History of Sierra Leone called 'Captured negroes', 'Recaptives' or 'Liberated Africans'. In 1808, the British Crown Colony of Sierra Leone was founded, with Freetown serving as the capital of British West Africa. The city's population expanded rapidly with freed slaves, who established suburbs on the Freetown Peninsula. They were joined by West Indian and African soldiers who settled in Sierra Leone after fighting for Britain in the Napoleonic Wars. In the early 1800s, Sierra Leone was a small colony extending a few kilometres (a few miles) up the peninsula from Freetown. The bulk of the territory that makes up present-day Sierra Leone was still
Sierra Leone only source of income for many communities in a country still recovering from over a decade of civil war. In June 2005, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and BirdLife International agreed to support a conservation-sustainable development project in the Gola Forest in south eastern Sierra Leone, an important surviving fragment of rainforest in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is a constitutional republic with a directly elected president and a unicameral legislature. The current system of the Government of Sierra Leone is based on the 1991 Sierra Leone Constitution. Sierra Leone has a dominant unitary central government and