Salone Blog O: An Introduction to "Salone"

Introduction

Myself with my Community Counterpart, who is also a teacher at my school, at the end of In-Service Training (IST).

This is the first entry in what I’m calling the “Salone blog,” which is where I want to share what I’ve learned about the people, culture, and what life is like in Sierra Leone, based on my own time here. Because I see this as very different from the goal of my Peace Corps blog (in which I’m sharing my own personal experiences with the Peace Corps living in Sierra Leone), I will be keeping it as its own separately numbered blog. I hope this will not be too confusing to readers (or myself) as time moves on!

I will caveat that, though I hope to depict what Sierra Leonean life is like as objectively and unbiased as possible, I will never be able to completely maintain this standard, since my experiences and thoughts will always be viewed through the lens of my perspective as a white, American man having lived the entirety of my prior life in a “highly developed”, “Western” country. Of course, this can also have some benefits, since my primary intended audience are also people living in “highly developed”, “Western” countries, so I can at least highlight what I see as the major differences and similarities I’ve noticed between our ways of life. But to help mitigate the disadvantages of my own unavoidable biases, I hope to share directly from Sierra Leoneonans themselves in future, so that you all can read their own words and experiences. And of course, if anything I convey here is factually, objectively wrong, I will try my best to correct and note it in future.

What does ‘Salone’ Even Mean?

Apart from the above introduction, for this first (or rather zeroth) entry of this blog, I wanted to give some explanation as to its name: Salone. As you may be able to guess, at its simplest, “Salone” is just a shortened form of “Sierra Leone” that the locals often use, in a similar way as to how “USA” is a shortened form of “United States of America.” However, I think that this simple word is much more than just an abbreviation, so I want to briefly share why I personally think it is so brilliant and why it's my preferred term for the country and its people.

First, let’s start with a brief history of the name, “Sierra Leone”, itself. For those of you fortunate enough to be well-versed in a Romance language, you may be able to guess that this name refers to the “Lion Mountains” that make up the Freetown peninsula (the current capital of the country). These mountains are pretty spectacular when you first see them from a distance, even to this day: large mountains (at least from this Midwesterner’s perspective) suddenly rising up out of the water only along this relatively small peninsula, with otherwise fairly flat surrounding coastline. It’s no surprise to me that the first European explorers who came to this area found them remarkable enough to name them (originally “Serra Leoa”, as the explorers were Portuguese). The name eventually became Italicized as Sierra Leone (and by Italicized, I of course mean: converted into Italian), because apparently the Italians were the best at map-making of Western Africa? In any case, this version of the name eventually stuck, and when the British colonized the area in the 1800s, they stole this name for their new colony in addition to the land they stole.

A small portion of the "Lion Mountains" of Freetown, as seen from a ferry in the water.

This pattern of using European-derived names for African places (and especially colonies) continued, with other colonies including the Gold Coast, Ivory Coast, and Cape Verde. However, upon the sudden surge of Independence movements in the 1960s, several of these former colonies, now newly independent countries, cast off their European names in favor of African ones, such as Ghana, Mali, and Burkina Faso. However, several, including Sierra Leone and Côte d'Ivoire, decided instead to retain their previous colonial names. This is a rather rare instance in human history when an “exonym” for an area used by outsiders became the “endonym” used by the locals.

Endonyms and Exonyms, A Tangent

As a brief explanation in case you are not familiar with these terms, an exonym is the name that people living “outside” of a place call it, while an endonym is the name that people living “within” that place call it. Oftentimes, these names share the same origin, with nothing more than some slight changes in pronunciation or translation. For example, the “United States of America” in most Spanish-speaking countries is known as “Estados Unidos de América.” However, it can sometimes be the case that exonyms and endonyms are completely different from each other and have completely different origins. For instance, Japan, China, and Korea are actually known in their own respective languages as Nippon, Zhōngguó, and Hanguk/Joseon (this is yet another thing the South and North can’t agree upon), which are all completely unrecognizable from the names we give them in English (as well as most other European languages).

Ridiculously divergent exonyms aren’t just limited to non-European countries, though. One of the most famous examples of major exonym/endonym differences is for the country we call “Germany” in English (derived from a Latin term), which calls itself “Deutschland” (derived from their own language), but also has at least four other groups of exonyms with completely different origins, including the French “Allemagne” (from the Alamanni tribe), the Finnish “Saksa” (from the Saxon tribe), the Polish “Niemcy” (from a Proto-Slavic language), the Luxembourgish “Preisen” (derived from Prussia), as well as several more groups whose etymology isn’t even known - all to describe the same country in Central Europe.

A map of what each country's language calls the country known as "Germany" in English. Each different color represents a different etymology. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

Examining the prevalence of exonyms and endonyms of a country can tell a lot about its history and current relationships with other countries. For instance, the capital city of Ukraine was spelled as “Kiev” in English for quite a long time, however, because of its derivation from the Russian-language name of the city, “Kiyev”, since 2014 (the start of the Russian occupation of Crimea and war in the Donbas) it has gradually (and since 2022, quite suddenly) been replaced by the Ukrainian-derived spelling in most English-speaking countries: “Kyiv” (for obvious geopolitical reasons).

Another quite interesting example I’ve noticed is with Japan, which has had very little geopolitical “hard” power since the end of World War II, but in large part due to its rising “soft” power, has perhaps even greater prominence on the world stage today than it did even back then. Perhaps due to this mismatch in “hard” and “soft” power, the usage of endonyms/exonyms for “Japan” remain somewhat mixed. From instance, while the Japanese mostly use their own endonyms (Nippon/Nihon) to refer to themselves, they are fully aware of the predominant global exonym “Japan” and will reference it themselves in some situations. This is reflected in their unique global music genre called “J-Pop” (“J” for Japan). However, the terms for some of their other “soft power” global entertainment industries retain their Japanese names, such as “anime”, “manga”, and even “karaoke”.

One last example that I think clearly shows the importance of endonyms and exonyms and their relation to power dynamics was something I noticed when watching the alternate history drama series “The Man in the High Castle”, which is set two decades after an Axis Powers victory in World War II, with Japanese control of the US West Coast. In one episode, an American character who ran a shop in San Francisco catering to the ruling Japanese elite was derogatively called a “Neep Lover” referring to the endonym “Nippon” rather than using the exonym “Japan”, which is so prominent in today’s world (such as by calling him a “Jap Lover” instead). In such a small instance, it really shows the changed power dynamic between the two cultures in this fictional universe, in which the occupied Americans themselves start using and adapting Japanese terms, even when they’re deriding someone for their supposed closeness to their Japanese occupiers.

So What’s so Special About ‘Salone’?

Circling back to our original topic after that brief look at endonyms and exonyms: what I find most extraordinary about the simple term “Salone” is that the people of this country were able to turn the exonym that was forced upon them, “Sierra Leone”, into their own newly minted endonym: “Salone”. It’s a term created by Saloneans for Saloneans. I would argue that they did something similar, but on a much larger scale, with the entire English language, for their adaptation and creation of the “Krio” language which is now the lingua-franca of the country (though this is the topic of a completely separate blog entry).

In fact, in most facets of life here in Sierra Leone, I see this same attitude reflected: changing and adapting whatever is available to them to suit whatever is needed. From the use of Africana print to make clothes, to the melting down of aluminum cans to make “country pots”, to the sheer variety of different dishes that have been developed from the cassava plant, the tenacious adaptability of the everyday lives of Saloneans is apparent and reflected in the name they chose for themselves: Salone.