Seen in the widest perspective, 1787 is only one date among the uncounted tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years during which the present Sierra Leone has been inhabited. Archaeologists have done disappointingly little work there. But it is clear from their findings (and by implication from findings in the rest of forest-belt West Africa) that people have lived there a very long time. Though traditional historiography always tends to present the peoples of Sierra Leone as immigrants from somewhere else, the language pattern suggests continuous occupation over a very long period. As Paul Hair (1967) has shown, there has been a striking linguistic continuity in coastal West Africa since the fifteenth century. Nor is there evidence to suggest that before that period stability and continuity were not the norm.

Freetown City Council, established in 1893, was the victim of a colonial government which concentrated authority in white hands and resented the survival of a municipality run by Africans. Successive governors regularly presented it as a scapegoat, along with the whole Krio community, for disturbances in Freetown, notably the 1919 anti-Syrian riots and the 1926 railway strike. In 1925 financial malpractices in the council were disclosed and some officials were prosecuted. The following year the Mayor, Cornelius May, editor of the leading newspaper, the Sierra Leone Weekly News, and a highly respected public figure, was charged with conspiracy to defraud, along with the Town Clerk and the City Treasurer, and was given a nine-month prison sentence. Then, on the recommendation of a Commission of Inquiry, the City Council was dissolved and replaced by a Municipal Board.

The study of women in Sierra Leone has been well launched. Except for the work of Carol P. MacCormack (formerly Hoffer) on political leadership and socio-economic development among Mende and Sherbro women (1972, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982), most of this scholarship focuses on women in Freetown, mainly the Krio. Filomena Steady (1975, 1976) has analysed Krio women's leadership in church and political organisations. The history of their economic contribution to the evolution of the city has been discussed by E. Frances White (1976, 1978, 1981a, b). Gender relationships in modern marriage have been examined by Barbara Harrell-Bond (1975). In addition, there are a number of biographical studies of prominent leaders: Paramount Chief Madam Yoko (Hoffer, 1974), Adelaide Casely Hayford (Okonkwo, 1985; Cromwell, 1986), Constance A. Cummings-John (Denzer, 1981, forthcoming a, b), Hannah S. Benka Coker (Metzger, 1973: 50–2), and Lottie Hamilton-Hazeley (Metzger, 1973: 52–3). On the basis of this body of work it is possible to study more closely the contribution of women in modern politics in Freetown and the socioeconomic forces behind their participation. This account covers the period from the emergence of the proto-nationalist movement, the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA), up to the campaign for independence.

In a country which in the last 200 years has undergone continuous and often momentous political, economic and social changes, few things are capable of conveying as strong an impression of stability and changelessness as wood fuel (charcoal and firewood) consumption and production; and nowhere is this more striking than on the Freetown or Western Area (formerly Colony) peninsula. In this region, which has always accounted for the major share of national electricity, kerosene and cooking gas (LPG) consumption, not only is current percentage household firewood consumption only fractionally lower than in the nineteenth century but a much higher proportion of households consume charcoal now than at any time in the last two centuries (Cline-Cole, 1984a). Today firewood and charcoal combined supply a minimum of 80 per cent of total peninsula energy demand for both domestic and non-household uses (Davidson, 1985). Freetown's firewood consumption also represents some 10 per cent of the national total (Atlanta, 1979).

In the development debate relating to Third World countries the concept of ‘accelerated growth’ dominated the initial arguments. Thus it was stated in one report that ‘the acceleration of the rate of economic growth of the developing countries and the rapid improvement in their social structures through the eradication of mass poverty and of inequality of income require inter alia a large-scale transfer from the vast pool of technology accumulated mainly in the developed countries’ (UNCTAD, 1972: 1).

In recent years scholars have shown considerable interest in the early use of photography by non-Western peoples. Research on nineteenth-century Indian, Japanese and Chinese photography has revealed a rich synthesis of European and Asian imagery. These early photographs show how non-Western peoples created new forms of artistic expression by adapting European technology and visual idioms for their own purposes. Because of the long history of contact between Sierra Leoneans and Europeans, Freetown seemed a logical starting point for similar photographic research in West Africa. The information presented here is based on ten years of searching for nineteenth-century photographs made by Sierra Leonean photographers. To locate these pictures, I have visited Freetonians and viewed their family portraits and photograph albums, interviewed contemporary photographers throughout Sierra Leone, and researched in the various colonial archives in England to locate photographs preserved from the period of colonial rule. I have discovered that a community of African photographers has worked in the city of Freetown since the very invention of photography. The article reviews the first phase of this unique photographic tradition, 1850–1918, and focuses on several of the African photographers who worked in Freetown during this period.

This article deals with the national languages of Sierra Leone and their use in education since 1978. Language information relevant to the period under review as well as language policy and its implementation are focal parts of our discussion.

There exists in practice if not in theory a formal mother-tongue education programme at primary school level in specially selected pilot schools of all four geographical regions of Sierra Leone. This programme was initiated in 1978 within the framework of a national language policy later spelt out in a working UNESCO study of 1981. Similarly, adult literacy education has gained rapid expansion over the same period although this sector of indigenous language education is mostly handled by so-called nongovernmental agencies such as CUSO Sierra Leone, the People's Educational Association (PEA), and similar bodies. To this extent the recommendations and proposals of the Dalby report concerning the implementation of a national language policy for Sierra Leone have seen practical implementation as well as some degree of experimentation in formal and non-formal education. In short, the bare bones of this experimental framework are illuminated by practice.

Thomas Alexander Leighton Decker, o.b.e., teacher, journalist, broadcaster, poet, dramatist, linguist and senior civil servant—to name only some of the major occupations or preoccupations of his busy life—was the man who, more than any other, crusaded for the acceptance of Krio as a language in its own right. At a time when others dismissed Sierra Leone's main lingua franca as a debased or corrupt form of English and failed to recognise its distinct identity and full potential, Thomas Decker never once faltered in his conviction that it was as good a language as any other. He spent much of his life trying to convince others of the truth of this, and the fact that Krio has at last begun to gain the acceptance he sought for it is in no small measure due to him and his efforts on its behalf.

From the time when I first became entangled with the Third World, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I have been fascinated by those contemporary ways of life and thought which keep growing out of the interplay between imported and indigenous cultures. They are the cultures on display in market places, shanty towns, beer halls, night clubs, missionary book stores, railway waiting rooms, boarding schools, newspapers and television stations. Nigeria, the country I have been most closely in touch with in an on-and-off way for some time, because of its large size, perhaps, offers particular scope for such cultural development, with several very large cities and hundreds if not thousands of small and middle-size towns. It has a lively if rather erratic press, a popular music scene dominated at different times by such genres as highlife, juju and Afro-beat, about as many universities as breweries (approximately one to every state in the federal republic), dozens of authors published at home and abroad, schoolhouses in just about every village, and an enormous fleet of interurban taxicabs which with great speed can convey you practically from anywhere to anywhere, at some risk to your life.