Franciscan Missionaries and the 1752 `Donation of Sierra Leone

The Franciscan mission to western Guinea between the 1660s and the late eighteenth century operated, from its Bissau centre, a 'Mission to Sierra Leone', whose priests occasionally reached the territory of modern Sierra Leone. Contact was made with the Afro-Portuguese resident in the Sierra Leone estuary, particularly with the Lopes family, and in 1752 a leading member was encouraged to make a 'Donation of Sierra Leone' to the Portuguese crown. This had little meaning and no effect. Hardly anything else is known about the local missionary activities, partly because of the decay of the general mission, but scraps of information about the Catholicism of the Afro-Portuguese appear in Portuguese and English sources.