The diligent observer of the diaspora history of the Krio of Sierra Leone is undoubtedly to be struck by the dearth of published material on the activities of Sierra Leonean immigrants in the environs of the Niger river. Unlike the adjacent Yoruba enclaves, which have attracted much patient scholarship over the years to emerge as the premier centre of Krio exertions outside Freetown, the Niger Delta communities to which Sierra Leoneans also ventured, have received scant review. This study is a corrective in that direction as it seeks to examine Sierra Leonean immigrant contributions in diverse fields of endeavour in this region of southern Nigeria during the first eight decades of the 20th century.

The Krio society of Sierra Leone, to be reviewed in more detail presently, was an amalgam of exslaves from England and the New World, liberated slave captives who never left African continental waters, and acculturated local indigenes who had been absorbed into the group over the years. Although much emphasis has been placed on Krio embrace of European values and ideas, and their willingness to be seen as “black Englishmen”, a matter that has drawn much criticism, Krio society was highly differentiated. Within it were selfconfessed and deeply conservative anglophiles, much enamored of the educational opportunity provided by the British, cultural nationalists in various stages of a nostalgic return to lost roots, and the not sufficiently remarked community of the poor and the generally disadvantaged. Though most Krio took to Christianity, a segment of the group held tenaciously to Islam, with both sides, often with consanguineal ties, participating actively in a regime of rites of passage encompassing birth, marriage, and death ceremonial that featured prominent elements of principally Yoruba culture. The ties with Nigeria were strong as will shortly be evident, for many of these exslaves considered that territory the home from which they had been captured. While most Krio would content themselves with cultural identification with Nigeria, others would pursue emigration to Lagos, Abeokuta, Ibadan, and other Yoruba towns for that muchsought reunion with kin group members. It is this latter group that became the Saro, a distinctive element of that emigre band of Krio that fanned out of Freetown over the years, not only to Nigeria and other locations on the coast of West Africa, but even into the Congo and Southern Africa.