About the Project — Echoes of Resistance
Inspiration
I want to be honest with you about where this started.
It didn't start with a grand vision. It started with embarrassment.
I was in a conversation — the kind you have a hundred times — where someone mentioned Africa, and the only things that came up were poverty, aid, and war. And I sat there, and I didn't say anything. Not because I didn't care. But because in that moment, I couldn't name a single kingdom. I couldn't name a single resistance leader. I couldn't point to a single thing and say: here — here is what existed before the story everyone tells.
That silence stayed with me.
I started reading. And the more I read, the angrier I got — not at the people in that conversation, but at the gap. The gap between what West African history actually contains and what most people ever get to hear. I found Bai Bureh — a Temne chief who held off the British army for ten months with warriors who knew every tree and river of their own land. Ten months. And I had never heard his name once in my entire education. Not once.
I found Madam Yoko — a woman who governed one of the largest confederacies in 19th century West Africa through intelligence and diplomacy, protecting her people at a time when a single wrong move meant destruction. I found the Krio intellectuals of Freetown, writing letters and petitions in perfect English, arguing for liberty using the very philosophers Britain claimed to honour — and being ignored anyway.
These were not small people. These were not peripheral stories. They had just never been given a room loud enough.
Echoes of Resistance is my attempt to build that room.
What I Learned
I learned that colonialism's most lasting damage wasn't the violence. The violence was visible. People could point at it, name it, resist it.
The most lasting damage was the paperwork.
A conference in Berlin. A protectorate declaration. A tax on a roof. These are administrative acts — dry, bureaucratic, easy to dismiss as "historical context." But the Hut Tax of 1896 meant that a man who built a home with his hands, on land his grandfather farmed, now owed money to a government he had never voted for, never agreed to, never even been consulted by. And if he couldn't pay — or refused to pay, as Bai Bureh did — his village could burn.
That is not history. That is a design decision. Someone designed that system. Someone signed that order.
I also learned something quieter, something I didn't expect: culture is not decoration. It is infrastructure.
The Poro and Sande societies of the Mende and Temne — secret societies that transmitted law, medicine, history, and identity across generations — survived colonialism not by fighting it directly, but by existing in spaces the colonisers could not reach or understand. The Krio language, a creole stitched together from Yoruba, English, Temne, and dozens of other tongues, became Sierra Leone's lingua franca — a language that was itself an act of survival, proof that identity does not dissolve under pressure, it transforms.
I came into this project thinking I was building a history site. I finished it understanding I had been building an argument: that culture is the most durable form of resistance humanity has ever produced.
How I Built It
I built this alone, at odd hours, with no prior experience in cultural archival work and no personal connection to Sierra Leone.
That last part scared me for a long time.
I spent more time researching than building. I read academic papers on the Hut Tax War. I read about the Berlin Conference — specifically about the silence in the room, the absence of African voices, the way an entire continent's future was decided by people who had mostly never been there. I read oral histories. I looked for the names of people who weren't famous enough to have Wikipedia pages but were real enough to have shaped what Sierra Leone became.
The letters — the fictional ones from Bai Bureh, the Mende mother, the Krio scholar — took the longest. I rewrote them many times. Every draft that felt too dramatic, I pulled back. Every draft that felt too detached, I pushed forward. I kept asking myself: what would a real person actually say? Not a symbol. Not a representative of History with a capital H. A person — tired, angry, clear-eyed, writing something they know may never be read.
I hope I got close.
Technically, the site is built as a single self-contained HTML file — CSS, JavaScript, and even the portrait images embedded directly as base64. The portraits of Bai Bureh, Madam Yoko, and the Krio Intellectual were hand-illustrated programmatically using Python, painted in the site's black, gold, and earth palette, because I wanted figures that felt like they belonged to this specific world — not stock images, not generic silhouettes, but something made deliberately for this.
The interactive map, the scroll-reveal timeline, the stats that count up from zero when you reach them, the reflection wall where visitors can leave their own response — all of it was built in service of one goal: make the person scrolling through this feel something. Not just know something. Feel it.
Challenges
The hardest moment in this project wasn't technical.
It was the night I almost scrapped the letters entirely.
I had written a draft of Bai Bureh's letter that I thought was strong. I showed it to someone, and they asked me: "Who gave you the right to speak in his voice?" And they weren't wrong to ask. I sat with that question for two days. I am not Sierra Leonean. I am not Temne. I have not inherited this history. What am I doing writing words and putting them in the mouth of a man who resisted a colonial empire?
I decided to keep the letters, but I changed how I thought about them. They are not Bai Bureh's words. They are an act of imagination in his direction — grounded in what he actually did, what was actually recorded, what the logic of his situation actually demanded of a person. They are clearly labelled as imagined. And I think there is value in that kind of imaginative act, if it is done carefully and honestly, because the alternative — saying nothing, leaving the silence intact — felt like the worse choice.
But I want anyone who reads this to know that I held that question seriously. I did not take it lightly.
The second challenge was simpler and more frustrating: I kept building things that looked impressive but felt cold. Early versions of the site were technically fine — the animations worked, the layout was clean — but they didn't feel like a memorial. They felt like a presentation. I had to strip things back, slow things down, let the words breathe. Good design in a project like this isn't about adding more. It's about knowing when to be quiet.
The third challenge was the question at the heart of this entire hackathon: is culture just art?
I didn't have a clean answer when I started. I do now. No. Culture is not art. Art is one of the ways culture survives. But culture itself is something older and wider — it is the full texture of how a people live, govern, remember, resist, and refuse to disappear. Bai Bureh's resistance was culture. The Mende mother's instruction to her daughter — remember every story I have ever told you — was culture. The Krio scholar writing into a silence he knew would not answer him was culture.
This project is culture too, I hope. Small and imperfect and made by someone who had no particular right to make it — but made anyway, because some silences are everyone's responsibility to break.
The lion is learning to write. This is one page.
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