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A Complicated History

Religious ConflictsCivil UnrestSlaveryNorth AfricaSierra LeoneAfrica

When Pedro da Cintra sailed from Portugal down the West Coast of Africa in 1462 he spotted a promontory that some say looks like the shoulders of a lion at rest and called it Serra Lyoa- Lion Mountain.

The people who lived in the region around the great harbor had been there for hundreds of years. The Limbas' origins stretch back the furthest, although the Temne, another ancient tribe, and the Mende, who came within the past 600 years, dominate the country today.

In the 1200s, the area was on the fringe of the Islamic Mali empire, which both influenced the culture's religion and learning, and carried off slaves to North Africa, perhaps the first of centuries of slave-trading that plagued the region.

After da Cintra, the Portuguese held the monopoly on trade in human beings, gold, ivory and kola nuts - valued for their caffeine-like properties - but by the late 1600s other nations had set up the great slave castles that changed hands during European wars and that finally gave way to smaller, more freelance traders.

In the 1700s the British dominated the trade with the operation at Bunce Island, which sent thousands of rice-growing farmers as slaves to South Carolina and Georgia, often in New England ships such as the Africa and the Good Hope.

In the decades after Samuel Gould's voyages, the British set up a settlement for freed slaves and called it Freetown, now the nation's capital. Slaves who had fought with the British against American slaveholders during the American Revolution and who had fled to Canada, migrated to Sierra Leone. After the British abolished their slave trade in 1807, slaves taken from captured smuggling vessels also were settled here - the resulting mixture of cultures creating a whole new language called Krio.

In the 1890s the European race to grab African colonies intensified, as did resistance among the kingdoms of the interior. After World War II the British Empire began to come apart, and Sierra Leone gained independence in 1961, setting up a British-style parliamentary government.

By the end of the 1960s corruption and conflicts between the Mende and the other main groups, the Limba and Temne, developed. President Siaka Stevens consolidated power during 17 years of rule, eventually forming a one-party state characterized as a "kleptocracy" and by electoral violence. His successor, Joseph Saidu Momoh, tried a return to multiparty democracy in 1990, but he also involved Sierra Leone in the civil war in neighboring Liberia, which led to a coup by young military officers and a collapse into anarchy.

A brutal civil war in the 1990s ended after U.N. intervention, and the presidential elections of 2002 were generally considered to be fair. But decades of corruption and war have ruined the economy and perpetuated vast poverty among most of the country's 5.8 million people.

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