Sierra Leone Creole people

Creole people of Sierra Leone
(Krio)
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Total population
104,311 (2022)[1]
Regions with significant populations
Sierra Leone, Gambia, United States, United Kingdom
Languages
Krio, English
Religion
Anglican • Methodist • Catholic • Baptist
Related ethnic groups
African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, Americo-Liberians, Atlantic Creoles, Black Britons, Black Nova Scotians, Gambian Creoles, Gold Coast Euro-Africans, Jamaican Maroons, Krio Fernandinos, Saro people, Tabom people.
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The Sierra Leone Creole people (Krio: Krio pipul) are an ethnic group of Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone Creole people are descendants of freed African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Liberated African slaves who settled in the Western Area of Sierra Leone between 1787 and about 1885. The colony was established by the British, supported by abolitionists, under the Sierra Leone Company as a place for freedmen. The settlers called their new settlement Freetown.[2] Today, the Sierra Leone Creoles are 1.2 percent of the population of Sierra Leone.[1]

The Creoles of Sierra Leone have varying degrees of European ancestry,[3][4] similar to their Americo-Liberian neighbours and sister ethnic group in Liberia.[5][6] In Sierra Leone, some of the settlers intermarried with English colonial residents and other Europeans.[7][8] Through the Jamaican Maroons, some Creoles probably also have indigenous Amerindian Taíno ancestry.[9][10] The mingling of newly freed black and racially-mixed Nova Scotians[11] and Jamaican Maroons from the 'New World' with Liberated Africans – such as the Akan, Bakongo, Ewe, Igbo and Yoruba – over several generations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, led to the eventual formation of a Creole ethnicity.[12][13][14][15]

The Americo-Liberians and Sierra Leone Creoles are the only recognised ethnic group of African-American, Liberated African, and Afro-Caribbean descent in West Africa.[16][17][1] Thoroughly westernized in their manners, the Creoles as a class developed close relationships with the British colonial administration; they became educated in British institutions and advanced to prominent leadership positions in colonial Sierra Leone and British West Africa.[18] Partly due to this history, many Sierra Leone Creoles have first names and/or surnames that are anglicized or British in origin.

The Creoles are overwhelmingly Christian[a] and the vast majority of them reside in Freetown and its surrounding Western Area region of Sierra Leone.[21] From their mix of peoples, the Creoles developed what is now the native Krio language, a creole deriving from English, indigenous West African languages, and other European languages. It is the most widely spoken language in virtually all parts of Sierra Leone. As the Krio language is spoken by 96 percent of the country's population,[1][22] it unites all the different ethnic groups, especially in their trade and interaction with each other.[23][24] Krio is also the primary language of communication among Sierra Leoneans living abroad.[25]

The Sierra Leone Creoles settled across West Africa in the nineteenth century in communities such as Limbe (Cameroon); Conakry (Guinea); Banjul (Gambia); Lagos, Abeokuta, Calabar, Onisha (Nigeria); Accra, Cape Coast (Ghana) and Fernando Pó (Equatorial Guinea).[26] The Krio language of the Creole people influenced other pidgins such as Cameroonian Pidgin English, Nigerian Pidgin English, and Pichinglis.[27][28] As a result of their history, the Gambian Creole people, or Aku people of the Gambia,[29][30] the Saro people of Nigeria,[31][32][33] and the Krio Fernandinos of Equatorial Guinea,[34][35][36] are sub-ethnic groups or partly descended from the Sierra Leone Creole people or their ancestors.

  1. ^ a b c d "CIA World Factbook (2022)". www.cia.gov. 14 February 2023.
  2. ^ Walker, James W. (1992). "Chapter Five: Foundation of Sierra Leone". The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp. 94–114. ISBN 978-0-8020-7402-7. Originally published by Longman & Dalhousie University Press (1976).
  3. ^ Torrent, Mélanie (2009). "Crowning the work of Wilberforce? The Settlers Descendants' Union and the challenges of Sierra Leone's independence". Cahiers Charles V. 46: 241–292. doi:10.3406/cchav.2009.1541.
  4. ^ Colonial Office Brief: CO554/2884, Note on the Attorney General's 'Note of the Supreme Court Judgement', 10 August 1960, op.cit.
  5. ^ R.W. July, Nineteenth Century Negritude: Edward W. Blyden in the Journal of African History, v, 1964, p. 77, n. 9. "This attitude to ‘mulattoes’ was of course racialist in view; cf. Burton, op. cit. p, 271 – ‘the worst class of all is the mulatto’. The correspondence recently published in Holden, op. cit. shows that Blyden had developed his views about ‘mulattoes’ during his conflicts with the Americo-Liberians in Monrovia, but his public writings were less outspoken about Liberia than they were about Freetown."
  6. ^ "Liberia Country Study: The True Whig Ascendancy" Global Security
  7. ^ Galli, Stefania (2022). "Socioeconomic Status and Group Belonging: Evidence from Early-Nineteenth-Century Colonial West Africa". Social Science History. 46 (2): 349–372. doi:10.1017/ssh.2021.47.
  8. ^ Galli, Stefania (2 October 2019). "Marriage patterns in a black Utopia: Evidence from early nineteenth-century colonial Sierra Leone". The History of the Family. 24 (4): 744–768. doi:10.1080/1081602X.2019.1637361.
  9. ^ Fuller, Harcourt; Torres, Jada Benn (2 January 2018). "Investigating the 'Taíno' ancestry of the Jamaican Maroons: a new genetic (DNA), historical, and multidisciplinary analysis and case study of the Accompong Town Maroons". Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. 43 (1): 47–78. doi:10.1080/08263663.2018.1426227.
  10. ^ Madrilejo, N; Lombard, H; Torres, JB (2015). "Origins of marronage: Mitochondrial lineages of Jamaica's Accompong Town Maroons". Am. J. Hum. Biol. 27 (3): 432–437. doi:10.1002/ajhb.22656. PMID 25392952. S2CID 30255510.
  11. ^ "Looking Back, Moving Forward: Documenting the Heritage of African Nova Scotians". www.archives.novascotia.ca. 20 April 2020.
  12. ^ Arthur Porter, Creoledom, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp.53, 58
  13. ^ Cite error: The named reference Baron was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  14. ^ Cite error: The named reference Eric was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference Wolf was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ Cite error: The named reference Dixon was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  17. ^ Cite error: The named reference Shana was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  18. ^ Bangura, Joseph (May 2009). "Understanding Sierra Leone in Colonial West Africa: A Synoptic Socio-Political History". History Compass. 7 (3): 583–603. doi:10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00596.x.
  19. ^ Cite error: The named reference Cole was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  20. ^ Bassir, Olumbe (1954). "Marriage Rites among the Aku (Yoruba) of Freetown". Africa. 24 (3): 251–256. doi:10.2307/1156429. JSTOR 1156429.
  21. ^ Taylor, Bankole Kamara (February 2014). Sierra Leone: The Land, Its People and History. New Africa Press. p. 68. ISBN 9789987160389.
  22. ^ "Translators without borders: Language data for Sierra Leone". www.translatorswithoutborders.org.
  23. ^ Oyètádé, B. Akíntúndé; Fashole-Luke, Victor (15 February 2008). "Sierra Leone: Krio and the Quest for National Integration". Language and National Identity in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 122–140. ISBN 978-0-19-928675-1.
  24. ^ "Sierra Leone languages", Joshua Project
  25. ^ Cite error: The named reference Tom was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  26. ^ Little, K. L. (1950). "The Significance of the West African Creole for Africanist and Afro-American Studies". African Affairs. 49 (197): 308–319. doi:10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a093841.
  27. ^ Yakpo, Kofi (2019). A Grammar of Pichi. Studies in Diversity Linguistics. Vol. 23. Berlin: Language Science Press. doi:10.5281/zenodo.2546450. ISBN 978-3-96110-133-7.
  28. ^ Njeuma B.J. Structural similarities between Sierra Leone Krio and two West African Anglophone Pidgins: A case for common origin University of South Carolina. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1995. 9541244.
  29. ^ Frederiks, Martha (2002). "The Krio in the Gambia and the Concept of Inculturation". Exchange. 31 (3): 219–229. doi:10.1163/157254302X00399.
  30. ^ Ashcroft, Shaka (2015). "Roots and Routes: Krio Identity in Postcolonial London". Black Theology. 13 (2): 102–125. doi:10.1179/1476994815Z.00000000051.
  31. ^ Agiri, Babatunde "The Introduction of Nitida Kola into Nigerian Agriculture, 1880–1920", African Economic History, No. 3, Spring 1977, p. 1.
  32. ^ Dixon-Fyle, Mac, "The Saro in the Political Life of Early Port Harcourt, 1913–49", The Journal of African History, Vol. 30, No. 1, p. 126.
  33. ^ Derrick, Jonathan, "The 'Native Clerk' in Colonial West Africa", African Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 326, p. 65.
  34. ^ Martín del Molino, Amador. 1993. La ciudad de Clarence. Malabo: Ediciones Centro Cultural Hispano-Guineano
  35. ^ García Cantús, M. Dolores. 2006. Fernando Poo: Una aventura colonial español, vol. 1: Las islas en litigio: Entre la esclavitud y el abolicionismo, 1777–1846. Barcelona: Ceiba Ediciones.
  36. ^ Lynn, Martin. 1984. "Commerce, christianity and the origins of the ‘creoles’ of Fernando Po". Journal of African History 25(3), 257–278.


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