Nova Scotian Settlers

The Nova Scotian Settlers, or Sierra Leone Settlers (also known as the Nova Scotians or more commonly as the Settlers), were African Americans who founded the settlement of Freetown, Sierra Leone and the Colony of Sierra Leone, on March 11, 1792. The majority of these black American immigrants were among 3,000 African Americans, mostly former slaves, who had sought freedom and refuge with the British during the American Revolutionary War, leaving rebel masters.^[3] They became known as the Black Loyalists.^[4] The Nova Scotian Settlers were jointly led by African American Thomas Peters, a former soldier, and English abolitionist John Clarkson. For most of the 19th century, the Settlers resided in Settler Town and remained a distinct ethnic group within the Freetown territory, tending to marry among themselves and with Europeans in the colony.

The Settler descendants gradually developed as an ethnicity known as the Sierra Leone Creole people. Loan words in the Krio language and the "bod oses" of their modern-day descendants are some of their cultural imprints. Although the Jamaican Maroons and other transatlantic immigrants contributed toward the development of Freetown, the 1200 Nova Scotian Settlers were the single greatest Western black influence. The Nova Scotian Settlers have been the subject of many social science books, which have examined how they brought "America" to Africa, because they naturally carried their culture with them. They founded the first permanent ex-slave colony in West Africa, and it was influential throughout the region.