Sierra Leone

The "Lion Mountains" coast that Portuguese sailors named in the fifteenth century became a source for the transatlantic slave trade, with an English slave castle on Bunce Island shipping captives, many to the rice country of South Carolina. In 1787 British abolitionists founded a settlement at Freetown for freed and destitute Black people from London, joined by Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia and Jamaican Maroons, and after 1808 the Royal Navy landed tens of thousands of Africans freed from intercepted slave ships. From these groups emerged the Krio — English-speaking, Christian, and Western-educated — and Freetown, with Fourah Bay College, became a centre of learning known as "the Athens of West Africa". The coastal colony was British from 1808 and the interior a protectorate from 1896.

Independence came in 1961, followed by a slide from democracy into one-party rule and deep corruption under Siaka Stevens from the late 1960s, and economic collapse under his successor. The civil war of 1991–2002 followed, in which the Revolutionary United Front, backed by Liberia's Charles Taylor and financed by "blood diamonds", waged a campaign of extreme brutality — mass amputations, tens of thousands of child soldiers — that killed some 50,000 to 70,000 people and displaced half the country, before Nigerian-led and then decisive British military intervention and a large UN peacekeeping mission ended it.

A post-war recovery followed, and a special court convicted Charles Taylor. Two further blows came: the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic, which killed around 4,000 Sierra Leoneans, and a 2017 Freetown mudslide that killed some 1,100. Governments have alternated peacefully between the two main parties, though a 2023 election was disputed and a barracks was attacked that November.

Sierra Leone is a Muslim-majority country with a large Christian minority and a striking degree of religious mixing — shared festivals, interfaith families, and mosques and churches side by side. Krio culture, carried by a small community, has an outsized reach through the language and through Freetown institutions, keeping traditions from the awujoh ancestral feast to the Christmas and Easter "masquerade" societies and the gumbe drum.

Across the ethnic groups, the men's Poro and women's Sande (or Bondo) initiatory societies remain important in much of the country, teaching adulthood, custom, and craft; the Sande society's carved wooden helmet mask, danced by a senior woman, is one of the few African masks worn by women.

Music runs from palm-wine guitar and maringa to Afrobeats, football is the mass passion, and hospitality, the extended family, and respect for elders are bedrock values.

Sierra Leone is young — a very large share of the population is under 25 — and mostly rural, farming rice, cassava, and oil palm, though Freetown, a crowded, hilly, traffic-choked city on a peninsula, holds well over a million people.

The country is among the poorest in the world, with weak electricity and infrastructure, high youth unemployment, and an economy that swings with the price of diamonds, rutile, and iron ore and with the rains. Recovery from the war and from Ebola has been real but fragile, and new shocks keep coming — inflation and food-price spikes since 2022, and a public-health emergency over "kush", a cheap and highly damaging synthetic drug spreading among young people in the cities.

Remittances from a large diaspora in Britain and the United States are an important support, and Freetown has drawn attention for an ambitious tree-planting and flood-resilience programme.

Sierra Leonean cooking centres on rice — eaten at least once a day, and so important that "rice" and "food" are near-synonymous — topped with a rich, oily leaf sauce, or plasas. Cassava leaf, pounded and stewed with palm oil, groundnut, and fish or meat, is the national favourite, with potato leaf, jute leaf (krain krain), and okra sauces close behind.

Groundnut stew, pepper soup, fried fish, jollof rice, and cassava dishes fill out the table, and street food includes akara bean fritters, fried plantain, and grilled meat and fish. Rice bread, ginger beer, palm wine (poyo), Star beer, and strong sweet tea are the drinks, and the east grows good cocoa and coffee.

The Freetown Peninsula is the main draw: a string of white-sand, palm-backed beaches — River No. 2, Tokeh, the surf beach at Bureh, and the Banana Islands offshore — with green mountains rising behind, all within an hour or two of the city. Freetown itself has the National Museum, the Krio "board houses", the King's Yard Gate, and, in the rainforest just above town, the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary.

In the Sierra Leone River, Bunce Island preserves the ruins of the slave castle, a site of deep significance for the African-American Gullah community. For wildlife, Tiwai Island in the south is a small rainforest reserve with one of the highest primate densities in the world, including rare pygmy hippos, and Outamba-Kilimi in the north has elephants and hippos.

The Turtle Islands and the Sherbro coast are remote and rarely visited, and the Loma Mountains in the northeast rise to Bintumani, the highest peak in West Africa west of Cameroon.