ABSTRACT
Christianity, specifically Protestantism, had a profound and lasting impact on the upper Guinea coast and on Sierra Leone's origins. This impact was not only due to the abolitionists who began the process of settling the Freetown peninsula, but also a result of the variety of sects of Protestantism which accompanied the Nova Scotian settlers to the colony. Understanding the kinds of Protestantism present, and how they interacted on the ground, and to which each demographic group belonged, is essential to understanding the events of the nineteenth century. While Maroons in Jamaica tended to preserve West African beliefs and rituals to a large degree, those in Freetown were converted into the various sects flourishing in the settlement, though largely into the two more mainstream forms of Protestantism as opposed to the Nova Scotian sects. The Maroons in Freetown tended to take paths which opposed that of the settlers they had arrived in time to quell.
