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An In-Depth Look at Slavery and Liberia's Past (by Monique Woolnough)

Monique Woolnough is a member of the War Child Canada Youth Advisory Board (YAB). She is also War Child Canada's No War Zone coordinator, an global online community connecting youth interested in human rights and international issues. The site is available at http://www.nowarzone.com.

Liberia, from the Latin for liberty, holds a unique position in the history of the emergence of African states following first European contacts, the Atlantic Slave Trade and colonization. It was the first independent African Republic to be recognized by the Western world in 1847, and it was never subjected to foreign rule by one of the colonial powers. The vision of the state of Liberia was of a colony for emancipated African-Americans to escape the discrimination of the United States, and for the United States to avoid the problem of an emancipated slave population.  Since 1980, when the ruling class of Americo-Liberians was removed from power by a coup, it has experienced two civil wars, one regional war and numerous tenuous ceasefires. It is left off of United Nations rankings of development and quality of life, a result of the almost 15-year long hiatus on development and destructive civil war which spilled over to neighbouring West African states in the late 1990s, sparking renewed conflict. In order to understand the current situation and prospects for Liberia’s development, we must examine the legacies of slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade in Liberia. We will underline how contact with Western countries in the form of the Atlantic Slave Trade led to internal social and political problems in Upper Guinea and then Liberia, both at the time of the triangular trade and on into the 20th century. Furthermore, we will explore how slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade were the basis for neo-colonial relations between Western powers and Liberia.

In order to understand the slave trade’s legacy of turmoil in the social and political realm, it is necessary to explore the initial effects of the contact of European traders with the tribes of West Africa. Though slavery had existed in West Africa since at least the 2nd century AD in the form of the trans-Saharan trade of Negroes, the institution of slavery in West Africa was markedly different from that which was understood by Europeans seeking to justify the slave trade as something the Africans would have undertaken anyways. African slaves had a number of reciprocal rights on their masters, and were often integrated into the kinship structures of West African societies. Dr. Walter Rodney argued that there was insufficient evidence that there existed a significant class of slaves and no indigenous institution of slavery that could have served as the “launching pad” sufficient for the Atlantic Slave Trade This is not to deny that slavery was part of West African infrastructures, and that the owning of slaves was a way to gain power and prestige in a society where land was always more abundant than labour, but to underline that the type of slavery practiced was not endemic enough to have been able to serve European demand from the beginning.

The development of class societies composed of specialized slave traders and rulers dependent on the institution of slavery to maintain power was a result of the European demand for slaves. It is unclear whether or not the slave trade spurred more conflicts in West Africa in an attempt to gain more captives. Research found Ashanti and Dahomey kings denied that wars were fought solely for the purpose of acquiring valuable slaves. Therefore, it could be argued that the West Africans were not consciously adapting to European demand. However, we must remember that the increasing opportunity cost of not engaging in the slave trade presented West Africans with the choice to sell captives abroad or keep them at home, as well as with an economic incentive to enact harsher penalties (including being sold into servitude) for ordinary crimes and to root out witchcraft by selling the suspected witches’ family into slavery.

Walter Rodney underlines this cooperation between European and West African interests during the Atlantic Slave Trade:

Europeans did a lot deliberately to sow the seeds of hostility among African tribes and even within tribes. However, it must be understood that Africans realized that they could exchange their captives at a profit.

The chiefs and rulers of West African tribes at the time thus had a vested interest in engaging in the slave trade, creating a gap between the rulers and the ruled that had not previously existed. The cycle of slavery was reinforced by a dependence on arms, as for a state “to be strong, [it] needed firearms; but to get firearms from the Europeans, the Africans had to offer slaves.” This influx of modern weapons heightened the stakes of inter-tribal warfare. One of the most important legacies of the slave trade is this nefarious trade in weapons.

A more recent example is the observation made by a journalist in 1996 that there were more arms in Monrovia than fighters in Liberia. The trade in arms at the time of the slave trade had a destructive value, as much of the international arms trade does today. Now that we understand the initial effects of the triangular trade on the political and economic fabric of West African societies, it is necessary to briefly examine the consequences of slavery in the United States that led to the creation of the Liberian state.

At the beginning of the 19th century, most of the slaves in the northern United States had been freed into what Charles Foster dubbed “a travesty of liberty”. Around 200000 slaves had been freed, much to the chagrin of those citizens who had supported emancipation, but could not now face the reality of sharing America with a class of freed slaves. The idea of the colonization of Africa by the freed slaves was proposed as an economically viable solution, as it satisfied liberal minds to think of Africans once again living in their “natural” environment. Furthermore, there existed a British precedent for this type of maneuver in the form of Sierra Leone.

The fact that many of the emancipated slaves had never seen Africa, had been raised in the United States and had probably descended from many different areas in Africa was ignored in the rush to solve the problem of having to contend with a freed class of slaves. As Foster put it, “the object was not to remove prejudice [by sending the ex-slaves to Africa to start an independent republic], but to remove the Negro,” and this without ever consulting “the Negro”. As one of the black abolitionists’ at the time of the creation of the American Colonization society noted:

America is more our country than it is the whites. We have enriched it with our blood and tears … and they will drive us from our property and our homes, which we have earned with our blood.

In January 1817, 3000 Philadelphia Negroes denounced the Colonization Society, underlining that they too were a part of America. It wasn’t until later, when racial discrimination escalated along with a higher rate of emancipation and a growing number of rebellions on plantations in the South that more of the ex-slaves decided to support the project. This recognition that slaves in America were now a part of American culture, and not the blanket “African culture” that the Americans in charge of the American Colonization Society envisioned as their rightful heritage, would be important in the effect of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Liberian history.

Though Liberia was the only African country never to experience colonial rule by a European power, it can be argued that the aristocratic society founded by the Americo-Liberians in the mid-1820s closely resembled the colonization model in its alienation of the natives and its model of indirect rule. In his article examining the causes of Liberia’s underdevelopment, Dalton recognizes that:

…the underlying difficulty is rather that the traditional Americo-Liberian rulers, for fear of losing political control to tribal people, have not allowed those changes to take place which are necessary to develop the national society and economy.

Liberia was a “nation-state claiming sovereignty over a hinterland of tribes”, a hinterland that was not easily accessible to ruling elite from the coastal areas, and that furthermore had to be initially subdued with the help of American guns and cannons. Much of the rebellions of the 20th century were borne out of this stratified political aristocracy modelled on that of the original enslaving country, the United States, that failed to recognize the indigenous population as a voice in the development of Liberia, much like the Americans ignored the voice of the slaves.

The first of these rebellions was the Kru revolt in 1915. The Kru had presumably been induced by a British diplomat to revolt and were promised aid that never materialized, and so the rebellion was viciously squashed with the help of American military resources.

The second violent clash between the Americo-Liberians and the tribes was the Gola war in 1918. The Liberian government had been weakened by cutbacks in trade with Britain and Germany due to the First World War, and attempted stricter tax regulations on tribal peoples. This pattern of continued antagonism continued throughout the 20th century, culminating in the Samuel Doe-led coup in 1980 with the aim of overthrowing the ancien regime. Doe’s revolution freed the Liberian people (of which 95% are indigenous) from the stranglehold of Americo-Liberian rule. However, Doe had bankrupted the country by 1985 and intensified social divisions, creating the turmoil that prompted Charles Taylor’s coup in 1989, the consequences of which are still being dealt with today in the difficult peace process. The politicization of ethnic identities since 1989 has been a dangerous turn in the history of Liberia’s social fabric. Previously, the tribes had been united in their antagonism towards the ruling Americo-Liberian elite, but now they have been turned against each other by a series of minority rebel groups, each purporting to truly want to lead Liberia to peace and democracy while committing horrific war crimes and continuing the civil war that is so costly to Liberia’s prospects for development.

The effects of the Atlantic Slave Trade and of slavery in the United States can thus be seen to have left a legacy of internal social and political divisions that is central to the problems faced by the Liberian people today as they struggle to create a unified peaceful state a century and half later. Furthermore, the Atlantic Slave Trade and slavery helped shape modern international relations by cementing the economic dependence of Africa on Western funds and by diffusing Western values and culture.

The first aspect of modern international relations as shaped by the legacy of the Atlantic Slave Trade rests in the realm of foreign involvement in Liberian politics and economics. Even before its instauration as nation-state, the power of African rulers in the region, as we saw above, depended on their ability to trade firearms, rum and tobacco for slaves. They had to compete with each other based on their relation with the great European powers. According to John Fage, economic and political development was synonymous with the growth of the institution of slavery. This was perhaps best illustrated by the resistance of African rulers to the abolition movement. The end of the slave trade meant that the strong monarchies that had been reinforced by the slave trade were left impoverished and weakened, and had difficulty adapting their fiscal, economic and political systems to the new nature of trade. The monarchies and chiefdoms of West Africa became less efficient at securing revenue, and were less able to provide the order and stability without a strong economic backbone. Once the state of Liberia was formed, the problems with attaining political and economic stability continued. Though they were prosperous at first, the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the United States aborted their prospects for economic development, as they were unable to compete.

Though the state of Liberia had the privileged position of being the first African state, “its government was long indebted to European financial interests, and so subject to continual foreign interference.” One example of this foreign interference was the continual pressure from France and Britain, who were deeply engaged in the colonization of Africa in the early years of the Liberian state. In 1931, Britain pushed the League of Nations to inquire into charges of slavery and forced labour in Liberia and requested the displacement of the Americo-Liberians from power. The charges of slavery were aimed at the hinterland tribes, who still engaged in traditional forms of slavery and indentured labour. In fact, much tension between the tribes and the Americo-Liberian government had arisen as a result of the central government’s pressure on the tribes to alter their traditions to become more “civilized”. However, perhaps the most important example of the twin pillars of economic and political neo-colonialism is illustrated in the events surrounding the acquisition by the Firestone Rubber Company of 11 million acres of Liberian land in 1925.

The Liberian government had “become desperate to secure resources to consolidate its hold on the territory it claimed to rule”, and the United States pressed the government to accept a contract from the Firestone Rubber Company, even though one of the clauses stated that Firestone would appoint 22 officials of the Liberian government to administer the country’s financial, military and native affairs. The Liberian government refused, and eventually negotiated a contract in which only financial advisors would be appointed by Firestone, in exchange for American protection against the French. From this point on, the United States did not hesitate to step in on behalf of Firestone or other investors.

This trend towards a free and open market in the interests of Europe and the United States was followed through with Tubman’s Open Door Policy. The issue of free trade and to what extent it actually benefits developing countries is an issue hotly debated today, and we can see how the slave trade set the foundation for much of the economic international relations of the modern world. Beyond the economic legacy of the Atlantic Slave Trade, the impact on the cultural make-up of Liberia was quite important.

The idea of repatriation to Africa arose with the combined philosophy of abolition and colonization, all suffused with a strong ideology of Christian missionary work. Dalton argued that the American Colonization Society was imbued with a sense of “manifest destiny”, an idea which Charles Foster expanded on, underlining how there was:

a natural affinity between antislavery and foreign missions induced by colour consciousness: the white person was a Christian while anybody duskier was a heathen to be saved.

Colonization was a method to save the Africans from themselves by exporting “proper” Western values. The ex-slaves who settled Liberia had adopted many Western customs, including Christianity. “Correct behaviour” in Liberia was defined as literacy in English, Western dress, owning large houses and automobiles, practicing the Christian faith and maintaining Anglo-Saxon names. However, Lowenkopf recognizes that the ruling Americo-Liberian elite maintained some aspects of tribal life that had survived the years of slavery in the United States. Extended family relationships were important, as were age-group associations, secret societies and polygamy. This cultural combination was dubbed a “hybrid Afro-Western culture”.

Cultural diffusion had the effect of segregating the “proper” Americo-Liberians from the very tribes from which some of them had descended, and of regarding anything falling outside their values as “barbaric”. The Americo-Liberians aspired to emulate the culture where they had been in a state of servitude, and then second-class citizenship. By doing so, they achieved a discriminatory state in which a minority of 2-5 % ruled over the rest of the country. Lowenkopf argued, however, that the Liberian social structure was not as rigid as it seemed, and that many of the Americo-Liberians today are not descendants of the original settlers. It was the adoption of Western values that guaranteed one a place in the hierarchy of Liberia. The Church was an avenue for education and advancement. Thus a mixture of accidental and forced diffusion ensured that Western values seemed paramount and worthy to those wanting to gain political power in Liberia.

The legacy of the Atlantic Slave Trade is revealed through a study of Liberia’s history. European contact, and then contact with Americanized Africans, caused significant internal social and political upheaval in Liberia, the consequences of which are still being dealt with today. Furthermore, Liberia is one example of how current economic and political international relations were formed by the dominance of Western-directed trade. It would be interesting to continue this investigation and compare the experience of Liberia with that of other African states, and from this to examine to what extent the Atlantic Slave Trade was responsible for the shaping of their history, and to what extent other factors were involved. It is without a doubt, however, that the Atlantic Slave Trade had a profound effect on the development of the state of Liberia, and that it will continue to do so in the future. 

Sources

Dalton, George. “History, Politics, and Economic Development in Liberia.” The Journal of Economic History. December 1965. 29 June 2004. <http://links.jstor.org/
sici?sici=0022-0507%28196512%2925%3A4%3C569%3AHPAEDI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S>.

Fage, J.D. “Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History.” The Journal of African History 1969. 29 June 2004. <http://links.jstor.org/
sici?sici=0021-8537%281969%2910%3A3%3C393%3ASATSTI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W>.

Fage, J.D. A History of Africa. London: Hutchinson of London, 1978.

Foster, Charles I. “The Colonization of Free Negroes, in Liberia, 1816-1835.” The Journal of Negro History. 1953. 29 June 2004. <http://links.jstor.org/
sici?sici=0022-2992%28195301%2938%3A1%3C41%3ATCOFNI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N>.

“How American Slavery Led to the Birth of Liberia.” New York Times Upfront  22 September 2003. 1 November 2003. <http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/hww/shared/shared_main.jhtml;jsessionid=
M50WE5YUX5KT1QA3DILSFFOADUNBIIV0?_requestid=168724>.

Lowenkopf, Martin. Politics in Liberia. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press: 1976

Rodney, Walter. West Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Dar-es-Salaam: East African  Publishing House, 1967.

Sesay, Max Ahmadu. “Politics and Society in Post-War Liberia.” The Journal of Modern African Studies. 1996. 29 June 2004. <http://links.jstor.org/
sici?sici=0022-278X%28199609%2934%3A3%3C395%3APASIPL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0>.

Welsh, Paul. “Liberia expects as Bryant takes over”BBC News. 15 October 2003. 2 November 2003. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3195238.stm>.

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