Before the slave trade · to 1561
Rice farms, palm oil and kernels, fishing nets and traps, cooking, shops, mines and markets: the work that fed the country and paid its way.
Many were made by colonial officials, missionaries and foreign visitors. Titles and descriptions come from the collections that hold them and can carry the attitudes and language of their time. We show them as historical records, not as endorsements. Dates, eras and categories were assigned automatically from those records and some will be wrong. If you or your family appear in a picture, you hold rights to one, a detail is wrong, or you think a picture should not be here, press “Report this picture” under it: your note reaches our editors with the picture attached, and they can take it down straight away. You can also write to hello@dt-ets.com.
Dominic (centre) and me resting in a banana grove after cutting a new trail down the mountain from Old Yagala, Sierra Leone (West Africa) (1 1967
John Atherton · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons · Source ↗ · Report this picture
Bored Stones from Sierra Leone (West Africa) (2422090592) 1968
John Atherton · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons · Source ↗ · Report this picture
Limba hunters trap south of Kamabai, Sierra Leone (West Africa) (1694996394) 1968
John Atherton · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons · Source ↗ · Report this picture
Palm nuts waiting to be processed near Yagala, Sierra Leone (West Africa) (1892479464) 1968
John Atherton · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons · Source ↗ · Report this picture
Young boy learning how to make stone tools, Kamabai, Sierra Leone (West Africa) 1968 (1127757541) 1968
John Atherton · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons · Source ↗ · Report this picture
Kimberlite (Koidu Kimberlite Complex, Jurassic; Yengema-Koiu area, eastern Sierra Leone, West Africa)
James St. John · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons · Source ↗ · Report this picture
Stone-lined pit, probably for extracting palm oil, near Yagala, Sierra Leone (West Africa) (1679217561) Photographed 1967 or 1968
John Atherton · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons · Source ↗ · Report this picture
Kimberlite (Koidu Kimberlite Complex, Jurassic; Yengema-Koidu area, Sierra Leone, West Africa) 2
James St. John · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons · Source ↗ · Report this picture