Time to tell Liberia’s ugly truth

Liberia, a West African country that has been at war with itself for the past seven years and is literally the United States’ “flesh and blood,” has surfaced briefly in our news because we are protecting Americans and the U.S. embassy in Monrovia, its capital city. Oped pieces in national newspapers call for U.S. intervention there, the way we have gone into Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia and Kuwait, but that is unlikely to happen because the public will not be moved by this disaster.

The U.S. media, handmaiden to government policies, have been short on printing the kind of photos from Liberia that elicit compassion and long on frightening ones of bizarre male warriors in women’s clothes; it has played up the tribal factions, if the war or peace process is reported at all; and it never gives the definitive background that Liberia came from our national womb: the only U.S. colony in Africa.

Liberia was the first casualty after the end of the Cold War and continued to be the worst human-made disaster in the world until Somalia, with at least 150,000 deaths, 1.5 million displaced Liberians in a population of 2.5 million, and a fanning out of violence and refugees that has disrupted all of West Africa. The war was begun in 1989 by a man who escaped from jail in Massachusetts without any trace of how he got from here to there, is financed by stealing and selling Liberian natural resources such as diamonds and timber — a wholesale thinning of one of the most important rain forests in the world, and is now fought by drugged youngsters the age of our Little Leaguers.

It was also the first experiment in “regional solutions,” which has proven to be counterproductive because it spread violence and disruption throughout the region instead of containing it. Now much of West Africa is infected with instability and anarchy, when attention in the United States in the beginning might have stamped it out.

Liberia is our child, our creation with Africa, and was once our colony. We started Liberia as surely as Spanish explorers, French Jesuits and English pilgrims spawned colonies in the Americas. A group of slaveholders, politicians, and clergy — white men who had various motives for sending blacks back to Africa — began the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1817 and started colonizing what is now Liberia. The ACS solicited both the funds and the “colonists” and dispenses their propaganda through a publicaton with a title that tells it all: “African Repository and Colonial Journal,” (Washington, D.C., 1825 until it became “Liberia” in the late 1800s).

In fact, the first important agent in Liberia caught his missionary zeal right here in Greater Bangor. Jahudi Ashmun, who taught at the theological seminary in Hampden and was principal of the Maine Charity School around 1815, did such tremendous spadework in securing the land from the natives in Liberia, the way the Europeans laid hold here from Native Americans, that a major boulevard in Monrovia is named Ashmun.

Liberia was created by white men who were afraid of free black men and wanted to get rid of them, by white Christians who believed they could convert the “dark continent” of Africa by sending it “domesticated” former slaves, and by political reformers who believed they could stop the slave trade both by dropping off in Liberia the recaptured human cargo from slave ships and by trading natural African resources instead of slaves. An alarmingly high proportion of the colonists paid for their ACS’s intentions with their lives because they died either en route or shortly after getting there, and the century-long effort “to send blacks back to Africa” still lurks in our national psyche and vocabulary.

Most African-Americans did not want to go back to Africa or any of the other places that were under consideration for years to come, including schemes supported by President Abraham Lincoln to send them to Central America or the Caribbean. They said they were as American as everyone else, if not more so, because early America was built from their sweat and sacrifices. They started the Negro Convention Movement (the precursor to the NAACP) in 1817 to protest their people being shipped to Liberia. African-Americans and Liberians have had a nearly 200-year relationship that is based on kinship, mutual respect and common values. Liberia is our flesh and blood.

The ACS was unable to fund its plan, so it encouraged the colonists to claim political independence, thus establishing the nation of Liberia in 1847; but we have kept it under our economic and political thumbs ever since. All of the European powers with colonies in Africa had to pay the price as they pulled out or were removed. The United States now distances itself from Liberia as if we had not staked out that part of Africa. And Liberia is always described by the media as being established by freed American slaves, as if it were their idea. Maybe the first way we could help Liberia would be to speak and write the truth about our relationship to this branch of the American family.

H.H. Price is a writer who lives in Mount Desert.