Nova Scotian Settlers

The Nova Scotian Settlers or Sierra Leone Settlers (also known as the Nova Scotians or more commonly as the Settlers) were African Americans who founded the settlement of Freetown, Sierra Leone on March 11, 1792. The majority of these black immigrants were among 3000 former slaves and free people of color who sought refuge with the British during the American Revolutionary War, known as the Black Loyalists. The Nova Scotian settlers were jointly led by former soldier Thomas Peters and English abolitionist John Clarkson. For most of the 19th century the Settlers resided in Settler Town and remained a distinct ethnic group within the country.

Today their descendants are found among the Sierra Leone Creole people. Loan words in the Krio language and the "bod oses" of their modern day descendants are some of their cultural imprints. Although the Jamaican Maroons and other transatlantic immigrants contributed toward the development of Freetown, the Nova Scotian Settlers were the single greatest Western black influence; their legacy remains there till this day. The Nova Scotian settlers have been the subject of many social science books which have examined how they brought 'America' to Africa, as the founders of the first permanent ex-slave colony in West Africa which proved influential throughout the region.

After the British lost the American War of Independence, 3,000 Black Americans were evacuated to Nova Scotia and their names were recorded in the Book of Negroes. Nearly two thirds of the Nova Scotian settlers were from Virginia. The second largest group of settlers were from South Carolina, and a smaller number were from Maryland, Georgia, and North Carolina. Thomas Jefferson referred to these people as "the fugitives from these States". One visitor to Sierra Leone distinguished the Settlers from other ethnic groups because of the "American tone" or accent, common to American slaves and perhaps lower class American working-class people of the time. Some of the settlers also had Native American or European ancestry; at least fifty were born in Africa. Many Nova Scotian blacks intermarried with Europeans while living in Sierra Leone. The Nova Scotians' political ideology of a democratic government was at odds with the Sierra Leone Company's imperialistic colony. The Nova Scotians referred to themselves as the "Settlers" or "Nova Scotians" in Sierra Leone. Later scholars would describe them as "Afro-American".

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