Sierra Leone

A country founded as a home for freed people, wrecked by a war over diamonds, and the origin of the term blood diamond. Freetown began in 1787 as a settlement for freed and destitute Black people from London, joined by Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia and Jamaican Maroons, and became the base for the Royal Navy squadron intercepting slave ships, which landed tens of thousands of liberated Africans there. From that mixture came the Krio, whose Fourah Bay College of 1827 was the first Western-style university in sub-Saharan Africa. The interior was made a protectorate separately in 1896 and governed under different law, leaving a coastal elite and an under-schooled hinterland that shaped politics from the first elections. Independence came in 1961. One-party rule and the collapse of state services preceded the civil war of 1991 to 2002, in which the Revolutionary United Front financed itself with alluvial diamonds and made amputation a deliberate tactic; a British intervention in 2000 helped end it. A special court later convicted Charles Taylor of Liberia. Ebola killed nearly four thousand people in 2014 and 2015. Freetown's harbour is among the largest natural ones in the world. The country has about eight million people. Its name comes from Portuguese for lion mountains, describing the peninsula's hills. Krio is the lingua franca and English is official. A mudslide at Freetown killed over a thousand people in 2017. The country holds one of the world's largest deposits of rutile. Bunce Island in the Freetown estuary shipped captives directly to the rice coast of South Carolina.

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