Freetown: Krio heritage hit by war

By Sylvie Kandé

Sylvie Kandé

It was a theoretical break that made African towns and cities objects of historical investigation. As long as the concept of the city (whose original models were the Greek polis and the Roman urbs) had been intrinsically linked to the concept of civilization, and the concept of civilization considered synonymous with the West, both the ideas of an "African civilization" and an "African city" were seen as inadmissible.

In this regard, it is worth recalling the galvanic effect of the publication of Frobenius's work entitled African Civilization on the Négritude generation. It was no accident that the maverick German investigator found his vanished mythical city of Atlantis in Ife, encouraged by his discovery of the Benin bronzes, which according to him were in a classical style.

Now, after several decades, the existence of a solid urban tradition in Africa has been recognized, as revealed for example by the excavation of Kumbi-Saleh, the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Ghana (5th - 11th centuries). It has also been stated that five modern megalopolises are located in Africa.

A periodization has even been established that distinguishes the cities linked to the trans-Saharan trade (from the 9th century onward) from the cities of the Guinea Coast that developed around the trans-Atlantic slave trade (16th - 19th centuries); the latter from the Swahili city-states on the Eastern coast; and all the preceding ones from the modern colonial cities founded in the 19th century and marked, around 1945, by a demographic explosion.

Heritage
Nevertheless, these categories do not account for Freetown, a city that was new in the 18th century but that was not, paradoxically, a creation ex nihilo. The capital of the first African colony in the modern sense of the term, a municipality at the end of the 19th century, and today a "capital of pain," Freetown has since its foundation crystallized all the beauties and contradictions of the Sierra Leonian settlement project.

In 1787, a group of English abolitionists including Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, and William Wilberforce "purchased," on a peninsula at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, a territory of refuge intended for four groups of ex-slaves. The Black Poor of England; the Black Loyalists of the United States; and the Jamaican Maroons living in Canada; as well as the "freed" slaves taken from the slave-traders. (The first three groups are often referred to as Creoles or Krio, but I propose the collective term of "Returnees" for all the groups.)

Questions
Sierra Leone's development was linked to Europe's shift from the slave trade that displaced African workers to the American colonies to the so-called "legitimate" trade in commodities produced in the new African colonies. Here, the process of colonization was rendered more complex by the African origins of the colonialists, in search of land but sometimes of a motherland as well.

Krio house-building

By zeroing in on their relationship to three social fundaments - land, cities, houses - in my book "Creole" Land, Urbanism, and Architecture in Sierra Leone During the 18th and 19th Centuries (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998), I studied the political and economic role and the identitary positions of these very particular colonialists. Was Freetown a colonial city? Are colonial cities African? Do the models for the houses of the Returnees recall their own African origins? Or their architectural experiences in the Diaspora? Are they inspired by the regional vernacular model?

Past and future
If historiography has presented the Returnees, regardless of origin, as an Anglophile, "native-hating" elite of such prosperity as to inspire the term "Creoledom"; if the Krio-centrist school "re-Africanized" the Krio even as it essentialized them, Freetown's urbanism and architecture seem to illustrate the varied styles the Returnees used to build and inhabit Africa. To be sure, the colony, wrested as it was from the elements, the slave-traders, and sometimes from the local population, developed a fortress-city. It was also a market that altered the surrounding rural fabric and depended on it.

However, Freetown reflects the multiple efforts of which it is the result. To the work of the English and their Creole auxiliaries have been added not only the initiatives of the other Returnees who have given the city the benefit of their prior urban experiences as well as their own construction techniques, but also the contributions of the local population.

One of the specific qualities of Freetown may be found in the game of reciprocal creation between the city and its inhabitants. A city of Return and a colonial city, Freetown was also, not incompatibly, a composite city, autonomous and in motion. War is now trampling that rich past into the dust.

(Translated by Christopher Winks)