Sierra Leone: From a Colonial Hill Town to Idris Elba’s Island Masterplan, What Can Two Sierra Leone Developments a Century Apart Tell Us About Urban Elitism?

Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, is celebrated as a city founded to resettle freed slaves in the 1790s. Over the following century, it became a truly cosmopolitan port city as people from across western Africa and the Americas made it their home.

But Freetown’s British colonial rulers struggled to acclimatise. Many were plagued by deadly fevers that earned West Africa its reputation in Europe as the “white man’s grave”.

By the turn of the 20th century, the intensifying racism of colonialism,…