When you live in the West, the concept of Pan-Africanism is much easier to appreciate. Lines of identity based on nationality alone fade into a more central identity, partly a function of the way the Westerners view you collectively—not particularly as Nigerian or Ghanaian, but as Black and African.
But for me, a Nigerian living in Europe, one thing that’s precipitated this sense of oneness is language. When I speak to my Ghanaian brothers or Cameroonian sisters, I can ease into my Nigerian Pidgin English and not fear being misunderstood. Not because our pidgin languages are exactly the same, but because they all descended from a common source.
Nigerian Pidgin, Ghanaian Pidgin, Cameroonian Pidgin (Kamtok) and Sierra Leone's Krio belong to a family of related English-based pidgins and creoles spoken by over 140 million people across coastal West and Central Africa.
Yet two centuries ago, only a few thousand people spoke these languages. How did improvised trade jargons born from slavery evolve into some of Africa's fastest-growing languages? And how did freed slaves returning to Freetown create Krio, the linguistic foundation that would spread across the entire coast?
This is the story of languages forged in bondage, shaped by resistance and transformed into tools of unity.
The Portuguese Beginning and English Transformation
The story begins with Portuguese sailors reaching the Gold Coast in 1471. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, a Portuguese-based pidgin emerged along the coast for trade. This early pidgin facilitated the brutal capture and sale of enslaved Africans. Portuguese merchants took West Africans to Portugal to learn Portuguese for translation during future voyages.
The pidgin never advanced far beyond basic jargon, but it established a crucial precedent: creating a simplified contact language to bridge linguistic gaps between Europeans and dozens of distinct African languages. When the Dutch seized Portugal's West African possessions in 1642, the Portuguese pidgin faded, leaving only scattered words that would later appear in English-based varieties.
The linguistic landscape transformed when British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade intensified during the 17th and 18th centuries. An English-lexified pidgin—"Coast English" or "Coast Jargon"—emerged for commerce between British slave traders and African middlemen.
British slave trader John Matthews warned in 1788 that Europeans would fail to understand Africans unless they recognised significant differences between Standard English and the coastal pidgin. This was not broken English but a distinct linguistic system.
The pidgin served horrific purposes. It allowed communication between traders and African captors. It became the medium through which enslaved Africans from different linguistic backgrounds—Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, Mende, Temne—communicated during the Middle Passage. On slave ships, the pidgin became a survival tool.
This explains striking similarities between these African pidgins and English-based creoles in the Caribbean and Americas. Enslaved Africans carried the pidgin across the Atlantic, giving rise to Gullah, Jamaican Patois, Bajan Creole and Sranan Tongo. Words like "unu" (you people, from Igbo) and phrases like "make we" (let us) appear on both sides, serving as linguistic evidence of forced migration.
The Birth of Krio: Freetown's Linguistic Crucible
The most significant chapter begins in 1787, when British abolitionists established a "Province of Freedom" on the Sierra Leone peninsula. This settlement, which would become Freetown, was intended as a home for London's "Black Poor"—formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants.
In 1787, around 400 Black Londoners arrived, bringing with them the coastal pidgin they had learned in encounters with British traders. Then in 1792, about 1,200 Black Loyalists arrived from Nova Scotia, formerly enslaved people who had fought for the British during the American Revolution. They brought Caribbean-influenced English varieties.
In 1800, approximately 550 Jamaican Maroons—escaped slaves who had waged guerrilla war in Jamaica—were exiled to Freetown. Research by linguist Magnus Huber suggests their Jamaican Creole had significant input into what would become Krio.
But the largest influx came after 1808, when Britain outlawed the transatlantic slave trade. When Royal Navy ships intercepted illegal slave vessels, they brought liberated Africans ("recaptives") to Freetown. Between 1808 and the 1860s, over 50,000 recaptives from dozens of ethnic groups settled around Freetown.
These recaptives came from everywhere: Yoruba, Igbo, Efik from Nigeria; Fante from Ghana; Mende, Temne, Limba from Sierra Leone's hinterland; groups from Angola and Mozambique. They spoke hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages. But in villages around Freetown, they had to communicate.
Out of this extraordinary diversity emerged Krio, a full creole language that became the mother tongue of the community. Unlike a pidgin, which serves only as simplified communication, a creole is a complete language capable of expressing any concept.
Krio’s Structure and Influence
Krio's grammatical structure reveals its African roots despite English vocabulary. Like many West African languages, Krio uses serial verb constructions. Where Standard English says "I walked to the market and bought fish", Krio says "A waka go maket bay fis"—literally "I walk go market buy fish", with three verbs in a row.
The tense-aspect-modality system works differently from English. Rather than changing verb forms (walk/walked/walking), Krio uses articles before the verb. "Dey" indicates continuous action: "I dey go" means "I am going" or "I go regularly". This mirrors tense systems in Niger-Congo languages.
Krio's pronoun system distinguishes between singular and plural second person ("yu" for singular, "una" for plural), a distinction English has lost but which exists in Igbo, Yoruba and other West African languages. The word "una" comes directly from Igbo "unu". Reduplication, repeating words for emphasis, is common in Krio as in West African languages. For instance, "Smol-smol" means "very small" or "little by little".
Krio didn't stay in Freetown. Throughout the 19th century, Sierra Leone Creoles became traders, missionaries and civil servants, spreading along the coast. In Nigeria, they became Saros, bringing Krio words like "sabi" into Nigerian Pidgin. In The Gambia, Creole migrants created the Aku community. On Bioko Island (Equatorial Guinea), they established Pichinglis.
Linguistic research confirms modern pidgins descended from Sierra Leonean Krio. Scholar Kofi Yakpo's research shows Nigerian migrant workers introduced Krio to the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in the 1920s, where it evolved into the second generation of Ghanaian Pidgin.
This linguistic continuum is crucial. Nigerian Pidgin, Ghanaian Pidgin and Cameroon Pidgin English are not independent developments but related descendants of the same Freetown source, each influenced by local languages in their respective regions.
Nigerian, Ghanaian and Cameroonian Pidgins
Nigeria’s Pidgin is naturally the most widely spoken pidgin as at least half of the country’s 200+ million population speaks it. In fact, Nigerian Pidgin is said to be the African language with the largest number of speakers. Given Nigeria’s remarkable linguistic diversity—with over 400 ancestral languages, it makes sense that Pidgin serves as the lingua franca for most. In the Niger Delta oil states, pidgin takes on a more revered status, even serving as the first language for many natives.
The language shows influence from multiple Nigerian languages: from Igbo "unu" (you people), from Yoruba "oga" (boss), from Hausa "ba" (question tag) and Portuguese remnants like "sabi" (to know). The BBC launched BBC News Pidgin in 2017 to serve “West and Central Africa”, essentially Nigeria, Ghana, the Gambia and Cameroon.
Pidgin is generally fluid, as BBC Pidgin’s head Bilikisu Labaran notes. This makes it easy for native speakers of other languages to infuse their languages into pidgin. For instance, a common Nigerian Pidgin expression is "my heart dey do gbimgbim" (my heart beats fast), which incorporates Yoruba onomatopoeia. This also explains why there are regional variations of Nigerian pidgin.
Ghanaian Pidgin remains more restricted, partly because Twi serves as a pertinent indigenous lingua franca. However, it is growing among young, educated men and also extending more and more to women. What started as "Town Pidgin" spawned "Student Pidgin", so-called because it is mostly spoken in secondary school and university settings.
Cameroon Pidgin English (Kamtok or "Cam talk") is spoken throughout Cameroon, in Central Africa, and in diaspora communities worldwide. Cameroon has approximately 280 indigenous languages, giving it an even higher linguistic diversity density than Nigeria. Thus, Kamtok also serves as a very important regional lingua franca.
The language varies between acrolectal (educated, urban) and basilectal (rural, influenced by indigenous languages) forms. Additionally, even though Kamtok is English-based, the Francophones who do speak Cameroonian Pidgin English adopt French influences.
The Edo Connection: Beyond English
The influence of coastal African languages extended beyond English-based pidgins. The Edo language, spoken by the Edo people of Benin Kingdom in present-day Nigeria, played a crucial role in shaping Portuguese creole languages—a linguistic legacy often overlooked.
In 1471, Portuguese explorers reached what would become the Bight of Benin. In 1486, Portuguese explorer Affonso d'Aveiro ventured into the Niger Delta to visit Benin. What he found astounded him: a large, sophisticated kingdom with a centralised bureaucracy, wide straight roads illuminated at night by massive metal lamps, large houses with courtyards and fine cloth made locally. He established diplomatic and trade relationships between Portugal and Benin, and the Kingdom of Benin sent several emissaries to Portugal.
In 1493, Portuguese settlers established themselves on the uninhabited island of São Tomé, located south of the Niger Delta. They acquired enslaved people through trade with Benin to work as servants and later as plantation labour until Benin banned slave sales in the mid-16th century.
The enslaved Edo speakers on São Tomé created Portuguese creole through contact with Portuguese colonisers. When Bantu-speaking peoples (primarily Kikongo and Kimbundu speakers) arrived from Congo and Angola after Benin's ban, they encountered a Portuguese-Edo pidgin already established. The result was Gulf of Guinea creoles, combinations of Portuguese, Edo and Bantu languages.
According to University of Westminster linguist John Ladhams, the grammatical process of article agglutination in Gulf of Guinea creole originated in Edo noun prefixes. More significantly, Edo contributed a higher proportion of adjectives, verbs and adverbs than nouns. Since borrowing adjectives and verbs occurs less frequently than borrowing nouns, this suggests Edo played a more important and specialised role than Bantu languages in creole formation.
Today, 35% of words in São Tomé Creole and 65% of words in Príncipe Creole derive from Edo. This makes Edo the major African component constituting the foundation of Gulf of Guinea creoles, which are spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe, Equatorial Guinea, with diaspora speakers in Angola and Portugal.
This Portuguese-Edo connection also influenced the Niger Delta region's linguistic landscape, shaping pidgin development there. The relationship between Portuguese traders and Edo speakers left lasting marks on both English-based and Portuguese-based contact languages in coastal Africa.
Languages of Triumph
For most of the colonial period, these pidgins and creoles were stigmatised as "bastardised English". But independence changed everything. As Kofi Yakpo notes, these languages became "world languages against the grain", spreading not through colonisation but through organic demographic and social forces.
It is, however, worth noting, that pidgins still face some stigma in West Africa and Cameroon, where they are often seen as the “language of the streets or uneducated” and not given official status. Even in Sierra Leone, where over 90% of the population speak Krio, only English is given the title of official language.
In Nigeria alone, approximately 40 million speak Pidgin as first language. Across the region, up to 140 million people speak these related varieties. By 2100, projections suggest 400 million speakers, rivalling French or Spanish.
But the power of the languages stretches further back. During colonialism, when European languages represented power and African languages stayed ethnic-bound, pidgins occupied unique space; they were nobody's ancestral language, so they belonged to everyone equally. During African nationalism, they became languages of resistance, with politicians and musicians using them to reach wider audiences.
The story of English-based pidgins and Sierra Leone Krio is ultimately about resilience. Languages born from slavery's trauma, developed by people torn from homes and forced together, became survival tools, then resistance tools, then unity tools. What began as desperate improvisation became sophisticated linguistic systems.
When you hear "How far?" (How are you?), "I dey kampe" (I'm fine), or "Make we go" (Let's go) across markets in Lagos, Accra, Yaoundé or Freetown, you're hearing echoes of Granville Town in 1787, of slave ships in the 1700s, of Portuguese traders in the 1400s. You're hearing languages that refuse erasure and grow stronger with each generation.
