Banana Islands

The islands lie off Yawri Bay on the sea route that Portuguese and later English traders followed along the West African coast, and the name Dublin was probably given by an Anglo-Irish agent of the Royal African Company in the 1680s. By the eighteenth century the group was a trading station: European and Afro-European merchants based here bought and held captives from the mainland for shipment across the Atlantic, and an old slave dock survives at the northern tip of Dublin. The islands were held by the Cleveland family, whose violent dispute with the Caulkers of the Plantain Islands in the late eighteenth century ended in the 1800s, when the Caulkers took both groups of islands.

After Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and Freetown became a Crown colony, the islands were drawn into the colony's system of villages for Africans freed from intercepted slave ships. Dublin and Ricketts were settled in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by liberated Africans and by freed African Americans and West Indians, most of them from Jamaica; most islanders today descend from those settlers, and the ruins of an 1881 church stand at the northern tip of Dublin.

For most of the twentieth century the islands were simply small fishing villages supplying Freetown's markets, connected to the mainland by open boats from Kent. The civil war of 1991–2002 brought displacement to the peninsula as it did everywhere. Since the war a handful of village guesthouses and a community tourism arrangement have grown up, and the islands have become a standard weekend trip from the capital, though electricity, water and transport remain basic.

Life on the islands runs on fishing and on the sea's timetable. Boats go out early and come back to be met on the shore; the catch is divided, part smoked or dried for sale on the mainland and part cooked at home. Everyone knows everyone, and visitors are greeted and placed by which guesthouse they are staying in.

The population is small and mixed. Descendants of the recaptive settlers live alongside Sherbro families, settled on Dublin since the early eighteenth century, and people from Freetown, and Krio is the everyday language, as it is on the peninsula generally. Christian and Muslim households share the villages, with a church in each and prayers marking the day for Muslim families, and the mixture is unremarkable here as it is across Sierra Leone.

The ruins are part of ordinary life rather than a separate heritage site: paths run past them, children play around them, and village guides explain what they are. Because the islands were a point of departure in the Atlantic slave trade, visitors of African descent sometimes come for that history specifically, and guides treat the subject carefully. Music, football on any flat ground, and long evenings talking outside the houses fill the time when the boats are in.

About 900 people live on the islands, almost all of them in Dublin and Ricketts. There are no cars, no proper roads and no mains electricity; light comes from solar panels and small generators that run for part of the evening, and water from wells and rainwater. Schooling and health care are basic, and anything serious means a boat to Kent and a vehicle to Freetown.

Fishing is the livelihood, supplemented by farming small plots of cassava, pepper and fruit trees in the forest behind the villages, and increasingly by tourism — guesthouse work, boat trips, guiding and cooking for visitors. Money arrives in season and thins out in the rains, when the crossing is unreliable and few people come. Young people leave for Freetown for school and work and come back for holidays.

The rhythm of the day is set by light and tide: boats out before dawn, work and school in the morning, the hot middle of the day spent in the shade, the shore busy again in the late afternoon. Freshwater supply, waste and the pressure of visitors on a small place are the issues talked about, along with the state of the road from Freetown to Kent, which decides how many people make the trip.

Fish is the centre of every meal here — barracuda, snapper, grouper and bonga landed by the village boats, grilled over charcoal or fried and served with rice, fried plantain and a fierce pepper sauce. Lobster and crayfish are caught around the rocks in season, and smoked fish is kept for the sauces that carry through the rains.

The staples are those of the peninsula: plasas, the thick leaf sauce made with red palm oil, over white rice — cassava leaf pounded and cooked long with groundnut paste and fish, potato leaf, krain krain from jute leaf, and okra. Groundnut stew and pepper soup appear regularly, and jollof rice marks any celebration. Cassava grown behind the villages is boiled, fried or made into gari and fufu.

Little is bought in, so the food is seasonal and simple: mangoes, pineapple, oranges, coconut and papaya from the islands themselves, and rice, oil and seasoning brought over from Kent. Poyo, the palm wine tapped on the peninsula, arrives fresh, ginger beer is made at home, and strong sweet tea and instant coffee are drunk in the morning. Meals in the guesthouses are arranged in advance, because everything is cooked from scratch when it is asked for.