The Sierra Leone Hinterland and the Provisioning of Early Freetown, 1792–1803

Freetown sits uncomfortably within the broader context of African urban and colonial history. Its establishment in the late-eighteenth century predates the era of formal European colonial expansion in Africa by more than half a century. As a planned urban center, the town’s early development also challenges the prevailing notion that African cities are relatively modern creations.¹ Freetown is thus faced with an identity crisis: in many ways, it seems to share more in common with the Atlantic-oriented ports that dotted the American littoral between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries than it does with Africa’s later industrial centers.² Yet the antislavery sentiment surrounding the city’s origin and its later legitimization as a British colony separate Freetown from both the colonial cities that developed in the later part of the nineteenth century and from most of the Atlantic port cities which grew largely from their role in the slave trade.

Despite these unique characteristics, Freetown’s long-term evolution as a city followed a familiar trajectory. In the century after its establishment, the city slowly developed an asymmetrical relationship with its hinterland. As British territorial expansion enlarged the size and scope of the abolitionist settlement, people living in the region came to depend increasingly on the colonial government for certain specialized functions. In exchange, the Sierra Leone relied upon its hinterland as the breadbasket to sustain the city’s growing population.³

However, the long-term picture of Freetown’s dominance over the countryside masks the complexities that its settlers faced in forging commercial relations with the Sierra Leone hinterland. Particularly in its early phase, the Sierra Leone Company struggled not only against the uncertainties that faced all newly-emerging settlements, but also with hostility from the inhabitants of a region still widely immersed in the Atlantic slave trade. This essay focuses on the origins of the Company’s efforts to secure a trade based in agricultural commodities with its neighbors. Based largely on the records of the Sierra Leone Company, it examines the early struggles in establishing trade with the hinterland, the way the Company’s commerce was organized in comparison to the slave trade, and its volume and spatial distribution. The results demonstrate that in Freetown’s infant stages, power rested in the hands of the Africans of the interior and not, as it would in the later-nineteenth century, with the Europeans and liberated Africans in the city. Indeed in the 1790s it was indigenous inhabitants who developed and supported the commercial networks that ensured Freetown’s early survival and subsequent growth.⁴

The Establishment of Commercial Factories North and South of Freetown

The history of Freetown’s establishment is well known and need not be rehearsed in great depth. In 1787, an attempt to found the “Province of Freedom” at Granville Town on the south bank of the Sierra Leone estuary ended in disaster, with a third of the inhabitants dying from exposure to unfamiliar diseases and most of the survivors abandoning the settlement to seek livelihoods elsewhere. In 1790, the few remaining inhabitants were drawn into a conflict between their Temne landlord and an American slave trader which led to the total destruction of the original settlement. The town was reestablished in 1791 under the control of the Sierra Leone Company, its population expanding considerably early in the following year with the arrival of a group of free blacks from Nova Scotia. Excitement was in the air. The new settlers arrived singing a hymn of prayer: “The day of Jubilee is come; Return ye ransomed sinners home.”⁵

The air of jubilation was not to last long. It quickly became clear that the location of the new “Freetown” was far from ideal for agricultural purposes. A report on the state of the settlement in 1794 found that “the land adjoining to the settlement has proved by no means as good as every account received before the inception of the Company had led them to expect.” The overall assessment of Freetown’s geographic merits, however, was positive enough to keep the settlement from being relocated...