Qualla: Sierra Leone National Museum

Sierra Leone National Museum: Introduction

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ODC-SIERRA-LEONE, CC0. Some national museums announce themselves with marble and columns. Sierra Leone's announces itself with a railway station. Tucked into what was once the Cotton Tree terminus, at the busy junction of Siaka Stevens Street and Pademba Road in central Freetown, the country's national museum has occupied its "temporary" home for nearly seventy years. The building is modest. What it holds is not.

Image: ODC-SIERRA-LEONE | CC0

Sierra Leone National Museum: Riddles in Stone

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 cert...

Image: John Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Sierra Leone National Museum: The Warrior Who Said No

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ODC-SIERRA-LEONE, CC0. 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 fighter...

Image: ODC-SIERRA-LEONE | CC0

Sierra Leone National Museum: Keepers of Memory

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 o...

Image: John Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.0