Charles Taylor and Liberia

Ambition and Atrocity in Africa's Lone Star State

Colin M. Waugh

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781848138483
• eBook ISBN: 9781848138506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Campaigner, insurgent, fugitive, rebel commander, commodity kingpin, elected president, exile and finally prisoner, Charles Taylor sought to lead his country to change but instead ignited a conflict which destroyed Liberia in over a decade of violence, greed and personal ambition. Taylor's takeover threw much of the neigbouring region into turmoil, until he was finally brought to face justice in The Hague for his role in Sierra Leone's civil war.

In this remarkable and eye-opening book, Colin Waugh draws on a variety of sources, testimonies and original interviews - including with Taylor himself - to recount the story of what really happened during these turbulent years. In doing so, he examines both the life of Charles Taylor, as well as the often self-interested efforts of the international community to first save Liberia from disaster, then, having failed to do so, to bring to justice the man it deems most to blame for its disintegration.

PART ONE

THE LAND OF THE FREED

ONE

FOUNDATIONS OF A SETTLEMENT

To those who speak of a Pan-African Union, I ask:

What are we supposed to share? Each other’s poverty?

Félix Houphouët-Boigny, president of Côte d’Ivoire¹

End of the Tubman era

In Harley Street’s London Clinic, on 23 July 1971, Liberia’s president William Vancarat Shadrach Tubman lay dead from a haemorrhage, the complication of a recent prostate operation. He had served as president for over twenty-seven years. His passing signalled the beginning of the end of a long period of single-party rule in the Republic of Liberia. Thanks to its extensive rubber plantations and mineral resources his small West African homeland had prospered handsomely, surpassed by few others in Africa for its economic growth rate. Days after Tubman’s death, the reins of power were handed over to his deputy, William Tolbert, who had already served for over a decade as vice president of the tropical country of 3 million inhabitants, with an area the size of Tennessee, or a little more than Ireland and Wales combined. It appeared as a picture of stability in government, a smooth transition of power from ruler to deputy, unusual by the standards of an African continent where the transition from one head of state to the next was increasingly brought about by armed coups rather than through a peaceful dynastic succession.

PRESIDENT TUBMAN, NOVEMBER 1956, WEARING A LIBERIAN TRIBAL CHIEF’S COSTUME

Already unique on the continent as Africa’s oldest independent nation, since 1847 a self-governing republic, never colonized by any European power, Liberia was ruled for over a century by the representatives of a single political dynasty, the True Whig Party (TWP). The elite which governed Liberia was composed of the descendants of freed American slaves, known as the Americo-Liberians, who were resettled to Africa in the early resettled to Africa in the early nineteenth century with the political blessing and financial support of the US government.

Presidents Tubman and Tolbert were descendants of the settler stock of the nation’s founding fathers, whose emigration to Africa had been organized by a body called the American Colonization Society (ACS). In July 1971, other African nations were completing their first decade of independence, still economically underdeveloped and politically immature. Some espoused pan-African idealism, while others experimented with socialist economics. Nearly all continued to depend on overseas assistance for survival – whether the support was from recently departed European colonial masters or from new partners in the East.

But Liberia was different. When William Tubman died, his successor just carried on the work of government and the running of the economy, whose official currency was the US dollar, and whose flagship economic enterprise, the Firestone rubber plantation, was the largest of its kind in the world, at the time encompassing a million acres under cultivation and employing over 10,000 hard-currency-earning Liberians just outside the country’s capital, Monrovia.

William Tubman’s settler predecessors first arrived on West Africa’s shores over 150 years earlier, as the result of an initiative of the United States government of the day. On 3 March 1819, the US Congress passed an act to enable the return to the African continent of any Africans recaptured from slaving vessels on the high seas by the American navy. The US government provided $100,000 in funding for the measure.

In February of the following year, a son of freed African slaves from Virginia named Elijah Johnson set sail from New York harbour with some ninety others, mostly African-American freemen, in a ship called the Elizabeth, bound for Sierra Leone on the west coast of West Africa, where there was a British colonial settlement. They hoped to find the land upon which to establish a colony for returnees of African origin from the United States. The only white people on the voyage were three ACS agents who accompanied them to handle the administrative and financial aspects of the expedition.

Freetown, Sierra Leone’s principal trading port, was also populated by former slaves freed from European ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and the new arrivals hoped that their plans would meet with the local authorities’ approval. Explaining their mission to their British hosts, the voyagers were not made welcome, however. The incumbent governor Charles McCarthy offered them neither hospitality nor encouragement.

On 8 March 1820, they left and sailed to Sherbro Island, along the coast to the south of Freetown. Here the crew was stricken by malaria, which killed all of the white agents as well as twenty-two of the African-American voyagers and they soon left, exhausted and landless, returning to Fourah Bay outside Freetown.²

Shotgun settlement in the palaver hut

The following year, the settlers who had arrived on the Elizabeth were still based outside Freetown, when a second ACS party arrived aboard a ship called the Nautilus, under the command of Captain R.F. Stockton.

The new settlers sailed to Cape Mount on the other side of the Mano river estuary and came ashore, meeting an African ruler, King Peter of the Dey tribe. Trading some goods in exchange for supplies, the white agents, on behalf of the settlers who remained on board ship, then explained their aspirations to found a settlement and negotiated for the purchase of land on which they might set up their new homeland. The freemen came with their high visions of a religious society carrying their Bibles and praying often along the way.

All that did not impress, nor did it entice, the king of the Dey, who was a big slave trader himself. Peter was interested in trade, but was not at all interested in the permanent presence of these antislavery religious pioneers from thousands of miles away. Indeed, at the time the Americans arrived he was in the process of negotiating for the sale of some of his own captive countrymen to a French frigate, also moored nearby.

King Peter and the local tribes were nothing unusual in that regard. Many of the tribes along the coast had for decades engaged in a brisk business in slavery with various different European traders and the sudden arrival of these ‘free’ former slaves could be highly disruptive to the business they had developed. King Peter sent the settlers on their way. They then sailed further south down the coast, coming next to Grand Bassa on 9 April. Here they encountered another native leader, King Jack Benn at Jumbotown, and once again traded with him, offered gifts, but received a similar reception to their proposal to settle.

Retracing his steps, Stockton sailed back and arranged a meeting with King Peter and the leaders of other tribes, the Mambe and the Bassa, in King Peter’s village in Montserrado, on 15 December 1821. Pulling out their pistols and pointing them at King Peter’s head, the pioneers gave their ultimatum to the King of the Dey at gunpoint: an agreement was finally struck. In exchange for about $300 worth of beads, tobacco, gunpowder and guns, the settlers received 130 acres of land on Cape Montserrado on which to found their colony.

On nearby Providence Island they finally raised the American flag, symbolically claiming a home. It was here that Elijah Johnson, leader of the first expedition that had left some twenty-two months earlier, uttered the immortal words: ‘for two long years I have sought a home; here I have found one, here I remain.’ That declaration by Johnson (one of whose sons went on to become the eleventh president of Liberia) is enshrined in Liberian history, and the words even became mandatory learning in the curriculum in Liberian schools.³

The Dey, still reluctant partners in their recent land deal with the settlers, soon launched an attack on the newcomers. The colonists, led by Elijah Johnson, marshalled superior firepower of their own and beat back the natives’ attacks. Having outgunned the Dey and holding on to their outpost, they were at last able to establish a city in 1822, which they initially called Christopolis. Fighting against the natives continued, however, with the local tribes continuing to harass the new settlers as they tried to build their city on the cape. After months of skirmishing, the Dey launched an all-out attack on the colony in November 1822, which threatened to wipe out the settlers.

However, the British Navy was still patrolling the coast and landed some officers and sailors who succeeded in negotiating a truce between the Dey and the colonists. Still with no formal presence on the virgin shores to the east of Sierra Leone, the British also had an interest in the new territory, doubtless with a view to adding it to their expanding colonial empire in West Africa before the French laid claim to it. The American settlers, despite being desperate for help, however refused to submit to British rule, while nonetheless accepting the British protection in the meantime.

According to legend, the commander of a British gunboat initially approached Johnson offering to send for additional help if the new colony would agree to raise the British flag. Johnson famously replied: ‘We want no flagstaff put up here that will cost more to take down again than it will to whip the natives.’⁴

Mythical Matilda Newport

An important date in the settlers’ calendar, which dates back to their earliest skirmishes with the native population, was Matilda Newport Day, 1 December, celebrated by Americo-Liberians right up until the 1970s, in an undisguised commemoration of supremacy over the native population of their own country. Until that time, the minority Americo-Liberian community still remembered a patriotic figure (who many native Liberians say was entirely fictitious), who, as the story goes, prevailed single-handedly over an attacking band of hundreds of indigenous Liberians almost two centuries ago.

The legend that was passed down in Americo-Liberian lore was that during the battle of Crown Hill between the colonists and an attacking throng of native Liberians in 1822, Matilda Newport, a formidable settler woman, went back to a cannon on the hilltop which her defending forces had just abandoned in retreat, and then, using all her cunning, turned the settlers’ defeat into a historic victory. It is said that she fired the cannon at the natives using a coal from her pipe, annihilating a large number of the attackers and scattering the remainder, after which the battle was won.⁵ Not surprisingly, native Liberian scholars dispute the story and some have even questioned the existence of Matilda Newport, let alone her incredible feat of bravery in battle.

In the only recorded history of the events of that time, written by Jehudi Ashmun, a white ACS pioneer who had been on board the Elizabeth in 1822 (the ship Matilda Newport is said to have arrived on) and who acted as the colony’s governor from 1824 to 1828, there is no mention of a Matilda Newport or the heroic events of such a figure at that battle. And yet the story was often repeated, and indeed taught, in Liberian schools as part of the history of the country.⁶

The new settlement was soon renamed Monrovia after the US president who encouraged its creation, James Monroe, himself a founding father in his own still fledgling United States of America. Over the following century, as European powers rushed to colonize the surrounding territories, then struggled to control them and exploit them commercially, settler Liberia remained independent and relatively underdeveloped within a European-dominated coastline of commodity trading ports. With next to no administrative structure in its hinterland, Liberia was run like a large plantation on the west coast of Africa with a way of life largely modelled on that of the American South, from which most of the country’s settlers had arrived. The neighbouring possessions had names like the Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast and the Slave Coast, while Liberia itself started life as the Pepper Coast, also known as the Grain Coast, as it became famous for the melegueta pepper, or the ‘grain of paradise’ to those who sought it.

For the first twenty-five years of its existence, the new settlement was administered by the agents of the ACS, temporarily seconded white men who supervised the growth of the territory without sharing any particular aspirations for its future. However, with the need to secure its commercial interests, raise taxes and negotiate with foreign states, particularly in competition with the British and French presences in the area, the settlements’ leaders moved to transform Liberia into a sovereign republic.

In 1845, a constitution was drafted with the support of the ACS and in 1847 Liberia became the continent’s first independent republic, some 110 years ahead of Ghana, the second country in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve self-rule. Liberia adopted its own constitution, based on that of the United States, together with a national seal, inscribed with the inspiring slogan ‘The love of liberty brought us here’. The period of stewardship by the white agents came to an end and Joseph Jenkins Roberts became the republic’s first president, serving from 1848 until 1855. A Liberian national flag was created. Today it contains a single white star on a blue background and eleven red and white stripes for the eleven original signatories of Liberia’s independence; a blue canton symbolizing the continent of Africa and a white star representing the freedom of the former slaves who came to found the country.

President Roberts was the first non-white leader to represent the independent settler colony after a quarter of a century of white ACS governors, but, although a poor immigrant from Virginia, he was also hardly black, rather a mulatto or an ‘octoroon’ as he is referred to in historical accounts.

The second president of Liberia, Stephen Benson (1856–1864), was also mulatto, and for the next several decades there developed a struggle for supremacy in government between the black settlers and the mulattoes. Following one such power struggle, resulting in the ousting, imprisonment on corruption charges and subsequent violent death of President E.J. Roye (the American-born descendant of Nigerian Ibo parents, regarded as Liberia’s first truly ‘black’ president⁷) J.J. Roberts came back to power in the early 1870s to serve for another term.

A Western colony in all but name

Indeed, while historically much has been made of Liberia’s status as the first independent republic in Africa, as run by blacks and not under the banner of a foreign master, in reality the Americo-Liberians who founded the settlement and launched it into nationhood were neither particularly black nor had anything at all in common with Africans, especially the ones they had chosen to share their new territory with. They were light in skin colour – as were a majority of freed slaves from the United States in the early nineteenth century – often the offspring of a white slave-owning father and a female slave...

Table of contents

• FRONT COVER
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: The land of the freed
• PART TWO: From dictatorship to anarchy
• PART THREE: Power in Greater Liberia
• PART FOUR: Fallout from a revolution
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX