Freetown

Freetown began with two landings. In 1787 British abolitionists put ashore about 400 poor Black Londoners and others on the shore of the peninsula, founding Granville Town, which disease and a Temne attack all but destroyed. In 1792 some 1,200 Black Loyalists, Africans who had sided with Britain in the American Revolution and been resettled in Nova Scotia, landed under Thomas Peters and John Clarkson and laid out the streets of Freetown. Jamaican Maroons followed in 1800. After Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and the settlement became a Crown colony in 1808, the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron brought tens of thousands of Africans freed from intercepted slave ships into the harbour, and they were settled in villages around the mountains — Regent, Gloucester, Waterloo, Kissy.

From this mixture grew the Krio, a people with their own English-based language, church life and architecture. Fourah Bay College, founded in 1827, drew students from across British West Africa and gave the city its old reputation as a centre of learning. Freetown's harbour made it a naval station, used heavily as a convoy assembly point in both world wars.

After independence in 1961 the city grew far beyond its colonial frame. The civil war of 1991–2002 reached it directly in January 1999, when AFRC and RUF forces attacked the city and over 7,000 people were killed, at least half of them civilians. Recovery since has been steady but interrupted: the Ebola epidemic of 2014–16, a mudslide at Regent in 2017 that left about 1,100 people dead or missing, repeated floods, and the loss of the old Cotton Tree, which fell in a storm in May 2023.

Freetown is the home of Krio culture, and although Krio people are only a small part of the population, their language is spoken by almost everyone in the city and across the country. The Krio year turns on church, the awujoh feast for the ancestors, and the masquerade societies whose costumed processions — hunting societies, Ode-lay groups, the Christmas and Easter parades — fill the streets with drums and brass. The steep-roofed wooden board house, with its shuttered balcony and stone cellar, is the city's own architecture.

The population is far broader than that: Temne and Limba from the north, Mende from the south, Fula and Mandingo traders, and Lebanese families settled for generations. Muslims are the majority and Christians a large minority, and the two mix to an unusual degree, sharing weddings, funerals and holidays, with mosques and churches on the same street. Poro and Bondo society membership persists in the neighbourhoods that grew from the mountain villages.

Music runs from palm-wine guitar and the maringa of Ebenezer Calender through gumbe drumming to a loud contemporary scene of Afrobeats and rap that argues over politics and hardship. Football is the mass passion, played on any flat ground and watched at the national stadium at Brookfields. Manners are formal in a way visitors notice: greetings before requests, respect for elders, and a general readiness to talk.

About 1.35 million people were counted in Freetown at the 2024 census, the great majority of them packed onto a narrow shelf between the mountains and the sea and spreading up the hillsides and out along the shore. The day begins before dawn, because the few roads linking the east end, the central business district and the western suburbs seize up by seven; traders set out at first light and much of the city's business is done by early afternoon.

Most households live on trade and small enterprise — market stalls, street selling, okada riding, workshops — while formal jobs come from the port, the ministries, banks, telecoms, aid agencies and mining companies. Money from relatives in Britain and the United States supports many families. Power cuts and water shortages are routine, and informal settlements on the shoreline at Kroo Bay and Susan's Bay and on the steep slopes flood or slip in the rains.

The city is run by a directly elected council headed by a mayor, chosen every four years, and flooding, landslides and building on the steep slopes are its recurring problems. Pressure on the forest above the city, the spread of the synthetic drug known as kush among young people, and the cost of imported rice and fuel are the issues people discuss.

Rice is the meal, and everything else is what goes on it. The daily plate is plasas — a thick, oily leaf sauce — over white rice: cassava leaf pounded fine and cooked long with red palm oil, groundnut paste and smoked or fresh fish, or potato leaf, krain krain made from jute leaf, or okra. Groundnut stew and pepper soup are everyday alternatives, and jollof rice appears at any celebration. Fufu and gari from cassava come with soups in Krio and provincial households alike.

The sea sets Freetown apart from the interior. Bonga, barracuda, snapper and lobster are landed at Tombo and the peninsula villages and grilled over charcoal at the beach bars along Lumley, usually with fried plantain and pepper sauce. Krio cooking adds its own dishes: black-eyed beans and rice, jollof, fried fish with pepper, and the awujoh table of beans, plantain and rice flour foods laid out for the ancestors.

Street food is constant. Akara bean fritters and binch akara, roasted groundnuts, fried plantain and cassava, rice bread, and sweet fried dough are sold from head trays and stalls through the day. Ginger beer is made strong and sweet, poyo palm wine arrives fresh from the villages each morning, Star is the local beer, and green tea with condensed milk is drunk at roadside stands, especially by traders from the north.