Sierra Leone
Capital: Freetown · West Africa
The 'Lion Mountains' — homeland of Mende and Temne chiefdoms, the women's Sande masking society, and the Krio culture of freed-slave descendants in Freetown.
Ethnic communities
- MendeSouthern chiefdoms; Sande society's sowei helmet masks
- TemneNorthern kingdoms with Poro traditions
- KrioDescendants of liberated Africans; Krio language and Freetown culture
- Limba, Kono, SherbroOlder indigenous groups of the interior and coast
More communities of Sierra Leone
- Limba · Palm-wine cultivators, the land's oldest claimants
- Kono · Diamond-country farmers of eastern forests
- Sherbro · Coastal islanders of Yassi society heritage
- Fula (Fulbe) · Cattle and commerce across the north
- Loko · Northern farmers of Temne-side traditions
- Susu · Border traders toward Guinea's coast
- Kissi · Tri-border rice farmers of stone ancestors
- Madingo (Mandinka) · Muslim merchant-teachers in every town
- Yalunka & Kuranko · Highland Mande farmers of the northeast
- Vai & Gola · Border communities of script and Sande fame
- Krim & Gallinas · Southern coast fishing and old trade towns
Languages
Major languages: Mende, Temne, Krio, English
Language families: Niger-Congo (Mande, Mel); English Creole
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Koya (Temne) Kingdom
- • Mende confederacies
Heritage sites
- • Bunce Island slave fort
- • Freetown Cotton Tree heritage
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Sierra Leone
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Science, business & activismb. 1964
Aminatta Forna
Memoir and human rights
Her memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water reconstructed the trial and execution of her dissident father and became a document of Sierra Leone's descent into war.
- Politics & liberationc. 1840–1908
Bai Bureh
Anticolonial resistance
Temne chief who led the 1898 Hut Tax War against British taxation of Sierra Leonean homes, holding out for ten months against a far better armed force.
- Sportb. 1979
Mohamed Kallon
Football
Sierra Leone's best known footballer, an Inter Milan and Monaco forward who later funded a club and academy at home.
- Music & the arts1926–1994
S. E. Rogie
Palm-wine music
Guitarist whose gentle palm-wine style, and the hit My Lovely Elizabeth, remain the sound most associated with Sierra Leone abroad.
Deep-dive community profiles
Aku of the Gambia
Descendants of liberated Africans resettled from Freetown at Bathurst in the 1820s, who built the colony's churches and mosques, supplied its lawyers and clerks for a century, and split into a Christian Aku and an Aku Marabout Muslim community that share a name and little else.
Open deep profile →Kissi
The rice farmers of the three-border forest — a people split across Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia whose ancestral stone figures are dug from their own fields, and whose region was where the 2014 Ebola epidemic began.
Open deep profile →Kono
The people who live on the diamonds — farmers of Sierra Leone's eastern highlands whose district produced some of the largest stones ever found, and who have almost nothing to show for a century of extraction.
Open deep profile →Krio
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.
Open deep profile →Kuranko
A Mande people of the northern hills whose chiefdoms sit on the Guinea border, whose hunters' associations and finaba praise-singers hold authority no chief can override, and whose oral tradition was recorded across four decades by a single anthropologist.
Open deep profile →Limba
Sierra Leone's oldest inhabitants by their own account and most others' — farmers and palm-wine tappers of the northern hills who kept no centralised state, produced the country's first president, and hold a storytelling tradition recorded in one of the classic works of African oral literature.
Open deep profile →Mende
The rice-farming people of Sierra Leone's forested south whose Sande and Poro societies school every generation, whose Sowei mask is the only known African mask danced by women, and whose chiefs and orators shaped the modern state.
Open deep profile →Sherbro (Bullom)
The coastal people of Sierra Leone's islands and estuaries — carvers of the ivory saltcellars that European nobles collected in the 1500s, hosts of the first Portuguese traders, and inhabitants of a shoreline now being taken by the sea.
Open deep profile →Susu (Soso)
The coastal Mande of Guinea — traders and rice farmers of the Conakry littoral whose language is the capital's lingua franca, and whose ancestors ruled the Soso kingdom that Sundiata Keita destroyed at Kirina in 1235.
Open deep profile →Temne
The people of Sierra Leone's central and coastal heartland — heirs of chiefdoms that met the first Atlantic traders, keepers of the Poro and Bondo/Sande societies, the Ragbenle and Ramena institutions, and the paramount chieftaincies that shaped the nation.
Open deep profile →Vai
The people who invented a script — coastal traders of the Liberia-Sierra Leone border whose syllabary, devised around 1833 from a dream, is one of the very few writing systems created independently in modern times and still in use.
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