Freetown Mayor Calls 2‑Year Terms ​“Crazy”

The mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, traveled across an ocean to her home’s ​“sister city” in New Haven to promote cross-continent comity, a shared history of liberation, green energy consciousness, and — unexpectedly — longer mayoral terms.

That happened Thursday at noon, when Freetown Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr met up with New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker at the Amistad statue outside of City Hall. She was joined by New Haven Sister Cities Program President Althea Norcott, past sister cities President Barbara Lamb, Roslyn Hamilton, and Cheryl Ray.

The two top mayors walked side by side in a circle around the decades-old memorial to one of the great, successful revolts in the history of the international slave trade, which has connections to both New Haven and Sierra Leone.

That connection dates back to 1839, when a 53 enslaved Africans captured from Sierra Leone revolted aboard a Spanish schooner while being ferried between Havana and Puerto Principe, Cuba to be sold into slavery. After being captured by the U.S. Navy, they were later imprisoned in New Haven, where they and a coalition of local, state, and national abolitionists fought years of legal battles to restore their freedom and ultimately return to Sierra Leone.

Aki-Sawyerr was in New Haven — after flying from Freetown to Accra, Ghana to New York City Thursday morning — in order to participate in a panel discussion on climate change on Friday morning at the Hixon Center Urban Conference at Yale University. She was also in town to sign a ​“Sister Cities Reaffirmation Agreement” with New Haven’s mayor, upholding a relationship of cultural exchange between the two cities that dates back to 1996.

“Freetown and New Haven have been sister cities for longer than I’ve been a mayor,” said Aki-Sawyerr, who recently finished her first five-year term in office and has won reelection to serve another five years. She said the sister city relationship with New Haven was started by Florence Dillsworth, who in addition to serving as the mayor of capital city of Sierra Leone in the 1990s, was also the principal of the school that Aki-Sawyerr went to as a kid. 

Like former Mayor Dillsworth, she said, ​“I am also a Creole. I have the same history. My great, great, great grandparents left the plantation in Virginia in landed in Freetown in 1792.” Her family has been there ever since.

What goes through her mind as she looks at the New Haven statue of Sengbe Pieh and memorial to the Amistad revolt?

“Resilience, perseverance, courage. All words which make what they did back then possible, and all words which we still need today,” she said.

And what’s life like in Freetown right now?

“There’s a cost of living crisis,” Aki-Sawyerr said. ​“We’re also facing a political impasse.” She said that the city has an ​“energy deficit” and a ​“waste crisis” and is feeling the brunt of climate change. ​“You don’t have a population explosion like we do,” she said about New Haven. In Freetown, which has over one million residents, there’s a ​“rapidly growing population. It’s eating away at” many of the city’s previously green spaces. 

She said that she came to New Haven to participate in Friday’s climate change panel in part to emphasize that addressing carbon emissions and resulting manmade climate change has to be addressed by the ​“global community,” and not any one city. ​“We’re the ones on a bicycle who have been hit by the ones in the limousine,” she said by way of analogy of lower-carbon-emitting countries getting hit hardest by climate change that has been exacerbated by huge, wealthy countries like the U.S. that are also some of the world’s biggest carbon emitters.

Elicker also celebrated the unique historical connection between Sierra Leone and New Haven in his welcoming of Freetown’s mayor to the city.

When the two city leaders first met, Aki-Sawyerr gave inadvertently weighed in on one of an issue of lively political debate in New Haven this year: that is, lengthening the term for New Haven’s mayor.

The city’s mayor currently serves two-year terms. A charter revision proposal on the ballot this November will ask New Haven voters whether or not terms for mayor and alder should both be bumped from two to four years each.

Aki-Sawyerr said that, in Freetown, the mayoral term used to be four years, and was recently increased to five.

When she found out how long New Haven’s mayoral term is, she said with a gasp, ​“Two years is crazy! I think it’s very hard to get an agenda articulated” and to act on that agenda in such a short time period. Mayor Elicker agreed.

Click on the video below to watch an interview with both mayors at the scene, and click here to read a timeline of Freetown’s and New Haven’s sister cities relationship.