Sierra Leone
POPULATION 5,614,743
MUSLIM 60 percent
AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGION 30 percent
CHRISTIAN 10 percent
Country Overview
Introduction
The Republic of Sierra Leone is a small West African country between Guinea and Liberia. Mountains in the east slope down to an upland plateau, wooded hills, and an Atlantic Coastal belt of mangrove swamps. About two-thirds of the inhabitants are subsistence farmers, but diamond mining provides the main hard currency. The Mende and Temne, the largest of the 18 principal ethnic groups, account for 60 percent of the population. Mende is spoken in the south, Temne in the north, and a literate minority speaks English (the official language). Ninety-five percent of the population also speak Krio, an English-based Creole.
Muslim traders and clerics brought Islam to northern Sierra Leone in the thirteenth century. Most Sierra Leonean Muslims are Sunnis, though some 10,000 Lebanese traders are Shiites. Portuguese explorers introduced Christianity on the mountainous, 25-mile-long Sierra Leone peninsula in 1462. Father Baltasar Barreira (1531–1612), a Catholic Jesuit priest, recommended that England and America settle freed slaves there. In 1787 a British Protestant abolitionist, Granville Sharp, established a settlement on the peninsula for 400 "black poor" from the London streets. Freed slaves from the American colonies and escaped slaves living in Jamaica joined them.
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