page_title: Mandingo people of Sierra Leone
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Mandingo people of Sierra Leone / History
context_page_description: Mandinka people of Sierra Leone is a major ethnic group in Sierra Leone and a branch of the Mandinka people of West Africa. Most Sierra Leonean Mandingo are the direct descendants of Mandinka settlers from Guinea, who settled in the north and eastern part of Sierra Leone, beginning in the late 1870s to the 1890s under the rule of prominent Mandinka Muslim cleric Samori Ture. Also later a significantly large population of Mandinka from Guinea migrated and settled in Eastern Sierra Leone and Northern Sierra Leone in the early to mid 20th century. The Mandingo people of Sierra Leone have a very close friendly and allies relationship with their neighbors the Mandingo people of Guinea and Liberia, as they share pretty much identical dialect of the Mandingo language, tradition, culture and food.
  The Mandingo constitute about 6.9% of Sierra Leone's population. The Mandingo are over 99% Muslim, adherents to the Sunni tradition of Islam. Islam has become the basis of their religious and cultural practices. The Mandingo are well known for their conservative Islamic tradition. The Mandingo people of Sierra Leone are predominantly traders and rural subsistence farmers.
context_section_description: In 1875, Samori Ture, an ultra conservative hardline Muslim cleric and Mandinka leader in Guinea, imported breech-loading rifles through the British colony Sierra Leone and supplied his warriors with them. By 1876, his Mandinka warriors had enslaved many African Tribes within the region, including the Limba led by Almamy Suluku and had conquered a large territory in Limba areas in northern Sierra Leone (present day Koinadugu and Kambia District). The Mandinka warriors moved into the northeastern part of British colony Sierra Leone, where they occupied lands of the local indigenous Temne and Loko people.
  Ture took the title of Imam, chief of all Believers. By late 1876, the Mandinka warriors had occupied a large section in northeastern Sierra Leone, possibly due to wars with France and intentions to spread the teachings of Islam. 
  Samori Ture established Islamic rule in parts of Northeastern Sierra Leone under his control, as part of the Wassoulou. He founded many Islamic Madrassa schools based on the Suffi tradition of the Maliki school within Sunni Islam. Ture ordered the local Sierra Leonean people, who were living under the Mandinka control territory in Northeastern Sierra Leone to abandon their animist beliefs and to convert to Islam or they must pay a tax known as Jizya for not converting to Islam.
  Samori Ture brought many ethnic Mandinka marabout Sunni Muslims clerics from the Sufi tradition of Islam from Guinea to Northeastern Sierra Leone to teach the Quran and the life of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad.  Ture banned some indigenous practices by the local Sierra Leone people that he viewed as un Islamic. Ture also imposed an Islamic dress code in Northeast Sierra Leone under his rule. Although most part of Northern Sierra Leone had been Muslims even before Samori's conquest, A minority of the local Sierra Leonean people under Samori Ture's rule were not Muslims at the time. But faced with the tremendous powers of the new hardline Muslim rulers, they abandoned their animist beliefs and converted to Islam. Many of the local peoples joined the Mandinka in enrolling in the Islamic Madrassa schools established by Samori Ture. Within a short period of time after Ture conquered part of northern Sierra Leone, part of the region, once dominated by Indigenous religion, rapidly became an overwhelmingly Muslim majority, and has remained an overwhelmingly Muslim majority to present.
  In 1878, Ture sent thousands of Mandinka people from the Wassoulou in central Guinea to Mandinka-occupied northeastern Sierra Leone as traders, farmers, and settlers to colonize the area. By late 1878, the Mandinka population had tripled in British-controlled Sierra Leone.
  By the late 19th century, many of the Mandinka had begun to have large families. And by 1900, most of the Mandinka population in Sierra Leone were first generation Sierra Leonean born. The British government considered the Sierra Leonean born Mandinka as citizens of the colony of Sierra Leone by birth. The British called them Mandingo. While they were concentrated in the North and East, the Mandinka traders and businesspeople also settled in the capital Freetown. Since the late eighteenth century, it had been dominated by the Krio people, an ethnic group made up of descendants of black colonists from Great Britain and Nova Scotia, and slaves liberated from ships by the British Navy. The settlers from Nova Scotia were mostly freed United States slaves (known as Black Loyalists who were resettled in Nova Scotia after the American Revolutionary War. Many had left rebel masters and joined the British to gain freedom.
caption: Samori with the Qur'an in his hands
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