Two Sierra Leonean Activists Have Fled the Country After a Police Raid and a Manhunt

George Reginald Freeman Browne, executive director of the Sierra Leonean LGBTQ+ organisation Pride Equality, and his partner Edwin Bolaji Deen have left the country. They have been wanted by police since 30 August, when officers raided a party the two men attended, and in the weeks since, according to an account Freeman gave to Erasing 76 Crimes, the pressure on them and on their families has escalated to the point where returning is not an option they consider survivable.

Police issued arrest warrants charging the pair with “homosexuality (gay) and LGBTI social activity,” claimed their work was “likely to cause the breach of the peace,” and offered a reward for information leading to their capture. That is an unusual level of public mobilisation against two named individuals in a country where the relevant law is very rarely used in court.

What has happened since the raid

Writing from outside Sierra Leone on 10 September, Freeman described a situation that had deteriorated sharply over a matter of days. Both men have been receiving continuous death threats and warning calls on WhatsApp from unknown numbers, alongside calls from family and friends telling them never to come back.

Deen’s father has died. His mother told him his father had suffered severe emotional shock and distress before his death, and his family now blames Deen for it. Police, Freeman wrote, have continued raiding and pressuring the family to produce Deen even after the funeral, following a 3 September article in a local newspaper that named him publicly.

Their landlady contacted them to terminate the lease on the flat they rented, telling them they would be arrested if they returned and forfeiting two years of rent they had already paid. “We feel completely trapped, unprotected, and overwhelmed right now,” Freeman wrote.

We are relaying this account as it was given. Freeman is the named source and the detail is his own, which is the only responsible way to report on people whose safety depends on what does and doesn’t get published about them.

The law that makes this possible

Sierra Leone criminalises sex between men under section 61 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 — an English statute that remains in force in Sierra Leone through the Courts Act 1965, more than six decades after independence. It carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment and, as written, applies only to men.

The Human Dignity Trust notes that the provision is not actively enforced through prosecutions. That does not make it decorative. A law like this one functions less as a charging instrument than as a permission slip: it tells police that queer people are legitimate targets, it tells landlords and employers that discrimination carries no consequence, and it gives newspapers licence to print a man’s name and photograph next to the word “homosexual.” Freeman and Deen’s case is a fairly exact demonstration of the mechanism. Nobody has been convicted of anything. Two people have still lost their home, their country, and in Deen’s case his family.

Pride Equality is one of only a handful of organisations working openly on LGBTQ+ rights in Sierra Leone, and it has spent years doing HIV outreach, community support and advocacy in an environment where that work is constantly negotiable. Losing its executive director to exile is not a small administrative problem for a group that size.

Bad timing on top of bad timing

This has landed at the worst possible moment for the infrastructure that might otherwise catch people like Freeman and Deen.

Outright International published its report “Breaking Point” on 10 September — the day before Freeman’s account was published — and we’ve covered its findings separately. The short version is that nine in ten LGBTIQ organisations surveyed worldwide have lost, had suspended or seen reduced funding since January 2025, with four in ten saying they are at severe or immediate risk of closure. The emergency funds, legal support networks and relocation grants that African activists have historically relied on when a raid turns into a manhunt are precisely the things that have been cut.

So the sequence in Sierra Leone is not isolated. Across the region, Erasing 76 Crimes has documented anti-gay raids in Cameroon that sent six men back to prison in early September, and admissions by Senegalese police that they subjected female suspects to anal examinations. What connects these cases is not a single policy but a shared calculation by governments that the cost of moving against queer people has gone down.

What support actually looks like now

For two people in Freeman and Deen’s position, the practical needs are unglamorous and immediate: somewhere lawful to be, legal representation for an asylum claim, money to live on while that claim is processed, and — in Deen’s case — some form of mental health support for a man grieving a father whose family holds him responsible for the death.

Those needs are met, when they are met at all, by small organisations and individual donors rather than by governments. That has always been true. It is more true now than it was two years ago.

Sierra Leone’s colonial-era law has been raised repeatedly in constitutional reform discussions and has survived each time. The more realistic near-term goal, and the one groups like Pride Equality have generally pursued, is the unglamorous work of keeping people alive, housed and out of custody while the law stays on the books. That work continues in Sierra Leone whether or not its best-known director can be in the country to do it — which is, in the end, the thing that a manhunt is designed to prevent, and the thing it usually fails at.