Jamaican Maroons in Sierra Leone

The Jamaican Maroons in Sierra Leone were a group of just under 600 Jamaican Maroons from Cudjoe's Town, the largest of the five Jamaican maroon towns who were deported by the British authorities in Jamaica following the Second Maroon War in 1796, first to Nova Scotia. Four years later in 1800, they were transported to Sierra Leone.

The Sierra Leone Company had established the settlement of Freetown and the Colony of Sierra Leone in 1792 for the resettlement of the African Americans who arrived via Nova Scotia after they had been evacuated as freedmen from the United States after the American Revolutionary War. Some Jamaican Maroons eventually returned to Jamaica, but most became part of the larger Sierra Leone Creole people and culture made up of freemen and liberated slaves who joined them in the first half-century of the colony. For a long period, they dominated the government and the economy of what developed into Sierra Leone.