The history of Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone, on the Atlantic coast of West Africa between Guinea and Liberia, takes its name from the Portuguese description of the mountains above its great natural harbour. Its interior was home for many centuries to farming peoples such as the Bullom, Temne, Limba and later the Mende, whose societies were reshaped by migrations from the Mande world and by the Atlantic slave trade. In 1787 British abolitionists founded a settlement for freed black people on the peninsula, which grew into Freetown, the capital of a Crown colony and a centre of education for the whole of West Africa. Britain added the interior as a protectorate in 1896. Since independence in 1961 the country has known one-party rule, military coups and a brutal civil war from 1991 to 2002, followed by more than two decades of elected government.

People have lived in the forests and savannas of Sierra Leone for thousands of years. Rock shelters such as Yengema in the east and Kamabai in the north have yielded stone tools and later pottery, left by hunter-gatherers and early farmers. Ironworking had reached the region by the ninth century CE, and by around the end of the first millennium coastal communities were growing rice in the swamps and estuaries, a skill that West African rice farmers would later carry, by force, to the Americas.

The coast and its hinterland were home to peoples speaking languages of the Mel family, among them the Bullom, or Sherbro, along the shore, the Temne to their north and east, the Kissi in the far east, and the Limba in the northern hills, who are often described as among the longest-settled peoples of the country. They lived in villages grouped under local rulers, and much authority lay with the initiation societies, the Poro for men and the Sande or Bondo for women, which taught law, custom and skills and regulated trade and war. Mande-speaking peoples from the savanna to the north-east, the region dominated by the Mali Empire, moved into the area over many centuries, bringing new crafts and, in time, Islam.

When Portuguese ships arrived in the fifteenth century during the Age of Discovery, they called the coastal peoples collectively the Sapi. In 1462 Pedro de Sintra charted the hills above the estuary and named them Serra Lyoa, the lioness mountains, possibly for their shape or the roar of thunderstorms. Portuguese traders settled on the coast and married into local families, creating a Luso-African community that acted as middlemen between Africans and European ships.

The Sapi were accomplished artists. Their carvers produced some of the finest ivory work of the age for Portuguese patrons: elaborate salt cellars, spoons and hunting horns decorated with European coats of arms and hunting scenes, now known as Sapi-Portuguese or Afro-Portuguese ivories, made in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Small stone figures called nomoli, carved in soapstone, are found buried in fields across the south and east; their makers and meaning are uncertain, but many scholars attribute them to the ancestors of the Sapi.

From about the 1540s the Sapi world was overturned by invaders the Portuguese called the Mane, Mande-speaking warriors who arrived from the south-east by way of the Liberian coast. Over two decades they conquered the coastal peoples and set up new ruling lines, selling many of the defeated into slavery. By the early seventeenth century the Mane had merged with the peoples they ruled, and new chiefdoms, including Temne states such as Koya on the Freetown peninsula, had emerged from the upheaval.

The coast of Sierra Leone was drawn into the Atlantic slave trade from the late fifteenth century, and the trade lasted until the mid-nineteenth. English, Dutch, French and Portuguese merchants all operated in the estuaries, buying captives from local rulers and dealers in exchange for cloth, iron, guns and spirits. The most important British post was Bunce Island, in the Sierra Leone River, which served the Royal African Company and later private London firms. It was attacked by the Dutch in 1664 and by the French in 1704 and 1779, but each time rebuilt. Captives shipped from Bunce Island went especially to the rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia in North America.

In the eighteenth century Islam spread more widely in the north. Fula and Susu traders and clerics from the Islamic state of Futa Jallon, in present-day Guinea, extended their influence among the Temne, Limba, Kuranko and Yalunka, and Muslim communities became established in the trading towns. Inland, the Mende expanded westwards in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and powerful war chiefs built warrior towns ringed by stockades.

The colony grew out of the British anti-slavery movement. In 1787 the abolitionist Granville Sharp and his allies sent about 400 of London's Black Poor, many of them former slaves and soldiers who had fought for Britain in the American Revolution, to found a free settlement they called the Province of Freedom. Land was obtained from the Koya Temne ruler King Tom, but disease and conflict killed many settlers, and in 1789 the settlement, Granville Town, was burned by his successor King Jemmy.

The project was revived by the Sierra Leone Company, run by abolitionists in London. In 1792 about 1,200 Black Loyalists, African Americans who had escaped slavery to fight for the British and had been resettled in Nova Scotia in Canada, sailed from Halifax in fifteen ships and founded Freetown. The Nova Scotians, devout Methodists and Baptists, clashed with the company over land and taxes, and when they rebelled in 1800 the company used more than 500 newly arrived Maroons from Jamaica to crush the revolt.

After Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the company handed the colony to the Crown on 1 January 1808. Freetown became the base of the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron and of the courts that condemned captured slave ships. Tens of thousands of Liberated Africans, freed from those ships and drawn from all over West and Central Africa, especially the Yoruba lands of present-day Nigeria, were landed in the colony and settled in villages around the peninsula.

The descendants of the settlers, Maroons and Liberated Africans merged into a new people, the Krio, with their own English-based language, a Christian and often highly educated culture and strong commercial networks along the coast. Missionaries founded schools, and Fourah Bay College, established by the Church Missionary Society in 1827 and later affiliated to Durham University, trained clergy, teachers and professionals for the whole region. Krio clergy, doctors, lawyers and traders spread to Lagos, Accra and beyond, and Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a Liberated African educated at Fourah Bay, became the first African Anglican bishop. For much of the nineteenth century Freetown served as the headquarters of the British Empire in West Africa.

During the Scramble for Africa, Britain moved to claim the interior before France could. A boundary with French Guinea was settled in 1895, and on 31 August 1896 Britain proclaimed a protectorate over the hinterland, ruling through chiefs but stripping them of many powers. When Governor Frederic Cardew imposed a tax on every house from January 1898, the Temne chief Bai Bureh led a guerrilla war in the north, using stockades and ambushes against British columns for most of the year. A separate rising in the Mende south killed missionaries, traders and Krio seen as agents of the colonial state. Both were suppressed; ninety-six rebels were hanged, and Bai Bureh, who surrendered in November 1898, was exiled to the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana, until 1905.

The colony and protectorate were governed separately, and the Krio, who held most educated posts in the colony, were increasingly sidelined by British officials. Diamonds were discovered in the 1930s, and mining rights were granted to a De Beers subsidiary in 1935, while iron ore was exported from the north. Domestic slavery in the protectorate was not abolished until 1928. Freetown's harbour was an important convoy base in World War II. Labour activists such as I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson and the trade unionist Siaka Stevens organised workers and challenged colonial rule.

After the war, constitutional reform gave the protectorate majority a voice for the first time, ending Krio political dominance. Milton Margai, a doctor from the Mende south, led the Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP), founded in 1951, became chief minister in 1953 and led the country to independence on 27 April 1961, part of the wider decolonisation of Africa. After his death in 1964 his half-brother Albert Margai succeeded him and moved towards a one-party state.

In 1967 Siaka Stevens's All People's Congress (APC) narrowly won the election, but the army seized power within hours of his swearing-in. A further coup by non-commissioned officers restored him in April 1968. Stevens declared a republic in 1971 with himself as president, and a 1978 constitution made the APC the only legal party. His long rule concentrated power in Freetown and allowed diamond revenues to be diverted through smuggling and patronage, while public services decayed. In 1985 he handed over to his chosen successor, the army commander Joseph Saidu Momoh, under whom the economy collapsed further. A new constitution restoring multiparty politics was adopted in 1991, but by then war had already begun.

On 23 March 1991 the Revolutionary United Front, led by the former army corporal Foday Sankoh and backed by Charles Taylor's rebels in Liberia, invaded the east. In April 1992 young officers led by Captain Valentine Strasser overthrew Momoh. The war dragged on, funded on all sides by the eastern diamond fields. In 1995 the government hired the South African private military company Executive Outcomes to push back the rebels, and in 1996 elections brought Ahmad Tejan Kabbah to power. In May 1997 soldiers under Major Johnny Paul Koroma overthrew him and invited the RUF to share power. A Nigerian-led West African force, ECOMOG, drove the junta out of Freetown in 1998, but in January 1999 the rebels stormed the capital, killing more than 7,000 people.

The war was notorious for atrocities against civilians: the RUF and allied forces systematically cut off the hands and limbs of thousands of people, used rape as a weapon and forced children to fight. The Lomé Peace Accord of July 1999 gave Sankoh an amnesty, a share of government and control of the mines, and a United Nations peacekeeping mission was deployed. When the RUF took more than 500 peacekeepers hostage in May 2000, Britain sent troops; their intervention, together with the UN force and Guinean pressure on the rebels, broke the RUF. Kabbah declared the war over on 18 January 2002. Between 50,000 and 70,000 people had died and some 2.5 million had been displaced.

A UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone tried leaders of all the main factions. Sankoh died in custody in 2003, and in 2012 Charles Taylor was convicted of aiding and abetting war crimes in Sierra Leone, the first former head of state convicted by an international court since the Nuremberg trials. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission also took testimony from victims and perpetrators.

Peacetime elections brought alternation of power. Ernest Bai Koroma of the APC won the presidency in 2007 and served two terms. In 2014 the Ebola epidemic that began in Guinea spread to Sierra Leone, which recorded more cases than any other country; nearly 4,000 people died before the country was declared free of the disease in November 2015. In August 2017 floods and a mudslide in the Regent area of Freetown killed more than a thousand people.

Julius Maada Bio of the SLPP, who as a young officer had briefly headed the military government in 1996 before handing power to Kabbah, won the 2018 election. He was declared re-elected in June 2023 with 56 per cent of the vote, but local and international observers criticised the lack of transparency in the count and the opposition rejected the result. On 26 November 2023 gunmen attacked an armoury and prisons in Freetown, freeing nearly 1,900 inmates; 21 people were killed, the government called it a failed coup, and former president Koroma was charged with treason in January 2024. In June 2025 Bio was elected chair of the regional bloc ECOWAS.