A History of the Early Sierra Leone Colony

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“A History of the Early Sierra Leone Colony” is an excerpt from “A Residence at Sierra Leone” , a book written by Elizabeth Melville and edited by Mrs. Norton. The book consists of the letters and journal entries of Melville, a British woman who lived in Sierra Leone in the 1840s.

Today Sierra Leone in a West African country, unfortunately, has been best known in the media for its civil war, its “blood diamonds”, and the more recent Ebola epidemic. But in the late 18th century, Sierra Leone was founded as a British colony for people of African descent living in Great Britain. The Black Britons were joined, in the 1790s, by African American Loyalists from Nova Scotia, Canada. Later immigrants included Jamaican Maroons, who arrived in 1800, African captives freed from slave ships after 1807, and a handful of Barbadian exiles after 1816.

The first colonists to arrive in Sierra Leone were Black Britons, who founded Granville Town in 1787. Granville Town was named after Granville Sharpe, the British abolitionist who helped poor blacks living in London to establish the colony in West Africa. The 1787 colony was a failure, however, due to high mortality from disease and attacks by indigenous Africans. Of about 400 original settlers, only about 70 survived.

The Sierra Leone Colony was saved by the arrival of almost 1200 new settlers from Nova Scotia. These were Black Loyalists who had emigrated from the southern United States to Nova Scotia, Canada, after fighting for Great Britain during the American Revolutionary War. Disliking their new home, some of them left for Sierra Leone. The new settlers founded Freetown in March 1792, with the support of the Sierra Leone Company, which had been organized by British abolitionist brothers Thomas and John Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and Henry Thornton.

In this excerpt, Melville describes the early history of the Sierra Leone colony, from its foundation until the early 1800s. Melville used one of the original 1792 Nova Scotian settlers as a source of information. The unnamed woman, who Melville quotes in the text in vernacular language, arrived in Sierra Leone as a young girl in March 1792. She lived through the upheaval of the early colony, including a devastating French raid in 1794, during the French Revolutionary wars, and attacks on the colony by the indigenous African Temne people.

The descendants of the Black Britons, Nova Scotians, Jamaican Maroons, the many different ‘liberated African’ ethnicities, and others, eventually intermarried to form the Sierra Leone Creole, or Krio ethnic group. Living mainly around Freetown, these Krio people have formed a small, but influential, segment of Sierra Leone’s population. Their vernacular language, Krio- an English-based Creole- has become the lingua franca spoken as a second language by many Sierra Leoneans.