## The African diaspora and Freetown, Sierra Leone  
The British colony of Sierra Leone emerged as an important site in the global diaspora of Africans uprooted and displaced as a result of the Atlantic slave trade in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This small area of territory on the Sierra Leone peninsula became the focus for inward streams of coerced, semi-voluntary and voluntary migrations of people of African origin and descent from across West Africa and the Atlantic world (Lovejoy and Schwarz, 2015, pp. 4-9, p. 24). Abolitionist intervention on the peninsula from 1787 onwards set in motion overlapping phases of migration of peoples with differing experiences of slavery and freedom in North America, the Caribbean region, Europe and West Africa. The formation of the 'Province of Freedom' in 1787, through the combined initiative of the 'Black Poor' in Britain and the abolitionist Granville Sharp, was intended to establish a society free from slavery in which people of African descent would handle their own affairs. The Sierra Leone Company, a chartered trading company that assumed responsibility for the settlement in 1791 following the collapse of the 'Province of Freedom', rejected the idea of a self-governing black community and placed emphasis instead on attacking the slave trade through policies combining 'commerce, civilization and Christianity' (Braidwood, 1994, pp. 225-277; Fyfe, 1962, pp. 25-37; Peterson, 1969, pp. 17-32;