Sierra Leone
Lion mountains, diamonds, and a freed-slave legacy
Sierra Leone is a small, humid country on the Atlantic coast of West Africa, its name, meaning lion mountains, given by a fifteenth-century Portuguese explorer struck by the rugged hills above the magnificent natural harbor at Freetown. That harbor and the capital became a haven for freed and rescued slaves in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, giving Sierra Leone a distinctive Krio culture and language. Its roughly 8.8 million people inhabit a land of beaches, rainforest, and diamond-bearing gravels, a country that has rebuilt itself with remarkable resilience after a brutal civil war.
The coast holds mangrove swamps and the mountainous Freetown peninsula, behind which lie wooded hills, interior plateaus, and the Loma Mountains near the Guinea border, where Mount Bintumani rises to about 1,945 meters, the highest point in West Africa west of Cameroon. One of the wettest countries in Africa, Sierra Leone is drained by numerous rivers and blessed and cursed by mineral wealth, including the alluvial diamonds whose trade financed the war, alongside rutile, bauxite, gold, and iron ore that dominate exports today.
British abolitionists founded Freetown in 1787 as a settlement for freed slaves, and the colony later became a base for the Royal Navy's suppression of the slave trade, landing thousands of liberated Africans whose descendants form the Krio community. Independence came in 1961. From 1991 to 2002 a horrific civil war, fueled by blood diamonds and marked by mass amputations, devastated the country before a UN intervention restored peace. Sierra Leone has since held competitive elections and survived the 2014 Ebola epidemic, gradually rebuilding around its mineral resources, fisheries, and tourism.