John Kizell was an American immigrant who became a leader in Sierra Leone as it was being developed as a new British colony in the early nineteenth century.
Years later, after the American Revolutionary War, during which he gained freedom with the British and was evacuated to Nova Scotia, he eventually returned to West Africa.
[1] Kevin Lowther has proposed that Kizell may have been Bom or Krim, other peoples who lived on the islands and in this area near the Sierra Leone coast.
[2] As a child, Kizell (as named in North America) was captured and sold into slavery, taken during a visit to see his uncle, a chief who lived nearby.
[3] Surviving the Middle Passage, the boy was sold again after his ship reached Charleston, South Carolina, which had a major slave market.
The city was the center of a major area of rice and long-staple cotton cultivation, two labor-intensive commodity crops that created a high demand for enslaved labor.
Implementation of such plans was slow, and the immigrants suffered from the harsh climate, limited supplies, and, for the blacks, discrimination by present and former enslavers.
Great Britain was developing a new colony in West Africa for resettling the formerly enslaved people they had evacuated, including some "Black Poor" in London.