The story of the Nova Scotians in Sierra Leone is inherently compelling. It comprises the experiences of enslavement in Africa, slavery and war in the British North American colonies, emancipation, and settlement in Nova Scotia, and finally, in 1792, the return to Africa. There nearly 1,200 of them settled in the foundering ‘Province of Freedom’ which had just been taken over by the Sierra Leone Company. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Nova Scotians have attracted considerable interest from historians and continue to do so. The book under review by Kevin Lowther, a non-academic historian, is an addition to this historiography. Lowther's objective is to provide a ‘serious’ biographical study of John Kizell and to explore ‘the evolution of the African-Atlantic diaspora’ and ‘the forces linking South Carolina and Sierra Leone’. The book includes a three-page foreword by historian Joseph Opala, setting out its importance.

Kizell's life certainly merits such attention, particularly from an Africanist's point of view. Although some historians of the Nova Scotians have referred to him, there has been no study devoted exclusively to him until now. Kizell played an interesting role in Sierra Leone, although he was not one of the Nova Scotian leaders or rebels against the Company. Rather, he was a pioneer trader who used his good rapport with several Sierra Leone governors to his own advantage. He served on diplomatic missions to neighbouring regions, most importantly to the Sherbro to negotiate an anti-slave trade treaty. In 1811, he became the first president of ‘The Friendly Society of Sierra Leone’, a trading cooperative that he had co-founded with an Afro-American trader to escape the stranglehold of European company officials over Sierra Leone's trade. This trans-Atlantic connection led to Kizell's contact with the American Colonisation Society, which in 1818 made an abortive attempt to found an Afro-American settlement at his town on Sherbro Island before eventually settling in what became Liberia. Kizell clearly was a complex and ambivalent individual who negotiated his way within the colonial hierarchy, African society, and a web of trans-continental connections.

Lowther brings great enthusiasm to the subject and made efforts to find sources in archives in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, although not in Sierra Leone. He has traced a Kysell family who may have been Kizell's masters in South Carolina. However, Lowther's book fails to do justice to Kizell's complex life. There are several reasons for this. One of them is a lack of focus on Kizell as Lowther gets carried away with the bigger story of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery in America. As a result, nearly half of the book is devoted to the United States, despite the fact that there is scarcely any information about Kizell's life there. Most is retrospective, second-hand, and brief, coming as it does from a letter by Governor Columbine published in the African Institution's Report of 1812 (and partly contradicted by information from Governor Macaulay's journal, which Lowther ignores). The first strictly contemporary records that put Kizell on the spot date from the mid-1780s when he was in Nova Scotia. Instead of focusing on the parts of the biography for which there is information, that is, in Sierra Leone, Lowther fills the gaps with descriptions of the historical context, including extensive quotes from secondary literature, and a generous amount of speculation about what Kizell and other Africans may have seen, heard, felt, or thought. For example, faced with the harsh winter in Nova Scotia, the African immigrants ‘might well have thought longingly of the relative comfort of a thatched hut and the abundance of tropical fruit’ that supposedly characterised their former life in Africa (113).

This indicates other problems, including a lack of analytical depth. Even for the period of Kizell's life in Sierra Leone that is relatively well documented, the evidence is uneven and fragmented, demanding careful interpretation and contextualisation. This, however, is not provided. Nor is there much interest in the complexities and (apparent) contradictions in human behaviour, which for example may have meant that Kizell's own experience of slavery did not necessarily lead to his sympathetic treatment of social inferiors, such as the liberated African boy who was apprenticed to him. For Lowther, things are clear, if based on guesswork: ‘[The boy's] eventual fate is unknown, but Kizell must have felt special kinship to a youth who could have been himself forty years earlier’ (p. 199). Instead, there is a meandering narrative based on a combination of sources and (not always relevant) secondary literature, which is strewn with generalisations and clichés about Africans and Africa. The result is a book that sits uneasily on the boundary between a ‘serious’ biography and the historical novel that Lowther originally wanted to write.