Sierra Leone P-34 1 Leone 2022 UNC—War Chief Bai Bureh

Banknote Characteristics

• Varieties: Only one variety
• Front: Coat of arms; carvings; portrait of Bai Bureh
• Back: Telecommunications satellite dish
• Color: Reds
• Watermark: Lion head; electrotype "1"
• Composition: Paper
• Size: 120 × 62 mm
• Issuing entity: Bank of Sierra Leone
• Printer: De La Rue, London, United Kingdom
• Signatures: Professor Kelfala Morana Kallon (PKMK), Governor; Dr Ibrahim L. Stevens (DILS), First Deputy Governor
• Country: Sierra Leone
  • British Colony of Sierra Leone (1808–1961)
  • Independent Sierra Leone (1961–1971)
  • Republic of Sierra Leone (1971–date)

The Rebel the British Respected: Bai Bureh

There's something quietly remarkable about putting Bai Bureh on a banknote. He spent his life fighting the very colonial system that would eventually produce the nation now honoring him. That tension — between resistance and legacy — is exactly what makes him worth knowing about.

Bai Bureh (c. 1840–1908) was a Temne ruler and war chief in what is now Sierra Leone — skilled, pragmatic, and politically astute long before the British gave him a reason to fight them. When the colonial administration imposed the Hut Tax in 1898 — a levy on dwellings that many communities correctly understood as a mechanism of control over their land and autonomy — Bai Bureh organized resistance. Not a riot. A campaign. He ran a disciplined guerrilla war that tied down British forces for months, using terrain, mobility, and deep local support to compensate for being catastrophically outgunned.

What makes his story stick is how he was remembered on both sides. To Sierra Leoneans, he is a founding hero of resistance — the man who said no before it was fashionable. To the British at the time, he was documented as a capable and honorable adversary, which for the colonial military was about as close to a compliment as it got. He was eventually captured and exiled to the Gold Coast, but later allowed to return home, where he died in 1908.

His image on this note — issued in 2022, over a century after his death — is a deliberate act of national reclamation. The once-rebel is now the face of the currency. The colonial tax collector is gone. That's the whole story, compressed into a banknote.

About Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone — Portuguese for "Lion Mountains" — sits on the West African coast and has one of the most dramatic modern histories on the continent. It was founded in part as a settlement for freed slaves, making Freetown one of the oldest cities in sub-Saharan Africa with that particular origin. It gained independence from Britain in 1961, endured a devastating civil war from 1991 to 2002 — notorious for the systematic use of amputations as a terror weapon by the RUF — and has been rebuilding since. The country holds some of the world's largest deposits of diamonds, which funded the war as much as they could have funded development. In 2022, Sierra Leone redenominated its currency, dropping three zeros — the old 1,000 Leones became the new 1 Leone — a fresh start written into the money itself.