Warning: This story contains disturbing details of violence.
The office is warm, colourful and inviting, and the same goes for May-Marie Duwai-Sowa, the woman who brought it to life just over a year ago.
No signs point the way nor has there been any great fanfare, so people in Hamilton may have no idea that a little piece of Sierra Leone’s government has taken up residence in the city’s downtown.
At the corner of West Avenue and King Street, on the third floor of a building that started out as a brush factory in the 1890s, is Sierra Leone’s Office of the Special Envoy for International Relations, Trade and Investment (SEIRTI) — the only one in Canada.
It’s where Duwai-Sowa works diligently as the special envoy. Born in Sierra Leone, she ended up in Hamilton after she was forced to flee the West African country’s civil war in 1999.
Canada is a great country that Sierra Leoneans need to know a lot more about. Likewise, Canadians need to know more about Sierra Leone.– May-Marie Duwai-Sowa, special envoy
Now a Canadian citizen, Duwai-Sowa’s mission is to help find ways to better connect the two countries.
Once she was named special envoy, Duwai-Sowa wanted the office to be in her adopted home of Hamilton. The goal of the office is to help establish stronger diplomatic ties, investment and international relations between Sierra Leone and Canada.
“My goal is to make meaningful connections for both countries,” said Duwai-Sowa, 46. “Canada is a great country that Sierra Leoneans need to know a lot more about.
“Likewise, Canadians need to know more about Sierra Leone, and know about the history of Sierra Leone, and the potential and prospects that Sierra Leone has.”
“They’re two places that are so close to my heart,” she added. “That’s why this office matters so much to me.”
At the moment, trade between the two countries is modest. In 2022, Canada exported $9.8 million Cdn worth of goods to Sierra Leone while receiving $6 million worth of imports. Compare that with the $697.4 billion worth of goods Canada exported to the U.S. last year.
Freetown’s Canadian connections
Canada and Sierra Leone have an important historical connection that dates back more than 200 years.
In the wake of the American Revolutionary War, thousands of formerly enslaved Black people who fought on the side of the British resettled in Nova Scotia, but they faced harsh conditions, financial exploitation and discrimination. Joining them in Nova Scotia were hundreds of Black Jamaicans who were forcibly resettled to Nova Scotia in 1796 following the Maroon War.
Between 1792 and 1800, about 1,700 of these new Nova Scotians took advantage of an offer to return to Africa. Those who survived the cross-Atlantic journey helped establish the city of Freetown, now the capital of Sierra Leone.
In recent years, the country has rebounded from a string of calamities. There was a decade-long civil war during the 1990s that left 50,000 people dead and another 500,000 people displaced. An Ebola virus outbreak in 2014 and 2015 killed around 3,600 people, according to the World Health Organization. And like the rest of the world, Sierra Leone dealt with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020.
Today, about 3,100 immigrants from Sierra Leone are living in Canada, according to 2021 census figures, with more than half of them settled in Toronto, Edmonton and Winnipeg. About 80 people from Sierra Leone live in Hamilton.
Mark Stewart, a strategic management professor with McMaster University’s master of communications management program, acts as an adviser to the SEIRTI office.
Stewart is also president of marketing agency FlyPrint, and a board member and adviser to Empowerment Squared, a Hamilton-based charity that helped build the first post-war public library in Liberia, which neighbours Sierra Leone to the south.
The library project was the dream of Leo Johnson, a refugee of Liberia’s civil war in the late 1990s, who settled in Hamilton and founded Empowerment Squared.
Stewart said Duwai-Sowa is “uniquely suited” for her new role as Sierra Leone’s special envoy in Hamilton.
“Obviously being Sierra Leonean and Canadian, she has a great appreciation and affinity for both of these countries,” Stewart said. “There is something notable in having someone doing this role who actually authentically knows, and is connected to and is literally a citizen of both countries.”
‘If we survive this, you have to leave’
Duwai-Sowa’s journey to Canada began 25 years ago.
She can recall the first time rebel forces infiltrated her family’s home in Sierra Leone.
A civil war that started in 1991 along the border with Liberia had been spreading for several years. On Jan. 6, 1999, the rebel forces reached the capital of Freetown on the Atlantic coast. Duwai-Sowa went into hiding.
“We were told there was a list of names and they would go house to house looking,” she said.
Her parents were government civil servants, making the family a potential target for the rebel fighters. “We had already escaped and gone to an aunt’s place in another part of town, thankfully.”
Her father stayed behind to protect the house. The rebels arrived, looking for him. He pleaded with them but they pushed their way in, making their way to Duwai-Sowa’s empty bedroom.
“They couldn’t find us, but they came into my bedroom and shot it,” she said. “For the longest time, I kept the mirror with a gunshot in it.”
The rebels ransacked the place and took a book of 100 poems she had written. “That one book I lost in the war still breaks my heart,” she said. Then, they tried to set the house on fire.
“My dad pleaded with them and somehow they left without killing him,” she said.
Soon after, the family’s second experience with the rebels was even scarier.
Duwai-Sowa was 21 and studying sociology at a university in Freetown.
While hiding out in another house, Duwai-Sowa peeked out a front window and saw a group of rebels confront a young man outside. When he turned to walk away, she watched them shoot the man in the back.
“The scream stayed with me for so long, this animal sound,” she said.
Rape and amputations were used as weapons of terrorism by the rebel forces, and women and girls were targets, said Duwai-Sowa. Her mother’s greatest fear was that it could happen to Duwai-Sowa.
“My mom said if we survive this, you have to leave,” she said.
Duwai-Sowa and her family were hiding under beds when the rebel fighters came upstairs.
“They walked around and I was holding my breath, trying not to breathe,” she said. “There was a priest in the house where we were hiding. He talked to them and by the grace of God, they left.”
How she ended up in Hamilton
That narrow escape was the final straw.
Duwai-Sowa was the only one in her family with a visa, so she fled to New Jersey to live with her uncle. The rest of her family were taken in as refugees in Gambia, another West African country.
She enrolled at a local university in New Jersey, graduated in 2000 and was granted asylum by the U.S.
At the time, she was dating a fellow Sierra Leonean who also had gone to Gambia as a refugee.
He relocated to Canada for work, then asked her to come visit Toronto. They went to Niagara Falls, the Caribana festival, the CN Tower and on horse-drawn carriage rides — “all the touristy stuff,” she said. In the process, she fell “in love” with Canada.
“My parents told me, ‘We don’t mind if you want to venture out and explore Canada but you can’t just go live with a guy,'” she recalled with a laugh. “The compromise was if I wanted to come study, I could come to Canada.”
In 2003, Duwai-Sowa moved to Toronto with whatever could fit in her car and started in the master’s program of sociology and international development at the University of Guelph.
A year later, she was married.
Her husband — they’re now separated — then got a job in Hamilton with Settlement and Integration Services Organization. Out of curiosity one day, she came to Hamilton to attend an anti-racism symposium.
A chance encounter led to an interview and she was hired for the role of community developer with the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion.
From there, she was hired by the City of Hamilton and became the first person there to hold the position of accessibility and equity specialist. In 2017, she joined McMaster as an employment equity specialist.
After she helped negotiate the signing of a memorandum of understanding between McMaster and Sierra Leone around educational opportunities, Duwai-Sowa encouraged the government to explore more partnerships with Canada. The government, in turn, suggested she would be the ideal point person and the special envoy’s role was created in 2023.
Duwai-Sowa had always imagined she would one day return to Sierra Leone, but there came a point when she decided Canada was her new home.
“It was starting to be the place I had lived the longest and I was starting to build community,” she said. “I can still contribute to Sierra Leone and other parts of the world without having to leave.
“I came for love but then I stayed because I fell in love with Canada and the people.”
She has now brought her parents to Canada to live permanently, a process that took eight years, in part because of the Ebola outbreak.
Sharing Sierra Leone’s ‘potential’ with the world
There are scars that are still healing, both for Duwai-Sowa and her birth country.
“Little things like fireworks used to traumatize me,” Duwai-Sowa said. “Just the sound of it terrified me. That’s when I realized that there’s a lot of trauma that I hadn’t addressed because I didn’t have the tools.”
Helping people deal with the after-effects of a long civil war and the subsequent Ebola crisis remains one of Sierra Leone’s challenges.
There’s also the problem of young people addicted to kush, a cannabis derivative, often mixed with other drugs, that’s cheap and plentiful.
“You have a lot of people who are living with this mindset of no longer nation first but survival first,” said Duwai-Sowa. “We’ve normalized hardships. We’ve normalized suffering. We’ve normalized deprivation.
“How do we unlearn those things and begin to value ourselves so we can achieve our potential?”
Having worked previously with organizations in Liberia and Ghana, Stewart is familiar with the hurdles that a country such as Sierra Leone must overcome.
West African countries have a lot of scars, but many people there, especially young people, are “very ambitious,” Stewart said.
“They have a lot of aspiration to build their countries.”
Sierra Leone’s president, Julius Bio, has established his “Big 5” key priorities going forward: agriculture and food security; human capital development; youth employment initiatives; improved infrastructure; and a revamped public service.
More than half a dozen members of the cabinet are under age 40 while 30 per cent of the country’s members of Parliament are women, one of the highest rates in West Africa.
Duwai-Sowa believes Sierra Leone has turned the corner on its tumultuous past and is ready to prosper. Her goal with the SEIRTI office is to help foster partnerships with Canadian agencies, academic institutions and businesses.
Down the road, there may even be an opportunity to elevate the office into a Sierra Leone consulate in Hamilton, or perhaps even the country’s embassy in Canada.
Leaving Sierra Leone a quarter-century ago under traumatic circumstances hasn’t dampened the love she has for her birth country.
“I am who I am because of the foundation Sierra Leone gave me — my appreciation for diverse cultures and people, my humility about humanity,” Duwai-Sowa said. “All of that was nurtured into me in Sierra Leone.
“I’ve seen suffering, love, all of these things in Sierra Leone. I’ve seen women in leadership. I’ve seen women in advocacy.
“I understand its resilience but I also see its potential,” she said. “I feel the world doesn’t know enough about it.
“At the same time, I recognize I have a new home, a place I hold dearly. How can I be a conduit to connect these places? This is an opportunity for me to give back.”
For anyone who has been sexually assaulted, there is support available through crisis lines and local support services via the Ending Violence Association of Canada database. If you’re in immediate danger or fear for your safety or that of others around you, please call 911.
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