Flag: Sierra Leone Emoji

The flag of Sierra Leone. Three horizontal bands of green (top), white, and blue. Ratio 2:3. Adopted on April 27, 1961, the day Sierra Leone gained independence from the United Kingdom.

The design came out of a 1960 College of Arms brief: the coat of arms was designed first, then the three dominant colours of that shield (green, white, blue) were lifted into a tricolour. Green stands for the country's forests, mountains, and agriculture. White for unity and justice. Blue for the natural harbour of Freetown (one of the world's deepest) and the country's aspiration to contribute to world peace. First raised at midnight on April 27, 1961 by founding Prime Minister Sir Milton Margai. The flag has not changed since.

Sierra Leone sits on the Atlantic coast of West Africa between 🇬🇳 Guinea and 🇱🇷 Liberia, roughly the size of South Carolina. Capital Freetown. Population about 8.9 million. Official language English; Krio is the mother tongue of the Krio minority and the working lingua franca for almost everyone. Currency Leone (SLE, redenominated in 2022).

Emoji 0.6 (2015), regional indicator pair U+1F1F8U+1F1F8 + U+1F1F1U+1F1F1 (S + L). Platforms without flag support fall back to SLSL.

Independence Day and Salone pride. April 27 is the anchor date. Freetown parades through Victoria Park, and Sierra Leonean diaspora in London, Washington DC, New York, and Toronto throw flag-heavy parties. Users call the country 'Salone' in Krio; 🇸🇱 #Salone is a standard tag across the diaspora.

Drizilik and the Afrobeats wave. For twenty years Sierra Leone's musical profile sat below its smaller neighbour Liberia on global feeds. That shifted in the 2020s with Drizilik (Benjamin Menelik George), who fuses Afrobeats with traditional Goombay, Bubu, and Milo Jazz rhythms in Krio. His 2018 album Shukubly broke Audiomack streaming records for the country. 🇸🇱 + 🎤 is a rising diaspora combo.

Leone Stars football. The national football team qualified for AFCON in 2021 for the first time in 25 years, a moment that drove the biggest sustained 🇸🇱 wave since independence. Musa Noah Kamara and Kei Kamara (ex-MLS) are the diaspora poster children; diaspora-raised players from the UK and US are increasingly key to the squad.

Diaspora weight. The Sierra Leonean diaspora is huge relative to population. Estimates suggest more than 300,000 Sierra Leoneans live in the US and UK combined, concentrated in Washington DC, southeast London (Lewisham and Peckham), and around Boston, New York, and Atlanta. Krio-speaking WhatsApp groups run the country's informal diplomatic and remittance backbone; 🇸🇱 is standard bio furniture for second-generation Salone-British and Salone-American accounts.

Civil war memory and Ebola. 🇸🇱 still carries the long shadow of the 1991-2002 civil war (blood diamonds, the RUF, Kono district) and the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak that killed nearly 4,000 people. Posts around these topics still circulate on anniversaries, often from diaspora accounts.

• 🏛️
  Capital: Freetown (population ~1.3M, on the Atlantic)
• 👥
  Population: ~8.9M (2025 estimate)
• 📐
  Area: 71,740 km² (roughly the size of South Carolina)
• 💵
  Currency: Leone (SLE); redenominated in 2022 (knocked three zeros off)
• 🗣️
  Languages: English (official); Krio as the working lingua franca; Mende and Temne as the major African languages
• 📞
  Calling code: +232
• 🕐
  Time zone: GMT+0, no daylight saving
• 🌐
  Internet TLD: .sl

Sierra Leone's unusual founding. The country's modern name comes from the Portuguese Sierra Leoa ('lion mountains'), coined by 15th-century navigator Pedro de Sintra for the roar-like thunder over the Freetown peninsula. Freetown itself was founded in 1792 as a settlement for formerly enslaved Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia, Black Poor from London, and later Jamaican Maroons and Africans liberated by the Royal Navy from slave ships during the 1807-1860s suppression of the transatlantic slave trade. This population formed the Krio community, Anglophone, Christian, and disproportionately educated, which has shaped Sierra Leonean culture ever since.

The 1961 flag. In 1960, with independence scheduled for the following year, the College of Arms in London designed a coat of arms for the new nation: a lion on a green shield with white and blue wavy lines representing the mountains, freedoms, and Freetown harbour. The three dominant colours were lifted into a horizontal tricolour. On April 27, 1961, at midnight in Freetown, Sir Milton Margai accepted the constitutional instruments from the Duke of Kent and raised the new flag for the first time. Margai, a soft-spoken medical doctor, became the country's first Prime Minister.

The civil war (1991-2002). A decade-long war, sparked by the Revolutionary United Front's March 1991 invasion from Liberia and fuelled by diamond revenues from the Kono district, displaced more than two million people and killed an estimated 50,000 to 70,000. British military intervention in 2000 (Operation Palliser) broke the back of the insurgency. The war was the direct inspiration for the 2002 Kimberley Process Certification Scheme and the 2006 film Blood Diamond. Sierra Leone's Special Court convicted RUF leaders and, in 2012, former Liberian president Charles Taylor.

Ebola and recovery. In May 2014, the West African Ebola outbreak crossed from Guinea into eastern Sierra Leone. Over the next 18 months, Sierra Leone recorded more than 14,000 cases and 3,956 deaths, straining a healthcare system still thin from the war. The country was declared Ebola-free in November 2015. Since then, Sierra Leone has leaned into rebuilding tourism (the beach peninsula), music exports (Drizilik and others), and football (2021 AFCON qualification).

• ⭐
  April 27: Independence Day: 1961 independence from the UK. The biggest civic day of the year; diaspora parties in London, DC, and Atlanta.
• 🎄
  December 25: Krismas: Christmas is enormous in Krio/Christian Sierra Leone; diaspora come home, flag flies everywhere for two weeks.
• 🌙
  Eid al-Fitr (variable): End of Ramadan; ~78% of Sierra Leoneans are Muslim (mostly Temne and Mende). One of the biggest family-gathering days.
• 🕯️
  August 14: Mudslide Remembrance: Anniversary of the [2017 Regent mudslide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Sierra_Leone_mudslides) that killed 1,140+ around Freetown.
• 🌳
  May 24: Cotton Tree Day: Since the tree's collapse in the 2023 storm, an unofficial memorial day for the 400-year-old symbol of Freetown.
• 🎗️
  March 19: Ebola Survivor Day: Unofficial remembrance of the 2014-2015 outbreak; health-worker tributes and survivor advocacy.

• •The name 'Sierra Leone' comes from the Portuguese Serra Leoa ('lion mountains'), coined by 15th-century navigator Pedro de Sintra for the mountain silhouette of the Freetown peninsula.
• •Freetown was founded in 1792 as a settlement for freed enslaved people, two decades before Liberia's Monrovia. It was, in that sense, West Africa's first 'return' capital.
• •Fourah Bay College, founded in Freetown in 1827, was the first Western-style university in sub-Saharan Africa. Students from across British West Africa studied there, which is why Freetown was nicknamed 'the Athens of West Africa'.
• •Freetown harbour is the third-largest natural harbour in the world, after Sydney and Rio. It's literally what the blue stripe on the flag references.
• •Sierra Leone's national dish is cassava leaves (plasas): pounded cassava greens cooked in palm oil with ground melon seeds, smoked fish, and beef, served over rice.
• •The Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, in the hills above Freetown, is home to around 100 rescued chimps and is one of the most-visited conservation sites in the region.
• •The Sierra Leone Leone currency was redenominated in 2022, knocking three zeros off every banknote; 1,000 old leones became 1 new leone.

• •🇸🇱 is a regional indicator sequence: U+1F1F8U+1F1F8 (S) + U+1F1F1U+1F1F1 (L). ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code: SLSL.
• •Unsupported platforms render it as the letters SLSL.
• •Shortcode: :flag_sl::flag_sl: or :sierra_leone::sierra_leone: on most messaging platforms.

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