Sierra Leone Colony and Protectorate

Two entities under one governor, and the difference between them outlasted the colony. The coastal settlement around Freetown began in 1787 as a philanthropic project of the British abolitionist movement, a home for freed and destitute Black people from London, joined by Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia in 1792 and Jamaican Maroons in 1800. It became a Crown colony in 1808 and then the base for the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, which landed tens of thousands of Africans taken from intercepted slave ships. Out of that extraordinary mixture came the Krio, a people speaking an English-based creole, largely Christian and literate, who supplied clerks, missionaries and doctors across British West Africa. Fourah Bay College, founded in 1827, was the first Western-style university in sub-Saharan Africa. The interior was a different matter entirely. It was declared a protectorate only in 1896, governed indirectly through paramount chiefs, and administered under separate law - the people of the protectorate were British protected persons, not subjects, and the distinction limited their rights and their access to the colony's institutions. A hut tax imposed the following year provoked a serious war in 1898. The result was a state with a small, educated, coastal minority and a large, deliberately under-schooled hinterland, a division that structured party politics from the first elections onward and never really dissolved. Colony and protectorate were formally joined in 1951, and independence came on 27 April 1961 under Milton Margai, whose Sierra Leone People's Party drew its strength from the protectorate rather than from the settlement the colony was named for.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration