From Western Europe to West Africa: today I wanted to emphasize that the links between these two regions are of great depth and duration. After “first contact” Sierra Leone (from the Portuguese, Serra Lyoa or “Lion Mountains”) functioned as a trading post, then became the site of a “colonization” effort which attempted to settle formerly enslaved people of African descent. (Several decades later the US abolitionists also sought to do this, and the result is the country now known as Liberia.) The initial attempt at a settlement failed, but roughly 13 years later the Sierra Leone Company, a private corporation founded by opponents of the slave trade, induced freedmen from all over the British Empire– Jamaica, Nova Scotia, etc.– to come to the colony. With the abolition of the international slave trade (enslaved people were still traded domestically) the Royal Navy would pursue contraband slave ships and deposit anyone they managed to get ahold of in Sierra Leone. These “recapitves” were a heterogeneous bunch: polyglot, multi-ethnic, of different religions, etc. It became colonial policy to attempt to forge these disparate elements into a single, cohesive people via proselytizing them into Protestant Christianity. The first generations of the recaptives would come to be known as Creoles and eventually constitute the Sierra Leonean elite.

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