saw him as a continuation of Stevens, as many of the old cabinet returned.

  After an alleged coup attempt in March 1987, more than 60 senior officials were arrested. Vice-President Francis Minah was convicted and hanged in 1989. In October 1990, under pressure for reform, Momoh set up a commission to review the one-party constitution. A new constitution restoring multi-party politics took effect on the 1st of October 1991, though many suspected he was not serious about reform.

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• 6. Civil War And Aftermath

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  Next door in Liberia, Charles Taylor, leader of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, reportedly helped form the Revolutionary United Front under Foday Sankoh, the former corporal. Sankoh was a Temne from Tonkolili District. Taylor wanted the RUF to attack bases of Nigerian-dominated peacekeepers in Sierra Leone who opposed his own rebel movement. In this way the Liberian war helped set off the fighting that began in 1991.

  On the 29th of April 1992, young soldiers led by seven officers staged a coup that sent Momoh into exile in Guinea. Captain Valentine Strasser became chairman of the new National Provisional Ruling Council. He seized power three days after his 25th birthday, which made him the world's youngest head of state. The junta suspended the constitution, banned political parties, limited the press and gave soldiers unlimited power to detain people without charge. Its deputy chairman, Solomon "SAJ" Musa, was a childhood friend of Strasser.

  On the 28th of December 1992, an alleged coup attempt was foiled, and 17 soldiers were executed by firing squad. Former police chief Bambay Kamara and other Momoh officials held at Pademba Road prison were also executed. Meanwhile the RUF gained ground. By 1994 they controlled much of the diamond-rich Eastern Province and were close to Freetown. The council hired several hundred mercenaries from the South African firm Executive Outcomes, who within a month pushed the rebels back to border enclaves and cleared them from the Kono diamond areas.

  On the 16th of January 1996, Strasser was arrested in a palace coup led by Brigadier Julius Maada Bio and flown into exile in Guinea. Bio held a national conference at the Bintumani Hotel in Freetown, where participants debated whether peace should come before elections or the reverse. They agreed that elections should be held as soon as possible, and Ahmad Tejan Kabbah of the SLPP won them. Kabbah promptly invited Sankoh to peace talks.

  On the 25th of May 1997, Corporal Tamba Gborie and 16 other soldiers launched a coup that sent Kabbah into exile and created the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council. They freed Major Johnny Paul Koroma from prison and made him head of state. Koroma invited the RUF to join the junta, with Sankoh as vice-chairman, and within days Freetown was overwhelmed by RUF fighters. The Kamajors, traditional fighters mostly from the Mende people under Samuel Hinga Norman, stayed loyal to Kabbah. Nigerian-led ECOMOG forces overthrew the junta after nine months, and Kabbah was reinstated in February 1998. On the 19th of October 1998-24 soldiers were executed by firing squad.

  The United Nations agreed in October 1999 to send peacekeepers, and the first of a 6,000-member force arrived that December. The Security Council raised the force to 11,000 in February 2000, and later to 13,000. In May 2000, Sankoh's forces clashed with UN troops as they tried to disarm the RUF, and some 500 peacekeepers were taken hostage. UN troops launched Operation Khukri to end the siege. British troops arrived in Operation Palliser, first to evacuate foreign nationals, but they exceeded that mandate and fought to defeat the rebels. Tony Blair, the British prime minister at the time, is regarded as a hero by many Sierra Leoneans.

  About 50,000 people died between 1991 and 2001, and hundreds of thousands were forced from their homes, many into Guinea and Liberia. The war was declared over in January 2002, and Kabbah was re-elected in a landslide in May. Disarmament was complete by 2004, the year a UN-backed court began trying senior leaders from both sides. UN peacekeepers left in December 2005.

  Elections in 2007 and 2012 returned the country to multi-party democracy, and Ernest Bai Koroma's presidency brought stability. The Ebola epidemic of 2014 led to a national state of emergency. Julius Maada Bio became president after the March 2018 election. In August 2022, protests over the cost of living turned violent, a nationwide curfew followed, and 33 people died: 27 civilians and 6 police officers.

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• 7. Land, People And Chiefs

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  Mount Bintumani, in the eastern highlands, rises 1,948 metres and is the highest point in Sierra Leone. The country covers 73,252 square kilometres on the southwest coast of West Africa and has 400 kilometres of Atlantic coastline. Lowland plains of forest, bush and farmland fill the centre and occupy about 43% of the land. Freetown sits on a mountainous coastal peninsula beside Sierra Leone Harbour.

  The rainy season runs from May to November, and the dry season from December to May. The dry months include the harmattan, when cool winds from the Sahara blow in and night temperatures can fall to 16 degrees Celsius. The average temperature is 26 degrees Celsius.

  Human habitation here goes back at least 2,500 years. Iron technology had arrived by the 9th century, and farming was established along the coast by 1000 AD. Dense rainforest and swamps, together with the tsetse fly, which carried a disease fatal to the horses and zebu cattle of the Mande people, shielded the region from invasion by the Mandinka Empire and limited the reach of the Mali Empire. Susu traders brought Islam in the 18th century, and Samory Toure's conquest in the northeast later strengthened it among the Yalunka, Kuranko and Limba.

  Today about 18 ethnic groups live in the country, with the Temne and Mende the largest. The Creoles, descended from freed African-American and Afro-Caribbean slaves and liberated Africans, make up about 1.2% of the population. English is the official language, but Krio is spoken by 97% of people. Muslims make up three-quarters of the population, there is a significant Christian minority, and religious tolerance is very high.

  The 186 chiefdoms outside Freetown are led by paramount chiefs recognised by the British in 1896. They are chosen by a Tribal Authority of local notables from ruling families. Chiefs typically have power to "raise taxes, control the judicial system, and allocate land, the most important resource in rural areas". Of the 149 seats in parliament, 135 are elected alongside the president and 14 go to paramount chiefs.

  The president is elected for a maximum of two five-year terms and needs at least 55% of the vote, or else faces a runoff between the top two candidates. Although the constitution makes the judiciary independent, the president holds large unofficial power over it. In 2025, the Gowa-Tiwai Complex, made up of Gola Rainforest National Park and Tiwai Island Wildlife Sanctuary, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its exceptional biodiversity.

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• 8. Diamonds And Poverty

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  Between US$250 million and $300 million is the estimated yearly value of Sierra Leone's diamond production. The country ranks among the top ten diamond producers and is a major source of gem-quality stones. Some of the output is smuggled and used for money laundering or illicit financing. During the civil war, so-called blood diamonds were sold to buy the weapons that fuelled atrocities. Mining and the corruption around it slowed economic growth in the 1970s and early 1980s.

  A UN-approved certification system for diamond exports began in 2000 and sharply increased legal exports. In 2001 the government created a mining community development fund, which returns part of diamond export taxes to the communities where the stones are mined. The aim was to give local people a larger stake in the legal trade. Sierra Leone also holds one of the world's largest deposits of rutile, a titanium ore.

  In 2007, agriculture accounted for 58% of gross domestic product. Rice is the main staple, grown by 85% of farmers in the rainy season, and each person eats about 76 kilograms of it a year. By the 1990s the economy was declining and its infrastructure had badly deteriorated, and the civil war destroyed much of the formal economy. Since 2002, large amounts of outside aid have helped recovery. Many Sierra Leoneans believe that official corruption was the chief cause of the war, so recovery depends heavily on curbing it.

  In the most recent survey, from 2019-59.2% of people lived in multidimensional poverty, and a further 21.3% were vulnerable to it. Unemployment is high, especially among young people and former combatants. The currency is the leone, and the country floats its exchange rate.

  In 2016, only about 12% of the population had electricity, and 10% of that 12% was in Freetown. Most people rely on firewood and coal, which harm the health of women and children. With the UK's Department for International Development, Sierra Leone set a goal of solar power for all its citizens by 2025, under the Energy Africa campaign. It agreed to remove import duties and value added tax on certified solar products.

  Of 11,300 kilometres of highways, 904 kilometres are paved, about 8%. Sierra Leone has Africa's largest natural harbour, served by the Queen Elizabeth II Quay in eastern Freetown. Its only international airport is at Lungi, and passengers cross the river to Freetown by ferry. A bridge across the estuary is planned for completion by the end of 2027.

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