Liberia

By: Kate Tuttle

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Liberia

Located on the Atlantic Ocean coast of West Africa, Liberia is bordered by Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire. Once regarded by the West as the continent’s most stable, prosperous, and peaceful country, Liberia is one of only two African countries never colonized by a European power (Ethiopia is the other). Its modern political foundation was built by Free Blacks from the United States who settled in West Africa in the early 1800s. Since that time, relations between Liberia’s native peoples and the African-American settlers have rarely been easy. After more than 130 years of government dominated by the Americo-Liberians, a military coup ended the First Republic in 1980, after which an unstable government faced a series of insurrections. A second revolt occurred in 1989, and throughout the 1990s Liberia suffered from political chaos, civil unrest, famine, and violence. Some experts estimate that about 10 percent of Liberia’s population died during that period, while another 80 percent was dislocated. A new era in Liberia’s modern history began when, after years of civil war, Charles Taylor surrendered power in 2003.

Early History

Anthropologists believe that Liberia’s first inhabitants were hunter-gatherers, ancestors of the Gola and Kissi peoples of the Mel language group. They were joined by Kruan people (the Kru, Kuwaa, Bassa, Kran, and Dei ethnic groups) who migrated from the north and east. Later, around the fifteenth century, people of the Mande language group moved into the area, among them the Gio, Mano, Loma, Bandi, Mende, and Kpelle.

Traders from the savanna kingdoms of West Africa visited Liberia’s early communities, seeking spices, gold, and ivory. In the fifteenth century, trade shifted to the coast when European merchants came seeking Malaguetta peppers, gold, and, later, slaves. The chiefdoms of the Mande- and Mel-speaking groups in what is now northern Liberia met the demand for slaves by forging alliances and conducting raids on neighboring peoples. Other exports included rice, palm oil, and textiles. In return, the indigenous peoples received European firearms, knives, jewelry, and liquor.

American Settlement

The end of the transatlantic slave trade spawned the republic of Liberia. By the late eighteenth century, the abolitionist movement had become a powerful force in Great Britain. Abolitionists ended the British slave trade in 1804, but some hoped to do more—to restore enslaved Africans or their descendants to their home continent. In 1787, 1,500 freed British slaves were settled in the English colony of Sierra Leone. Drawing partly on this example, a group of American abolitionists organized the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816. Although some other repatriation groups were run by people of African descent, the ACS was administered solely by wealthy white men, including such prominent members of society as former U.S. president James Madison and Kentucky congressman Henry Clay. As many historians have noted, the ACS goal of relocating America’s free black people in Africa united two very different groups: those who saw the abolition of slavery and resettlement in Africa as the best route to restoring African American dignity and freedom, and those who supported slavery as an institution and considered free blacks a threat to its existence.

In addition to soliciting funds from the U.S. government, the ACS sold memberships to free American blacks, many of whom were farmers, professionals, or small businessmen. Memberships—which were lifelong, and did not necessarily mean that the holder planned to go to Africa—cost $30. One ACS agent estimated that by 1825 the group had raised “not less than $50,000” through membership sales. In claiming that this money went into “the treasury of the Lord,” the agent revealed the religious basis for much of the ACS’s work; many supporters, black and white, were motivated at least in part by the desire to spread Christianity.

In 1820 the group launched its first ship, the Elizabeth, which sailed with more than eighty African American emigrants. After landing on the coast of what would be northwestern Liberia, many of these first arrivals died of tropical diseases to which they lacked immunity, and the group retreated to Freetown, Sierra Leone. More settlers arrived the following year and founded a town at Mesurado Bay. The Americans were controlled by ACS governors, whose board was all white until 1842 and supported by the U.S. military. In 1824 they named their first settlement Monrovia, after U.S. President James Monroe. The colony itself was named Liberia, from the Latin liber, meaning “free.” The Liberians adopted a Plan of Civil Government and began negotiating treaties with indigenous chiefs to expand their territory and ensure their safety. Over the next decade, state colonization societies continued to sponsor the emigration of free blacks to Liberia, and the population of Americo-Liberians grew to around 3,000. In 1838 they formed the Commonwealth of Liberia; the next year they adopted a constitution based on that of the United States.

Relationships between the settlers and the indigenous population were often strained. Liberian law excluded “tribal” people from most jobs and schools. It also tried to impose Christian practices on them through such means as outlawing work on Sundays. In addition, the settlers—most of whom were artisans or semi-skilled workers—had begun to establish a caste-like social system, in which the most wealthy and well educated formed an elegant and sheltered elite. But unlike Africa’s European colonies, Liberia had no discrimination based on color to divide long-time inhabitants from newcomers. It was possible, though difficult, for Africans to enter settler society. In addition, intermarriage and informal multiple-marriage arrangements, and the children born to such unions, helped swell the Americo-Liberian population.

First Republic

Independence came earlier to Liberia than to other African nations. Resistance to ACS authority grew among the colonists; they also wanted nationhood so that they could regulate the activities of European traders within Liberia’s borders. On July 26 1847, the Americo-Liberians declared their independence from the ACS. They elected Joseph J. Roberts, the first nonwhite ACS governor, as president of Liberia. Roberts, who served for eight years, oversaw the founding of Liberia University in Monrovia and expanded the new country’s boundaries, largely through treaties with local ethnic groups.

William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman was the nineteenth president of Liberia. Under his direction Liberia entered World War II on the side of the Allies, and would go on to become a significant world economic power. Tubman served in office from 1944 until his death in 1971. Library of Congress

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Liberia began receiving diplomatic recognition from other nations, including the United States, Haiti, and Germany. Divisions within the Americo-Liberian community led to the formation of two political parties, the Republicans and the True Whigs (both based on American parties of that era). Starting with the 1870 election of Edward James Roye, the True Whig Party (TWP), which was almost entirely Americo-Liberian, became the dominant force in Liberian politics. It would remain dominant for 110 years.

The early years of Liberian independence saw continued tensions between the Americo-Liberians and the indigenous peoples, who did not enjoy full citizenship rights. These tensions sparked rebellions by a number of groups, including the Kru Confederation in 1856 and the G’debo Kingdom in 1875. In 1873, the Liberian government gave the native peoples some representation in the legislature, calming the political waters to some degree. The interior of Liberia, however, was not truly under the central government’s control until the 1920s.

Following the economic model of the American South, the settlers developed a plantation economy and cultivated sugarcane and coffee, often employing Africans liberated from slave ships. But they faced stiff competition from other countries that produced the same crops, and persistent economic problems forced Liberia to seek foreign loans. In return for support from the United States and Great Britain, Liberia served as a base for Allied armies during World War I, after declaring war on Germany in 1917. When the war was over, foreign industries began arriving. The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company was the most influential—it started operations in 1926 and eventually became the country’s largest private employer. In 1929, the American-led League of Nations investigated allegations of forced labor at the Firestone plant, a charge that led to the resignation of Liberian president Charles D. B. King.

The 1944 inauguration of William V. S. Tubman continued the unbroken chain of True Whig presidents. During Tubman’s twenty-seven-year presidency, Liberia was open to foreign investment, had close ties with Western powers, and slowly extended political opportunities—although not economic ones—to groups that had previously been shut out of power. Tubman extended the vote to women in 1945 and to indigenous people in 1946, although Americo-Liberians continued to enjoy a representative advantage in the legislature.

When Tubman died in 1971, his vice president of nineteen years, William R. TOLBERT, Jr., became president. In what some historians see as an effort to distinguish himself from Tubman, Tolbert attempted to reach out to the growing populist movement while at the same time continuing to support the old-line establishment. Not surprisingly, both sides soon distrusted him. Tolbert’s foreign policy mixed the familiar dependence upon the United States with new aims, such as establishing relations with the People’s Republic of China and raising money for the Antiapartheid Movement in South Africa. For most Liberians, however, the most pressing concern was the domestic economy, which in the late 1970s suffered from declining world prices for the rubber and iron that were Liberia’s primary exports and from the rising cost of imports. Popular discontent over increasing food prices led to the 1979 Rice Riots, led by the Progressive Alliance of Liberians (PAL) and the Movement for Justice in Africa (MOJA).

Doe, Taylor, and Civil War

On April 12 1980, Samuel K. Doe, a master sergeant in the Liberian army, led seventeen men to Tolbert’s home and assassinated him. The men, former members of the People’s Progressive Party, called themselves the People’s Redemption Council (PRC) and declared themselves in charge of the government. Doe, who staffed his administration with fellow members of the Krahn ethnic group, pledged that his military rule would be only temporary. In 1984 voters approved a new constitution written by Dr. Amos Sawyer, a University of Liberia professor who had been involved with MOJA. Doe promised that elections would be held the following year. But from the beginning Doe faced challenges from former PRC accomplices—who led at least two failed coup attempts—and when he and his newly formed National Democratic Party of Liberia (NDPL) won the 1985 elections, they were suspected of widespread vote fraud. Doe took revenge on the coup plotters by burning and sacking the towns of their ethnic groups, drawing accusations that he was engaging in tribal favoritism and persecution.

A pattern of quick turnover and unexplained deaths in Doe’s administration, coupled with heavy restrictions on press freedoms, prompted the United States to send advisers in 1987 as a condition for continued foreign aid. Liberia’s economic woes had heightened tensions throughout the country, and these had in turn strained relations with neighbors such as Sierra Leone and Guinea, which feared a flow of refugees from Liberia. Their fears were justified. In late 1989, a group called the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), led by CHARLES TAYLOR, a former government official facing arrest for corruption charges, launched a rebellion in Nimba County, on the border of Côte d’Ivoire. Liberians fleeing the NPFL spilled into neighboring countries, while shipments of smuggled arms crossed the borders in the opposite direction. Facing a threat to regional stability, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) intervened in 1990, sending a multinational peacekeeping force (ECOMOG) to take control of Monrovia. Much of the rest of the country, however, remained under the control of Taylor’s NPFL.

Although peace talks took place in gambia in August 1990, Taylor did not attend. Shortly afterward, he declared himself the true president of Liberia. Meanwhile, a rebel group led by Prince Yormie Johnson had made surprising inroads into Monrovia, and in September this group assassinated Doe. ECOMOG ultimately secured the capital again, but Taylor still controlled the countryside.

The next opposition force to enter the fray was Johnson’s United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO), which included some of Doe’s former supporters. After crossing the border from Sierra Leone in 1991, this group clashed repeatedly with Taylor’s NPFL troops. Fighting continued and grew more intense. Reports appeared of NPFL’s numerous human rights abuses, including the drafting of preadolescent boys as soldiers and the wholesale execution of civilians. The first half of 1993 was characterized by repeated skirmishes among ULIMO, the NPFL, and ECOMOG, which had abandoned its peacekeeping role and become an active combatant. After the breakdown of a July 1993 cease-fire, the United Nations established an observer mission in Liberia. At the same time, new factions emerged. Many of them were based on ethnic affiliations, and most of them were armed.

Taylor Era Ends

Throughout the mid-1990s the major factions in Liberia’s civil strife tried to make peace, fearing the threatened removal of ECOMOG troops (which now included soldiers from Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Togo)—an event that would likely result in even more widespread war. The UN Security Council increased the number of its observers, but each attempt to build a coalition or forge a peace agreement failed. Then, at an ECOWAS-sponsored meeting in Nigeria in August 1995, the combatants signed a peace accord, agreeing on plans for a council of state that would last until free elections could be held. Professor Wilton Sankawulo was pronounced chairman, and the main factional leaders, including Taylor, were on the council.

But hostilities continued, including fighting between Taylor’s forces and the predominantly Krahn defenders of the Doe regime, who had thrown their support behind Johnson’s ULIMO. In August 1996, a former senator named Ruth Perry was chosen to replace Sankawulo as council chair, becoming the first African woman head of state in modern times. Elections were held in July 1997. In a field of thirteen political parties, Taylor’s National Patriotic Party proved strongest, and Taylor won the presidency he had sought for nearly eight years. Within months of the election, several of his political rivals were found dead under suspicious circumstances.

Years of civil strife and warfare had weakened Liberia’s economy, which had been declining even before Doe’s 1980 coup. Before the war, about half of Liberia’s population lived in the countryside; subsistence farming and the export of iron ore, wood, and rubber were the dominant economic activities. Liberia had also long maintained a large shipping fleet due to its “open registry” policy for foreign ships. But the war, in addition to creating a huge refugee population and destroying the homes and businesses of hundreds of thousands of Liberians, had disrupted rural food production. By 1997, the country was heavily dependent on food aid, and many regions faced a severe food shortage. The only people who had benefited from the years of turmoil were the leaders of the armed factions who took advantage of the opportunity to make deals with foreign firms for diamond mining in the country’s interior.

In 1999, new opposition to Taylor’s rule formed in Liberia. An anti-Taylor group called the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) mounted armed resistance to his administration and gradually gained control of more and more of the country. Economic and social conditions in Liberia worsened during the early years of the twenty-first century, when food shortages became desperate and lawlessness reigned. After the United Nations accused Taylor of promoting a civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone, it banned him from selling diamonds or traveling outside Liberia. In 2003 fighting in Liberia rose to new intensity, and by the middle of the year Taylor’s forces controlled only Monrovia. Under pressure from the United Nations, the United States, and other African nations, Taylor resigned from office in August, turning the presidency over to Moses Blah, his vice president.

See also Human Rights in Africa.

Liberia

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William Tubman.  William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman was the nineteenth president of Liberia. Under his direction Liberia entered World War II on the side of the Allies and went on to become a significant world economic power. Tubman served in office from 1944 until his death in 1971.

(Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

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