About 500 years later, Beginning in the late 1870s to the 1890s under the rule of prominent Mandinka Muslim cleric Samori Ture, an even larger group of Mandingo immigrated from Eastern Guinea settled in northeastern Sierra Leone on lands conqured by the Muslim ruler Samori Toure as part of the Wassoulou Empire.

[1] Like the larger Mandinka people, the Sierra Leonean Mandingo are over 99% Muslim and they follow the Sunni tradition of Islam based on the Maliki Jurisprudence.

The Mandingo people of Sierra Leone are historically predominantly traders and rural subsistence farmers.

The Mandingo make up the majority of the population in Yengema, Kono District in Eastern Sierra Leone.

In 1875, Samori Ture, an ultra conservative hardline Muslim cleric and Mandinka leader in Guinea, imported breech-loading rifles through the British colony Sierra Leone and supplied his warriors with them.

The Mandinka warriors moved into the northeastern part of British colony Sierra Leone, where they occupied lands of the local indigenous Temne and Loko people.

By late 1876, the Mandinka warriors had occupied a large section in northeastern Sierra Leone, possibly due to wars with France and intentions to spread the teachings of Islam.

Many of the local peoples joined the Mandinka in enrolling in the Islamic Madrassa schools established by Samori Ture.

In 1878, Ture sent thousands of Mandinka people from the Wassoulou in central Guinea to Mandinka-occupied northeastern Sierra Leone as traders, farmers, and settlers to colonize the area.

Since the late eighteenth century, it had been dominated by the Krio people, an ethnic group made up of descendants of black colonists from Great Britain and Nova Scotia, and slaves liberated from ships by the British Navy.

The Mandingo have traditionally supported the Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP), which ruled the country as recently as 2007.

In rural areas, western education's impact is minimal; the literacy rate in Latin script among these Mandinka is quite low.

But, more than half the adult population can read the Arabic script used locally; small Qur'anic schools for children are quite common.

The kora is a 21-stringed guitar-like instrument made out of a halved, dried, hollowed-out gourd covered with cow or goat skin.

It is played with traditional songs to accompany a dying person into the meaning of death, so the deceased can go in peace to the phantom place.

Mandinka villages are fairly autonomous and self-ruled, being led by a council of upper-class elders and a chief who functions as a first among equals.

Many Mandinkas children, particularly those in the rural areas who attend madrassas, learn to recite chapters of the Qu'ran in Arabic.

Marabouts, who also have Islamic training, write Qu'ranic verses on slips of paper and sew them into leather pouches.

Mandinka are rural subsistence farmers who rely on groundnuts, rice, millet, and small-scale husbandry for their livelihood.

Small mud houses with conical thatch or tin roofs make up their villages, which are organized on the basis of clan groups of related individuals.

Only about 50% of the rice consumption needs are met by local planting; the rest is imported from Asia and the United States.

While farming is the predominant profession among the Mandinka, men also work as tailors, butchers, taxi drivers, woodworkers, metalworkers, soldiers, nurses, and extension workers for aid agencies.

However, most women, probably 95%[citation needed], remain in the home as wives and mothers because their labor is integral to the survival of families.