Here is a thread on 12 influential Sierra Leoneans throughout history you may or may not have heard off:

#sierraleone #SaloneTwitter #SaloneTwitter #AfricanPerspective #african #africa #nigeria #ghana #blacktwitter #BlackHistoryMonth

1)Evelyn Dove was an internationally renowned singer, actress & star of the 1920’s cabaret scene. The daughter of a Sierra Leonean Barrister and his English wife. She studied music at the Royal Academy of Music where she performed with some of the world’s top black entertainers.

2)Davidson Nicol was the first black African to graduate with First Class Honours from the University of Cambridge. He was the first to analyse the breakdown of insulin in the human body, a discovery which led to a breakthrough for the treatment of diabetes.

3)Bai Bureh was a great ruler & military strategist who led the Temne uprising against the British. Bureh refused to recognise the hut tax the British had imposed in 1893 in Salone and In 1896 he declared war on the British. The war later became known as the Hut Tax War of 1898.

4)Mammy Yoko was a brilliant & ambitious woman who used her friendship with the British to gain control of Kpaa Mende, but in the end that very friendship may have destroyed her...

...She ruled as a Paramount Chief in the new British Protectorate until 1906, when it appears that she committed suicide aged 55.

5)Sengbe Pieh aka Joseph Cinque was a Mende who led a revolt against slave traders on the Spanish slave ship, La Amistad. After the ship was taken into custody by the US Revenue Cutter Service, Cinqué & his fellow Africans were eventually tried for killing officers on the ship...

in a case known as US v. The Amistad which reached the US Supreme Court, where he and other Africans were found to have rightfully defended themselves from being enslaved through the illegal Atlantic slave trade & were released. After They returned to Africa.

6)Asadata Dafora aka Austin Dafora Horton was a Sierra Leonean multidisciplinary musician. He was one of the first Africans to introduce African drumming music to the United States, beginning in the early 1930s. He is best remembered for his work in dance and music.

He was talented in opera and concert singing, dancing, choreographing and composing. In 1934, Dafora created Kykunkor (The Witch Woman), a successful musical/drama production using authentic African music and dance and is considered one of the pioneers of black dance in America.

7) Christian Cole was the first African barrister to practice in the English courts. Originally from Sierra Leone, then a British colony, he was the first black graduate of the University of Oxford, where he studied at University College.

8)Adelaide Casely Hayford was a Sierra Leone Creole advocate, an activist for cultural nationalism, educator, short story writer, and feminist. She established a school for girls in 1923 to instill cultural and racial pride during the colonial years under British rule...

promoting the preservation of Sierra Leone national identity and cultural heritage, in 1925 she wore a traditional African costume to attend a reception in honour of the Prince of Wales, where she created a sensation.

9)Samuel Coleridge Taylor was an English composer and conductor, his father was a Sierra Leone Creole physician. Coleridge-Taylor achieved such success that he was referred to by white New York musicians as the "African Mahler" at the time when he had three tours of the USA...

in the early 1900s.He was particularly known for his three cantatas based on the epic poem, Song of Hiawatha by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Coleridge-Taylor premiered the first section in 1898, when he was 22.

10)Kai Londo was a great warrior & from boyhood was trained systematically in the art of warfare. During the 1880s Kai joined the famous Mende warrior Ndawa, in a series of military campaigns against Chief Benya of Small Bo but Kai Londo fell out with Ndawa over the treatment...

of his men and the division of spoils. Ndawa took revenge on Kai Londo by leading a large army into the heart of Luawa country, but the Kissi elders met and called upon Kai to lead the men of Luawa and "defend the land". Kai led his forces in defeating the Mende invaders.

The Kissi elders then called upon Kai Londo to become the supreme ruler of Luawa, and they held a ceremony in which the new King was presented with a handful of Luawa's soil in a piece of white country cloth. Kai immediately set about improving and expanding the Luawa State.

He built new roads and fortified towns and established a new capital at Kailahun or "Kai's Town". He conquered surrounding states in what is now Salone, Guinea & Liberia. He was among the last of Sierra Leone's great and thoroughly independent warrior kings.

11)Africanus Horton aka James Beale
was a surgeon, scientist, soldier, & a political thinker who worked towards African independence a century before it occurred. He also wrote a number of books & essays, one of which is his 1868 Vindication of the African Race.

Furthermore Horton is often seen as one of the founders of African nationalism and has been called "the father of modern African political thought". He wrote a book entitled West African Countries and Peoples (1868) and a crater on Mercury is named after him.

12)Ebenezer Calender was a cultural musician, historian and social commentator who used his popular maringa music to entertain and educate his fellow countrymen. He was a versatile musician playing several different instruments including the mandolin, the cornet...

, rhythm guitar and the trumpet. Calendar's group in the 1940s and 50s relied upon a combination of locally-produced instruments like the bata (hand drum) the triangle, and Western instruments like the guitar and the tambourine to produce his distinctive maringa rhythm.