The first known colonization effort took place in Sierra Leone, home to the Temne, Mandingo, Fulani, Bullom, and Kru people. The original settlers, 450 destitute black men and women from England, called the Black Poor, arrived in 1787. In 1792, they were joined by twelve hundred Black Loyalists from Canada - former U.S. bondsmen who had fought alongside the British Army during the Revolutionary War - who were dissatisfied with conditions in Nova Scotia, where they had been sent. Jamaican Maroons, runaways who had been deceitfully deported to Canada after they had signed a peace treaty with the British, followed them in 1800.

	The Providence African Society's Sierra Leone Emigration Scheme, 1794-1795: Prologue to the African Colonization Movemen... from The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 7, no. 2 (1974) by George E. Brooks, Jr.
	Beloved Africans (1787-1830) , Chapter 1 from Speak Out in Thunder Tones: Letters and Other Writings by Black Northerners, 1787-1865 by Dorothy Sterling

In its early years, the settlement was governed by the Sierra Leone Company, an organization founded by British humanitarians with the goal of developing agricultural and other products for trade with England. Its population rapidly increased after 1807 with Africans recaptured from slave ships following the British and American abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. These "recaptives" or Liberated Africans came from throughout western, central, and southeastern Africa. About 58,000 were eventually settled in Sierra Leone.

African-American involvement in Sierra Leone began in 1811 when Paul Cuffee, a prosperous black and American Indian Quaker, ship owner, and lifelong campaigner for black people's rights, set sail from Massachusetts for Freetown with a crew of nine African-American seamen. The journey came in response to an invitation from England's Royal African Society to visit the colony.

While there, Cuffee decided to develop trade between blacks in England, Sierra Leone, and the United States. He also began to consider the possibility of relocating skilled African Americans to the colony, and founded the Friendly Society of Sierra Leone to put his ideas into practice. In 1815, he took thirty-eight emigrants to the colony. Among them were a Senegalese who had migrated from Haiti, and a Congolese. This would be the first migration of African Americans from the United States to Africa.

Memoir of Captain Paul Cuffee, A Man of Colour: To Which is Subjoined The Epistle of the Society of Sierra Leone in Africa, &c. by Paul Cuffee