Kenema is the big city of eastern Sierra Leone, the third-largest in the country and the capital of the Eastern Province. Nestled among the green Kambui hills, it is a bustling commercial centre where the east's main products come together: diamonds, cocoa, coffee, palm oil and timber. Its lively street life, its markets and its diamond trade give it a strong character all of its own.
For the traveller, Kenema is above all the gateway to the eastern rainforests and the best base for reaching Gola Rainforest National Park —the largest remaining lowland tropical rainforest in the country, now part of Sierra Leone's first World Heritage Site— as well as Tiwai Island. But the city has its own pulse: tailors hammering away at their Singer machines under the eaves, women carrying basins of okra and bitter leaf on their heads, the call to prayer mixing with the Krio gospel from the minibuses.
This guide covers Kenema with a practical eye: what to see in the city and around it, how the diamond trade works, how to get around by okada and keke, where to sleep and eat, and how to use the city as a springboard to Gola and the forested east. Kenema is not a postcard destination, but it is an honest immersion in the real Sierra Leone and an essential base for the natural adventure of the east.
According to oral tradition, Kenema was founded by Ngombulango, a hunter from the nearby village of Gombu. The city grew with the colonial railway, which made it the terminus of the eastern line, and above all with the discovery of alluvial diamonds in 1931, which brought it fully into the country's extractive economy. Over time it became the east's great commercial centre, home of the Government Diamond Office (1959) and capital of the Eastern Province. In 2014 it was one of the epicentres of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
Read the full history ↓The eastern province of cocoa, coffee and diamonds: Kenema, a city of markets, and the Gola rainforest, the largest lowland tropical forest in the country.
Read the history of The east and the rainforests →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Like many towns in the interior of Sierra Leone, Kenema has an origin that blends history and legend. Local oral tradition says the city was founded by Ngombulango, a hunter from the nearby village of Gombu, who settled in this spot in the Kambui Hills, on the lands of the Mende people. As in so many African stories, the hunter, a figure of prestige who knows the bush, is remembered as the founder of the settlement.
The east of present-day Sierra Leone was, and still is, mostly Mende territory. The Mende are one of the country's major ethnic groups. They speak a Mande language, are organised into chiefdoms and have powerful secret societies that shaped social life. The region lived from tropical farming (rice and palm, and later cocoa and coffee), with villages and busy inland trade among forested hills and rivers.
Until the late 19th century, this whole interior stayed outside direct British colonial control, which reached no further than the Colony of Freetown and its peninsula. That changed in 1896, when the Protectorate of Sierra Leone was proclaimed over the interior. The east, and the future Kenema, were drawn into the orbit of the British Empire and its great project for pushing inland: the railway.
Kenema as we know it is largely a product of the colonial railway. In the early 20th century, the British built the Sierra Leone Government Railway from Freetown into the interior to link the rich lands of the south and east economically with the capital's port. The main line headed south-east. Kenema, set in a pass through the Kambui Hills, became a key stop and the terminus of the eastern network.
The arrival of the train turned Kenema from a rural settlement into a trading hub. Produce from the east (palm, cocoa, coffee and timber) crossed its platforms on the way to the port of Freetown, and imported goods passed through on their way to the inland villages. The city grew around its station, and its street layout still spreads out from that old railway terminus today.
For decades the railway was the backbone of the country. Its closure in 1974 was a controversial decision that cut off the interior and marked the end of an era. By then, though, Kenema was already an established city and the main centre of the east. In the decades in between, another factor joined the railway's legacy and shaped the city's future for good: diamonds.
In 1931, alluvial diamonds were discovered in eastern Sierra Leone, and that find changed the history of the region and of Kenema for ever. The east became one of Africa's great diamond-producing areas, and Kenema became its trading capital, full of buying houses, dealers and lapidaries, with an economy more and more focused on gems. In 1959 the Government Diamond Office was set up. From Kenema, it coordinates the valuation and certification of the province's stones.
Diamonds brought wealth, but they also badly distorted the region. The economy came to depend on extraction, and the trade brought waves of prospectors, smuggling and huge inequality. Most of Sierra Leone's diamonds are alluvial, meaning they lie scattered through river sediments and soils. That makes mining very hard to control and opens the door to informal digging and trafficking.
That built-in fragility would fuel a tragedy. When civil war broke out in 1991, the conflict came to revolve around control of the alluvial diamond fields of the east, in districts such as Kono and Tongo near Kenema, and the income from smuggling. 'Blood diamonds' funded the rebels and dragged the war out, and the east, Kenema included, was caught at the centre of the storm.
The civil war of 1991 to 2002 was the darkest chapter in Sierra Leone's recent history, and the east, the heart of diamond country, suffered especially. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) fought for the diamond fields to fund itself. The region went through fighting, looting, mass displacement and the atrocities that defined the conflict: massacres, the recruitment of child soldiers and mutilations. Kenema lived in fear, took in displaced people and saw its whole economy disrupted.
The war ended in 2002 after a major intervention by the UN and the United Kingdom, and Kenema rebuilt itself and became the east's great trading centre again. But the city had another blow ahead. In May 2014, Sierra Leone's first confirmed case of Ebola was diagnosed at Kenema Government Hospital. It came at the start of the worst Ebola epidemic in history, which devastated West Africa.
Kenema became one of the epicentres of the crisis. Between 2014 and 2015, hundreds of cases began in the city and its district, and the hospital's health workers paid a terrible price. The epidemic was finally brought under control and Sierra Leone was declared Ebola-free, but it left a deep mark. Both traumas, the war and Ebola, are part of the city's recent memory.
21st-century Kenema is a city that is recovering and growing. It is the country's third-largest city, with more than 200,000 inhabitants and a busy commercial pulse. It is still the great centre of the east: diamonds, cocoa, coffee, palm oil and timber are traded in its streets and markets, amid okadas, kekes and the bustle of a provincial capital. It is a city of work and trade, without grand monuments but with character and authenticity.
What's new about Kenema as a destination is the boom in nature tourism. Kenema is the gateway to Gola Rainforest National Park, the largest remaining area of lowland tropical rainforest in the country. In 2025, together with Tiwai Island, it was inscribed by UNESCO as Sierra Leone's first World Heritage Site: the Gola-Tiwai complex. Trips to Gola, via Lalehun, and to Tiwai are organised from Kenema.
That double identity defines Kenema today. On one side it is the extractive, trading city of diamonds and cocoa, with its history of wealth and pain. On the other, it is the gateway to some of West Africa's most valuable rainforests. Railway town, diamond capital, survivor of war and Ebola, and today a springboard to the country's natural heritage, Kenema sums up much of the modern history of eastern Sierra Leone.
