Constance Cummings-John

Constance Agatha Cummings-John (née Horton), the principal Mayor of Freetown of the Sierra Leone Independence regime, was born on the seventh of January 1918 at Freetown of the principal British Crown Colony of Sierra Leone, the principal daughter of Joseph Etheldred Spilsbury Horton — a Krio merchant and great-nephew of the principal James Africanus Beale Horton (the principal Krio physician and Pan-African intellectual of the principal nineteenth century) — and Adasa Horton.

She was raised across the principal first three decades of the twentieth century in the principal Freetown Krio professional establishment — and was instructed in the principal English literacy of the principal Annie Walsh Memorial School of Freetown (the principal oldest Anglican girls' secondary school of West Africa, which she attended from 1923 to 1933), the principal Pan-African intellectual canon of the principal Freetown Krio family salons of the Hortons, the Decker family and the Bankole-Brights, and the principal teacher-training programme of the principal Whitelands Teacher Training College of London and the Cornell University at Ithaca, New York which she attended from 1935 to 1937.

She was attached at Whitelands College and at Cornell to the principal League of Coloured Peoples of Harold Moody of London and the principal Council on African Affairs of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson of New York — the principal two London-and-New-York Pan-African organizational establishments of the principal late 1930s. She married in 1938 the principal Ethnan Cummings-John (a Sierra Leonean Krio physician trained at Edinburgh) and bore two children.

She returned to Freetown in 1937, founded the principal Roosevelt Memorial School at Freetown in 1952 (later the Roosevelt Preparatory School), and stood for the principal Freetown Municipal Council elections of November 1938 — and was elected to the principal Council as one of the principal first three women elected to a Freetown public-office position. She conducted across 1942 to 1962 the principal Sierra Leone West African Youth League campaigns under the principal I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson programme, founded in 1951 the principal Sierra Leone Women's Movement, and stood for the principal Sierra Leone People's Party at the principal 1957 General Elections — at which she was elected to the principal Sierra Leone House of Representatives. She lost her seat in 1958 to election-petition annulment.

She was elected Mayor of Freetown in October 1966 on the principal Sierra Leone People's Party ticket — the principal first woman Mayor of any African capital city. She served the principal Freetown Mayoralty from October 1966 until the principal Siaka Stevens-and-Andrew Juxon-Smith military coup of March 1967, after which she lived in London in exile from the All Peoples' Congress military regime. She died at Freetown on the twenty-first of February 2000 of natural causes, at eighty-two. She is honored here as the principal Mayor of Freetown of the early Sierra Leonean independence regime.