Slavery and Abolitionism in Sierra Leone

The Sierra Leone peninsula and estuary were part of a wider area on the west coast of Africa that supplied people for export in the transatlantic slave trade between the mid-16th and the mid-19th centuries. Classified as part of the Western Area of the modern state of Sierra Leone, the peninsula was in the territory of the Koya Temne in the 18th century, although Bunce Island, the site of a slave fort in the Sierra Leone estuary, was in the possession of the Bullom on the northern shore of the Sierra Leone River. The relationship of this area with the transatlantic slave trade shifted markedly in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. British abolitionist intervention from 1787 set in motion far-reaching changes, which had the effect of halting slave supply from areas immediately around the peninsula within three decades. Freetown, a newly planted town on St. George’s Bay (formerly Frenchman’s Bay and now Kroo Bay), emerged as a fiercely contested site, and its fluctuating fortunes were debated around the Atlantic world. Ambitious plans to develop a society free from slavery led to the introduction of a new population comprised mainly of people who had firsthand experience of slavery in the Americas. After the transfer of the private settlement to British Crown control in 1808, Royal Navy vessels intercepted slave ships and disembarked approximately one hundred thousand enslaved people from West Africa and West Central Africa at Freetown by the early 1860s. The development of this colony also led to a changed relationship with slavery in its hinterland, as various governors attempted to prevent the sale of Africans in their areas of jurisdiction.

Research on the history of Sierra Leone has been dynamic and diverse in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. While new work emerged on the “Province of Freedom,” new research approaches have also developed, which include reconstructing the identities of the colony’s inhabitants and the nature of imperial governance as well the colony’s relationship with regional polities.