Pedro de Sintra’s lioness mountains became a freed-slave colony
Sierra Leone covers 73,252 square kilometres of West African coast between Guinea and Liberia. Portuguese explorer Pedro de Sintra named it Serra Leoa, “lioness mountains,” in 1462, and Britain’s 1808 colony later resettled freed Africans at Freetown. Krio, the everyday common language, is spoken by 97 percent of people.
People have lived here for at least 2,500 years, using iron by the ninth century and farming the coast by 1000 AD. Rainforest, swamps and tsetse flies deadly to horses and zebu cattle kept out the Mandinka and limited Mali’s reach. Portuguese traders prized Sapi ivory carving, and European posts soon turned to trading in slaves brought from the interior.
In 1787 some 400 Black and 60 white colonists, many of them London’s Black Poor, founded Granville Town in the Province of Freedom, but disease and a local chief’s attack left only 64. Thomas Peters and John Clarkson then brought nearly 1,200 Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia, who founded Freetown on 11 March 1792. Household heads there, a third of them women, won the vote that year.
The inland Protectorate was added in 1896, and independence came in 1961 under Sir Milton Margai. Stevens’s 1978 APC one-party rule yielded to Momoh and a 1991 multiparty constitution just as civil war began. The war against the Revolutionary United Front lasted 11 years until ECOMOG and British forces defeated the rebels in 2002.
A presidential republic with a unicameral parliament is formally secular despite a Muslim majority. About eighteen ethnic groups include dominant Temne and Mende plus Creoles descended from African American, Afro-Caribbean, and liberated African settlers. Tropical belts run savanna to rainforest. Diamonds, gold and bauxite are among its resources, and the 2023 census counted 8,460,512 people.
Source: Sierra Leone
