An ambitious campaign has been launched to twin the county with a small fishing village in Sierra Leone called Kent.
Towns across the county are already twinned, such as Ramsgate and Chimay in Belgium, Canterbury with Rheims, France and Tunbridge Wells with Wiesbaden in Germany.
Such partnerships were encouraged after the World War Two to bring Europeans closer together.
But campaign organisers believe now the time is right to bring the UK closer to African nations, many of which have been torn apart by more recent conflicts such as the devastating civil war in Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2002.
The village of Kent is in the south west of the country on a peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean near the capital Freetown, there are around 1,000 residents and the people mainly earn their living from fishing.
Josie Renner, who was born in Kent, Sierra Leone, and now lives in Gravesend, is one of the organisers of the twinning campaign.