The Roots of Liberia’s Bent Toward Violence

Liberians living in the United States and many Americans have called on the president to intervene militarily and politically in Liberia. They contend such an action would save lives in a now chaotic Liberia and, especially, to prevent further civilian slaughter in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital.

Liberia’s collapse into chaos is not in doubt. Nor is the present likelihood that this misery will continue and worsen. Does this mean that other nations, above all the United States, have a duty to impose a peace that Liberians are evidently unable to make for themselves?

As matters now stand, the answer will probably be yes. Yet, clearing up this Liberian emergency will be long and expensive. Even if it be agreed, as it will be, that Liberia needs help, does America have reasons to shoulder the burden?

History, as usual, gives a contradictory answer. Liberia was formed as a budding nation-state more than a hundred years ago, by some 5,000 emancipated and freedom-loving black Americans, later joined by some 15,000 other blacks, many of whom had been rescued from slave ships by the U.S. Navy. All were shipped to the rugged “windward coast” of West Africa and were settled there at an entirely new place named after President James Monroe. Here, with courage and initiative, they began to build a new life.

Most of their village settlements were united into a “commonwealth” in 1838, and, in 1847, this “commonwealth” declared itself an independent country, and proceeded to invent a government. What was invented proved to be an early version of the one-party state. From 1869 to 1980, its True Whig Party, so named after the fashion of those times, ruled Liberia as a stiff dictatorship.

President Abraham Lincoln recognized the Liberian Republic in 1862, although in practice Liberia had become a closely guarded U.S. colony. This arrangement perfectly suited the American-educated governing elites of the True Whigs and their friends or relatives. The problem, not tackled then or later, was that these elites were very few, while the “bush people,” the rest of the inhabitants, were very many. The True Whig dictatorship had to democratize or rule as a tyranny. It chose the second. Liberia has been paying the price ever since.

In making their choice, the True Whigs were in line with 19th-century attitudes toward Africa. Go-ahead modernizers, they were sure that native Liberians, however numerous, must be made to toe the line. The natives were simply savages who must do as they were told. Their own history must be ignored, their own institutions abolished. In their place would be “the genius of free government,” meaning institutions imported from America, even while the most important of those institutions, the True Whig Party, behaved as a dictatorship.

In all this the colonists of the elites were patently sincere. An effort of the historical imagination is needed to recover their state of mind, but the effort is worth making for anyone who thinks about Liberia now. Consider the case of perhaps their most notable spokesman, Alexander Crummell, born in New York in 1810. Crummell’s grandfather had been a chief of his people in the tropical forest of West Africa before being robbed of his freedom by the slave trade and shipped to America. Grandson Alexander became one of the visionary founders of Liberia.

Crummell witnessed and portrayed in his own life the drama of his people. He had no doubt of the rightness of their self-appointed mission to bring civilization to “this seat of ancient despotism and bloody superstitions.”

If it were objected that these uninvited newcomers from across the ocean had no right to assume any such “mission.” then “to this I [Crummell] reply that both our positions and our circumstances make us the guardians, the protectors, and the teachers of our heathen tribes.” Now this, of course, was undiluted imperialist colonialism as applied by the British and other invaders of Africa.

The new nation-state of Liberia was to be cut always from the origins and historical development of most of its inhabitants, whether they liked it or not. They did not like it. They were soon at war with the colonists, and the colonists replied in kind. The True Whig rulers declined into a violent dictatorship. Only in the 1950s, under the influence of new democratic trends set going by the democratic victories of World War II, did the True Whigs begin to make peace with the “bush people.”

But as tends to happen when hope has been long deferred, concessions by the ruling elites were judged too small and too late. In 1980, the True Whig tyranny, as it had become, was overthrown by the “bush people,” led now by a sergeant of the Liberian army, Samuel Doe. He made himself president of the “Second Liberian Republic.” But he didn’t make peace.

Since then, there has been an eruption of uncontrolled violence by all manner of practical rivals for state power and its profits. Reckless “warlords” wielding automatic weapons have taken over. Facing this kind of gang warfare, what is to be done, and who is to do it?

First, Liberia now shares in the general political and moral degradation of the whole, long colonialist adventure. But when colonialism ended, power was returned to Africans within an empty shell of alien ideas and priorities. The elites continued to flourish, but more and more Liberians festered in poverty and despair.

Second, peace will come when Liberians make it for themselves. This will happen, but not yet. Liberia is a sick country on a sick continent. American and other nursing, after-care and money will be needed, even a lot of money. But the cure for this disease of violence and hatred will become effective only when Liberians find and do it for themselves. No one else can do it for them.*