III.] THE AFRICAN NEGRO : I. SUDANESE. 5 I 



every tribe along the seaboard, and even in the far interior, 

 but also to a large extent from the freedmen and runaways of 

 Nova Scotia and London, besides many maroons of Jamaica, 

 who were settled here under the auspices of the Sierra Leone 

 Company towards the close of the eighteenth and beginning of 

 the nineteenth century. Others also have in recent years been 

 attracted to the settlements from the Timni and other tribes of 

 the neighbouring districts. The Sierra Leonese are consequently 

 not themselves a tribe, nor yet a people, but rather a people in 

 course of formation under the influence of a new environment 

 and of a higher culture. An immediate consequence of such a 

 sudden aggregation of discordant elements was the loss of all the 

 native tongues, and the substitution of English as the common 

 medium of intercourse. But English is the language of a people 

 standing on the very highest plane of culture, and could not 

 therefore be properly assimilated by the disjecta membra of tribes 

 at the lowest rung of the social ladder. The resultant form of 

 speech may be called ludicrous, so ludicrous that the Sierra 

 Leonese version of the New Testament had to be withdrawn from 

 circulation as verging almost on the blasphemous 1 . 



It has also to be considered that all the old tribal relations 

 were broken up, while an attempt was made to 

 merge these waifs and strays in a single community Relations, 

 based on social conditions to which each and all 

 were utter strangers. It is not therefore surprising that the 

 experiment has not proved a complete success, and that the 

 social relations in Sierra Leone leave something to be desired. 

 Although the freedmen and the rescued captives received free 

 gifts of land, their dislike for the labours of the field induced 

 many to abandon their holdings, and take to huckstering and 

 other more pleasant pursuits. Hence their descendants almost 



[ "Da Njoe Testament, translated into the Negro-English Language by the 

 Missionaries of the Unitas Fratrum," Brit, and For. Bible Soc., London, 1829. 

 Here is a specimen quoted by Ellis from The Artisan of Sierra Leone, Aug. 4, 

 1886, "Those who live in ceiled houses love to hear the pit-pat of the rain 

 overhead; whilst those whose houses leak are the subjects of restlessness and 

 anxiety, not to mention the chances of catching cold, that is so frequent a source 

 of leaky roofs" 



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