page_title: Sierra Leone
section_title: Early history
hierarchical_section_title: Sierra Leone / History / Early history
caption_attribution_description: English: An illustration of liberated slaves arriving in Sierra Leone.
context_page_description: Sierra Leone, officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, informally Salone, is a country on the southwest coast of West Africa. It is bordered by Liberia to the southeast and Guinea to the northeast. Sierra Leone has a tropical climate with a diverse environment ranging from savanna to rainforests, a total area of 71,740 km² and a population of 7,092,113 as of the 2015 census. The capital and largest city is Freetown. The country is divided into five administrative regions which are subdivided into sixteen districts.
  Sierra Leone achieved independence from Britain on 27 April 1961, led by Milton Margai, who became the country's first Prime Minister. Sierra Leone held its first general elections as an Independent nation in May 1962, and Margai's Sierra Leone People's Party and its allies won the vast majority of seats in Parliament. Under the leadership of Albert Margai, who was elected by parliament as Prime Minister in 1964 after the death of his brother Milton Margai, SLPP narrowly lost the 1967 Sierra Leone parliamentary election to the main opposition party the All People's Congress, led by Siaka Stevens, an outspoken critic of the SLPP government.
context_section_description: Archaeological finds show that Sierra Leone has been inhabited continuously for at least 2,500 years, populated successively by societies who migrated from other parts of Africa. The people adopted the use of iron by the 9th century and by 1000 AD agriculture was being practised along the coast. The climate changed considerably and boundaries among different ecological zones changed as well, affecting migration and conquest.
  Sierra Leone's dense tropical rainforest and swampy environment was considered impenetrable; it was also host to the tsetse fly, which carried a disease fatal to horses and the zebu cattle used by the Mande people. This environmental factor protected its people from conquests by the Mande and other African empires. This also reduced the Islamic influence of the Mali Empire but Islam, introduced by Susu traders, merchants and migrants from the north and east, became widely adopted in the 18th century.
caption: An 1835 illustration of liberated Africans arriving in Sierra Leone
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