The Sierra Leone archive

Oldphotographs,stampsandfilm

2,885 items

The collection: photographs, postcards, stamps, maps, objects and film from across Sierra Leone, gathered from museums and open collections and sorted by period. Every item is credited to its maker and the collection that holds it.

About these pictures +Every picture comes from an open collection, mostly Wikimedia Commons and museum open-access programmes, and is credited to its maker and holder under its licence. Follow “Source” to see the original record.

Every picture comes from an open collection, mostly Wikimedia Commons and museum open-access programmes, and is credited to its maker and holder under its licence. Follow “Source” to see the original record.

Many were made by colonial officials, missionaries and foreign visitors. Titles and descriptions come from the collections that hold them and can carry the attitudes and language of their time. We show them as historical records, not as endorsements.

Pictures showing nudity, slavery, death or violence are hidden behind a notice until you choose to see them. So are pictures of Poro and Sande (Bondo) society ceremonies and objects, which keep some of what they do for members; public masquerades are shown as they are. Dates, eras and categories were assigned automatically from those records and some will be wrong.

If you or your family appear in a picture, you hold rights to one, a detail is wrong, or you think a picture should not be here, press “Report this picture” under it: your note reaches our editors with the picture attached, and they can take it down straight away. You can also write to hello@dt-ets.com.

Cloth, dress, hair, building and sound

Made in Salone

What people here made with their own hands, before and alongside the colony: country cloth spun, woven on the narrow loom and dyed; gara, tie-dyed and wax-resisted, like Kadiato Kamara's; how hair was dressed and what was worn on it; how towns were built, from the stone-walled houses of old Yagala to Mende round houses and the barri where cases were heard; and what music was played on, from Sapi ivory horns to a harp-lute no longer made and the drum that kept time on the rice farm. Little from before the 1800s survives as photographs, so the oldest evidence is in objects (the Sowei masks carry the hairstyles of their day) and ruins. Most of what follows was collected, photographed or drawn by Europeans, from a slave-trade agent in the 1780s to colonial officials and foreign collectors, and what they chose to record reflects their purposes, not ours; the Lisk-Carew brothers were Freetown's own photographers. Including a record here is not an endorsement of the person who made it or of their views. Pictures of the Bundu and Poro societies stay behind a notice. If you know these places, these crafts or these people, tell us.

178 pictures and objects, by subject →

The Hofstra photographs

Panguma, 1934–36

The Dutch anthropologist Sjoerd Hofstra lived in Panguma, a Mende town in the Lower Bambara chiefdom in the east, from 1934 to 1936, studying everyday life, work and the societies. He photographed a whole year of it: clearing and planting the rice farms, harvesting palm kernels, weaving, masquerades and burials, and the people of the town, some by name. They are shown here by subject, with near-identical shots gathered together; most of the people in them are still unnamed. If you know Panguma, or recognise someone, tell us.

484 photographs, by subject →

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