Kenema

Kenema was a small Mende settlement until the Sierra Leone Government Railway reached it in 1909 and connected it directly to Freetown. Trade followed the rails: palm kernels, cocoa, coffee and timber were gathered here for Freetown, and a town of traders, carpenters and forest workers grew around the station and the market. A forestry industry developed on the edge of the Kambui Hills, and the government established one of its main timber operations in the district.

Diamonds transformed the region after alluvial stones were found in the Kenema area in 1931. Kenema became a buying centre rather than a mining town: dealers' offices on its main streets handled stones dug from alluvial gravels, and from 1959 the Government Diamond Office, which still oversees valuation and export in the east, was based here. The railway closed in 1974, and the road took over.

The civil war of 1991–2002 began in the east, and Kenema changed hands and filled with displaced people; the diamond fields nearby were fought over throughout the conflict. Recovery in the 2000s brought reconstruction, a growing student population and renewed cocoa and coffee exports. In 2014 Kenema and neighbouring Kailahun were early centres of the Ebola epidemic, and Kenema Government Hospital, long known for its Lassa fever programme, lost many health workers, including the virologist Sheik Humarr Khan, before the outbreak was brought under control. Since then the city has grown steadily as the commercial capital of the east.

Kenema is a Mende city with a strong mixture: Kissi, Kono and Vai families from the border districts, Fula and Mandingo traders, Lebanese merchants long established in the diamond business, and people from every part of the country drawn by mining and trade. Mende and Krio are both heard constantly, and English is the language of offices and schools.

Trade sets the social tone. Deals are made in the open on the main streets, reputation carries weight, and the diamond business in particular runs on personal trust between diggers, dealers and exporters. The city is more informal and more transient than Bo, and its rivalry with the larger southern city is a standing joke in both places, played out in football and market talk.

Christianity and Islam are both strong and thoroughly mixed at family level, with churches and mosques on the same streets and shared attendance at each other's celebrations. In the chiefdoms around the city, paramount chiefs settle land and family disputes, and the Poro and Sande societies continue to initiate young people; the carved sowei helmet mask danced by senior Sande women is one of the region's best-known art forms. Football fills every open ground, and music from palm-wine guitar to Afrobeats plays from shopfronts and bars.

About 255,000 people lived in Kenema at the 2021 census, making it one of the two largest cities after Freetown and the commercial centre for the whole eastern region. It is low-rise and sprawling, with compounds of concrete and mud-brick houses under tin roofs, mango trees in the yards, and cassava plots and cocoa farms beginning where the streets end.

Work is trade, transport and the forest. Produce from Kailahun and Kenema districts — cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rice, kola — is bought and bulked here for Freetown; timber is sawn and made into furniture in the yards; diamond and gold dealers keep offices on the main streets; and okada riding, tailoring, carpentry and petty trading support most households. Government offices, the hospital, schools and colleges provide salaried jobs, and aid and conservation organisations working in the Gola forest have a presence.

Electricity is intermittent, generators and solar panels fill the gaps, and water comes from wells and boreholes. The concerns people raise are the price of rice and fuel, youth unemployment, the pressures that mining and logging put on the forest, the spread of the synthetic drug known as kush, and the perennial state of the feeder roads that bring the harvest into town.

Kenema eats Mende food, built on rice and palm oil. The standard plate is rice under plasas — a thick leaf sauce cooked long with red palm oil — most often cassava leaf pounded fine with groundnut paste and smoked fish, or potato leaf, krain krain made from jute leaf, or okra. Groundnut stew and pepper soup are everyday alternatives, and jollof rice marks any celebration.

The forest districts give the city its distinctive produce. Cocoa and coffee are grown as cash crops rather than eaten locally, but kola nuts from the same farms are chewed and exchanged as a mark of respect, and wild fruit, honey and bush meat come in from the villages. Cassava is boiled, roasted, grated into gari or pounded into fufu to eat with soups, and smoked bonga fish from the coast flavours almost every sauce.

Street food runs all day: akara bean fritters, roasted groundnuts, fried plantain and cassava, rice bread and fried dough sold from head trays and stalls around the market and the lorry parks. Fresh poyo palm wine arrives each morning from the villages, ginger beer is made strong and sweet, Star beer is sold in the bars, and green tea with condensed milk is drunk at roadside stands. Oranges, pineapples, bananas and mangoes fill the market in their seasons.