Kingdoms of the Coast: Koya, the Mane and the Sherbro

When Portuguese ships first reached this coast in the fifteenth century, they found it settled and governed. The Bullom and Sherbro held the coast and the islands, Temne-speaking people farmed and traded inland, and the carvers the Portuguese called the Sapi were making the ivory and stone work that now sits in museums around the world.

Koya

In or around 1505, Temne migrants from the north founded the kingdom of Koya, drawn south by trade with the Portuguese on the coast. Koya reached from the coast inland. Its king was called the Bai or Obai, and nobles with the title Gbana ruled its sub-kingdoms.

The Mane

Through the sixteenth century the whole coast, from what is now Guinea to Liberia, was overrun by the Mane, a Mande-speaking people from the east. An elite of Mane warriors led an army of rank-and-file soldiers called the Sumba, and within about fifteen years they had conquered the region. They brought new ways of fighting and of working iron and cloth, and they made war a part of life on the coast into the nineteenth century. The Mende are very probably descended from Mane rulers who mixed with the Bullom people they conquered.

The Sherbro

English traders followed the Portuguese, and by the 1620s they had agents buying goods in the Sherbro country. Some married into Sherbro families, and from those marriages came clans that led chiefdoms for generations: the Sherbro Tuckers and the Sherbro Caulkers, whose line traces back to Thomas Corker, who died in 1700. In the eighteenth century the Sherbro were drawn into the slave trade, and some of their rulers grew more powerful than the European traders on their shore.

Freetown on Koya's land

Koya's history runs straight into Freetown's. In 1788 its king, Naimbana, signed the treaty that allowed a British settlement on the peninsula, and the settlers of 1792 built on land that had been Koya's. The kingdom kept its kings until Britain declared the Protectorate on 31 August 1896; after that they lost almost all their power.

Most of this history was kept in memory, not on paper: in the praise songs, genealogies and stories of chiefdoms across the country. If your family keeps one, record it and share it.