Sherbro Island

Coordinates: 7°33′N 12°42′W / 7.550°N 12.700°W / 7.550; -12.700
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other uses of Sherbro, see Sherbro (disambiguation).
Natural Color Landsat image of Sherbro Island, Sierra Leone. In the west, the Turtle Islands can be seen.
Sherbro Island, Sierra Leone
UTC±0 (Greenwich Mean Time
)

Sherbro Island is in the Atlantic Ocean, and is included within Bonthe District, Southern Province, Sierra Leone. The island is separated from the African mainland by the Sherbro River in the north and Sherbro Strait in the east. It is 32 miles (51 km) long and up to 15 miles (24 km) wide, covering an area of approximately 230 square miles (600 km2). The western extremity is Cape St. Ann. Bonthe, on the eastern end, is the chief port and commercial centre.

Historically, this was part of the territory of the historic

ethnic group
in the island, where the total population is 28,457. The island has more than 65 miles (105 km) of tropical beaches. It has been earmarked by the Ministry for Tourism and Development of Sierra Leone for tourism development.

Economic activities

Swamp-rice cultivation, tourism, and fishing are the main economic activities.[citation needed]

In 2024 it was reported that English actor

Sierra Leonean Creole, had founded Sherbro Alliance Partners with the goal of developing a "smart-city" capable of supporting up to a million people on Sherbro.[1]

History

Sherbro Island was long inhabited by the Sherbro people, who historically dominated other ethnicities in much of the region on the mainland. The islanders had an economy based on extensive fishing. They also traded by boat with neighboring people in villages along the coast.

During the Mane invasion in the 16th century, Sherbro was the center of one of their main kingdoms.[2]: 227  The king throughout the first half of the 17th century was a man named Sherabola or Selboele, after whom the island was named.[2]: 232 

In the seventeenth century Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch explorers and traders came to this area. They traded with the Sherbro and with other tribes up the rivers to the interior. They referred to what is now known as the Sherbro River as the Madrebombo River, which may have referred to "mother drum" in Spanish. Dutch letters dated 1633 refer to the river in a spelling variation as Maderebombo. Other spelling versions included Madrabomba. (See: Navigantium Atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca)

In the seventeenth century, the

slave trading
, which its monopoly covered.

The RAC established a Company fort known as York Island at Sherbro Island. It was a port for exporting enslaved Africans to the Americas. Thomas Corker, who was from Falmouth, Cornwall, had been working with the RAC for more than a decade when he was appointed agent here in the late seventeenth century. He married the daughter of a Sherbro chief, and their two sons became the patriarchs of a family dynasty of traders and chiefs in the region. Shortly after being reassigned to The Gambia, he died on a business trip to England in 1700, but his descendants in Sierra Leone did well.[3]

After Great Britain abolished the international African slave trade in 1808 in partnership with the United States, it used the former RAC trading fort on Sherbro Island as a base for naval operations against illegal slave traders. Liberated slaves were resettled in the Freetown colony. But for decades more, both Spain and Portugal continued to buy African slaves for their colonies in the Caribbean, and Central and South America.

In 1815

Creole/Krio ethnicity.[5][6]

Cuffe believed that skilled American blacks could help develop trade between Sierra Leone and the United States, benefiting both. In 1815, he resettled a group of 88 American

freedmen on Sherbro Island. After returning to the US, Cuffe marketed his cargo of goods taken on at Freetown.[4]

Cuffe died in 1817, but the

Black Loyalists resettled in Freetown
in 1792. Kizell became a leader to a number of Sherbro people.

The

Republic of Liberia
. In this period, most free blacks (and enslaved) in the US were native to the nation; they had family and history there. They wanted to gain equal rights and non-discriminatory treatment in the US.

In 1821, the ship Elizabeth from New York carried 86 free African Americans (including missionary Daniel Coker), as well as three ACS agents, as the first ACS sponsored group to Sherbro Island. Disease and fever quickly killed more than a quarter of the would-be settlers.[7] The survivors relocated in April 1822 to Providence Island at Cape Mesurado in what developed as the nation of present-day Liberia.[7]

In 1861 the British Crown Colony at Freetown acquired Sherbro Island from the Sherbro people, putting it under the jurisdiction of its government. The Sherbro continued to live there. The colonial and later protectorate government administered it until Sierra Leone achieved independence in 1961.

Environment

Part of the coast of Sherbro Island

Sherbro Island is believed to be a breeding ground for

IGFA
have been made by catches from this area.

Population

In May 2013, the Government of Sierra Leone's record of the island's population was 28,457.

References

  1. ^ "Idris Elba 'dreams big' with Sierra Leone eco-city plan for Sherbro Island". 2024-03-17. Retrieved 2024-03-20.
  2. ^
    S2CID 163011504
    . Retrieved 16 July 2023.
  3. ^ Tattersfield, Nigel (1991). The Forgotten Trade: Comprising the Log of the 'Daniel and Henry' of 1700 and Accounts of the Slave Trade From the Minor Ports of England 1698–1725 (1778). London. pp. 309–19.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  4. ^ a b Harris, Sheldon H. Paul Cuffee: Black America and the African Return. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.
  5. ISBN 978-0-8020-7402-7
    . Originally published by Longman & Dalhousie University Press (1976).
  6. ISBN 978-0-8204-7937-8
    . A substantial part of this ex-slave population was Yoruba, but members of ethnic groups from other regions of the Atlantic (Igbo, Efik, Fante, etc) were also very much in evidence in this coterie of Liberated Africans. Individuals from ethnic communities indigenous to Sierra Leone were significantly represented among the Liberated Africans [...] Many a Temne, Limba, Mende, and Loko resident of Freetown, influenced by local European officials and missionaries, would come in time to shed their indigenous names, and cultural values, to take on a Creole identity which gave them a better chance of success in the rarefied Victorian ambience[sic] of a progressively westernized Freetown society.
  7. ^ a b "Excerpt: 'This Child Will Be Great'". Npr.org. Retrieved 2017-01-21.
  8. ^ "MTN 54:10-12 Sea Turtle Nesting in Sierra Leone, West Africa". Seaturtle.org. Retrieved 2017-01-21.

External links

7°33′N 12°42′W / 7.550°N 12.700°W / 7.550; -12.700

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