Bullom

The Bullom are a West Atlantic people of the low-lying Sierra Leone coast, their name meaning low-lying land. They speak Bullom languages of the Mel branch, whose northern form is Bullom So and whose southern dialects include Sherbro, and Portuguese navigators already noted them in 1507.

In 1545 Mande invaders called the Mane defeated them in a great battle near Cape Mount, overrunning the country in the 1540s and 1550s and planting their own chiefdoms among them. During the seventeenth century Temne expansion to the coast split the Bullom: northerners kept their name while gradually assimilating to the Temne and Susu, and southerners came to be counted as Sherbro.

At Kaffu Bullom the missionary Nyländer printed a Bullom grammar in 1814, and in 1827 John Macaulay Wilson, son of a local chief, was elected king there.