In 1817, two stories that had nothing to do with each other collided in a name. In London that year, Princess Charlotte of Wales - the only child of the future King George IV, and the young woman expected to one day be queen - died after childbirth at just 21, her baby stillborn, plunging Britain into mourning. That same year, in the green mountains above Freetown, a new village rose to shelter African men, women, and children freed from the holds of slave ships. The British named the settlement Charlotte, after the lost princess. The grief belonged to a palace; the village belongs to the people who made their home in it.
Charlotte sits in the mountains of the Western Area Rural District, about twenty miles outside Freetown, close to the neighboring villages of Regent and Leicester. It is high, cool, and green, a farming community where the land still provides the main living. The village runs its own affairs through a directly elected council led by a Village Head - Catherine K. Harding was chosen in the 2013 election - even as it sits within the larger rural district. Almost everyone in Charlotte belongs to the Creole, or Krio, community, and the village is known for the depth of its Christian faith. Its several churches stand as the social and spiritual anchors of a place built, from the start, around the idea of starting over.
Charlotte's founding is the heart of its meaning. After Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron patrolled the coast, intercepting slave ships and freeing the captives crowded into their holds. These liberated Africans - called recaptives - were brought to Freetown, and as their numbers grew, the British settled many of them in villages carved into the mountains above the town. Charlotte was founded in 1817 to house them. Out of these settlements, and the Maroons, Black Loyalists, and others who came before, grew the Krio people who fill the village today. Every family here descends, in one way or another, from people who were torn from their homes, freed on the open sea, and given the chance to build a life on solid ground.
For a village this small, Charlotte holds an outsized place in the history of education. The Annie Walsh Memorial School - the oldest girls' secondary school in sub-Saharan Africa - was originally founded here by the Church Missionary Society. It began humbly, with just eight pupils, in a community where the very idea of educating freed African girls was radical. The school eventually outgrew the hills and moved to Kissy Road in Freetown in 1865, where it continues to this day. Its first classrooms, though, sat here in the mountains, among the children and grandchildren of people who had themselves been denied every freedom, learning to read in the place their families had been given to start again.
The village's reverence for learning never left. Charlotte is home to the Solomon Ekuma Berewa Primary School, named for the former Vice President of Sierra Leone, who opened it himself on November 10, 2006. The school has become one of the highest-scoring primary schools in the country's national examinations - a striking achievement for a small mountain village with no secondary school of its own, whose older students walk to Regent and Leicester to continue their studies. From the freed children of the Annie Walsh classrooms to today's top-ranked pupils, Charlotte has kept faith with the conviction that built it: that people given their freedom deserve, above all, the chance to learn.
Charlotte lies at roughly 8.42 N, 13.20 W in the forested mountains of the Freetown Peninsula, about 10 nm southeast of Lungi International Airport (GFLL) across the estuary, and around twenty miles inland from central Freetown. From the air, look for a small village set in green peninsula highlands above the capital, near the neighboring settlements of Regent and Leicester, with the Atlantic visible to the west and south. Best viewed at 3,000-6,000 ft in dry-season clarity (November-April); harmattan haze and rainy-season cloud (May-October) can reduce visibility over the hills.