Galinhas

Galinhas was a coastal region of southern Sierra Leone, broadly extending between the Kerefe and Mano rivers. Estuaries, mangroves and interconnected waterways shaped its geography; nineteenth-century outsiders often used the name especially for the Kerefe River. Its emergence as a major slave-trading center was concentrated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rather than being an unchanging feature of the whole colonial period.

British merchants arrived in greater numbers during the 1790s. After the Anglo-American prohibitions on slave trading, traders, capital and shipping networks shifted toward Cuba and Galinhas. Between 1808 and 1820, warfare and political consolidation produced a kingdom under Siaka. Trade was disrupted while fighting affected the same coastal spaces on which merchants depended. Once Siaka consolidated power, the frontier of captive-taking moved inland and exports expanded. Connections with Havana supplied firearms and other goods, binding the kingdom's authority to the forced removal of people across the Atlantic.

The later city of Bo lies here.