Every year from then on, ships came from the United States carrying groups of liberated slaves, who began to settle in the area of present-day Monrovia. They did not constitute a large population. By the time the Republic of Liberia was proclaimed in 1847, there were only six thousand of them. It is quite possible that their number never even reached twenty thousand: less than 1 percent of the country’s population.
The fate and behavior of these settlers (they called themselves Americo-Liberians) is fascinating. Yesterday still they were black pariahs, slaves from America’s southern plantations, with no legal rights. The majority of them did not know how to read or write, and had no trade or professional skills. Their fathers had been kidnapped years earlier from Africa, transported to America in chains, and sold in slave markets. And now they, the descendants of those unfortunates, until recently slaves themselves, found themselves once again in Africa, in the land of their ancestors, among kinsmen with whom they shared common roots and skin color. At the will of liberal white Americans, they were brought here and left to themselves, to their own fate. How would they conduct themselves? What would they do? In contrast to their benefactors’ expectations, the newcomers did not kiss the ground or throw themselves into the arms of the local Africans.
From their experience in the American South, the Americo-Liberians knew only one type of relationship: master-slave. Their first move upon arrival in this new land, therefore, was to recreate precisely that social structure, only now they, the slaves of yesterday, are the masters, and it is the indigenous communities whom they set out to conquer and rule.
Liberia is the voluntary continuation of a slave society by slaves who did not wish to abolish an unjust order, but wanted to preserve it, develop it, and exploit it for their own benefit. Clearly, an enslaved mind, tainted by the experience of slavery, a mind born into slavery, fettered in infancy, cannot conceive or conjure a world in which all would be free.
A large portion of Liberia is covered in jungle. Thick, tropical, humid, malarial, and inhabited by small, impoverished, and weakly organized tribes. (Powerful communities, with strong military and state structures, lived most often on the wide, open expanses of the savannah. The unhealthy conditions and difficulty of movement and communication in the African jungle prevented such societies from arising there.) Now, newcomers from across the ocean start to move onto these terrains, traditionally occupied by an indigenous population. Relations develop badly and are hostile from the very start. To begin with, the Americo-Liberians proclaim that only they can be citizens. They deny that status, that right, to the rest — to 99 percent of the population. Laws are passed defining this majority as merely “tribesmen,” people without culture, savage, heathen.
The two groups usually live far from each other, and their contacts are infrequent and sporadic. The new masters keep to the coast and to the settlements they have built there, of which Monrovia is the largest. It would not be until one hundred years after the creation of Liberia that its president (it was then William Tubman) ventured for the first time into the country’s interior. The newcomers from America, unable to set themselves apart from the locals by skin color or physical type, try to underline their difference and superiority in some other way. In the frightfully hot and humid climate, men walk about in morning coats and spencers, sport derbies and white gloves. Ladies usually stay at home, or if they do go out into the street (until the middle of the nineteenth century there were no asphalt roads or sidewalks in Monrovia), they do so in stiff crinolines, heavy wigs, and hats decorated with artificial flowers. The houses the members of these high, exclusive echelons live in are faithful reproductions of the manors and palaces built by white plantation owners in the American South. The religious world of the Americo-Liberians is similiarly closed and inaccessible to the native Africans. They are ardent Baptists and Methodists. They build their simple churches in the new land, and spend all their free time within, singing pious hymns and listening to topical sermons. With time, these temples will come to serve also as venues for social gatherings, as exclusive private clubs.
As early as the middle of the nineteenth century, long before apartheid was instituted in southern Africa by the Afrikaners, it had been invented and made flesh by the rulers of Liberia — descendants of black slaves. Nature and the impenetrability of the jungle alone created a natural barrier between the natives and the newcomers, an uninhabited no-man’s-land that divided them and fostered segregation. But this was not enough. In the small, bigoted world of Monrovia, an ordinance is instituted forbidding close contacts with the local population, particularly intermarriage. Everything is done to ensure that the “savages know their place.” To this end, the government in Monrovia allocates to each tribe (there are sixteen of them) a territory where they are allowed to live — not unlike the typical “homelands” created for Africans decades later by the white racists from Pretoria. All who speak out against this are severely punished. Punitive military and police expeditions are dispatched to places of rebellion and resistance. The chiefs of unsubmissive tribes are eliminated on the spot, the rebellious population murdered or imprisoned, its villages destroyed, its crops set afire. In accordance with the ancient, worldwide custom, these expeditions, incursions, and local wars have a single overriding goaclass="underline" to capture slaves. The Americo-Liberians need laborers. And indeed, they start using slaves on their farms and in their businesses as early as the second half of the nineteenth century. They also sell them to other countries, especially to Fernando Po and Guinea. In the late 1920s, the world press discloses the existence of this trade, plied officially by the Liberian government. The League of Nations intervenes. The then president, Charles King, is forced to resign. But the practice will continue, only conducted in stealth.
From the very outset, the black settlers from America thought about how to preserve and strengthen their dominant position in the new country. At first, they did not allow its indigenous inhabitants, denied the rights of citizenship, to participate in government. They let them live, but only in designated tribal territories. Then they went further: they invented the single-party system of rule. In 1869, a year before the birth of Lenin, the True Whig Party is formed in Monrovia; it will enjoy a monopoly on power for the next 111 years, until 1980. The party’s directorship, its political bureau — a National Executive — decides everything, and in detaiclass="underline" who will be president, who will participate in the government, what sort of politics this government will conduct, which foreign company will get what concession, who will be appointed chief of police, head of the postal service, and so on, down to the lowest rungs of the civil service. The leaders of the party are the presidents of the republic, or the other way around — the positions are treated interchangeably. You can achieve something only if you are a member of the party. Its opponents are either in prison or abroad.
In the spring of 1963 I met its then chief and Liberia’s president, William Tubman, in Addis Ababa, during the first conference of Africa’s heads of state. Tubman was then close to seventy. He never took a plane — he was afraid. A month before the conference, he set out by ship from Monrovia, sailing to Djibouti, and from there he traveled by train to Addis Ababa. He was a short, slight, jovial gentleman with a cigar in his mouth. To troublesome questions he responded with long, resounding laughter, which devolved into an explosion of loud hiccups, followed by an attack of wheezing, convulsive breathlessness. He trembled, his eyes bugged out and filled with tears. The discomfited and frightened interlocutor would fall silent and dared not insist further. Tubman brushed the ashes from his suit and, calm once more, hid again behind a thick cloud of cigar smoke.