Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone in the context of West Africa Squadron

Americo-Liberian people (also known as Congo people or Congau people) are a Liberian ethnic group of African American, Afro-Caribbean, and liberated African origin. Americo-Liberians trace their ancestry to free-born and formerly enslaved African Americans who emigrated in the 19th century to become the founders of the state of Liberia. They identified themselves as Americo-Liberians.

Although the terms "Americo-Liberian" and "Congo" had distinct definitions in the nineteenth century, they are currently interchangeable and refer to an ethnic group composed of the descendants of the various free and ex-slave African American, Caribbean, recaptive, and Sierra Leone Creoles who settled in Liberia from 1822.

The Sierra Leone Creole people (Krio: Krio pipul) are an ethnic group of Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone Creole people are descendants of freed African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Liberated African slaves who settled in the Western Area of Sierra Leone between 1787 and about 1885. The colony was established by the British, supported by abolitionists, under the Sierra Leone Company as a place for freedmen. The settlers called their new settlement Freetown. Today, the Sierra Leone Creoles are 1.2 percent of the population of Sierra Leone.

The Creoles of Sierra Leone have varying degrees of European ancestry, similar to their Americo-Liberian neighbours and sister ethnic group in Liberia. In Sierra Leone, some of the settlers intermarried with English colonial residents and other Europeans. Through the Jamaican Maroons, some Creoles probably also have indigenous Amerindian Taíno ancestry. The mingling of newly freed black and racially-mixed Nova Scotians and Jamaican Maroons from the 'New World' with Liberated Africans – such as the Akan, Bakongo, Ewe, Igbo and Yoruba – over several generations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, led to the eventual formation of a Creole ethnicity.