Sierra Leone In Early West Africa
Arrival of the Mande-Speaking People
Beginning perhaps in the late thirteenth century a wave of new people, collectively referred to as Mande speakers (not to be confused with the later Mende), brought elements of more advanced cultures into the forests. These people came from the Sudanic states to the coast throughout the portion of West Africa stretching from present-day Liberia to The Gambia, in a wave that was just ending when the first Portuguese explorers arrived in the middle of the fifteenth century. The Susu, for example, one of the most important groups in this wave, had been on the coast for only two generations when the Portuguese arrived.
The advanced knowledge of these people allowed them to impose themselves, peacefully in many cases, on the earlier inhabitants. They tended to take over the key roles in existing communities or to adapt communities to their own ideas. Thus the earlier Temne continued to be ruled by their own chiefs at the local level, but these chiefs now paid allegiance to an overlord from another tribe in this wave, the Koranko, sometimes through an intermediary Koranko governor.
The Mani
A second wave of Mande-speaking invaders came after the Portuguese and was therefore more accurately recorded, although controversy about their precise origins persists. These people, first called Mani (or Manes), arrived between 1540 and 1550. It has been conjectured that they came along the trade routes that ran from the Niger to the Atlantic coast in present-day Ghana, but the only reasonably firm evidence indicates that they entered the Sierra Leone area from the southwest through present-day Liberia. By one interpretation of the often ambiguous accounts, they formed an alliance with their near relatives in that area, the Vai and Kono, against the Bullom kingdoms of the coastal belt. By another interpretation they were, in fact, a segment of the Vai.
According to Portuguese chronicles, over a twenty-year period the Mani conquered or entered into alliances with all the peoples of southwestern Sierra Leone, so that by the 1570s they were effectively the rulers of most of the country south of the Sierra Leone River. About 1569, however, their advance was stopped by the Susu, who defeated the Mani and their allies in a battle on the Rokel River. The battle involved the largest forces the country had seen.
The Rokel River remained the boundary between the northern peoples and the Mani kingdoms into the nineteenth century. From the late sixteenth century through the late eighteenth century the Mani were generally divided into several kingdoms, ruling over the southern Bullom, the Temne, and the Lokko. All owed allegiance to a distant Mani senior king or emperor, the Manimansa of Mande, whose own people lived near Cape Mount, Liberia.
This north-south division of the country was only a political one; the major ethnolinguistic divisions did not coincide with this alignment; the Temne's alignment with the Mani rather than with their fellow West Atlantic peoples is a good example. Despite their allegiance to the Mani the Temne retained what the Sierra Leone historian Alexander P. Kup has called fundamental cultural and linguistic ties with the Bullom, the Limba, and other northern peoples. The Portuguese called all these people the Sapi.
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