Back in Africa 🙏🏾✈️💚 And it feels good.
My new virtual office for the next month…and perhaps longer will be in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Freetown is the capital, principal port, commercial center, and largest city of Sierra Leone. I’m already thoroughly fascinated with the rich history of this town which was founded by freed American slaves from Nova Scotia in 1792. Freetown was part of the larger colony of the Sierra Leone which was founded by the Sierra Leone Company (SLC) in 1787. The SLC, sought to rehabilitate the black poor of London and former slaves of North America by bringing them to the settlement in Sierra Leone where they would stop the African slave trade.
The first groups of blacks, about 400 Londoners, arrived in Sierra Leone in 1787 and established Granville Town, named after British abolitionist Granville Sharp. When the settlement was destroyed by the indigenous inhabitants in 1789, British abolitionists sent a second, larger party of 1,100 former American slaves who had been resettled in Nova Scotia at the end of the American Revolution. These settlers established Freetown in 1792. In 1800, 500 Jamaican Maroons were landed by the British. The surviving Londoners, the Nova Scotians, and Jamaican maroons, intermarried to create the Creole population of Freetown.
It is amazing to walk through the streets of this town and see faces that mirror the diversity of Africa as a whole. They speak English and a dialect called Krio which reminds me of Nigerian Pidgin or Jamaican Patois.
My first stop on Day 1 was to a farm and a market where I copped some greens and herbs for week one. 🌿