Kono

The Kono are a Mande-speaking people whose homeland is the wooded hill country of eastern Sierra Leone, with part living across the border in Guinea. Their traditions describe them as descendants of migrants from the Mali-Guinea region who moved west as peaceful hunters and settled the land that became Kono District in the mid-1500s; they claim to have once been a powerful people in Mali and Guinea.

Later, raids by the related Mende drove them north into Koranko territory, where they were granted farmland; when the Mende shifted further south the Kono returned to their eastern homeland as farmers and hunters under village chiefs.