During the American Revolutionary War in North America, many slaves accepted the English offer to join the British army or navy which granted them their freedom. By the end of the war, most of these ex-slaves were settled in Nova Scotia (Canada). Some went to London and became the Black Poor as they were unemployed and very poor. Later, Sharp, the leader of the abolishitionists, persuaded the government to send them to start a new life in Africa. There was a plan to establish an agricultural settlement on the west coast of Africa, Sierra Leone. In 1787, roughly 500 settlers left England for Sierra Leone, most of whom were ex-slaves accompanied by about 70 European women. However, the settlers quarreled with King Jimmy who drove them away. Back in Britain, some member of a anti-slave trade campaign decided to take over Sharp��s abandoned settlement, revive it with new settlers and develop it as a commercial company, the Sierra Leone Company.
Around 1792, the Nova Scotian went to London to seek redress, sine the land grants they had been promised were reaely forthcoming and without land they risked becoming slaves again. The directors of the Sierra Leone Company offered them a home in Sierra Leone. About 2000 people accepted the offer.
In 1800, the two original settler groups were supplemented by a third one, the Marrons. They were runaway slaves in Jamaica, mostly Asante people, who had formed a state of their own in the mountains. In 1795, after renewed quarrels with the Jamaican Government, about 500 were deported to Nova Scotia. In there, they were as cold and unhappy as the Nova Scotians had been and they demanded to go to Sierra Leone as well. The Sierra Leone Company promised to take them.
For a long time, it was assumned that the three groups intermingled rather quickly. They formed a unity, which was among other things also expressed in their language. ��Thus the Black Poor, the Nova Scotians and the Maroons formed the Western foundations of the society , which were reflected in their Christinaity, education, politics, ideals and aspirations, civic pride and high sense of individualism, their mode of dress, their articulateness and their language�� (as cited in Putz, p. 328).
The linguistic scenario became more complicated when in 1870 Britain outlawed the slave trade and in the following year took over Freetown from the financially troubled company to use it as a naval base for anti-slavery patrols to intercept non-British slave ships. Between 1808 and 1864, about 84,000 slaves were released from the vessels, bringing with them more than a hundred distinct African languages. It was highly probable that due to the great number of new settlers (so-called Liberated Africans), the different versions of standard English became creolized, since the number of languages in contact with each other was more than two and the percentage of non-native English speakers must have been more than 80.
The acceptance of Krio
In 1896, the entire area was declared a British Protectorate as a strategy in the competition with France over the partition of West Africa. The political power was in the hands of the Whites. The creole population found itself completely excluded from the governing the Protectorate. During this time of radical change, the Creloles were forced to establish some form of group identity in order to hold their own against the British and against the Protectorate people. They tried to promote the acceptance of the creole language as a means of expressing their identity. Foremost in the 1880s and 1890, the appropriateness of all that was dominantly English was being questioned. The debate was chronicled in the Sierra Leone Weekly News. However, it stayed on a very superficial level and only affected the elite.
Roughly between the 1920s and the 1940s, the acceptance of the creole languages was discussed in the Daily Guardian. Prose, poetry, letters, satire and sociocritical tests were written in Creole. It became the outspoken goal of Thomas Decker, the most prominent promoter of his native tongue, to prove that everything can be expressed in that language. In an article of the Daily Guardian, August 28, 1939, he states that the vernacular of the Sierra Leone Creoles is called Creeo and only a month later the speakers are called Creeos as well. This spelling co-existed with Creo and Creeoh and of course Creole until 1954, when Krio was used for the first time to connote the language. Today, the term Krio is used for both the language and the people in all official declarations and by most of the young people, but Creole is often heard among the elderly people.
Today's Krio
Due to the historical circumstances, the Krio developed as an ethnic group, the position in between (between African and European) and the ��blend�� of the two provides scope for identification. Singled out from various cultural strands their ancestors had transmitted, the Krio have indeed formed a new cultural entity with its corpus of customs, beliefs and language. And now, their language is ��threatened�� because many of the Non-Krio Sierra Leonians claim it to be their language and they ��pollute�� it. Therefore, notions of ��rightness��, ��correctness��, ��pureness��, ��deepness�� and so forth of the one variety of the language are being used and attached to the one group of speakers to reinforce norms, to strengthen the group form within and to keep others at a distance outside.