For many, Tokeh is the most beautiful beach in Sierra Leone and one of the great gems of the African coast: a very long strip of fine golden sand, lined with coconut palms, with a river coming down from the rainforest and the peninsula's green mountains rising behind it. Longer and wider than neighbouring River No. 2, it offers kilometres of shoreline to walk with hardly anyone else around.
Unlike other beaches on the peninsula, Tokeh has a long tourism history: back in the sixties and seventies it was home to a famous and ambitious complex, the Africana Tokeh Village, which grew to hundreds of rooms before the civil war wiped it off the map. Today the beach has come back to life with high-end resorts such as The Place and Tokeh Palms, alongside the everyday life of the fishing village.
This guide covers how to enjoy Tokeh: how to get there from Freetown, where to stay for each budget (from simple bungalows to luxury resorts), what to do (swim, walk the sand, eat fish, take a boat trip) and how to link it with River No. 2 and Bureh. A tropical paradise with a history, ideal both for backpackers and for anyone looking for comfort by the sea.
The village of Tokeh was founded in colonial times by a Sherbro fisherman named Pa Baw, who settled beside the river. In 1968 the lawyer Shakib Basma, together with a French company, acquired land and developed the Africana Tokeh Village, a complex that reached 400 rooms and 600 staff and turned Tokeh into an international tourist destination in the seventies. The civil war (1991-2002) destroyed the complex and emptied the beach. With peace, Tokeh was reborn with new high-end resorts, reclaiming its place as one of the most sought-after beaches in West Africa.
Read the full history ↓The city of freedom and the lion mountains: Freetown grew out of a swampy settlement of freed slaves and is now a chaotic, vibrant capital set between white-sand beaches and forest.
Read the history of Freetown and the peninsula →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The story of Tokeh begins, like that of so many coastal villages in Sierra Leone, with the sea and fishing. According to local tradition, the village was founded in colonial times by a fisherman of the Sherbro people named Pa Baw, who settled beside the river that comes down from the peninsula's mountains and flows out onto the beach. The Sherbro are one of the oldest coastal peoples of Sierra Leone, skilled sailors and fishermen of the coastline and the southern islands, and their presence in Tokeh links the village to a long seafaring tradition in the region.
Like the rest of the Freetown Peninsula, the area fell within the orbit of the British colony established in Freetown from 1808. The coastal villages (Tokeh, York, Kent, Sussex) mixed local populations with descendants of the 'liberated' Africans from slave ships whom the British settled on the peninsula during the 19th century. For generations, Tokeh lived off fish, coconut palms and subsistence farming, completely untouched by tourism.
Its extraordinary beach, one of the longest and most beautiful on the peninsula, was known to the people of Freetown, but it remained a quiet fishing spot. That would change radically in the late 1960s, when Tokeh's beauty caught the eye of investors and international tourism.
In 1968, the prominent Sierra Leonean lawyer Shakib Basma bought beachfront land in Tokeh and, in partnership with a French company, began developing an ambitious resort: the Africana Tokeh Village. At a time when sun-and-beach tourism in West Africa was just taking its first steps, the project placed a big bet on Tokeh as an international destination. The complex grew to around 400 rooms and at its peak employed close to 600 people, becoming one of the largest resorts in the region.
Throughout the 1970s, the Africana Tokeh Village put Sierra Leone on the map of luxury tourism. The mix of the very long golden beach, the coconut palms, the tropical climate and the jungle-covered mountains drew European visitors looking for an African paradise. Tokeh enjoyed its golden age of tourism, with flights and package holidays bringing travellers to this remote corner of Africa's Atlantic coast. The beach featured in brochures and travel stories as one of the continent's great tropical secrets.
That splendour, however, depended on the country's stability, and that stability would collapse in the worst possible way. The economic crisis of the 1980s and, above all, the outbreak of civil war in 1991 brought the first golden age of Tokeh to an abrupt end.
The Sierra Leone Civil War (1991-2002) was a catastrophe that swept away almost everything, and tourism on the Freetown Peninsula was no exception. As the conflict drew closer to the capital and insecurity took hold of the country, the flow of visitors stopped completely. The Africana Tokeh Village, once a symbol of the tourism boom, was abandoned, looted and finally destroyed. The beach that had welcomed thousands of foreign tourists was left once again to its fishermen alone.
The war years left the peninsula's communities impoverished and their tourism infrastructure in ruins. Tokeh, like River No. 2, Bureh and Lakka, fell silent. For many Sierra Leoneans on the coast, those were years of fear, displacement and survival, a world away from the image of paradise the beach had projected to the world only a decade earlier.
When the war officially ended in 2002, with the help of British intervention and a large UN mission, the peninsula's beaches were empty and their resorts in ruins. Rebuilding tourism would be a slow process. In Tokeh's case it would take more than a decade, but it would eventually restore the beach's place among the great beach destinations of West Africa.
Tokeh's recovery came with a new generation of tourism investment well into the 21st century. On the sands where the Africana Tokeh Village once stood, and on other stretches of the beach, new resorts appeared: The Place Resort, an upmarket hotel with villas, pools, a spa and beachfront restaurants, and Tokeh Palms, a smaller and more exclusive enclave with suites and pools. They were joined by simpler options such as Tokeh Sands and village guesthouses, which widened the choice to suit different budgets.
This revival gave Tokeh back its status as Sierra Leone's signature beach, this time with tourism that sits alongside the everyday life of the fishing village. The country's political stability after the war, despite the blow of Ebola in 2014-2016, allowed the beach to draw visitors again, both Sierra Leoneans from the diaspora and international travellers looking for uncrowded destinations.
Today Tokeh offers the best of both worlds: the comfort of beachfront resorts and the authenticity of a fishing village with centuries of history. Its long golden beach, backed by jungle and mountains, is still one of the most striking sights on the Sierra Leonean coast.
Today's Tokeh is a place where history and present-day tourism live side by side. In the morning, the canoes of the fishermen, heirs to that founding Pa Baw, head out to sea and come back with a catch that is sold and cooked on the beach. Alongside that traditional life, resort guests enjoy pools, spas and seafood dinners facing the Atlantic. It is a typical mix of Sierra Leonean tourism, which still keeps a human scale and an authenticity that are hard to find in more developed destinations.
The beach is part of the great circuit of Freetown Peninsula beaches: to the north, neighbouring River No. 2, with its freshwater lagoon and community management; to the south, Bureh, the birthplace of surfing in the country; and closer to the capital, Lakka and the city beaches of Lumley. Many travellers visit several of them on the same trip, staying at one and visiting the others.
Tokeh sums up the story of beach tourism in Sierra Leone: the splendour of the 1970s, the destruction of the war and the revival of the 21st century. Its golden sand, which has witnessed all those ups and downs, is still among the most beautiful in West Africa, and a reminder of the resilience of a country that, against all odds, is opening its doors to the world again.
