Thomas Peters -- Nigeria

Thomas Peters (known also as Thomas Potters) was one of the Founding Fathers of Sierra Leone.  Peters, along with David George, Moses Wilkinson, Cato Perkins, and Joseph Leonard, were influential blacks who recruited African settlers in Nova Scotia for colonisation of Sierra Leone.  Peters himself was a former African-American slave who fled North Carolina with the British during the American Revolutionary War and later ended up as a leader in Freetown.

Thomas Peters has been called the first African American hero, like Elijah Johnson and Joseph Jenkins Roberts of Liberia, is considered the African American founding father of a nation.  Thomas Peters was born in Nigeria, and was an ethnic Yoruba of the Egba clan, in 1760 the twenty-two year old Thomas Peters was captured by slave traders and sold as a slave to Colonial America.  

In 1776, Peters fled his owner's flourmill at the start of the American Revolutionary War and joined the Black Pioneers.  A Black Loyalist unit made up of runaway African American slaves, the British had promised freedom in exchange for supporting the war effort against the colonies that formed the new United States.  Peters rose to the rank of sergeant in the regiment and he was twice wounded in battle. 

After the war the Black Pioneers were among the thousands of Loyalists transported by the British Navy to the north shore of Nova Scotia and then on to New Brunswick.  Peters soon became the recognised leader of the black communities, representing their concerns to provincial authorities.  Murphy Steele and Thomas Peters had developed a friendship during their service in the Black Pioneers, together they petitioned the government for land together.  In the process, he met abolitionist Granville Sharp, who had developed a plan to create a settlement of free blacks in Africa. 

Peters persuaded thirty families to go to Sierra Leone in 1790, however soon after arriving problems arose, supplies were inadequate, disease took its toll on the newcomers as the settlers slowly adjusted to the climate and new agricultural conditions.  When the leaders of the colony seemed unresponsive to these issues, Peters again spoke up for the black settlers.  He protested against the lies and exaggerations that were made, such as the promises of land grants, no taxation on the lands of the first settlers, and most importantly a democratic government. 

Thomas Peters wasn’t responsible for the broken promises, but the black Sierra Leone colonists blamed him for persuading them to come to Africa.  Peters lost the confidence of the settlers and was later accused of theft when trying to collect a debt, and was tried and convicted by a jury.  Soon after his conviction Thomas Peters fell ill and died of malaria in Freetown, during the first rainy season in 1792 leaving a wife and seven children.  A number of Creoles can claim descent from Thomas Peters and he is considered to be a "George Washington" figure of Freetown, Sierra Leone.  His descendants are members of the Creole ethnic group that live predominantly in Freetown. 

In 1999 Peters was honoured by the Sierra Leone government by being included in a movie celebrating the country's national heroes.  In 2001 it was suggested that Percival Street in Freetown was to be renamed in his honour, but this has yet to be done.  Leo Wringer portrayed Peters in the BBC television Rough Crossings (2007).