People & Culture

Liberia holds two geographies that never quite agree with each other. Along its 560 kilometres of coast, mangrove swamp and lagoon give way to surf beaches and old ship landings, while inland the country rises into a rolling plateau still carrying roughly 40 percent of its surface in rainforest, part of the Upper Guinean forest belt of which Liberia holds more than any other country. That coast produced one of the most distinctive maritime traditions in West Africa. The Kru, whose skill handling canoes through heavy surf was already famous to European traders by the eighteenth century, worked as pilots, porters and sailors on ships up and down the continent, from Senegal to Cameroon, and were valued highly enough as free labour that slavers are reported to have avoided taking them, since Kru men were known to take their own lives rather than accept bondage. Inland from that coast lies the Sapo forest of Sinoe County, the second largest block of primary tropical rainforest left in West Africa after Cote d'Ivoire's Tai forest, holding forest elephants, pygmy hippos and chimpanzees in a region botanists still rank among the most biodiverse anywhere. Long before any ship from America appeared offshore, this land was organised by peoples whose institutions still shape rural life. The Poro society for men and the Sande society for women, found across Liberia, Sierra Leone and into Guinea, carried initiation into adulthood along with much of the region's judicial and spiritual authority, and some scholars trace their origin to the Gola, one of the peoples holding the Cape Mesurado area before any settler arrived. Alongside the Gola lived the Kru, Grebo, Bassa, Kpelle, Mano and Gio, each with its own language and territory. The Vai, concentrated in what is now western Liberia, produced something rarer. In the early nineteenth century Momolu Duwalu Bukele developed the Vai syllabary, an indigenous writing system devised independently of any script imported from outside Africa. Sources disagree on exactly when, with some putting the invention as early as 1815, many settling on the 1830s, and the script's own documentary record beginning only after 1819, when Bukele returned inland from the coast. What is not in dispute is where the Vai live now. A modern count places roughly 140,000 Vai in Liberia against just over a thousand across the border in Sierra Leone, which makes Liberia rather than Sierra Leone the centre of Vai life today. The settlement that became Liberia arrived by an entirely different route. In 1820 and 1821 the American Colonization Society, a Washington body that mixed abolitionists who wanted free Black Americans to escape a racist republic with slaveholders who wanted the free Black population removed from it, sent settlers first to Sherbro Island near Sierra Leone, where disease killed a large share of them. Society agents Eli Ayres and Robert Stockton then negotiated with local leaders for a foothold at Cape Mesurado, and on 7 January 1822 a party landed on a small island in the Mesurado River that the settlers called Providence Island. Survivors from Sherbro reached the mainland at Cape Mesurado that 25 April. Jehudi Ashmun, who arrived in August with another thirty-seven colonists and became the colony's first effective administrator, spent the following years defending the fragile settlement and negotiating, not always peacefully, with the Gola and neighbouring peoples whose land it now occupied. Frederick Douglass and most Black American leaders of the period rejected the whole project as a scheme to drain off free Black Americans and leave slavery in the South undisturbed, a criticism historians still weigh against the society's more sincerely abolitionist wing. On 26 July 1847 the colony declared itself the independent Republic of Liberia, and Joseph Jenkins Roberts, who had emigrated from Virginia in 1829, was elected its first president that October and inaugurated the following January. Britain recognised the new republic in 1848, while the United States, wary of formal ties with a Black republic, withheld recognition until 1862. The 1847 constitution restricted citizenship to persons of colour, a clause meant to invert American racial law in the settlers' favour, but it drew the line just as sharply against the indigenous population whose land the settlers had taken. Birthright citizenship for indigenous Liberians in their own territory was withheld until 1904, and full political rights lagged decades beyond that. The settler elite, a small Americo-Liberian community clustered in the coastal towns, governed through the True Whig Party, founded in 1869, which held power without interruption from 1878 to 1980, the longest single-party run in modern African history. The cost of that arrangement surfaced most starkly in 1930, when the League of Nations sent a commission under the British jurist Cuthbert Christy, joined by the former Liberian president Arthur Barclay and the American sociologist Charles S. Johnson, to investigate reports that Liberian officials were forcing indigenous labourers onto Spanish plantations on Fernando Po. The commission's report implicated senior figures in the government, including Vice President Allen Yancy, in practices it judged akin to slave trading. President Charles D. B. King and Yancy both resigned that December, and Secretary of State Edwin Barclay took office in their place. Four years earlier, in 1926, the government had granted the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company a ninety-nine-year lease on one million acres, roughly four percent of the country's territory, at six cents an acre, tied to a five-million-dollar loan that bound Liberia's finances to the company for decades. It became, and remains, the largest single rubber plantation operation in the world. William Tubman, president from 1943 to 1971, tried to open the economy while reworking the politics around it. His Open Door Policy invited foreign capital on a scale that drew more than a billion dollars of investment within twenty-five years and gave Liberia one of the fastest growing economies anywhere in the 1950s, and his National Unification Policy extended the vote to indigenous property owners, who cast ballots alongside women for the first time in the 1951 election, though real power stayed with the coastal Americo-Liberian minority. That imbalance broke on 12 April 1980, when Master Sergeant Samuel Doe led seventeen non-commissioned officers into the Executive Mansion and killed President William Tolbert. Ten days later Foreign Minister Cecil Dennis and a dozen other officials, tried without defence counsel or right of appeal, were marched to a beach near the Barclay barracks and shot by firing squad in front of crowds of indigenous Liberians for whom the killings closed out more than a century of settler rule. Doe's own government collapsed into the wars that followed. Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia launched its uprising on Christmas Eve 1989, opening a war that ran until Taylor's election as president in 1997, and a second war against his own government broke out in 1999 and lasted until 2003. Every faction in both conflicts recruited children as fighters, a practice that began with Taylor's forces and spread to their rivals, and every faction has been documented committing summary killings, rape and forced conscription. Estimates of the total dead vary by source, with Liberia's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission putting the toll at 250,000 while the United States government and other assessments cite figures closer to 150,000 or 200,000, a gap that reflects how much of the killing happened outside any system capable of counting it. The peace that finally held owed less to the men who signed it than to the women who forced the issue. In 2002 Leymah Gbowee organised Christian and Muslim women into the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, whose sit-ins and public pressure are widely credited with pushing Taylor toward the negotiating table and then into exile in 2003. Two years later Ellen Johnson Sirleaf won the presidency and became the first woman elected head of state anywhere in Africa, with Gbowee's networks having helped turn out the vote that elected her. Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission worked from 2005 to 2009, and in 2011 the Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize jointly to Sirleaf, Gbowee and the Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman for their work on women's role in building peace. Barely three years later the country met a different catastrophe, recording 10,675 Ebola cases and 4,809 deaths between 2014 and 2016, the heaviest toll of any country in that West African outbreak, before the World Health Organization declared it over in June 2016. A visitor standing on Providence Island today stands on an eleven-acre spit at the mouth of the Mesurado River that still holds the old landing dock, a well, building foundations and the country's oldest cotton tree. The site sits on Liberia's tentative UNESCO World Heritage list rather than the inscribed list, a distinction tourism copy routinely gets wrong, and the government has recently begun redeveloping it as a heritage destination. A short walk up the hill overlooking downtown Monrovia and the West Point neighbourhood, the shell of the Ducor Palace Hotel, once among Africa's grandest and closed since the wars began in 1989, still stands roofless and stripped with its walls left as they were found. South of the capital the Firestone plantation at Harbel can still be visited by arrangement, its rows of rubber trees and its processing plant a working monument to the 1926 concession. Two hundred kilometres west at Robertsport, on the Cape Mount peninsula, the Atlantic breaks across point after point rated among the best surf in West Africa, with the brackish lagoon of Lake Piso just behind the town for anyone who prefers flat water and birdwatching to waves. Inland at Kpatawee in Bong County a tiered waterfall on a branch of the St. John River drops into a dark tea-coloured pool inside the rainforest, and Sapo National Park further south protects the largest tract of that forest left in the country, one of the few places anywhere to see forest elephant, pygmy hippo and Diana monkey under the same canopy. In the far southeast, Harper on Cape Palmas still holds the ruined plantation-style mansions of the Americo-Liberian families who settled it in 1833, their columned facades, Tubman's own house among them, standing empty and weathered above a coastline that once looked toward Baltimore rather than toward Monrovia. Moving through this history asks for some care about where a camera is pointed. Providence Island and Harper's old houses carry the memory of a settlement built by formerly enslaved people that in turn excluded and subordinated the people already living there, a history Liberians themselves still argue over, so a guide who can speak to both sides of it is worth more than an unaccompanied walk. Poro and Sande remain active and private institutions rather than museum exhibits, which means masks or ceremonies glimpsed in rural areas are not photograph opportunities without permission, and a refusal should end the matter. The Ducor's ruin and the sites tied to the civil wars sit inside living memory for most adult Liberians, and a visit there is better spent listening than narrating.