NOTES ET DOCUMENTS James Steel Thayer Dissenting View of Creole Culture in Sierra Leone The repatriated Africans who were settled in Sierra Leone are one of the most intensely studied and well documented people on the continent of Africa certainly in sub-Saharan Africa From the mid-eighteenth century different philanthropic and church organizations had called for just resolution to the problem of slavery in the British Empire The purchase of small piece of land on the coast of West Africa and the settlement of returned slaves there in 1787 did not end Great involvement with its former slaves To the contrary the early ideal of self-supporting self-sustaining entity was never realized and in 1807 this tract of land the Freetown peninsula became colony second-oldest in Africa From the very beginning the settlers were under constant scrutiny first by the Sierra Leone Company later by Church Missionary Society missionaries and colonial officials Still later travellers added their descriptions of Freetown and the surrounding area.1 By the mid-nineteenth century the settlers had come to be known as Creoles or Krios and developed distinctive Creole culture They also became self-reflective as can be seen in their thriving press and in number of autobiographies.2 By the middle of the twentieth century the Creoles had become the object of fairly intensive scholarly investigation Except for large ethnic groups such as the Yoruba or the Ashante it is hard to find single ethnic group on which so much scholarly effort mostly of an historical nature has been expended One reason for this attention believe has to do with the fact that the Creoles are peculiar people who were believed and believed themselves to have
The settlement later Colony of Sierra Leone was source of great interest to many people not only because it was philanthropic enterprise second colony in Africa after South Africa and the exotic and medically dangerous tropical setting Geographers explorers historians missionaries and colonial officials all wrote accounts of Sierra Leone particularly of Freetown See for example ALLDRIDGE 1910) BLYDEN 1889) CLARKE 1843) DALLAS 1803) FALCONBRIDGE 1794) MATTHEWS 1788) MELVILLE 1849) POOLE 1850) SHREEVE 1847) Government sources were also prolific One of the earliest white papers on Sierra Leone Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State the Colony of Sierra Leone Parliamentary Papers vol VII dates from 1827 On newspapers and the press Sierra Leone see FYFE 1957 There were dozens of periodicals which flourished most very briefly between 1870 and 1910
Cahiers tudes africaines 121-122 XXXI-1-2 1991 pp 2I5-230
