John Kizell

John Kizell is believed to have been born in the Gallinas region, southeastern Sierra Leone, around 1760. He was captured as a young boy in the early 1770s, enslaved and transported to Charleston, South Carolina.

During the American Revolutionary War, he joined the British. In 1783, after the war ended, John traveled with about 3,000 other black loyalists from America to Nova Scotia, Canada to settle there.

In 1792, John Kizell landed in Sierra Leone with nearly 1,200 black settlers from America. Together, they cleared a settlement near the Sierra Leone river and named it Freetown. John Kizell had returned back to the region of his original home that he had been enslaved in almost 20 years earlier.