ABSTRACT
In 1843 Dr. Robert Clarke, assistant surgeon to the Colony, indicated the extension of Mende-land as described by a friend with some twenty years experience of Sierra Leone. Mende inhabit a somewhat larger stretch of country which includes the western corner of Liberia as well as a fairly compact area of nearly 12,000 square miles in the central and eastern part of the former Sierra Leone Protectorate. According to the 1921 Sierra Leone census they numbered 557,674 out of total Protectorate population of 1,672,058. There were some seventy chiefdoms varying widely in area and population: some of the smaller ones had probably no more than 5,000 inhabitants; the largest, Luawa, a Kissi-Mende chiefdom on the border of the then French Guinea, had in 1941 over 26,000. Stories of the exploits, part historical and part fictional, of famous Mende fighters and chiefs, the founder of the Kissi-Mende chiefdom of Luawa, are the common heritage of the present generation of Mende children.
