The Saro, or Nigerian Creoles of the 19th and early 20th centuries, were Africans that were emancipated and initially resettled in Freetown, Sierra Leone by the Royal Navy, which, with the West Africa Squadron, enforced the abolition of the international slave trade after the British Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act 1807. Those freedmen who migrated back to Nigeria from Sierra Leone, over several generations starting from the 1830s, became known locally as Saro(elided form of Sierra Leone, from the Yoruba sàró). Consequently, the Saro are culturally descended from Sierra Leone Creoles, with ancestral roots to the Yoruba people of Nigeria.[1]
A related community of people were likewise known as Amaro, and were migrants from Brazil and Cuba.[2]
Saro and Amaro also settled in other West African countries such as the Gold Coast (Ghana). They were mostly freed and repatriated slaves from various West African and Latin American countries such as Sierra Leone, Brazil and Cuba. Liberated "returnee" Africans from Brazil were more commonly known as "Agudas", from the word àgùdà in the Yoruba language. Most of the Latin American returnees or Amaro started migrating to Africa after slavery was abolished on the continent, while others from West Africa, or the Saro, were recaptured and freed slaves already resident in Sierra Leone. Many of the returnees chose to return to Nigeria for cultural, missionary and economic reasons. Many, if not the greater majority, of them were originally descended from the Yoruba of western and central Nigeria. Other Nigerian groups forming part of the Sierra Leonean and Gambian Krio population included the Efik, Igbos, Hausa and Nupe.
The returnees mostly resided in the Lagos Colony, with substantial populations in Abeokuta and Ibadan. Some also settled in Calabar, Port Harcourt and other cities in the Niger Delta. Though many were originally dedicated Anglophiles in Nigeria, they later adopted an indigenous and patriotic attitude on Nigerian affairs due to a rise in discrimination in the 1880s,[3] and were later known as cultural nationalists.
^Dixon-Fyle, Mac (1999). A Saro community in the Niger Delta. ISBN 9781580460385.
^Falola, Toyin (2016). Encyclopedia of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 4. ISBN 9780253021441.
^Matory, Lorand, "The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yoruba Nation", Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 41, No. 1, January 1999, p. 89.
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