Sierra Leone - Ethnic Groups
It is clear from the few archaeological findings on Sierra Leone that people lived in the present area of Sierra Leone a very long time ago. Examinations of tools discovered in a cave in Yengema suggested that people inhabited that area at least 2,500 years before Christ. These people lived in small communities. It is not known for certain who they were.
By the time Portuguese traders began to appear on the West African Coast in the mid-fifteenth century, certain groups had already established themselves firmly in many areas in what is now Sierra Leone. On the coast were a host of communities such as the Baga, Bullum, Krim and Vai. The Portuguese called these coastal peoples the Sapes. In the North lived the Limbas. The Banta were found in the south-west while the Kissi and Kono lived in the East. Each group tended to be isolated from the others and there was very little internal migration. This was due to fear of war, suspicion of people from other groups, problems of social cohesion within the group and possible breakdown of traditions. These were all factors affecting ethnic diffusion.
The largest of the ethnic groups in Sierra Leone is the Mende, found in the Southern and Eastern Provinces. Next to them in number is the Temne in the North. The third largest group is the Limba, also in the Northern Province, followed by the Kono in the Eastern Province. There’s also the Koranko in the North as well as Yalunka, Loko, Soso, Madingo and Fula. On the coast, north and south are the Bullom and Sherbro followed by the much smaller groups of Krim, Vai, Gola, with the Kissi further inland in the Eastern Province. The Western area, including Freetown, is more mixed in population, but is basically the home of the Krio.
Ethnic differences and concomitant variations in local social systems and cultural patterns have been often reinforced and occasionally cut across by religious differences: indigenous systems, Islam, and Christianity in pure and compound states are found in Sierra Leone. Although these differences have not been the source of significant political conflict at the national level, they have directly affected access to education and economic opportunities, both of which had political implications.
Thus in a colonial system in which education was left almost entirely in the hands of missionaries, the Mende of the south, untouched by Islam, took earlier and greater advantage of mission-controlled educational opportunities than did the more northerly and wholly or partially Islamicized peoples. This did not mean that most Mende committed themselves wholly to Christian belief, practice, and mode of life. It did mean that, by virtue of the education provided them, Mende leaders were prepared a little earlier than most to move into the political realm at the national level and were able to function adequately at that level even if most Mende remained conservative in other respects.
The ethnic and religious patterns of Sierra Leone, similar in many respects to those found elsewhere in West Africa, were marked by a historical development peculiar to the country among African territo- ries formerly under colonial rule. (Liberia, never under such rule, had a related development.)
Until almost the end of the nineteenth century Sierra Leone consisted of the Colony, roughly coterminous with the present Western Area. Beginning in the last quarter of the eighteenth century the Colony came to be inhabited chiefly by Creoles, most of them the descendants of freed slaves returned to Africa from the New World (or landed in Freetown from slave ships intercepted by the British navy). However varied their ultimate origin, the Creoles came to be characterized by a variant of Western — British — culture (including, with some exceptions, Protestant Christianity) and patterns of life and law very different from those of the indigenous peoples who inhabited what came to be the British Protectorate of Sierra Leone in 18% (after independence, the provinces).
Eighteen ethnic groups (called tribes in many official documents) have been distinguished, primarily on the basis of self-identification. Two of them, the Mende and Temne (nearly equal in number), together accounted for more than 60 percent of the total population in 1963. The next most sizable group, the Limba, was much smaller — under 9 percent — and the remaining fifteen groups ranged from the Kono — under 5 percent — to the Gallinas — 0.1 percent.
Historians disagree over the exact timing and manner of the settling of Sierra Leone (see ch. 2). It seems, however, that upheavals connected with the rise and decline of major empires to the northeast set off a series of population displacements that ultimately affected the area from about the thirteenth century. Further migrations during subsequent centuries and the Muslim holy wars and the intertribal wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to a complicated pattern of geographic distribution of the country’s ethnic groups. These movements and internal migration during the twentieth century have created situations in which members of one ethnic group live in the territory of others.
The Sherbro and related Krim, and perhaps the Limba, arc probably the oldest inhabitants of the area; the Susu, Yalunka, and Temne, the first arrivals from the interior, were followed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Mende, Koranko, Kono, and related Vai, Madingo, and Fullah. Because of the arbitrary way in which political borders were drawn in the nineteenth-century European division of African territory, members of some groups, notably Kissi, Gola, Vai, and Susu, are also found in neighboring countries. Fullah and Madingo are widely distributed throughout West Africa.
Except for the Fullah, Madingo, and Kroo (and to a lesser extent the Sherbro), Sierra Leone’s peoples are predominantly agricultural. All (with the possible exception of the Sherbro) trace descent patrilineally, although the ways in which patrilineal descent is used as a basis for group formation vary. Occasionally the head of one chiefdom established a limited and usually temporary hegemony over another. No group, however, created large-scale political entities within Sierra Leone, not even the Madingo and Fullah, who were noted as empire builders elsewhere in Africa.
In general ethnic groups differ from one another in language and other cultural aspects. Ethnic identity, however, does not imply cultural and linguistic homogeneity. Some institutions are not characteristic of all segments of an ethnic group; for example, the southeastern but not the northwestern Temne share with some other ethnic groups the institution of secret societies; Islam and Christianity have affected some sections of a given ethnic group more than others. Moreover the languages of the larger ethnic groups and some of the smaller ones are differentiated into two or more dialects. At the same time cultural and linguistic diversity has diminished in some degree as members of smaller groups tend to acquire the language and culture of larger ones, particularly of the Mende and Temne. In some cases people who acquire the language and culture of another ethnic group have come to identify themselves as members of that group.
The Creoles are the descendants of freed slaves of diverse origin. Although a numerical minority (less than 2 percent of the population), their dominant political and economic role in the history of the country led to a significant gap between them and the other groups. The changing distribution of power was closing this gap by the 1970s.
As the significance of the distinction between Creole and non-Creole has diminished, differences among other ethnic groups have assumed increasing importance. These differences have affected political alignments and other matters, but they do not seem to have led to bitterness or intense conflict.
Guineans, many of them refugees from Ahmed Sekou Toure’s regime, were the largest group of alien Africans. Their number was unofficially estimated to be between 300,000 and 400,000 in 1969. Alien Africans included, according to the 1963 census, some 8,000 Liberians and 5.500 Nigerians (many of them Hausa who were engaged in trade).
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