Holidays in Sierra Leone

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Sierra Leone

A City Built in Three Separate Waves of Return

Freetown's founding unfolded not as a single settlement but as a sequence of arrivals spread across more than a decade, each bringing people whose freedom had been won through entirely different, often harrowing routes. In May 1787, roughly four hundred freed Black Londoners, many of them formerly enslaved people who had ended up destitute in Britain, arrived under the sponsorship of abolitionists including Granville Sharp and founded a settlement they called Granville Town, part of a project they named the Province of Freedom. It did not survive long: local ruler King Jimmy burned it to the ground in 1789 following a dispute, and the site had to be rebuilt.

The colony's real founding came on 11 March 1792, when roughly 1,100 to 1,200 Black Loyalists, formerly enslaved people who had sided with the British during the American Revolutionary War in exchange for promised freedom and had subsequently been resettled in Nova Scotia, crossed the Atlantic a second time under the leadership of Thomas Peters to found Freetown itself, laying it out on the grid pattern of the North American colonial towns they had known. A third and final wave arrived in 1800: roughly 550 Jamaican Maroons, descendants of enslaved people who had escaped Jamaican plantations generations earlier and fought the British to a standstill, deported to Sierra Leone following their defeat in the Second Maroon War. Intermarriage among these three founding populations, alongside later arrivals of Africans freed from intercepted slave ships after Britain's 1807 abolition of the slave trade, produced the Krio people and their Krio language, still spoken as Freetown's lingua franca today, a city's identity built entirely from the descendants of people whose freedom had each, in its own way, taken a different and difficult path to arrive there.

Eleven Years, Declared Over on a Single Day

On 23 March 1991, fighters of the Revolutionary United Front crossed into eastern Sierra Leone from neighbouring Liberia, launching a civil war that would last more than a decade and claim tens of thousands of lives in a country of roughly four million people. The conflict became notorious for the way it was financed, with diamond-rich territory in the country's east and south changing hands repeatedly between rebel and government forces, the gems mined there funding weapons on both sides in a pattern that gave rise to the term "blood diamonds."

Multiple peace agreements, including the 1999 Lomé Accord, briefly interrupted the fighting only for it to resume, and it was ultimately foreign military intervention, a British operation launched in 2000, alongside a renewed United Nations peacekeeping mandate, that finally allowed government forces to reassert control across the country and oversee the large-scale disarmament of tens of thousands of former combatants. On 18 January 2002, President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah formally declared the Sierra Leone Civil War over, drawing a definite legal end to eleven years of conflict on a single specific date, even as the country's long work of demobilisation, reintegration and recovery continued for years afterward.

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