Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milo Gough, Lecturer in History, University of Manchester
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, coupled with the emergence of the new field of tropical medicine, led to the construction of Hill Station, an experimental, racially segregated settlement built in the mountains four miles south of Freetown.
This was more than simply a public health measure to protect the white colonists. It was an abandonment of Freetown – an exit strategy from a city that was seen by this colonial elite as diseased, overcrowded and dangerous. The writer and journalist Graham Greene was highly critical of these motives in his travelogue, Journey Without Maps (1936):
England had planted this town [Freetown], the tin shacks and the Remembrance Day posters, and had then withdrawn up the hillside to smart bungalows, with wide windows and electric fans and perfect service … They had planted their seedy civilization and then escaped from it as far as they could.
Now, more than a century later, a proposed masterplanned city in Sierra Leone called Sherbro Island City is raising questions about the nature of modern urban developments – questions that resonate with my research in Freetown’s public archives about the story of Hill Station.
Sherbro Alliance Partners
The people behind Sherbro Island City, including English actor Idris Elba, are anything but colonial types. And in a country that is almost always portrayed as a place of violence and suffering – epitomised by its civil war in the 1990s and the devastating Ebola outbreak from 2014 to 2016 – the more optimistic headlines generated by Sherbro Island City are welcome. Its plans for an “afro-dynamic eco-city” promise long-term growth for Sierra Leone and the wider region.
But like Hill Station, this development – to be built on Sherbro Island, around 75 miles (120km) south of Freetown – has been planned for a small international elite. It is marketed as being clean and sanitary, with state-of-the-art “smart infrastructure” – in contrast to the perception of Freetown, like many other major African cities, as dirty, chaotic and perpetually malfunctioning.
Abuzz with anticipation
In 2019, I was in Freetown conducting research into the history of the city. On the day my fieldwork was wrapping up, Idris Elba landed for his first visit to his father’s homeland. Freetown had been buzzing with the news of his arrival. Everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of Sierra Leone’s own superstar.
On his week-long trip, Elba was busy. Events and photo opportunities swirled around a ritualistic centre piece: the presentation of citizenship by the country’s president, Julius Maada Bio. Elba was understandably enamoured by Sierra Leone and the welcome he received. Speaking to a BBC correspondent, he proclaimed that “the son of the soil is coming back to fertilise the soil”.
In fact, his plans to “fertilise” Sierra Leone were already in motion before this trip. Elba had set up a company called Sherbro Alliance Partners (SAP) earlier in 2019 with his childhood friend, Siaka Stevens – grandson of Sierra Leone’s dictatorial post-colonial president, also called Siaka Stevens.
That same year, SAP signed a memorandum of understanding with President Bio to build Sherbro Island City, envisaged as a thriving hub of improved infrastructure, tourism, media, healthcare and eco technologies.
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The project has moved slowly over the past five years, but recently gathered some momentum. Lloyd’s of London and Octopus Energy have been announced as project partners. These corporate tie-ins, alongside Elba’s stardom, have given Sherbro Island City enough clout to garner global media attention.
Many journalists and commentators have praised Elba and Stevens for their capacity to “dream big”. Braima Koroma, director of research and training at the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre in Freetown, told me that “local communities, government officials and potential investors seem to be excited about the vision of creating a modern, eco-friendly urban centre. There’s a palpable sense of anticipation surrounding the promises of job creation, improved infrastructure and increased foreign investment.”
On the other hand, Koroma told me the project’s “focus on luxury and exclusivity” has prompted “worry about the risk of exacerbating socioeconomic inequality” – suggesting the optimism generated by Sherbro Island City and desire for development in Sierra Leone may have obscured questions about the desirability of a hyper-modern city designed to attract a wealthy, globalised elite and provide returns for mobile foreign capital. The majority of Sierra Leoneans, who live on an average of just US$560 (£422) a year, will be economically locked out of this exclusive urban enclave.
A very different built environment
Much of my time in Sierra Leone was spent at the public archive building, which is located within the country’s most historic university, Fourah Bay College. One day, I was on the back of an okada (motorcycle taxi) on the steep mountain road up to the archive when I got a call from Alfred, one of the archivists, reminding me it was closed for a national holiday.
Taking advantage of a day away from dusty colonial-era documents, I redirected the driver up to the neighbourhood of Hill Station, as it is still called today, on the main road into the mountains overlooking Freetown.
At first glance, Hill Station appears an unremarkable neighbourhood of Freetown. Large compounds hide behind breeze block walls, and corrugated-iron houses hang on to the steep sides of the ridge on which Hill Station is perched.
However, a short walk off the main road reveals a very different built environment. Amid the red dirt roads and thriving palm and kapok trees, vast wooden bungalows are hoisted up on top of stilts. In varying states of decay and heavily modified with corrugated-iron extensions, these bungalows are still owned by the government and inhabited by civil servants and their families.
Milo Gough, CC BY-NC-ND
On my stroll through Hill Station, the neighbourhood was very quiet aside from several men finishing off the big job of painting one of the bungalows in pastel green. While only 12 of these colonial homes remain, at its peak Hill Station consisted of about 30 bungalows.
This mountain settlement, its first stage completed in 1904, was connected to Freetown’s city centre by a narrow-gauge railway that operated to suit the hours of the few government officials who lived in Hill Station and commuted into the city each day. After returning in the evening (the last train up was at 6:30pm), British colonial officials drank together and played billiards at the recreational club. At weekends they played tennis, watched by their wives and children.
The bungalows, club and railway were built at great expense – around £86,000, roughly equivalent to £9 million today – to provide a new way of life for this handful of white colonial officials, businessmen and their families who had previously resided in the city. This was a huge project that catered for a tiny white elite – by 1911, only 90 people out of Freetown’s total population of about 40,000 lived in Hill Station.
Investment on this scale was highly unusual in Britain’s African colonies, which were usually run on shoestring budgets. The colonial government rationalised it as a response to the discovery in the late 1890s that Anopheles mosquitoes were the vector of malaria.
But African people were identified as the “reservoir” of the disease and so, according to this logic, white people would be safe from disease if they spent the night – when mosquitoes were feeding – away from them. This understanding of disease prevention is characteristic of a period that saw a hardening of the racial hierarchy in British West Africa around monolithic categories of whiteness and blackness.
Wikimedia Commons
Escaping their ‘seedy civilisation’
To colonial officials and medical experts, the settlement of Hill Station was associated with whiteness, health and modernity. Its opposite was the city of Freetown, associated with blackness, dirt and disease. The hard binary of white-black and mountain-coast forged by the construction of Hill Station was new. But it was built on older ideas of disease transmission, race and landscape.
While I walked among the bungalows of Hill Station, a breeze blew across the ridge providing me with some relief from the hot and humid stillness that characterised Freetown’s city centre. More than a century ago, this breeze was highly prized by colonial medical officers as ventilation was thought to circulate “healthy” air.
The Hill Station bungalows were designed to harness the breeze. All four sides were lined with windows that could be opened to encourage the movement of air. But contrary to the aim of preventing the spread of malaria, the windows were not equipped with mosquito screens, as officials thought screens would prevent air flow.
Concrete foundations held iron stilts that raised the bungalows more than two metres from the ground. This functioned to distance occupants from the dangerous miasmas that were thought to emanate from the ground.
The idea that “bad air” was the cause of health problems remained central to the medical geography of empire even after the discovery of new tropical medicines. Freetown, perceived as insanitary and overpopulated, was understood as a hotbed of enervating miasmas that left white colonial officials vulnerable to contracting deadly fevers.
From the ridge, I looked down to the west over Lumley Beach, south towards the mountains of the Freetown peninsula, and east over the city centre. Freetown sprawled over the undulating terrain, pushing up tightly against the Atlantic coastline. From this same location, colonial officials would have surveyed the territory and perhaps felt secure in their place at the top of the colonial hierarchy.
Milo Gough, CC BY-NC-ND
In the 1890s, the governor of colonial Sierra Leone, Frederick Cardew, justified the construction of Hill Station because of the “exhilarating and bracing” sensory experience of walking along this ridgeline. He marvelled at a view that “could hardly be surpassed in any part of the world in range and beauty”.
Even after Sierra Leone gained independence in 1961, Hill Station has remained a site of state power. Adjacent to the old bungalows is the president’s official residence and the various high commissions of old imperial nations, all hidden behind high walls and barbed wire.
But earlier this year, several senior civil servants and their families were evicted from their Hill Station bungalows after the government of Sierra Leone granted Turkey and Saudi Arabia plots of land to build new embassies. Their bungalows are now slated for demolition.
The destruction of Freetown’s colonial-era built environment, including the once ubiquitous 19th-century Krio bode ose (board houses), has been a consistent feature of Freetown’s postcolonial period. Many locals, looking resolutely towards a better tomorrow, do not mourn the loss of the material aftermaths of colonialism. Yet the unchecked churn of urban development can also mean some important lessons from history are forgotten.
Nasa / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-ND
Sierra Leone’s ‘afro-dynamic ecocity’
The foundational idea of architects Foster + Partners for Sherbro Island City is to make it “afro-dynamic” – as encapsulated by its leaf motif, loosely inspired by the shape of Sherbro island. According to the marketing material, this leaf shows the way in which the city is both “connected to Africa” and “rooted in community”.
Having been a slave boat harbour in the 18th century, Sherbro island would go on to become an important colonial port. However, by the latter half of the 20th century, it was a remote and overlooked part of post-colonial Sierra Leone. The new architectural vision for Sherbro Island City doesn’t reference this history – but within the shiny publicity material, there are some echoes of Hill Station’s relationship with Freetown.
Back in October 1902, the Public Works Department erected signs in the vicinity of the proposed site, with one reading: “Warning. Any person found squatting, erecting huts, or planting on this and adjacent lands from this date will be PROSECUTED and EJECTED.”
While Sherbro Island City will also be built on land used by existing communities, SAP claims the new city will benefit the island’s population of around 40,000 people. But Bankolay Theodore Turay, a Sierra Leonean scholar based at the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, is sceptical. He explained to me that he is “not aware of any compensation process that has taken place for communities that will be dispossessed of their land, and those that will be relocated from the community”.
Sherbro Island City will exist on a separate legal footing from the rest of the nation as a special economic zone, and promises huge tax incentives to investors. It appears that it will be a private city, even if not in name, managed by business people and shaped by the interests of foreign capital.
The architects’ images conform to an aesthetic of globalised modernity. Where the bungalows of Hill Station were constructed from imported prefabricated materials that conformed to a pan-imperial style, CGI renderings of Sherbro Island City imagine a hyper-modern city of glass and steel that appears to have little to do with its locale.
Foster + Partners says it has “not engaged in any detailed designs at this stage, which will be shaped by input from several stakeholders including local communities”. It adds that all of the designs “are rooted in sustainability and a respect for the communities we design for”.
Turay told me that, regardless of SAP’s claims that the city will have minimal environmental impact, “construction work does not come without environmental issues, without changing the special dynamics of the community” in an area with an “ecological footprint that is very, very low”.
In an interview in 2023, SAP’s co-founder Stevens described how the idea for the new city first germinated while he was on holiday at a luxury beach resort in Dubai. He recalled thinking: “I wish I could make my country like this one day.”
It looks like Sherbro Island City will, like Hill Station, be a city for the elite. Fosters + Partners’ preview book describes five “character profiles” of potential residents of, and visitors to, the city. These are a tourist family from Europe, two renowned health professionals and young parents, a South African digital nomad living between Dubai and Singapore, a recent Harvard graduate, and a successful actor and DJ.
These profiles suggest the city will be for diverse people from all over the world, but with one condition: they must be well-off.
Africa’s masterplanned cities
Sherbro Island City is not the first masterplanned city for Africa in the 21st century. Over the past 20 years, similar plans for new cities have cropped up throughout the continent.
Perhaps the most notable is Eko Atlantic City in Nigeria. First announced in 2003, the Eko Atlantic project has radically altered the geography of Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos. Built on 6.5 million square miles of reclaimed land, it protrudes into the Atlantic Ocean from what was Bar Beach. Its first few skeletal tower blocks have changed the skyline of downtown Lagos.
Other projects on the continent have been less successful. Kenya’s Konza Technopolis, conceived in 2009, is still a work-in-progress street grid 50 miles outside the capital, Nairobi. Meanwhile, Ghana’s Hope City project got no further than computer-generated images of glowing towers before being cancelled.
And then there is Senegal’s Akon City, the brainchild of Senegalese-American rapper Akon. Six years after it was announced with great fanfare, Akon City is little more than a half-built welcome centre. Some parallels to the Sherbro Island City project are evident: both are backed by global superstars, and both promise to transform the fortunes of small and often overlooked west African nations.
Turay said his first reaction to the Sherbro Island City plans was: “Is this is going to be another Akon city?” Such city-scale projects require vast amounts of capital and organisation, and many flounder facing this harsh reality.
However, not all of these projects are mirages. As South African professor of urban planning Vanessa Watson has described, cities in Africa have become the latest frontier for speculative real estate investment. This trend sped up hugely after the global financial crisis of 2007–08 as, since then, interest rates have generally been very low and capital has sought out riskier investments with potentially higher yields.
The rise of a foreign capital-led, speculative real estate market in African cities has been widely celebrated. Many urban residents across the continent see visions for modernity and new concrete structures as evidence of development, investment, and change for the better.
Kehinde Temitope Odutayo / Shutterstock
Comments on Eko Atlantic update videos, for example, show great pride in these ambitious plans from people who will probably never afford to live in the city’s luxury apartments. Similarly, in Sierra Leone, many people appear optimistic about the prospect of a hyper-modern city that promises development in the form of investment, jobs and infrastructure.
However, according to Braima Koroma: “There are also voices of caution. Community members and environmental activists have raised concerns about the potential displacement of residents and the environmental impact of large-scale construction.” He suggests these concerns “underline the importance of ensuring that the development is inclusive, and takes into account the needs and rights of local populations”.
Exit schemes
Beyond Sierra Leone, in countries where city-scale projects have progressed further, concerns about their potential for entrenching inequality have been communicated in different ways. The Nigerian photographer Christopher Obuh’s series of images of Eko Atlantic City, No City for Poor Man, asks viewers to reflect on the unevenness of this speculative urbanism by showing the process of construction that is usually obscured by slick videos, glossy CGI renderings and marketing speak.
In an article about Eko Atlantic, journalist Katie Jane Fernelius argued that this new city is less about developing innovative solutions to the pressing problems of a changing climate, urban overcrowding and a lack of investment, and more a place of elite moneymaking where capital can be made liquid and free-flowing. In her view, Eko Atlantic City is likely to further entrench the highly unequal status quo.
Inequality was vital to the colonial system. European empires depended on the construction of rigid hierarchies, most often around ideas of race. More recently, harsh inequalities have again become a defining feature of the world since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s.
The speculative urbanism of the 21st century recycles colonial logics in the form of protected compounds, private suburbs and gated communities. These spatial fixes to the challenge of living amid the masses are supported by other fixes to the “problem” of regulation, such as special economic zones, freeports and tax havens.
In his 2022 book Adventure Capitalism, Raymond Craib describes libertarian schemes to carve out spaces beyond the regulatory systems of the nation-state, from private islands to seasteads and space colonies. These extreme forms of exit have largely remained imaginary – yet these exit plans are significant in themselves, as they tell us how the wealthy envision the future.
In using his stardom to mobilise investment in Sierra Leone, I’m sure Idris Elba genuinely wants to uplift the homeland of his father. But it feels problematic that many of the most ambitious attempts at urban development in Africa, and across the world, appear to manifest largely through “exit schemes”.
The Conversation has contacted representatives for Idris Elba, Sherbro Alliance Partners and Eko Atlantic, offering them the opportunity to comment on issues raised in this article. By the time of publication, we had not received a response from any of these parties.
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Milo Gough has received funding from the AHRC through CHASE DTP.
– ref. From a colonial hill town to Idris Elba’s island masterplan: what two Sierra Leone developments a century apart tell us about urban elitism – https://theconversation.com/from-a-colonial-hill-town-to-idris-elbas-island-masterplan-what-two-sierra-leone-developments-a-century-apart-tell-us-about-urban-elitism-233714
