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Settlement & History of Liberia

A Mother-Stepchild Relationship, Betrayed

It has been said that Americans will do anything for Latin America but read about it. The same might be said even more strongly of Americans and Africa. Individual dramatic events may capture the public imagine from time to time. Sometimes these events offer an image of hope, such as the release of Nelson Mandela and the fall of apartheid in South Africa. More often they present an image of horror and despair, such as the nearly continent-wide AIDS crisis, or the brutal civil war and recent French intervention in Ivory Coast.

Apart from these individual events, however, Americans have little consciousness of Africa. Even African-Americans often have little overall knowledge of their ancestors' homeland. Probably few could find Ivory Coast on a map. If they did, they would find that one of its neighbors is Liberia, and they might hazily recall having read that Liberia was founded in the 19th century by freed slaves from the United States.

In fact, Liberia was, if unofficially, America's first overseas colony, founded in 1822 by the American Colonization Society, which ruled it until it gained independence in 1847 -- peacefully, but on the initiative of the Liberian settlers rather than by grant (Liebenow, 1987, pp. 16-17). Between 1822 and 1904, some 20,000 African-Americans emigrated to Liberia, most in the early decades, but some 4000 in the decades after the Civil War.

Strong ties of identity and culture remained even after immigration trailed off. For over a century up till 1980, Liberia was governed by the True Whig Party, its named derived from the 19th century American political party. The Americo-Liberians, as the settlers' descendants are called, continued to identify strongly with the United States -- only to often discover, to their dismay, that Americans were scarcely aware of them, or of Liberia itself.

The American colonial origin of Liberia als...

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Settlement & History of Liberia. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:52, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1695414.html