10 Dollars Mountain Gorilla

Sierra Leone's wildlife coin program of the early 2000s was produced under license arrangements common to many small-nation commemorative issues — the coins were designed, minted, and distributed almost entirely outside the issuing country, typically by European private minting houses targeting collector markets rather than domestic circulation. Sierra Leone itself was still recovering from a brutal eleven-year civil war that ended in 2002, and the central bank had little infrastructure for numismatic programs of this kind.

KM#396 sits in a sprawling series. The gorilla motif was used across multiple denominations and years, making die attribution and series sequencing genuinely useful before purchasing.