Neocolonialism’s Legacy: Liberia Wars With Its Past : Rebellion: After centuries of American involvement, a woeful African nation struggles with the residue of U.S. imperialism.

When the Nigerians ravaged themselves in civil war, the British, their former colonial masters, followed the news avidly, took sides fervently and meddled shamelessly. More recently, when the Islamic fundamentalists won an electoral victory in Algeria, the news made the French, the former colonial masters, shudder with fear for the country’s future.

But now that Liberia is embroiled in the despair and bloodshed of a civil war, few Americans seem to care. Yet, we are as responsible for the creation of Liberia as the British for Nigeria and the French for Algeria.

Unlike the British and the French, we never looked on ourselves as imperialists. We never accepted the responsibility of treating Liberia as a colony. Yet the United States has long been the only outside power that counted in Liberia. Although most of the blame lies with foolish American do-gooders of the 19th Century, this little, woeful African land is one of the shames of American neocolonialism.

There was no doubt about American involvement 100 years ago. Using the crude and insensitive parlance of that era, Sir Richard Burton, the contemptuous British explorer, ridiculed Liberia as “the Yankee Doodle niggery republic.” Liberia had been molded from a strange alchemy of American goodwill and guilt.

Liberia was settled in 1822 by the American Colonization Society, with the help of a grant of $100,000 from the U.S. Congress. The society was made up of white philanthropists and white slaveholders who wanted to ship freed slaves “back to Africa.” At gunpoint, a U.S. naval lieutenant and a society agent forced tribal chiefs to give up Cape Mesurado, now the site of the capital of Monrovia, for less than $300 worth of muskets, beads, tobacco, gunpowder, bars of iron, iron pots, silverware, hats, coats, shoes, pipes, nails, mirrors, decanters, tumblers, beef, pork and biscuits. The first former slaves were then put ashore.

For several decades, the American Colonization Society sent out white governors to manage the settlement. But the society fell upon troublesome times. It had become too closely identified with the declining fortunes of Henry Clay and his Whig Party. Even more important, the society had enraged William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists who looked on its sponsorship of Liberia as a palliative that eased the guilty conscience of white Americans while failing to deal with the real problem of slavery in America. Its funds near depletion, the society could barely support its colony of Liberia.

By 1847, the few thousand settlers felt they had little choice but to declare themselves an independent republic. An odd kind of state developed that bore more resemblance to South Africa than any other territory in Africa. The former slaves--known as the Americo-Liberians--had little in common with the native tribes of Liberia--known as the tribals.

The Americo-Liberians were acculturated Americans. They did not speak an African language. Many were the offspring or descendants of white slaveholders. In fact, the republic’s first president, Joseph J. Roberts, who was of mixed parentage.Even the pure black settlers were unlikely to have roots in Liberia. Their forefathers could have been captured anywhere from myriad villages up and down the West Coast of Africa and, in some cases, the East Coast as well. Most of these blacks were hardly “home” in Liberia.

Save for their black blood, the settlers were thus as foreign to the tribes of Liberia as the Dutch settlers were to the tribes of South Africa. The Americo-Liberians ruled Liberia much the same way. In the 1930s Britain demanded that the League of Nations take control of Liberia as a mandate after the Americo-Liberians--in the cruelest of ironies--were accused by an international commission of practices “scarcely distinguishable from slave-raiding and slave-trading.” But, with U.S. help, the Americo-Liberians resisted the British pressure; Liberia remained independent.

The U.S. government entangled itself in Liberian affairs often. In 1926, the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. stepped into the financial morass, lending Liberia $5 million in exchange for a 99-year lease on a million acres of land for use as rubber plantations. Rubber soon ruled the economy of Liberia, and the American company built enough homes, schools and roads for wags to deride Liberia as the colony of Firestone.

The United States discovered the strategic importance of Liberia in World War II and sent black troops there to help build an airport and roads. After the war, Liberia, in exchange for aid that was lavish by African standards, allowed the U.S. government to set up a Voice of America transmitter and a military communications center.

By the 1970s, a visitor to Liberia could still find a bizarre, never-never land in which the 45,000 Americo-Liberians had set a near comic-opera society mimicking the antebellum American South on top of the squalor of African poverty.

The “Honorables”--as the elite of the Americo-Liberians were known--lived in porticoed white mansions. Men donned dark suits and homburgs for church services. The True Whig Party dominated politics. The brightest of the young attended black colleges in America.

Political leaders boasted of their allegiance to Masonry and the Baptist Church. They favored a kind of archaic, stilted English; President William R. Tolbert, for example, tried to rally enthusiasm by repeating the slogan, “Total involvement in our sustained upward thrust for higher heights.” The long line of youngsters and brass band that followed funerals seemed to come straight out of New Orleans. Commerce was conducted in wrinkled and faded American dollar bills. Radio waves crackled with American gospel music.

The lilt of the accents of educated Americo-Liberians could embarrass a visitor because they sometimes seemed to sound just like the comical accents of the “Amos and Andy” show that irritated so many blacks back in the United States.

Much of this world collapsed in 1980. Sgt. Samuel K. Doe, a tribal man, rose up, led a part of the army in a coup and slew Tolbert and much of his Cabinet. The executions on a beach shocked the sensibilities of many outsiders who felt an affection for Liberia despite its grievous faults. But the coup d’etat was hard to condemn, for it obviously represented the uprising of 1.5 million tribals against the Americo-Liberian autocracy.

Yet Doe proved oppressive, corrupt and capricious and more concerned with pampering his tribe than developing Liberia, and it is now hard to condemn the rebellion against him by several other tribes led by Charles Taylor, who is descended, in part, from the Americo-Liberians.

There seems little point in speculating about what might have been. The United States was always a halfhearted, peripheral, offhanded neocolonial ruler in Liberia, and the little country might have been better off if it had been a real American colony or, as the British once demanded, a League of Nations mandate.

It is also hard to say what the United States should do now. Surely motivated far more by fears for the security of U.S. installations in Liberia than anything else, the United States encouraged an orderly escape for Doe even as rebel troops invaded the capital of Monrovia late last week.

But most Americans do not seem really to care what happens there. They turned their backs on Liberia long ago. And, when they did so, they shut out of their minds a poignant bit of U.S. history.