Culture and Economy
Among the features of this early culture were certain artistic traditions that were lost in the Mani invasion and later upheavals. The best known of the artworks were the nomoli — small stone carvings of man-like figures that are still occasionally unearthed from sites throughout much of the country. The Sapi were also well known to the early European coastal traders for their fine ivory carvings, pottery, and rattan work.
This cultural loss, as well as contemporary Portuguese reports that tell of the coastal people’s preferring to be slaves to the Europeans rather than face Mani conquest, reflected the initial and continuing harshness of Mani rule. Nevertheless the Mani did introduce new and more advanced technologies, notably improving the production of iron and cloth. Travel had been largely limited to the narrow forest trails, purposefully not improved to inhibit invaders, and to portions of the rivers navigable by light canoe. The Mani, however, introduced large seaworthy canoes that could hold thirty men or more.
Trade had considerable significance despite the limited means of transport and the very small number of people directly involved. A small amount of gold was produced in ancient Sierra Leone, generally by panning but in some cases by digging mines as far as ninety feet down. Gold from the inland empires continued to be a medium of trade. Kola nuts, used as a mild stimulant, were a major trade item: those produced in the Great Searcies and Little Searcies river basins were particularly prized throughout the region for their quality.
Some of the early peoples apparently migrated to the coast to process salt from the sea. Cotton and rice were also important produce, although presumably only for local trade. The limited trade in kola nuts and salt, however, passed far inland, where these items were exchanged for the products of the empires, such as finished cloth, cattle, high-quality ironware, and other relative luxuries. Most trade followed routes up the northern rivers, then overland east or northeast into the Niger valley.
The Influence of the Fouta Djallon
The Fouta Djallon plateau region, just north of the present-day Guinea-Sierra Leone border, lay across the route used by most of the peoples coming from the Sudanic belt into Sierra Leone. Of the people of modern Sierra Leone, the Temne, the Susu, the Limba, the Krim, the Koranko, and the Yalunka all had inhabited the massif before being pushed southward into Sierra Leone. Thus the Fouta Djallon was the cultural homeland of the great majority, perhaps nearly all, of the people of the northern half of the country.
By the early eighteenth century the Fouta Djallon had become a center for Muslim religious activity, spread abroad largely by Muslim Fullah and Madingo traders. After 1725 the Muslim Fullah began a long holy war, or jihad, for the forced conversion of their neighbors. The Fullah founded a highly organized Islamic state in the Fouta Djallon that was to dominate events in the adjacent portions of Sierra Leone until after the effective establishment of British colonial rule at the end of the nineteenth century. The extent of this state's direct control varied with its military strength, but at all times its influence was important, even among those people who rejected efforts at conversion.
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