The Republic of Liberia

The Republic of Liberia. The Republic of Liberia (1847-present) is Africa's oldest modern republic, founded by free Black people from the United States. From 1820 the American Colonization Society, supported by slaveholders and abolitionists alike, settled freed African Americans on the Grain Coast of West Africa, where they founded Monrovia, named for President Monroe. The settlers, known as Americo-Liberians, established towns along the coast, and in 1847, pressed by Britain and France to assert sovereignty, the colony declared independence under its first president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts.

The young republic faced a difficult existence. Its people, never more than a small minority, ruled a coast of trading towns while the African peoples of the interior, including the Kru, Grebo, and Vai, resisted settler control for generations. Britain and France nibbled at its borders, and the government survived on customs revenue, foreign loans, and the flag of convenience it sold to foreign shipping. Only in the early twentieth century, with armed frontier forces, did Monrovia extend real control over the hinterland, imposing on its peoples taxes and forced labor that drew international scandal.

Modern Liberia was shaped above all by William V. S. Tubman, president from 1944 to 1971, who opened the country to foreign investment, especially the Firestone rubber plantations and iron ore mining, and extended citizenship to the interior peoples. Yet power and wealth remained concentrated in Monrovia and among the settler-descended elite of the True Whig Party. In 1980 soldiers led by Samuel Doe overthrew and killed President William Tolbert, ending 133 years of Americo-Liberian rule.

What followed was tragedy: a decade of dictatorship and then two devastating civil wars between 1989 and 2003 that killed a quarter of a million people. Since the peace, Liberia has rebuilt under elected governments, including Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa's first elected female president. The republic's history, born of freedom in America and forged through rule, resistance, and war, remains unique on the continent.

To read more about this topic:

Library of Congress: History of Liberia, 1847-1871 BlackPast: Americo-Liberians Smithsonian Magazine: Tumult and Transition in Little America Settler Colonial Studies: The History of Liberia's Formation