Freetown Is the Capital of Sierra Leone, and That Is Where the Name Comes From

Where Freetown is

Freetown is the capital and largest city of Sierra Leone, on the Atlantic coast of West Africa, roughly eight and a half degrees north of the equator. It sits on the northern edge of the Sierra Leone Peninsula, on the southern shore of the Sierra Leone River estuary, which forms one of the largest natural harbours in the world. That harbour is the reason the city exists where it does, and the reason it mattered to every navy that ever passed through the region.

The peninsula behind the city is mountainous and forested, rising steeply from the water. Freetown climbs those hills, so much of it looks down on the harbour rather than across at it. Well over a million people live in the urban area.

Why the mountains gave the country its name

Sierra Leone is named for those hills. A Portuguese navigator sailing the coast in 1462 recorded the peninsula as Serra Lyoa, the lion mountains, most often explained as a description of the shape of the ridge or the sound of thunder rolling off it during the rainy season. The name stuck to the region for centuries before it belonged to a country, and it was anglicised along the way.

The city's own name is more direct. Freetown means what it says.

How the city was founded

Freetown's founding is one of the more unusual stories in the Atlantic world, and it runs in the opposite direction to the one people expect.

In 1787 a settlement called the Province of Freedom was established on the peninsula, populated largely by the Black Poor of London, many of them formerly enslaved people who had reached Britain by various routes, along with a group of white settlers. It failed within a couple of years, destroyed after a conflict with the local Temne, and was rebuilt on a smaller scale as Granville Town.

The founding that stuck came in 1792. Around eleven hundred Black Loyalists, people who had fought for the British in the American Revolution in exchange for their freedom and then been resettled in Nova Scotia on land that never materialised, sailed from Halifax across the Atlantic and landed on the peninsula. They cleared ground, laid out streets and named the place Freetown. These were people who had been born in or carried to North America and who chose to cross back. In 1800 they were joined by Jamaican Maroons from Trelawny Town, deported first to Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone.

From 1808 the settlement was a British Crown Colony and the base for the Royal Navy squadron that intercepted slave ships in the Atlantic. Tens of thousands of people taken off those ships, recorded at the time as Liberated Africans, were landed at Freetown and settled in villages around the peninsula, from many different homelands. Fourah Bay College was established in 1827 and drew students from across the region, which is where the city's old nickname, the Athens of West Africa, comes from.

Those groups, the Nova Scotian settlers, the Maroons, the Liberated Africans and the earlier arrivals, converged into the Krio people, and their language, Krio, an English-based creole carrying Yoruba and other West African structure underneath, became the language most of Sierra Leone uses to talk across ethnic lines.

Sierra Leone became independent in 1961. A civil war ran through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, and it scattered a generation of Sierra Leoneans across Britain, North America and elsewhere, which is a large part of why there is a Sierra Leonean diaspora at all. Freetown's best-known landmark, the ancient Cotton Tree in the middle of the city, fell in a storm in 2023 after standing through all of the above.

What Freetown eats

Rice is not a side dish in Sierra Leone. It is the meal, and there is a widely repeated saying to the effect that if you have not eaten rice you have not eaten. Almost everything else on the table is a sauce or a stew poured over it.

Two of those stews are the ones most closely identified with the country. Cassava leaf is made from the leaves of the cassava plant, pounded to a fine pulp and cooked down for a long time with palm oil, protein and pepper into something dense and dark green. Groundnut stew, built on peanuts ground to a paste, is thick, savoury and nutty, and it has cousins running east and north across the region. Alongside those sit okra soup, fried fish, pepper sauces, and Freetown's own jollof, which belongs to the same rice family as the Senegalese and Nigerian versions without being identical to either.

If you want the plant and the method instead of the country, what cassava leaf is and how it is made goes into the dish itself, and where to find Sierra Leonean food in Brooklyn covers the local side.

The Freetown on Park Place

FreeTown African & American Cuisine sits at 1172 Park Place, Brooklyn, NY 11213, in Crown Heights, and the family behind it is rooted in Freetown, Sierra Leone. That single sentence is the whole of what this page will claim about the family, because it's the whole of what we can state. Names, dates and the route from there to here belong to the people who lived it. If you want that story, ask them at 718-799-7160. A version invented for a website would be worth nothing.

What's on the table is easier to talk about. Cassava leaf and groundnut stew are both served by name here, next to Southern trays that came up a different road entirely, and that combination is the subject of West African and soul food from one Crown Heights kitchen. The neighborhood that made such a combination possible has its own history, told in how Crown Heights came to eat the way it does.

There is also a neat symmetry worth sitting with. Freetown was founded in part by people who left North America and crossed the Atlantic eastward looking for ground of their own. Two centuries later a family from that city crossed back westward and opened a kitchen in Brooklyn. Traditions that travel in both directions tend to turn up in the food, which is exactly what happens at a Crown Heights gathering where a Sierra Leonean stew and a Southern side share a table, and it is part of why a mourning tradition like the Jamaican Nine Night and its West African roots feels familiar to so many households on the same block.