Sierra Leone - Captain Moses and the Turtle Islands

The Sierra Leone dry season is fast drying up and we catch the very tail end, surfing south from Freetown along the western Peninsula to Banana Island.

Uniform blue waves meet mountains that rise from the coast like giant rock beasts. Serra Lyoa means Lion Mountains in Portuguese, the dominant language of early European exploration of West Africa. Fast-paced football games pit and pattern the beach. Wide open creeks dotted with bright working fishing boats cut through the coast, forming long, easy-to-ride right-and-left sandbars.

There is a constant sound of cicadas, and on the weekends infectious guitar-based music pours out from Krio wooden board houses. This lyrical celebration of life is perhaps best captured in Freetown’s music heroes Ansumana Bangura, Suleiman Rogie and Abdul Tee-Jay, who gained global recognition in the 1970s for fusing Sierra Leone’s drumming templates and traditional songs of bravery and romance with Afrobeat guitars and calypso styles.

They called it ‘palm-wine’ music, then ‘Milo-jazz’ after the empty Milo cans filled with stones that are used as rattles. Today the soundtrack to the dancefloors of Freetown (where there is a growing recording industry) is hip-hop and dancehall, using keyboards and digital mixers. But beach parties still blast out the palm-wine hits known as ‘oldies’.