# Roots and routes: the Sierra Leonean diasporas  
The use of 'we' in the Afro-British press indicated that said press classed itself, along with the English, with the 'natives' (Zachernuk, 2000, p. 43) ${ }^{15}$ or with a community of the 'in-between'. The complexity of this identity was better understood through the concept of hybridity, which also subverted the teleological narrative of the rise of the nation. By emphasizing the multiple crossings of Afrodescendants who constituted the black Atlantic and of whom the diasporas were themselves composed, Paul Gilroy outlined that origin and return remain negotiable arguments.  
The Province of Freedom was founded in an already hybrid region, one that was penetrated by Islam with the Mandingo and Fulbe in the seventeenth century and where Portuguese presence dated back to the fifteenth century. The French and the English also owned warehouses there. Language, dress (Sidbury, 2007, p. 100) and ambitions of local rulers testified to their familiarity with these cultures. Naimbana, for example, married his daughter to a settler, sent a son to France, another to England and made a third Muslim (Fyfe, 1962, p. 23, p. 30).  
As for the so-called 'Black Poor', they included lascars, sailors of the East India Company, English women and demobilized soldiers of the Ethiopian regiment whose exodus had begun on the American plantations of the south. It is recorded that the 'intermediary exiles' of the settlers, in Nova Scotia, for example, did not necessarily unify them; although African-American Baptists and Methodists saw Africa as a place of resurrection (Brooks, 2003, pp. 87-113), their Ethiopian project (Boahen, 1996, pp. 78-83) was violently crushed in 1800  
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[^0]:    14 Chapter by Dixon-Fyle.
15 Zachernuk quoting Erechuo.  
as a result of Maroon accommodationism. ${ }^{16}$ It was also on the basis of presumed 'tribal' origin that the colonial administration had spread the 'liberated' into villages and then into the 'Seventeen Nations'.