“That the American headquarters,” he said, nodding in the direction of a palatial white estate surrounded by high, razor-wired, cinder-block walls. The Stars-and-Stripes drooped from a flagpole, and a spindly forest of antennas and several large satellite dishes scanned the skies from the flat, palisaded roof of the main building. “CIA, FBI, the Marines — all of ’em in there,” Satterthwaite said, as if to himself, and chuckled. “Busy, busy, busy.”
“Oh,” was all I said. And thought: My country, my enemy.
I knew almost nothing then of the history of Liberia and its deep and abiding connections to my country, my enemy. Piecemeal and from various sources I gradually discovered where I had landed. Liberia is a tiny nation, barely the size of Tennessee and shaped like a thick-bodied lizard, and for generations has given the appearance of being of no newsworthy importance to anyone not actually in residence there. There is fertile land for growing rice and other tropical crops; and rubber, of course, but not much; and beneath the jungle floor a few small caches of diamonds, but hardly enough to sell off or trade away, it was thought. And were it not for the end of the Cold War and, within a year or two, the discovery of a deep and wide vein of diamonds running the length and breadth of the land all the way into Sierra Leone and Guinea, the country might have remained — except to its residents and academic and U.S. State Department specialists — an all-but-forgotten backwater, a misplaced packet of towns and jungle villages and one small city squeezed between its larger, richer, more socially elaborate and cantankerous neighbors on either side, Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire.
To get to the beginning of the modern history of Liberia and to understand its peculiarities, you have to return to the early nineteenth century, when religious, financial, and racial interests in the United States neatly converged over the idea of installing a man in West Africa. In the early 1820s, white Americans, having noticed the presence of a growing number of ex-slaves on the streets of northern cities, began to realize for the first time that they were facing not just a slavery problem, but a race problem as well. And while the first problem was political — merely the price a republic had to pay for the economic advantages of owning a self-perpetuating, constitutionally protected slave-labor force of nearly three million people — the second, the “race problem,” was moral, emotional, cultural, and, I suppose, sexual. Its dimensions were mythic and deeply threatening to most white Americans’ dearly held view of themselves as a morally and racially pure, not to say, superior, people. Besides, the presence of growing numbers of freed black Americans living more or less like white people in cities like Philadelphia and New York was having an unsettling effect on the slave population in the South. Before you knew it, the free blacks would want the vote. Before you knew it, they’d join with the radical abolitionists and in some states would come to outnumber the pro-slavers.
Thoughtful white and some black Americans asked themselves, Why not send the freed slaves back to Africa? Why not create an alliance between northern white Christians and anti-slavery advocates and slaveholders from New York State to Georgia, and give the already free and manumitted blacks some seed money, an ax, and a Bible? And why not raise government and philanthropic funds to purchase the freedom of enslaved blacks — especially the more troublesome ones — give them a one-way ticket to Africa in exchange for their freedom, and let those people go?
Baptist and Methodist missionaries on reconnaissance had already spotted a corner of coastal West Africa overlooked by the British, French, and Portugese slave traders that perfectly suited these purposes. It was a large tract of impenetrable jungle, mangrove swamps, and malaria-infested estuaries, a plot of super-heated, saturated ground that no one else wanted — except, of course, for the fifteen or sixteen tribes of illiterate, black-skinned savages who happened to be living there unencumbered by legal deed or title. The word Liberia was not on any map, though surely the native people had a name for the region and for the Mandingo tribal village situated conveniently for coastal trade between the Europeans and the tribes from the hinterlands on a high peninsula at the seaside terminus of a large river. Why not ship forty or fifty thousand mostly literate, nominally Christian black-skinned Americans overseas to Africa, then? Why not send them from the fatherland to the motherland, from the home of their masters to the home of their ancestors, tell them this land is your land, and let them make the place safe for Christianity, civilization, and capitalism?
The place was perfect. The first American settlers — several hundred Christian freedmen and — women and recently manumitted slaves — came ashore in 1825. They named the Mandingo trading village on the peninsula Monrovia, after James Monroe, the fifth American president, who had been an early sponsor of the notion of return. And thus, in short order, was established the first U.S. colony. Soon to be known as the Republic of Liberia, it was organized from the start to operate not as a straightforward colony, but as a covert surrogate, clamped tight to the white-skinned leg of its North American founding fatherland. Consequently, as early as the 1840s, the Americans, unlike their European cousins, had installed in West Africa a homegrown, self-replacing class of overseers — a loyal ruling class made up of tens of thousands of freed and escaped ex-slaves who’d been making Philadelphia, New York, and Boston so scary, and nearly as many manumitted slaves, almost all of them from the South, who’d been offered and had accepted banishment in place of slavery. And for a long time, even to today, the arrangement paid the investors back handsomely.
After the Civil War, of course, it grew increasingly difficult to convince African-Americans to relocate to the soppy, equatorial jungles of West Africa, when they could homestead instead in Kansas or the Oklahoma Territory. Recruitment by the American Colonization Societies, as the founders were called, fell off. In Liberia, however, a diminished ability to recruit new settlers turned out not to be a major handicap. By the 1870s the black American settlers were running things — mainly from the coastal towns of Monrovia and Buchanan — efficiently and ruthlessly enough to generate a wide range of exports at little or no cost to the Stateside importers. Not only was this a feel-good program for white Christians in the United States, but also the resident tribes of savages in the nation were proving to be nearly as economically advantageous as the enslaved African-Americans had been back before the Civil War. The black Americans in Africa had duplicated nicely the old Southern and Caribbean plantation overseer system. It had worked there; it could work in Africa, too. No reason for the whip hand to be white.
By the end of the nineteenth century, just as in parts of the deep South and the Caribbean at the end of the eighteenth, one percent of the population of Liberia for all intents and purposes owned the other ninety-nine percent, and a huge chunk of the profits generated by the back-breaking labor of that ninety-nine percent went straight to the board rooms of America. Where, after the usual executive skim, it got distributed to the white Christian shareholders whose parents and grandparents had put up the original investment. When you pay for the seeds, you get to keep most of the crop. That’s why they call it seed money.
Until the turn of the century, the main exports were rice, lumber, spices, bananas, cocoa, and from the hinterlands, ivory. In the twentieth century, with the development of the auto industry, the main crop became rubber. But things change. Not everything, of course; principles of exploitation and use remain the same. Where once there had been enough black-skinned savages and rubber to put treads on every motor vehicle in the West and enough banana trees to put a banana on every plate, by the late 1950s, cheaper, closer-to-home supply sources for both rubber and tropical fruit had been located. The Firestone, B. F. Goodrich, and United Fruit ships turned towards Central and South America and Hawaii, and our man in Africa got left behind.