Among the museum's oldest treasures are the nomoli - small soapstone figures, weathered and enigmatic, carved by hands whose owners left no written record. Farmers across the south of Sierra Leone still turn them up in their fields, and for centuries no one has been entirely certain who made them, or why. Some are crouching figures; some have faces that seem to gaze inward. They are among the most haunting objects in West African art precisely because they refuse to fully explain themselves. To stand before a nomoli is to confront a civilization that speaks only in form, and to feel the depth of a past that stretches back long before any settler stepped ashore at Freetown.

If the nomoli embody mystery, another part of the collection embodies defiance. The museum holds the relics of Bai Bureh, the Temne leader who in 1898 launched an uprising against British colonial rule after the imposition of a deeply resented tax on houses. His guerrilla fighters held off colonial forces for months in the war that bears the tax's name. Bai Bureh's drum, his sword, and a rare photograph of the man himself survive here, alongside a portrait of a figure who has become one of Sierra Leone's enduring national heroes. The British eventually captured and exiled him, but they never erased him. In the museum that bears his nation's name, he remains.

The museum's roots reach back to before independence. A 1946 ordinance created a commission to protect the nation's monuments and relics, chaired by the retired Creole doctor M. C. F. Easmon, and in the 1950s the Sierra Leone Society gathered the collection together. The museum opened its doors on the tenth of December, 1957, dedicated by Sir Milton Margai, the chief minister who would soon lead the country to independence. In the decades since - through civil war and the Ebola epidemic - the institution has endured. A recent partnership with University College London digitised some two thousand of its objects, a quiet act of preservation ensuring that the nomoli and Bai Bureh's drum will outlast even the fragile building that shelters them.