Gibril R. Cole, "The Krio of West Africa: Islam, Culture, Creolization, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century "
English | ISBN: 082142047X | 2013 | 280 pages | PDF | 2 MB
Sierra Leone's unique history, especially in the development and consolidation of British colonialism in West Africa, has made it an important site of historical investigation since the 1950s. Much of the scholarship produced in subsequent decades has focused on the "Krio," descendants of freed slaves from the West Indies, North America, England, and other areas of West Africa, who settled Freetown, beginning in the late eighteenth century. Two foundational and enduring assumptions have characterized this historiography: the concepts of "Creole" and "Krio" are virtually interchangeable; and the community to which these terms apply was and is largely self-contained, Christian, and English in worldview.