Bunce Island is not a conventional tourist destination: it is a place of memory, one of the most important and moving sites in the entire history of Atlantic slavery. On this small island in the Freetown estuary, between 1670 and 1808, stood the largest British slave castle on the 'Rice Coast' of West Africa, from which tens of thousands of Africans were shipped to the plantations of the Americas.
What makes Bunce unique is its direct link to the United States. Unlike other castles such as Gorée (Senegal) or Elmina (Ghana), Bunce sent a significant number of captives to South Carolina and Georgia, where rice planters paid high prices for Africans experienced in growing it. Those enslaved people are the ancestors of the Gullah/Geechee people, who still preserve traces of the language and culture of Sierra Leone along the US Atlantic coast today.
This guide explains how to visit Bunce with the respect it deserves: how to get there by boat from Freetown, what you see in the ruins, how the guided visit works and why this site matters so much for the history of the slave trade and for African American memory. A hard but essential place, one that makes you face one of the greatest crimes in history head-on.
Bunce Island was the largest British slave castle on the 'Rice Coast'. Founded around 1670 by English merchants, it operated until 1808, when Britain's abolition of the slave trade closed it, and tens of thousands of Africans passed through it on their way to the Americas. Its distinctive feature is that it sent many captives to the rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia —planters paid more for Africans who knew how to grow rice—, and from them descend the Gullah/Geechee people of the United States. In the 1750s its main owner, Richard Oswald, partnered with the planter and slave trader Henry Laurens, his agent in Charleston. Today it is a National Monument and a memorial site, treated with historical rigour. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓In the estuary of the Sierra Leone River, the Banana Islands invite you to switch off, while the ruins on Bunce Island keep the memory of the Atlantic slave trade.
Read the history of The islands of the estuary →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In the middle of the Sierra Leone River, the wide estuary that opens out in front of Freetown, there is a small island just a few hundred metres long. Today it holds silent ruins, partly overgrown with vegetation: stone walls, collapsed towers, rusting cannons. This is Bunce Island, and for almost a century and a half those stones were the setting for one of the greatest crimes in history: the largest British slave castle on West Africa's 'Rice Coast'.
Bunce was founded around 1670 by English merchants looking for a safe, defensible and well-placed spot for trade in the region. Its position in the estuary, upriver but with access to the sea, was ideal: it allowed control of river and sea traffic and protection from attack. Over its history, the castle changed hands between various English companies and was attacked by rival powers (the French and the Dutch) and by pirates, who on several occasions plundered it and partly destroyed it, forcing it to be rebuilt.
Unlike the trading posts devoted to gold, ivory or timber, Bunce's main 'commodity' was human beings. The castle became a collection and shipping centre for enslaved Africans: men, women and children captured in wars in the interior and bought from middlemen, who were held on the island in appalling conditions until slave ships carried them across the Atlantic. It is estimated that tens of thousands of people passed through Bunce on their terrible journey.
What makes Bunce unique among Africa's slave castles is its specific link to the rice plantations of North America. The Sierra Leone region was part of the so-called Rice Coast, where African peoples had grown rice for centuries and mastered the techniques for cultivating it in swampy areas. That skill had a terrible value on the slave market: in the British colonies of South Carolina and Georgia, planters were willing to pay higher prices for Africans who knew how to grow rice.
According to UNESCO, Bunce represents 'the only case in which Africans were sought to be bought and sold specifically for their skills'. Captives from the Rice Coast were selected and traded precisely for their farming knowledge, and many ended up on the rice plantations along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, which became one of the richest regions of colonial America thanks to that forced labour and that stolen African know-how.
So a direct thread links the ruins of Bunce with the history of the United States. The Africans shipped from this island in the Freetown estuary crossed the Atlantic to work and die in American rice fields, leaving a deep mark on the culture, economy and demographics of the US South. Today that thread has a name: the Gullah connection.
Bunce reached its peak in the mid-18th century, when its main owner was the Scottish merchant Richard Oswald, one of the leading figures in the Atlantic trade of the time. Oswald and his partners turned the castle into a highly organised enterprise, with facilities to hold hundreds of captives, a small harbour and even a golf course for the European agents, staffed by enslaved Africans: an image that sums up the monstrous normality with which that trade was treated.
In the 1750s, Oswald built a close business and personal relationship with Henry Laurens, one of the richest rice planters and slave traders in the colony of South Carolina. Laurens acted as Bunce's commercial agent in Charleston: he received the human cargoes arriving from Sierra Leone, advertised them and sold them at auction, keeping a 10 % commission on each sale. That Bunce–Charleston, Oswald–Laurens axis shows just how far slavery was an integrated transatlantic business, with partners in Africa and in America.
What became of these men later carries a striking historical irony. Richard Oswald would go on to be the British negotiator at the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which recognised the independence of the United States. And Henry Laurens became president of the US Continental Congress. Two men who had grown rich trading human beings at Bunce held central roles in the birth of the American nation, a contradiction that sums up the slaving roots of Atlantic history.
The slave trade at Bunce ended when the British Parliament abolished the trade in 1807; the following year, in 1808, the castle stopped operating as a slaving post. The nearby colony of Sierra Leone, based in Freetown, became a Royal Navy base for hunting down slave ships, and the island that had been a centre of slavery fell into the shadow of the new abolitionist project. Bunce was abandoned and its buildings slowly fell into ruin, swallowed by the forest and by oblivion for more than a century and a half.
The island's memory was revived above all thanks to the work of the American historian Joseph Opala, who from 1976 studied Bunce's history, archaeology and oral tradition. Opala rigorously documented the link between Bunce and the Gullah/Geechee people, the descendants of enslaved Africans who live on the islands and coast of South Carolina and Georgia and who preserve, more than any other African American group, elements of the languages, food, songs and traditions of Sierra Leone. The word 'Gullah' itself has been linked to the peoples and region of the Rice Coast.
Opala organised three historic 'homecomings' of Gullah families to Sierra Leone (in 1989, 1997 and 2005), moving trips in which African Americans returned to the land of their ancestors and visited Bunce, closing a circle of more than two centuries. Those reunions, documented on film and in the press, turned Bunce into a powerful symbol of reconnection between Africa and its diaspora, and into a place of pilgrimage for African American memory.
Today Bunce Island is a National Monument of Sierra Leone and one of the most important memorial sites of the transatlantic slave trade. Its ruins (the castle walls, the cannons, the holding pens, the traders' cemetery and the unmarked graves of the Africans) can be visited on boat trips from Freetown, always with guides who tell its story with the rigour and seriousness the place demands. It is not a leisure destination but a space for reflection, comparable to a genocide memorial.
In recent decades there have been efforts to preserve and interpret the site. The Bunce Island Coalition works to stabilise and protect the ruins, threatened by erosion and vegetation, and to make their history known. Joseph Opala and the specialist Gary Chatelain, of James Madison University, even produced a 3D reconstruction of the castle that lets you 'walk into' its structures virtually and see them as they were two centuries ago. The World Monuments Fund and UNESCO have drawn attention to its universal value.
Bunce forces us to look squarely at one of the greatest crimes in history and to recognise the deep ties that bind Africa, Europe and America through slavery. For Sierra Leone, for the United States and for the whole African diaspora, preserving this island and telling its story truthfully is a duty. Visitors won't find a tropical paradise here, but something more valuable: the memory of those who suffered there, and the responsibility not to forget.
