The scale of migration increased at a rapid rate following British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and the coerced inward movement of Africans released from slave ships led to far-reaching changes in the composition of the colonial population. Between 1808 and 1861, an estimated 100,000 men, women and children were released at Freetown from across different regions of West Africa stretching from Senegambia to western Central Africa (Liberated Africans digital humanities project). The individuals disembarked at Freetown also included some from East Africa (Fyfe, 1987, p. 412). By the early 1850s, the missionary linguist Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle had collected testimonies from 179 formerly enslaved people in Sierra Leone. As Hair points out, the origins of these individuals present 'a miniature of the slave trade within Western tropical Africa in the early nineteenth century' (1965, p. 201; Da Silva et al., 2014, pp. 365-366). In the colony village of Waterloo in the 1840s, this diversity is reflected in how the main national groups were formed into an  
organization called the 'Seventeen Nations' to resolve disputes. From the 1830s, the complexity of migration was increased still further by an outward diaspora of Africans from Sierra Leone returning to their homelands, and these Saros, ${ }^{1}$ or returnees, contributed directly to the transmission of Christianity from the colony (Fyfe, 1962, pp. 227-228, pp. 233-234; Ayandele, 1966, pp. 7-16).