Sierra Leone

Overview

Sierra Leone is a small coastal West African republic of ~73,000 km² between Guinea and Liberia, named by Portuguese explorer Pedro de Sintra (1462) after the "lioness mountains" above Freetown. Its ~8.5 million people are mainly Mende and Temne, ~78% Muslim and 21% Christian, with notably high religious tolerance; English is official and Krio the lingua franca.

History

The interior, shielded by rainforest and tsetse fly, largely escaped the great Sudanic empires; Islam arrived with Susu traders and Samory Touré's campaigns. Sierra Leone's modern identity was forged by abolitionism: after Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, the coastal colony (established as a Crown colony in 1808) became a settlement for freed slaves — the "Black Poor" of London (1787), Nova Scotian Black Loyalists who founded Freetown in 1792, Jamaican Maroons (1800), and thousands of Liberated Africans recaptured from slave ships. Their descendants, the Krio, dominated the colony; Fourah Bay College (1827) made Freetown the "Athens of Africa." The interior Protectorate was declared in 1896, sparking the 1898 Hut Tax War led by Temne chief Bai Bureh.

Independent on 27 April 1961 under Sir Milton Margai (SLPP), the country slid from parliamentary democracy into coups (1967–68), Siaka Stevens's increasingly authoritarian APC rule — a republic from 1971, a one-party state from 1978 — and Joseph Momoh's corrupt succession. In 1991 the Revolutionary United Front under Foday Sankoh launched an eleven-year civil war infamous for amputations and "blood diamonds"; the NPRC coup (1992), Ahmad Tejan Kabbah's 1996 election, the AFRC junta (1997) and its expulsion by ECOMOG, the 1999 Lomé Accord and British/UN intervention finally ended the war in 2002, with over 50,000 dead.

Later history and present status

Post-war recovery under Kabbah and Ernest Bai Koroma (2007–18) was set back by the 2014–16 Ebola epidemic and a 2017 mudslide; Julius Maada Bio has been president since 2018, re-elected in 2023. The economy depends on diamonds, rutile, bauxite, iron ore and subsistence agriculture, and the country remains among the poorest in the world despite rich minerals.