As was the case in many settler-colonial regimes, like the U.S. in Puerto Rico, the British Empire aggressively enlisted colonized peoples into its military during wartime. A new commemoration project by Tosin Oshinowo will speak to this history. Sir Edwin Lutyens designed 44 war memorials all throughout the U.K. before his death in 1940. Lutyens also built a World War I memorial in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in a government building courtyard. It was updated after World War II to include the names of more dead Sierra Leonean soldiers. Tosin Oshinowo of Oshinowo Studio, a Lagos architecture office, is now adapting Sierra Leone’s National Memorial for Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). Oshinowo is the first woman and the first West African to be commissioned by CWGC, the organization said. The update will deliver structural glass members atop the existing Lutyens memorial. (Courtesy Hayes Davidson) The memorial, CWGC added, will honor the Carrier Corps, or “non-combatant laborers and soldiers from across Africa that contributed toward campaigns.” The Carrier Corps transported war supplies “across terrain that was impassable to vehicles and animals”—at least 946 of them died in combat, and were never commemorated. The original design by Lutyens is a squat masonry block with plaques on the sides that slightly tapers upward in profile. The existing memorial has the names of 229 soldiers who died in World War I, and also World War II casualties, but no names of Carrier Corps members. This will soon change: Oshinowo Studio’s proposed design modifies the existing block’s top section with a new pyramid made of structural glass. A beacon of light will shine from the pyramid’s apex, making the memorial visible from 2 miles away at night when it shines. The addendum will be made of four structural glass blades etched with the names of 946 Carrier Corps members. “Honoring the past, shaping the future, our design for the Freetown memorial stands not only as a tribute to the fallen, those who lost their lives during the First World War, but as a symbol of Sierra Leoneans’ collective commemoration, representing cost of war and a people’s resilience, as well as the global commitment to peace for generations to come,” Oshinowo said in a statement. The overall project is informed by CWGC’s Non-Commemoration Report, which is meant to combat historical inequities in British World War I memorials. So far, CWGC has completed a new memorial in Cape Town, South Africa, as part of the campaign, among other works.