The settler community of Freetown — descendants of freed slaves from Nova Scotia, London, Jamaica and captured slave ships, who built a Victorian city on the African coast, spread a language now spoken by most Sierra Leoneans, and were the region's teachers and clerks for a century.
Krio people
Krio people in Sierra Leone.png · Wikimedia Commons
Population: Around 100,000 identifying as Krio; Krio is spoken as a lingua franca by most of Sierra Leone
Location: Freetown and the Western Area peninsula, with historic village settlements at Regent, Gloucester, Waterloo and York
Language: Krio, an English-lexified creole with Yoruba, Igbo and other African substrate
Language family: English-lexified creole
Traditional governance: Municipal and colonial institutions rather than chieftaincy; the community's civic life ran through churches, lodges, schools and the professions.
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Nova Scotian settlers
Black loyalists from the American Revolution who arrived via Nova Scotia in 1792.
Maroons
Jamaican Maroons deported via Nova Scotia in 1800.
Liberated Africans (Recaptives)
Tens of thousands landed from intercepted slave ships after 1808, the largest component, with strong Yoruba (Aku) representation.
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Clothing: Victorian dress adopted deliberately in the nineteenth century — top hats, frock coats, crinolines — alongside the kabaslot and print gowns; the print and lace of contemporary Krio ceremony.
Food: Jollof rice, fufu, akara, cassava leaf and the distinctive Krio dishes of plassas and foofoo; the Awujoh feast with its prescribed foods for the ancestors.
Ceremonies: Awujoh, a feast for the dead combining Yoruba practice with Christian and Muslim prayer; elaborate weddings and funerals; the Hunting and Ode-lay masquerade societies of Freetown's youth.
Marriage customs: Church or mosque marriage with extended family negotiation; historically strong endogamy within the Krio community, weakening steadily since independence.
Initiation rites: Education above all: the community's identity was built on schooling, and Fourah Bay College's degrees were its formation.
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Sierra Leone, at national rather than community level — 8 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
Fermented cassava fufu with a leaf sauce, the everyday meal across Sierra Leone. The fufu is sourer than the Ghanaian version and comes wrapped rather than pounded to order.
Serves 6 · 1 hour, plus 3 days fermenting
also Beans stew, Bean sauce
Black-eyed beans stewed with palm oil, onion and smoked fish, eaten with rice or bread for breakfast across Sierra Leone.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes, plus soaking
Finely pounded cassava leaves cooked slowly with palm oil, meat and fish into a thick dark green stew over rice. Sierra Leone's national dish by common consent.
Serves 8 · 2 hours
Black-eyed pea fritters sold in bread with pepper sauce at Freetown's morning stalls, eaten on the way to work with a cup of sweet tea.
Serves Makes 20 · 40 minutes, plus 4 hours soaking
Rice cooked in a tomato and pepper base with beef and chicken, made for weddings and Christmas. Sierra Leoneans add a spoon of palm oil that neither Ghana nor Nigeria would allow.
Serves 8 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Chicken or beef in a groundnut sauce made with roasted peanuts ground fresh, thickened and eaten over rice. Every household claims a slightly different balance of tomato to nut.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
also Fish pepper soup
A thin, ferociously peppery broth of fish or goat with country spices, drunk as much as eaten and prescribed for colds, hangovers and childbirth.
Serves 4 · 45 minutes
also Palm wine
Palm sap tapped at dawn and drunk the same day, sweet in the morning and increasingly sharp and alcoholic as the hours pass. Drunk in poyo bars from a shared calabash.
Serves Varies · Tapped daily; drunk within hours
The Province of FreedomHistorical account
Freetown was founded in 1787 as a settlement for London's Black poor, refounded in 1792 with over a thousand Black loyalists from Nova Scotia who had fought for the British in the American Revolution, and reinforced in 1800 by Jamaican Maroons. From 1808 the Royal Navy landed tens of thousands of Africans freed from intercepted slave ships. Out of those four streams a single people and language formed within two generations.
The Athens of West AfricaEducational history
Fourah Bay College, founded in 1827 and affiliated to Durham in 1876, was the first Western-style university in sub-Saharan Africa. Its graduates staffed colonial administrations, missions and schools from Gambia to Nigeria, and Freetown was called the Athens of West Africa. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first African Anglican bishop, was among the Recaptives educated there.
“Monkey wok, baboon it.”
“Monkey works, baboon eats.”
Others take the profit of your labour.
“Ushai you tie cow na de i de it grass.”
“Where you tie the cow is where it eats grass.”
People live off what is near them.
“Book na wetin dem no go tif.”
Education is the one thing that cannot be stolen from you.
Creation: Christian cosmology predominantly, with a substantial Muslim (Aku) minority, and Yoruba understandings of the ancestors surviving in the Awujoh feast.
Beliefs: Anglican, Methodist and other Protestant churches; Islam among the Aku; Awujoh ancestral feasting; belief in the ancestors' continued interest in family affairs.
Ancestors: Awujoh feasts held at deaths, anniversaries and moments of family difficulty; genealogies traced to the ship, the regiment or the village of recapture.
God in Christian worship
Central to the community's churches and civic life
Allah
Worshipped by the Aku Muslim community from the Recaptive generation
The ancestors
Fed at the Awujoh feast, a Yoruba inheritance within a Christian community
Traditional settlements: Freetown's board houses with dormer windows and shutters, built by settlers in a Nova Scotian idiom; the mountain villages founded for Liberated Africans; St George's Cathedral and the Old Fourah Bay College building.
Building techniques: Timber board construction on stone bases with shingle roofs and verandas; stone and lime in the public buildings; the distinctive Krio house is a recognised architectural type now largely lost to fire and neglect.
Village layout: House raised on a stone ground floor with living quarters above and a veranda; village laid out around church and school.
Krio board house
Architecture
Timber settler house with dormers and shutters, Freetown's historic form.
Old Fourah Bay College building
Heritage site
1848 structure of sub-Saharan Africa's first Western-style university.
Awujoh feast objects
Ritual
Prescribed foods and vessels of the ancestral feast.
Ode-lay masquerade regalia
Performance
Costume of Freetown's urban masking societies.
1787–1792
The Province of Freedom is founded and refounded with Black loyalists from Nova Scotia.
1800
Jamaican Maroons arrive.
1808–1863
The Royal Navy lands tens of thousands of Liberated Africans from intercepted ships.
1827–1876
Fourah Bay College founded and affiliated to Durham University.
1961–present
Independence; Krio political prominence declines while the language becomes the national lingua franca.
Open sources
Premium & scholarly sources