Freetown's identity as a Christian city in West Africa was deliberately constructed by the directors of the Sierra Leone Company during their seventeen-year period of administration (1791-1807), and the governance of the settlement was largely in the control of English and Scottish Protestants of an evangelical turn of mind. Freetown schools were based on Christian systems of education, and the scriptures were used to teach reading and writing to the children of settlers as well as to African children from neighbouring areas (Schwarz, 2007; Keefer, 2019). However, the settlement was not uniformly Christian despite the emphasis placed on commerce, civilization and Christianity by company administrators. While the spread of Protestant Christianity was an important factor in the cultural evolution of the colony, this has had the effect of obscuring considerable religious diversity within the make-up of Freetown's population. A significant Muslim presence in Freetown and its immediate hinterland can be traced in the earliest phases of the settlement's development. In 1794, the village of Dalamodiya was constructed adjacent to Freetown and was led by Alimaamy Dalu Mohammedu Dumbuya, a Muslim trader who provided a direct link between Freetown and inland Muslim supply routes (Mouser, 2013, pp. 334-341). The arrival in 1800 of 550 Jamaican Maroons, runaway enslaved people who had established independent communities in Jamaica, introduced a new migrant group retaining strong elements of African traditional practice in religion. While Maroon children attended schools run by Christian missionaries, potentially for the secular benefits offered, adults refused to acquiesce to the company's insistence that they accept Christian regulation of marriage (Fyfe, 1962, pp. 85-88).