Sierra Leone was sold as Britain's good deed in Africa: a "Province of Freedom" for freed Black people and a refuge for Africans rescued from slave ships. The truth is more tangled. The same coast held a British slave fort, the colony bought and used enslaved labour, and when Britain pushed inland in 1898 it fought a war to make people pay for their own colonisation.
Before there was a colony, there was a slave fort. On Bunce Island, up the Sierra Leone River, British companies held and shipped thousands of captives in the 18th century. The abolitionists who planned the colony knew it was there.
In 1787 about 400 people, most of them the Black Poor of London, many of them former soldiers who had fought for Britain in the American war, sailed to the Sierra Leone peninsula. They called their settlement the Province of Freedom. Disease, hunger and an attack by a local Temne ruler in 1789 nearly wiped it out.
In 1791 the Sierra Leone Company, backed by Granville Sharp, Henry Thornton and William Wilberforce, took over. Its real founders were the next settlers: about 1,200 Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia. They had escaped slavery in America, been promised land in Canada and been cheated of it. Their spokesman Thomas Peters went to London to petition the company, and in March 1792 they landed and founded Freetown under John Clarkson. In 1800 some 550 Jamaican Maroons were landed too.
The settlers soon fell out with the company over land and quit-rents. In 1800 some of them rebelled, and the rising was put down with the help of the newly arrived Maroons. On 1 January 1808 the Crown took over from the failing company, and Sierra Leone became a British colony.
After Britain banned its slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, based at Freetown, stopped slave ships at sea. The captives on board were brought to Freetown, where a Vice-Admiralty court condemned the ships. An article on the LSE's Africa at LSE blog counts more than 85,000 people landed this way. The historian Richard Anderson puts the figure at no fewer than 99,752 between 1808 and 1863.
They came from all over West Africa, Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa and many more. They were called "Liberated Africans", though many were first apprenticed to settlers or drafted into the army and navy, and British anti-slavery leaders expected them to be grateful. Over time the settlers and the recaptives together formed a new people, the Krio, with their own language that is now the common tongue of Sierra Leone.
Freetown became the educational centre of British West Africa. The Church Missionary Society founded Fourah Bay College in 1827, the first Western-style university institution in sub-Saharan Africa, which affiliated with Durham University in 1876. Fourah Bay's first student, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, was a Yoruba recaptive who became the first African Anglican bishop. The CMS Grammar School followed in 1845, and in 1863 John Ezzidio became the first African elected to the colony's Legislative Council.
Krio teachers, clergy, clerks and traders spread out along the coast to Lagos, Accra and the Gambia. Britain relied on them to run its West African colonies, then pushed them aside from the 1890s as racist ideas hardened and white officials took the senior jobs.
The colony was only the Freetown peninsula and some coastal strips. On 31 August 1896, after the Berlin Conference and a border deal with France, Britain proclaimed a protectorate over the whole interior. What "protectorate" meant was never defined.
London expected the new territory to pay for itself. The governor, Colonel Frederic Cardew, imposed a hut tax of five shillings a year on each dwelling by an ordinance of 1897, to be collected from January 1898. Twenty-four chiefs petitioned against it. Many people simply did not have the money, and the chiefs saw the tax as an attack on their authority over their own land.
In the north the Temne chief Bai Bureh of Kasseh, once an ally of the British, had warned that the tax would bring war. In February 1898 the colonial police tried to arrest him on rumour alone and fired the first shots. For months his fighters held the British to a standstill with ambushes and stockades, and by 19 February they had cut the route between Freetown and Port Loko. In the south a separate Mende rising killed hundreds, including many Krio traders and missionaries. Britain answered with a scorched-earth campaign, burning villages, and raised a new West African Regiment.
To end the destruction of his people's towns, Bai Bureh surrendered on 11 November 1898. The Law Officers in London advised that he could not be tried for treason in a protectorate, so a special ordinance was passed to hold him without trial, and he was deported to the Gold Coast. A royal commissioner, Sir David Chalmers, investigated and largely blamed the tax. London kept it anyway. Bai Bureh was allowed home in 1905 and died in 1908. Today his face is on Sierra Leone's banknotes.
"I have the honour to report to Your Excellency on the operations undertaken during the past year in the suppression of rebellion in the Protectorate of Sierra Leone."Military despatch transmitted from Government House, Fort Thornton, Freetown, January 1899, published in the London Gazette
For the next 60 years Britain ran Sierra Leone as two places: the Krio-dominated colony around Freetown, under British law, and the far larger protectorate, ruled indirectly through paramount chiefs. The railway from Freetown into the interior carried palm kernels to the coast. In the 1930s diamonds were found in Kono and iron ore at Marampa, and British companies took the mining rights. Diamonds would later fuel the civil war of 1991–2002.
The 1951 constitution gave the protectorate a majority for the first time, and power passed from the Krio elite of Freetown to politicians from the provinces. The Sierra Leone People's Party, founded in 1951 by Dr Milton Margai, a Mende doctor trained at Fourah Bay and in Durham, won the elections.
In April and May 1960 Margai led a delegation to constitutional talks in London with the Colonial Secretary, Iain Macleod. On 4 May Britain agreed to independence. Parliament passed the Sierra Leone Independence Act 1961, and on 27 April 1961 Sierra Leone became independent at a ceremony in Freetown, with Margai as Prime Minister and the Queen as head of state. On 19 April 1971 it became a republic under Siaka Stevens.
The independence stamps of 1961 show a diamond miner, palm fruit gatherers, Margai, and Bishop Crowther in front of old Fourah Bay College. Freetown chose to remember its scholars.
Sierra Leone's own history did not start in 1787. Temne, Mende, Limba, Kono, Sherbro and other peoples lived and traded here for centuries, and the Portuguese named the mountains "Serra Lyoa" in the 1460s. Our partner site covers the country in depth:
The Colonial Office papers on Sierra Leone and the Chalmers report are at The National Archives in Kew. The Sierra Leone Company's printed reports can be found in libraries, including King's College London's special collections. The Black Poor who left for Sierra Leone in 1787 sailed from Plymouth.
In Freetown, see the Cotton Tree, where the settlers are said to have given thanks in 1792; the Sierra Leone National Museum next to it; the old King's Yard Gate, through which recaptives entered; Fourah Bay College on Mount Aureol; and St John's Maroon Church. Bunce Island, the British slave fort, is a boat trip up the river. Lungi International Airport lies across the estuary from the city, reached by water taxi or ferry.
Entrance fees are included in the tour price; tips are not included but are always welcome. There are currently no Viator tours in Sierra Leone itself. The nearest bookable tours are next door in Guinea and in London:
Who the 1787 settlers were, and why they left.
Equiano, Cugoano and the men behind the Sierra Leone scheme.
A Fante man in Georgian London who backed the colony.
The next West African colony, run from Freetown for decades.
All of Britain's African territories, country by country.
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