Kru

Kru is the cluster of closely related tongues spoken from south-eastern Liberia to western Ivory Coast, divided into Western and Eastern Kru; their resemblance to the Niger-Congo languages is disputed, and some catalogues treat Kru as a family of its own. The name Kru, from the people's own word Klao, was spread by Europeans who long confused it with the English word crew.

The shore facing these speakers was the Pepper Coast visited by Portuguese voyagers for melegueta pepper. Kru oral history records a move from the interior to the sea in the eighteenth century.

From the 1790s Kru men, called Krumen, shipped as free sailors, pilots and interpreters on European and American vessels, their forehead tattoos marking them as freemen; Krumen settlements then grew up in ports from Freetown to the Nigerian coast.