The Fascinating Story Of Liberia: The African Country Founded By African-Americans
An interesting, but ultimately sad history.
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On the 12th of April, 1980 a band of 17 men stormed Liberia’s presidential palace. Despite being only low-ranking soldiers in the army, they decided to take matters into their own hands. Finding the president sleeping in his bed, they killed him on the spot. After this bloody deed, the insurgents rounded up almost all the members of his cabinet, and put them on trial.
The leader of the coup was Samuel Doe, an indigenous master sergeant of the Liberian Army. Proclaiming himself general, he quickly implemented his own version of swift justice. All the members of his band of men were indigenous Africans. All the government officials he arrested were members of the Americo-Liberian ethnic group.
This group had ruled Liberia since its founding in 1847. Descendants of former slaves and free African-Americans who made their way back from the US to the African continent, they had kept a tight reign on power in the country. Back in America, they were citizens of second category. In Africa, they realized how American they really were. They differed from the native Africans they found themselves among. In language, culture, and education.
President William Tolbert, the man executed by the conspirators when they entered the Executive Mansion, was the grandson of a former slave from South Carolina who emigrated to Liberia in 1878. Yet, he was just the second Liberian president to actually speak an indigenous language. It was only under his predecessor in the 1960’s that the native Africans got the right to vote in national elections.
All power in the country was concentrated in the hands of the Americo-Liberians. Never making up more than a small percentage of the total population of the country, they ruled over the rest of the native groups. Through the True Whig Party, they controlled the government, the economy, and the state. The societal inequalities this system generated caused much resentment among the majority population.
This boiled over into enormous anger, culminating in Samuel Doe’s coup of 1980. The native African soldiers put the top government officials on a show trial, and condemned…
