Sierra Leone and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Sierra Leone was the first colony of the British abolitionist movement, and it was the first experiment in a question that has never quite been settled: what does a free African look like? The answer that the Sierra Leone Company and the Colonial Office arrived at — Christian, English-speaking, civilised in the manner of a Victorian clerk — would haunt the project for two centuries. But for all the limits of the abolitionist vision, the colony that the British built on the Sierra Leone peninsula remains one of the most significant sites of the transatlantic slave trade and its suppression.

The Founding of Freetown

Freetown was founded in 1787 by the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, and it was settled by African Americans who had served in the British forces during the American Revolutionary War. The Committee, led by the reformer Granville Sharp, purchased the land from a local African chief (King Tom) and established a settlement on the Sierra Leone peninsula. The early years of the settlement were difficult, and the first community collapsed in 1789.

The Sierra Leone Company, a second organisation chartered in 1791 under the leadership of the abolitionist Henry Thornton and the Scottish reformer Zachary Macaulay, took over the project and brought in a new group of settlers, including the Black Loyalists who had been resettled in Nova Scotia after the American Revolution. The city of Freetown was founded as the capital of the new colony. As the historian Christopher Fyfe observed in his classic A History of Sierra Leone (1962), the colony was a “charitable foundation” of a kind that no one had previously attempted on a national scale.

The Black Loyalists and the Nova Scotian Settlers

The Black Loyalists were African Americans who had served the British during the American Revolutionary War, and who had been resettled in Nova Scotia after the war. Disappointed by their treatment in Canada — many had been denied the land grants they had been promised, and the climate was brutal — some 1,200 of the Black Loyalists accepted the offer to be resettled in Sierra Leone, and they arrived in Freetown in 1792.

The Nova Scotian settlers formed the core of the new colony, and they brought with them a tradition of political organisation and Baptist Christianity. The Sierra Leone Company, which governed the colony until 1808, also recruited settlers from Jamaica, including the Maroons who had been deported from Jamaica after the Second Maroon War of 1795–1796.

The Maroons of Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone

The Maroons of Nova Scotia, who had been deported from Jamaica in 1796, were eventually resettled in Sierra Leone after a brief and unhappy sojourn in Halifax. About 550 Maroons, together with some of the Black Loyalists, founded the settlement of Maroon Town in the mountains above Freetown. The Maroons were difficult to govern, and many of them died in the unfamiliar West African climate. The Maroons, together with the other settlers, were the foundation of the Sierra Leonean Creole community, which developed a distinctive identity based on a mixture of African, European, and American traditions. The Creole elite later played a leading role in the politics of British West Africa.

The Recaptives and the Liberated Africans

After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the British Navy’s West Africa Squadron intercepted slave ships and resettled the freed captives in Sierra Leone, where they were known as “recaptives” or “liberated Africans.” By 1855, more than 50,000 recaptives had been settled in Sierra Leone, and they were accommodated in villages around Freetown and in other parts of the colony. The recaptives were often Yoruba, Igbo, and other West African peoples, and the experience of being resettled in Sierra Leone gave them a new sense of identity. The recaptives were taught English, converted to Christianity, and trained in trades, and they became the principal labour force of the colony.

The experiences of the recaptives are preserved in the registers of the Liberated African Department, which the historian P. E. H. Hair and others have mined for what they tell us about the slave trade in its final decades. The registers, which list the ethnic origins, the languages, and the personal details of the recaptives, are an irreplaceable record of the trade.

The Colony of Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone became a Crown colony in 1808, with a British governor and a Council. The colonial administration was led by a series of British governors, including Charles MacCarthy, who led the West African campaign against the Asante. The economy of the colony was based on the trade in palm oil, groundnuts, and other agricultural products, and the colony served as the base for British operations in West Africa.

The Church Missionary Society, led by figures such as Henry Venn, was important to the development of the colony, and the Anglican church became the established religion. Fourah Bay College, founded in 1827 by the CMS, became the first Western-style university in West Africa, and its graduates — including Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the composer, and J. E. K. Aggrey, the educationist — dominated the politics and education of British West Africa for the next century. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the Yoruba recaptive who became the first African Anglican bishop in 1864, was perhaps the colony’s most remarkable product.

The Path to Independence

Sierra Leone became independent on 27 April 1961, with Sir Milton Margai as the first prime minister. Margai, a Mende and a member of the Creole elite, led the Sierra Leone People’s Party to victory in the 1962 elections, and the country became a constitutional monarchy with Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. Margai died in 1964 and was succeeded by his brother Albert, who governed the country until 1967, when the military took over in a coup.

The post-independence history of Sierra Leone has been marked by political instability, including the 1991–2002 civil war, in which perhaps 50,000 people died. The war was fought over the diamonds of the eastern province and over a long-running political marginalisation of the Mende and Temne that the British colonial system had reinforced rather than resolved. The legacy of the colonial period remains contested, but Sierra Leone retains the foundational importance of being the first Western-style settlement of free Africans in the contemporary era.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of Sierra Leone is unusually rich, in part because the colony generated its own historians. James Africanus Beale Horton, a Sierra Leonean doctor, published West African Countries and Peoples (1868), one of the first African defences of self-government; J. C. Reeve’s history of the Maroons and A. B. C. Merriman-Labor’s more recent accounts of the Creole elite have produced a substantial national literature. Christopher Fyfe’s A History of Sierra Leone (1962) remains the indispensable older account; more recent work by P. E. H. Hair, Akintola Wyse, and the late John Grace has complicated the older picture. The current debate, exemplified in the work of Bruce Mouser, is over how far the Sierra Leonean colonial experience should be read as the foundation of the modern state or as a prologue to its disappointments.

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