Serra Lyoa: The Coast Before Freetown

Around 1462 an expedition led by the Portuguese explorer Pedro de Sintra reached this coast and named the hills above the great harbour Serra Lyoa, the Lioness Mountains. The historian C. Magbaily Fyle has questioned whether the story is quite that simple. Either way, the name stuck.

Portuguese ships visited regularly from the late fifteenth century. Some sailors stayed, traded and married into local families, and their descendants became a Luso-African trading community along the rivers.

Around 1505, Temne migrants from the north founded the Kingdom of Koya, ruled by a king called the Bai. Its sub-kingdoms were governed by nobles, it traded with the Portuguese and with Muslim states to the north, and some nobles sent their children abroad to be educated.

In the sixteenth century Mane armies, a Mande-speaking people, swept down the coast. They fought a great battle with the Bullom in 1545. Historians disagree whether it was near Cape Mount in present-day Liberia or on Sherbro Island. Within about fifteen years the Mane had conquered nearly all the coastal peoples as far north as the Scarcies River, and their bows, shields and knives were soon found everywhere.

English merchants followed the Portuguese. By 1628 they kept a trading post near Sherbro Island, dealing in ivory, camwood and enslaved people. Around 1670 English slave traders fortified Bunce Island, 20 miles up the Sierra Leone River. For more than a century it shipped captives across the Atlantic, many to the rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia, where their skill in growing rice was prized.

Under Koya's king Nembanga, who reigned from 1775 to 1793, the kingdom signed the treaty that allowed a British colony on the peninsula in 1788. The Freetown story starts there, but it was built on a coast with a long history of its own.