Oluwaseun Babalola and Ishmael Beah talk to us about how Sierra Leone's past impacts its present and future.
Oluwaseun is a Sierra Leonean-Nigerian-American filmmaker; she founded DO Global Productions, a video production company specializing in documentaries.
Ishmael, born in Sierra Leone, is the New York Times bestselling author of 'A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,' 'Radiance of Tomorrow, A Novel,' and his latest novel 'Little Family' released in 2020.
The idea of freedom was at the core of Sierra Leone’s founding over two hundred years ago, and the contestation over the meaning of that concept shaped its political trajectory since. The capital, Freetown, was first founded in the late eighteenth century by British abolitionists, wanting to find a home for both the undesirable poor blacks of England and newly freed former slaves who had helped them fight the American war of independence. A negotiated independence, won without mass struggle, would leave the work of decolonization incomplete, and a series of coups and military dictatorships, would culminate in a devastating civil war between 1991 and 2002. Following that, Sierra Leone took on another epochal mark, becoming a “post-conflict state.”
