Bo

Bo grew up as a Mende settlement in Kakua chiefdom and became a town because of colonial administration and the railway. After Britain declared a protectorate over the hinterland in 1896, a district headquarters was established here, and in 1906 the Bo School was founded to educate the sons and nominees of paramount chiefs — a deliberate attempt to shape the future leadership of the interior, and an institution whose graduates went on to dominate politics and the civil service. The Sierra Leone Government Railway reached Bo in 1903, making it the point where palm kernels, rice, cocoa and coffee from the south were loaded for Freetown.

From 1930 until independence in 1961 Bo served as the administrative capital of the Protectorate, giving it courts, offices, schools and a professional class, and cementing a rivalry with Freetown that runs through the country's politics. The railway closed in the 1970s, but by then the road had taken its place, and the city kept its position as the market and service centre of the south. Diamond buying offices opened as the alluvial fields of the south and east were worked.

The civil war of 1991–2002 reached Bo repeatedly. The city was attacked more than once and filled with people displaced from the countryside, and Bo District was a main recruiting ground for the Kamajors, the Mende hunter militias that formed the Civil Defence Forces. Since the war the city has grown quickly, rebuilt its schools and university campus, and absorbed the shocks of the Ebola epidemic of 2014–16 and the economic strains that followed.

Bo is the cultural capital of the Mende, the largest group in the south, and Mende is heard everywhere alongside Krio, which serves as the language of trade and of anyone from elsewhere. Christian churches and mosques stand within a few streets of each other and families are frequently mixed, a pattern that holds across Sierra Leone but is especially visible in a city built around mission and government schools.

Education is the city's self-image. The Bo School and the secondary schools around it give the place an old-boy network that reaches into every ministry, and school anniversaries, sports days and alumni gatherings are major social events. Bo and Kenema carry a long, good-humoured rivalry played out in football, school results and market trade, while the city as a whole enjoys its reputation for being less formal and more welcoming than the capital.

Chiefdom institutions matter. Paramount chiefs are recognised authorities, land questions are settled locally, and the Poro and Sande societies continue to initiate young people in the surrounding villages, with the carved sowei helmet mask of the Sande society among the best known art forms of West Africa. The south is the heartland of the Sierra Leone People's Party, and election periods are followed closely and argued about loudly.

About 223,000 people lived in Bo at the 2021 census estimate, making it one of the two largest cities after the capital. It is low-rise and spread out: compounds of concrete and mud-brick houses with tin roofs, mango trees in the yards, and cassava and vegetable plots running into the rice valleys at the edges. The day starts before six with sweeping, water fetching and the first traders, slows through the heat of the afternoon and picks up again in the cool of the evening.

Trade and services carry the economy. Produce from Bo District and beyond is bought and bulked here for Freetown, and diamonds from the alluvial diggings pass through the buying offices on the main streets. Schools, the university campus, hospitals, government offices and aid organisations provide salaried work, while most households live on petty trade, transport, tailoring, carpentry and farming. Okada riding employs large numbers of young men.

Power is intermittent and many businesses run generators or solar panels; water comes from wells, boreholes and standpipes. The cost of rice and fuel, youth unemployment, the spread of the synthetic drug known as kush, and the state of the feeder roads that bring produce in from the chiefdoms are the everyday concerns, along with flooding in the low ground during the heaviest rains.

Bo eats the cooking of the Mende south: rice at every meal, with a sauce poured over it. Plasas, the thick leaf sauce made with red palm oil, is the daily standard — cassava leaf pounded and stewed long with groundnut paste and smoked fish, potato leaf, krain krain made from jute leaf, or okra. Groundnut stew and pepper soup are common alternatives, and jollof rice appears whenever there is something to celebrate.

Cassava is the second staple, boiled, roasted, grated into gari or pounded into fufu and eaten with soups. Smoked bonga and other fish come up from the coast to flavour sauces, freshwater fish comes from the rivers, and bush meat has a traditional place in village cooking. The district's cocoa, coffee and oil palm are cash crops rather than everyday food, but palm oil is in almost every dish, and kola nuts are offered and exchanged as a mark of welcome and respect.

Street food is constant and cheap: akara bean fritters, roasted groundnuts, fried plantain and cassava, rice bread and fried dough, sold from head trays and small stalls. Fresh poyo palm wine arrives daily from the villages, ginger beer is made strong and sweet, Star beer is the local brew, and green tea with condensed milk is drunk at roadside stands. Mangoes, oranges, pineapples and bananas fill the market in their seasons.