Republic of Liberia

Republic of Liberia
Flag Coat of arms
Motto: The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here
Capital and largest city	Monrovia
Official languages	English
Demonym(s)	Liberian
Dominant mode of production	Capitalism
Government	Unitary presidential republic
• President	Joseph Boakai
• Vice President	Jeremiah Koung
Area
• Total	43,000 km²
Population
• 2024 estimate	5,437,249
Currency	United States dollar (USD) Liberian dollar (LRD)
Driving side	right
Calling code	+231
ISO 3166 code	LR
Internet TLD	.lr

Liberia, officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country in West Africa and former U.S. colony. It borders Sierra Leone and Guinea to the north and Côte d'Ivoire to the east with a coast on the Atlantic Ocean to the south.

History

Precolonization

The archaeological record of human occupation in Liberia extends back between 280,000 and 25,000 years ago. Though Middle Stone Age core-and-flake technologies are found in the broader region roughly 780,000–126,000 years before the present. These technological traditions persisted to around 12,000 years ago, when the population gradually started penetrating the forest periphery.

Between roughly 4,000 and 3,500 years ago these societies began the transition toward agriculture, they cleared forest patches to cultivate yams and early strains of African rice, while a few remained as hunter-gatherers for millennia in the deeper forest. Pre-colonial Liberia was home to more than sixteen major ethnic groups, including the Bassa, Belle, Dan, Dei, Gbandi, Gola, Grebo, Kissi, Kpelle, Krahn, Kru, Lorma, Mah, Mandingo, Mende, and Vai. The Dei, Bassa, Kru, Gola, and Kissi were among the earliest documented populations, The Dei, the earliest known inhabitants of the area, migrated from present Guinea south. Their oral traditions trace them from an ancient marriage between a father, Zie, who emerged from the water, and a mother, Dewulo, who dwelt with her parents in a cave.

Ethnicity in antiquity was fluid and remains fluid, but Liberia is a great example of this as, the Wee, Glebo, and Klao peoples emerged from the blending of Kru-speaking populations; the Mende arose from the fusion of southwest and northern Mande groups; the Loma acknowledge a mixed southwest Mande and Kissi ancestry; the Kpelle and Mano represent a fusion of Mande, Kru-speaking, and Kono elements. Ethnicity and race function more so as forms of social organization and consciousness  created by specific material conditions rather than real identity, and this identity is fluid.

Golo and Kissi

Coastal societies around the St. Paul River and the Sapo basin were loosely hierarchical, governed by consensus-based councils of elders, lineage heads, and ritual specialists. Authority rested on spiritual knowledge, wisdom, and ability rather than hereditary succession, and a chief's decisions were regulated by the council of elders, which mediated disputes, allocated farmland, and coordinated collective labor. The central institution was the initiation and secret societies, primarily the Poro (for men) and the Sande (for women), found across much of Liberia and Sierra Leone, particularly among the Gola, Kpelle, Vai, and Mende.

Their highest officials, the zoes (ritual experts) and bodios had authority over rites of passage and wielded spiritual and temporal authority. The Poro and Sande functioned as societal organization that concentrated esoteric knowledge, ritual authority, and juridical power in the hands of a hereditary and initiated elite  (the zoes and bodios) who mediated the community thereby exercised coercive and ideological power over the mass of producers. which allowed them to install or depose chiefs, declare war, negotiate peace, and regulate inter-group trade.

The Vai script was an indigenous syllabary for the Vai, the image shows Folio 1 of the Vai manuscript MS 17817.

The economy combined agriculture, artisanal production, and long-distance trade, operating through exchange, barter, and currencies. Farmers cultivated cassava, yams, maize, and most significantly, African rice, a crop brought south by Mande migrants and grown in the coastal and inland swamps. Animal husbandry included the deliberate selective breeding of the barkless "kaykay" hunting dog, which were descended from ancient Egyptian dogs.

Since Liberia was rich in accessible iron ore, it developed iron-smelting. Mandingo smelters in the villages of Bakpapa and Nemisola and Kissi, Loma, and Kpelle blacksmiths were the "Keepers of the Iron"  who produced a fiat currency, the Kissi penny, a hand-forged iron rod twisted along the shaft. Bundles of Kissi pennies served as a regulated standard currency for centuries for local and regional trade, fines, and bride wealth and remained primary money in the region into the 1920s, being phased out only when colonialism began to reach the region.

Vai Kingdom & Southwestern Mandé

After both the Mali and Songhai empires were destroyed, it triggered an southward migration of Mande-speaking peoples. Among these migrants, the most notable was that of the Vai, whose oral traditions trace them to the Sosso Empire. Their ancestors, likely Dyula merchantswere drawn coastward by the lucrative Gola salt trade. The Dyula were merchants, skilled in commerce and of Islam, whose penetration of Liberia integrated it to the long-distance exchange within Africa.

The Vai migration was gradual, slowly establishing strategic trade corridors, and the Vai intermarried among the Dei and Gola, creating hybrid clans. The Kru who were protective of their maritime monopolies, formed military alliances to halt the Vai migration. As it became a struggle for control of the maritime trade monopoly. But the Vai succeeded and established themselves as powerful middle-men. They capitalized on their location to control trade networks and amassed wealth by trading gold, ivory, kola nuts, this gradually allowed them to form the Vai Kingdom.

In 1461,  the Portuguese navigator Pedro de Sintra reached the coast, charting Cape Mount. However due to the military capacity of the Vai, the dense mangroves and endemic disease blocked any European long-term presence. Contact was strictly commercial and mutually dependent as European navigators relied heavily on Kru seafaring expertise to learn to maneuver the coastal currents. The principal commodity of the early trade was Malagueta pepper, whose seeds were desired in Medieval and Renaissance Europe for flavoring food and spiced wines.

The volume of "grains" exported gave the coast its European name, initially the Costa da Pimenta, then the "Grain Coast.". Between the late 15th and late 17th centuries the Portuguese, Dutch, and British bartered firearms, brass, cloth and spirits for gold, ivory and pepper. The profitability of the Vai Kingdom, the spread of firearms and the Mande invasion created a period of intense militarization.  The Mande sent warriors who swept coastward, subjugating the distant population and forcing political consolidation.

The Kru navigated this crisis  through changing alliances, at times joining the Mande against the Vai, at other times resisting Mande subjugation.

Quoja Kingdom

An invasion during this period happened near Cape Mount that established the Kingdom of Quoja, a kingdom exercising hegemony over the northern coast between the Mano River and Cape Mesurado. The Folgia subjugated the Quoja Kingdom and established their language as the regional lingua franca.

The kingdom was ruled by a supreme king known as the O-Bai (or Bai). The term Ra-bai historically translated to "kingdom" or "dominion". To manage its territories, the kingdom was divided into sub-kingdoms. These were governed by nobles who carried the hereditary title of Gbana. Alongside coastal trade with Europe, Koya traded with Islamic states to its north, creating an diverse economy that led to a notable domestic Muslim population and enforced and levied custom taxes on European ships that gathered freshwater along the Port Loko Creek and Rokel River.

Déanglé mask by the Dan clan, Déanglé are seen as the physical embodiment of glé (bush spirits) and is perceived as an gentle, attractive, and benevolent spirit.

In 1626, a Dutch ship at Sierra Leone ended up spreading a plague into the Quoja Kingdom in Northern Liberia that left plantations untilled for three years, worsening the mortality of already-established smallpox. From the 17th century, As demand for plantation labor in the Americas exploded, European merchants shifted their primary interest from pepper to human beings, and the transatlantic slave trade began its work in Liberia. The indigenous ruling class, specifically chiefs, merchant lineages, and the Poro/Sande elites participated as active compradors, enriching themselves through the sale of foreign captives and the people, at the expense of their own people and sovereignty.

Condo Confederation

As Mandinka trade routes expanded coastward, tensions sparked between interior merchants and the Dei along other coastal middlemen. To bypass these tensions, a multi-ethnic union established a capital at Bopolu (present Gbarpolu County, Liberia), a fortified town which their armies were used to protect the trade routes.

The Condo Confederation reached its peak under King Sao Boso Kamara also known as King Boatswain. King Sao Boso came from the Loma area of present Guinea as a mercenary to defend communities against a Gola warrior, Boga, after his victory he rose to rule Bopolu, and founded his own town of Totokwele. Under his leadership the Confederation united the Gola, Vai, Loma, Kpelle, and Mandingo under a single political and economic umbrella for nearly half a century, and the Condo Confederation flourished as an empire where ivory, gold, kola, and slaves were exchanged for European firearms and brass.

The Condo Confederation was the manifestation of a political form of merchant capitalism, a state built, in the first instance, to protect and tax the trade routes, and whose ruling class derived their wealth and power from the exchange of domestic commodities (gold, ivory, kola, and slaves). King Sao Boso's was managing the competing factions of this mercantile ruling class such as the Muslim Mandingo merchants, indigenous landed chiefs, and coastal middlemen within a single apparatus of taxation and coercion.

Colonization

Eli Ayers of the American Colonization Society took control of Cape Mesurado in May 1822. Six months later, several African nations united and fought against the colonizers but were defeated. In July 1847, Liberia declared independence as a U.S. neocolony.

Neocolonization

After so-called independence, the ruling settler elite continued to oppress native Africans. Indigenous Africans could not be citizens until 1904.

The Firestone company arrived in Liberia in the 1920s to form a rubber monopoly and the U.S. pressured the Liberian government into granting the company exploitation rights. Firestone paid the Liberian government a small amount in return for being able to exploit local resources and used forced labour to extract it. Firestone also decimated the local rice industry by persuading the government to send rice farmers to work on their rubber plantations and filling the gap by making Liberia dependent on imported rice.

Under the rule of William Tubman, Liberia held the largest CIA base in Africa and supported the USA's fight against socialist, pan-African, and national liberation movements. During the Second World War Liberia provided a base for allied military operations and supplied resources such as rubber.

Tolbert Presidency (1971–1980)

After the death of Tubman in July 1971, his vice-president William Tolbert became president. Tolbert was the only anti-colonial president in Liberian history and as a follower of Nkrumah, Touré, and Cabral, was influenced by socialism and Pan-Africanism. He broke relations with Israel in 1973 while establishing relations with Cuba and the USSR. Domestically he pushed for greater economic self-reliance, and introduced free education and health care, social security and welfare programs along with a progressive tax system.

Tolbert took measures to undermine Firestone and other Western corporations that were plundering Liberia's natural resources. His government also attempted to end the U.S. rice monopoly but was hindered by rice riots organised by Gabriel Backus Matthews' Progressive Alliance for Liberians (PAL) which was backed by the CIA.

Although already operating against him the U.S. finally put a coup into operation when Tolbert agreed with other African leaders to consolidate Africa's national resources into commodity cartels which would allow Africans to control prices of exports rather than the West. The Carter regime attempted to bribe Tolbert with $100 Million USD as a counter offer in return for expanding U.S. military operations in Liberia, but when Tolbert refused they prepared to launch a coup before the commodity cartels could come into effect. On April 12, 1980 soldiers loyal to Samuel Doe shot Tolbert in front of his family, afterwards government ministers were stripped and walked around Monrovia before being taken to the beach and shot.

Doe Presidency (1980–1990)

After the murder of Tolbert, Doe took power as a U.S. puppet with the U.S. deploying troops to help restore order following the coup and assigning advisors to key ministries. The U.S. invested over $500 Million USD in Doe's Liberia whilst Doe embraced neoliberal policies, working closely with the IMF to reorient the Liberian economy in favour of the West. Doe also gave the U.S. unlimited access to Liberian facilities in order to send military equipment to anti-communist rebels in Angola among other operations throughout Africa. Doe's military also received special training from the CIA under the orders of CIA Director William Casey, along with several other U.S. backed African leaders.

Over time the U.S. began to sour on Doe as he became influenced by Pan-Africanism and began to consider revoking U.S. military rights to Liberian facilities but Doe still rigged the 1985 elections with U.S. support. The Reagan administration made a last attempt to salvage the Doe regime by persuading him to accept a team of Statesian financial efforts to monitor all expenditure. At the same time the U.S. began supporting opposition leader Charles Taylor and his National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) to overthrow Doe. Taylor crossed into Liberia in late 1989 to begin a guerrilla campaign that would become the First Liberian Civil War and in September 1990 Doe was captured by a breakaway faction of the NPLF led by Prince Johnson and murdered.

Civil Wars

The First Liberian Civil War between the forces of Doe and Taylor, lasting until 1997, killed over 250,000 people and possibly as many as 800,000, whilst destroying Liberian infrastructure. Taylor was advised by the U.S. on how to conduct the war but over time the U.S. began to distance themselves and changed support under the Clinton regime to creating the ECOMOG "peacekeeping mission" staffed by mostly Nigerian troops to intervene in the conflict against Taylor. Atrocities occurred on all sides of the war with child soldiers, looting and rape being common, whilst Taylor earned over $421 million a year in diamonds, gold, iron ore and timber.

The First Liberian Civil War came to a formal end after Taylor won the 1997 elections. Over the next few years the U.S. alternated between supporting and working against Taylor whilst Taylor himself attempted to restore close relations with the U.S. by offering Liberian military facilities but also angered the U.S. by refusing exploitive oil contracts. The United States desire to control Liberia's natural wealth resulted in the Bush administration launching a smear campaign, applying UN sanctions and supplying anti-Taylor rebels resulting in the Second Liberian Civil War. In August 2003 Taylor resigned under pressure allowing the U.S. to take de facto administration over Liberia.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf came to power in 2006, ruling until 2018, and established Liberia as once again a close ally of the United States, being the only African leader to offer their country for the headquarters of AFRICOM.