Oshinówò Studio Completes Carrier Corps Memorial in Freetown, Sierra Leone

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) has unveiled a new Carrier Corps memorial in Freetown, Sierra Leone, honoring more than 900 members of the Sierra Leone Carrier Corps who died in the First and Second World Wars. Designed by Lagos-based Oshinówò Studio, the intervention opened on November 7 and commemorates the Carrier Corps individually by name for the first time. The design was first revealed in May 2025, and the finished work now stands as a permanent addition to an existing national monument.

That existing monument is the original Freetown Memorial, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and unveiled in 1931. It serves as Sierra Leone’s national memorial for those who died in the World Wars and have no known grave, and its bronze panels record the names of African soldiers from the West African Regiment, the Sierra Leone Battalion of the West African Frontier Force and the Royal Engineers Inland Water Transport. Members of the Carrier Corps, however, were not named individually on it and were commemorated numerically, which is the gap the new structure closes.

The addition is a prism of structural glass, glass used as a load-bearing element, permanently integrated onto the Lutyens memorial. Four structural glass fins reaching 8.4 meters in height are etched with the names of the fallen, and the structure incorporates 4,000 kilograms of glass. The edges of the glass are lit, and a laser beacon will send a pillar of light into the night sky on significant days of commemoration in Sierra Leone, visible within a five-kilometer radius across Freetown.

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Delivering the work took 16 months and a team spread across several countries. Engineers, glass designers, laser consultants and construction partners from Nigeria, the Netherlands, Spain, Sierra Leone and the UK worked with the CWGC on the project, while CWGC stonemasons and bronze specialists restored the original base, uplifting the bronze panels and renewing the stonework. The names on the glass are accompanied by an epitaph in Krio and English by poets Nii Ayikwei Parkes and Julianknxx, which reads: “from today you will be carried, you are borne, now and ever.”

The studio also designed four marker memorials in provinces from which carriers were raised. These satellite sites follow the language of the Freetown Memorial and result from a co-design process that determines the places, people and events to be memorialized, which is a new approach for the CWGC. The project is accompanied by a register of names, museum partnerships and educational programs for schools.

Tosin Oshinówò describes the design as a continuation of the older monument rather than a separate object. “The structure we designed is, in effect, an extension of Sir Edwin Lutyens’ existing monument. By following its tapering geometry, the new monument rises higher, elevating the immense volume of names etched into glass. In this gesture, the Sierra Leone Carrier Corps are symbolically carried by their comrades, reversing the relationship between those who served and those who were served.” He adds that there is “a profound irony in this act: it becomes a fitting expression of gratitude to men whose sacrifice was fundamental to shaping the world we inhabit today.”