Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone owes its name to a Portuguese sailor who, in 1462, saw the mountains of the Freetown Peninsula and called them Serra Lyoa, the lion mountains. Behind the mangrove coast, the land climbs through farmland and forest to an eastern plateau and the Loma Mountains. On Tiwai, an island in the Moa River, pygmy hippos live in the rainforest. The rains, from May to October, can be torrential.

From Bunce Island, a British fort in the Sierra Leone River, enslaved Africans were shipped to the rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia. In 1787 British abolitionists landed settlers on the peninsula; Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia followed in 1792 and laid out Freetown. As a crown colony from 1808 it took in thousands of captives the Royal Navy had freed from slave ships. Independence came in April 1961, and a civil war fought largely over the diamond fields lasted from 1991 to 2002.

The Krio, descendants of those settlers and freed Africans, built clapboard houses and a culture of their own, while the Temne and the Mende are the largest peoples inland. Muslim and Christian families often intermarry. Women of the Sande society wear glossy black helmet masks, among the few African masks worn by women. Rice is eaten daily, often with cassava-leaf stew. Diamonds from Kono, rutile from the southern sands, iron ore and bauxite are the mineral wealth, and cocoa and coffee grow in the east.