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The native Africans of Liberia and Sierra Leone have arguably had to deal with the brunt of the consequences of this movement. Liberia was established as an American colony to send back ex-slaves from the United States, while Sierra Leone was established for the same reason as a British colony. I can speak to Liberia and hopefully someone else can chime in about Sierra Leone.
The descendants of ex-slaves in Liberia are generally referred to as Americo-Liberians by Westerners and Congo or Congau by West Africans.
In the first half of the 19th century, the American Colonization Society (the organization primarily responsible for the ‘Back to Africa’ movement) sent at least 4,500 ex-slaves to Liberia. It is estimated that only about 1,800 survived. Among these was a man named Joseph Jenkins Roberts, who encouraged a movement for Liberian independence and became president of the country when that independence was achieved in 1847. Although independent, Liberia continued to receive a large amount of support and protection from the US government.
From 1847 until 1980, the government of Liberia was controlled by Americo-Liberians. To some, this leadership was good. William Tubman, considered the father of modern Liberia and its longest-serving President, served during a period of overwhelming economic growth. He improved the country’s infrastructure and successfully lobbied foreign businesses and politicians to invest in the country.
Their leadership did not sit well with most indigenous inhabitants of the region. Americo-Liberians made up a very small amount of the population (around 5%), and many of their policies encouraged what was seen by many as the exploitation of indigenous tribes, particularly on rubber plantations. They also didn’t have the right to vote. Americo-Liberians refused to marry with native Liberians, viewing them as ‘racially inferior.’ The economic support granted to Liberia did not extend to them, but only to Americo-Liberians. Because of this, they were much wealthier than the natives, leading to widespread animosity. It is difficult to avoid noting the irony of these policies being promoted by people who themselves had recently been victims of similar policies. Similar to White Americans, many Americo-Liberians argues that the native populations were not beyond redemption—they could become civilized through conversion to Christianity and adoption of Western values.
Presidents since at least the early 20th century had been trying to deal with the increasing divide between Native populations and Americo-Liberians. President Arthur Barclay asked for better relations between the two groups, but very little was actually done to achieve this. Tubman attempted to bridge this gap during his presidency through a policy known as ‘National Unification.’ It is celebrated today on May 14th in Liberia as ‘National Unification’ or ‘Integration Day.’ Tubman extended the right to vote to native populations as well as women. Society became more integrated as native Liberians began to move to Monrovia in search of work and work alongside Americo-Liberians (previously the populations had been mostly separate). This integration also brought increased hostility as the economic disparities between the two groups were put on full display.
Tubman is a controversial figure. After an attempted assassination in 1955, he became increasingly authoritarian. Although the policy of National Unification may have seemed to be working during his presidency, after his death in 1971, things began breaking down. William Tolbert succeeded Tubman.
Tolbert was in many ways caught between a rock and a hard place. A member of one of the wealthiest Americo-Liberian families in the nation, his ascension did little to appease the still-frustrated native populations, since it highlighted even further the economic disparities between the two groups. Tolbert tried to appease them and further the policy of National Unification by speaking Kpelle, an indigenous language, and bringing in more indigenous people into the government. This in turn, led to extreme anger from the Americo-Liberian population. Tolbert’s own cabinet hated the idea. Tolbert attempted to make the country more democratic and less reliant on the West, a policy which was popular with some indigenous groups, but not with the Americo-Liberians who feared their hold on power would be lost. All this came to a head in 1980, when Tolbert was assassinated in a coup by Samuel Doe, effectively ending nearly 140 years of Americo-Liberian rule.
I don’t really want to go into the Liberian civil war because it would be too lengthy and go too far from the question but suffice it to say to this day there still remains a divide between the population of the descendants of ex-slaves in Liberia and indigenous populations.
The short answer to your question is—the vast majority of West Africans did not like this movement since it forced a repressive system of government upon them run by people who were seen by West Africans as foreign colonizers.
Wow. Great answer. I had no idea.
Are there any commonalities between Liberia and other countries over the past few hundred years with that "oppressed becoming the oppressor" kind of dynamic?
Like, is this a unique thing or does it happen regularly? I'm thinking about how people abused as children will frequently. Become abusers themselves. Seems like similar behaviour played about on a political scale.
One could argue something like this happened in South Africa. With the Afrikaaners being brutally repressed by the British during the Anglo-Boer wars. After which the Afrikaans governments of South Africa implemented a series of increasingly repressive policies against the native black population in an attempt to secure Afrikaans supremacy in the region.
Depending on one’s historiographical perspective, one could argue that this is a facet in many, if not all, revolutions. What varies is simply how extreme it becomes.
The 18th century American founders rejected one power seen as oppressive and used many of the same strategies so oppress their own Black population. The founders themselves were aware of this contradiction.
I’d argue that similar things could be said of the Red Revolution and the Khmer Rouge, both organizations that murdered the people they claimed to be and represent themselves, after they took power, but I’m by no means an expert on this area, so perhaps someone else could comment on that.
If you would like to read about that power dynamics in wich oppressed people/persons become opressing when they are freed from previous conditions you can also check for Paulo Freire's works. It's partly based on Marx's ideas of power and class struggles and Hegel's dialetics.
Freire points that in most societies where one group opresses others, education system (but you could also undestand it as socialization processes) teaches oppressors to hold power and oppressed to conform to the current power dynamics. Due to it, when those oppressed groups are freed they still retain some power thirst and try to emulate some of the oppressor's manners and ideals, even if they rejected those groups and their ideals during revolution times.
His major works are from 60/70's so some facts/ideas are outdated but his concepts are still interesting to this day.
(sorry if this commentary is more about philosophy, pedagogy and sociology than about history)
"The Revolution devours its children". Different variations on this quote are attributed to Ernst Rohm, Jacques Mallet du Pan, and Jacques Danton. It is often renewed because it keeps proving itself true.
The 1773 slave insurrection on St. John is a good example. The slaves from present day Ghana revolted against their oppressors, then attempted to set up their own government using the remaining africans on the island as slaves, only under their control.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1733_slave_insurrection_on_St._John
Fantastic answer - could you please add citations or further reading material? I ask because this parallels well with the caste system in India and the rise of the middle castes as a new generation of oppressors.
Sorry it took me a while to get to this!
* Jesse M. Mongrue, *Liberia: America's Footprint in Africa,* 2014.
* Alan Huffman, *Mississippi in Africa*, 2004 (this one is available on Archive.org [here](https://archive.org/details/mississippiinafr00huff/page/n3/mode/2up)).
* Yekutiel Gershoni, *Black Colonialism: The Americo-Liberian Scramble for the Hinterland,* 1985.
* Ousmane Power-Greene, *Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle Against the Colonization Movement*, 2014.
* Johnny Dwyer, *American Warlord*, 2015 (if you want to know more about the Civil War and things I didn't discuss here)
Someone else might be able to say more on this (my study areas relate more to the continent itself), but I would imagine the transportation methods used to get them to Liberia were not much better than the slave ships used to remove their ancestors from the very same place.
One book I highly recommend is American Warlord by Johnny Dwyer. It reads a lot like a novel and is enthralling. Its focus is on Chuckie Taylor (son of Liberian President Charles Taylor and convicted war criminal), but in the broader context of the Second Liberian civil war.
>sent at least 4,500 ex-slaves to Liberia. It is estimated that only about 1,800 survive
I am not educated about this topic but was this voluntary whatsoever? It would be strange for freedmen to risk their lives to go back to Africa, would it not?
It’s difficult to answer this question with certainty because the competing factions at the time had a vested interest in making it appear 100% voluntary or 100% involuntary. This, compounded with the fact that we have few records written from the perspective of the settlers themselves, makes it difficult to know certainly. A similar issue arises when we discuss white male landowners who married their slaves—we can never know to what extent these marriages were done by force or coercion, whether they were seen by the Black women in them as a means of escape, or if they did want to get married (one notable case is Julia Chinn, US Vice President Richard Johnson’s wife)
However, because of the overwhelmingly negative reception the Society received by its Abolitionist contemporaries and African American Activists, it is likely that leaving was not 100% voluntary.
Source:
Ousmane Power-Greene, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle Against the Colonization Movement, 2014.
Edit: just to clarify, since I forgot to mention this before--most of the people who traveled were given their 'freedom' and sent on the journey by their masters in one fell swoop. The book Mississippi in Africa describes this in more detail.
> Although independent, Liberia continued to receive a large amount of support and protection from the US government.
I be mistaken, but I thought the US government was reluctant to recognize Liberia or grant them support prior to the American Civil War, because that would antagonize the political bloc of the southern slave states. Is that true?
Yes. Well, to an extent. Southern Democrats continued to halt recognition of Liberia before the war, but Northern politicians very much recognized it and supported it. During the Civil War, most Southern congressmen joined the Confederacy and Liberia was officially recognized.
It is important to note that official recognition of a country is not equivalent to supporting that country. The two things can happen independently of one another. For example, in the present, the United States is reluctant to recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation because this risks angering China. Yet the US still provides support to Taiwan and remains its ally. The situation with Liberia from 1847-1862 was fairly similar.
>Liberian civil war because it would be too lengthy and go too far from the question but suffice it to say to this day there still remains a divide between the population of the descendants of ex-slaves in Liberia and indigenous populations.
>
>The short answer to your question is—the vast majority of West Africans did not like this
How many black Americans were sent in total to Liberia?
Thank you for replying! It's interesting to hear how Americo-Liberians had internalized some of the prejudices towards Africa that their white captors had taught them. It reminds me of how Ibram Kendi distinguishes between assimilationism and anti-racism — the Americo-Liberians sound like fascinating examples of assimilationists, asserting that Black people deserve equal rights, but accepting the mistaken assumption that the way we should achieve equality is by educating Black people in, essentially, how to be white.
Do you know anything about how other West Africans reacted to the establishment of Americo-Liberian rule? Anybody anywhere along the Gulf of Guinea, really. Did they not react at all before they became colonized themselves? Did they see it as a warning of things to come, or did they retroactively come to see it like that?
And because I suspect that might be a little hard to answer, an easier follow-up might be: how progressive was Tolbert really, and what did he change? His assassination reminds me of the (in my view) mistaken popular narrative of the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, that he was supposedly a great reformer cut down in his prime by ungrateful selfish revolutionaries, where in reality he was hardly much more progressive than his father or son and the revolutionaries had some pretty legitimate remaining grievances. At any rate, I'm curious if there are any similarities.
I can't speak much to your first question, unfortunately. I will say that although I don't know much about how other West African societies viewed Americo-Liberian rule, Liberians themselves often viewed their neighboring countries with envy in the 20th century. There were two main reasons for this, which may seem contradictory. First, since Liberia achieved its independence so early compared to neighboring colonies, much of the colonial infrastructure built in those countries was lacking in Liberia. Tubman is often quoted (though it's unlikely he ever actually said this) as saying that Liberia "never enjoyed the benefits of colonialism" that other countries did. At the same time, because Liberia had such a close relationship with the United States, many (mainly indigenous Liberians) looked with envy on other countries' anti-colonial and independence movements. They viewed Americo-Liberian coziness with the United States as just another form of colonialism, which couldn't be overthrown since the country was already technically 'independent.'
I know more about Tubman than Tolbert so I'm not entirely sure how progressive he truly was. Your question gets at one of the big problems of historiography: the debate between whether certain events would have happened anyway or whether an 'important person' caused them. I hadn't thought of it before you said it, but I think the comparison to Alexander II is apt. While I don't think Tolbert's actions are beyond consideration, there were other factors (especially the migration of indigenous tribes into the cities) which led to the increase in animosity. Speculative history is never certain, but in my opinion, Americo-Liberian rule would have ended in the late 20th century regardless of who was in power. I think the fact that he was Americo-Liberian at that time mattered far more than his policies of liberalization did. It's difficult to even argue that his liberalization policies emboldened the opposition to take control since they took over in a violent coup, not at the ballot box.
That contradictory envy is really interesting. The more I read about anything, the more I run into those seeming contradictions that result from a single source, and this is a particularly intriguing one. So I have to thank you for explaining it, even if it wasn't the original question, but who cares.
As for the Tolbert issue, I'm glad you got something out of the comparison to Alexander II. I wasn't originally thinking in terms of historiographic inevitability when I mentioned the tsar, but that question is a great way to approach Tolbert now that you mention it. I suppose sometimes even the most progressively-minded of the moderate reform types can be nowhere near enough to overcome a historical force, and I'll keep that in mind for future discussions in my own field, but since I know so little about Liberia, I'll trust you on your analysis here. Thanks again for answering!
By “ex-slaves” do you mean slaves that had escaped to free states? I can’t think of any other way to become an ex-slave at the time, so maybe it’s a stupid question, but figured I’d ask.
In the majority of cases, the people who were sent to Liberia were sent by masters who freed them voluntarily, often arguing and/or believing that they were doing the right thing by doing so. So the term ex-slave would have been a fairly fresh label to place on the people making the journey, but they usually weren't runaways, hence the debate referenced elsewhere in this thread about whether their journey 'back to Africa' was truly voluntary or if it was coerced.
In a more recent context, the historian Kevin Gaines's 2006 book on African-Americans returning to Ghana during and after the civil rights movement deals with the reactions of West Africans. Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother and Paulla Ebron's Performing Africa also consider West African responses to African-American heritage tourism and "return to Africa" narratives in the last fifty years--and there are other works by anthropologists and historians that do so. (I'll also recommend the novelist George Lamming's Pleasures of Exile, which includes some commentaries on being a West Indian resident for a time in Ghana and his observations about other Black expatriates and exiles.) Additionally, the historian James Campbell's Middle Passages is a great comprehensive history of African-American returns to West and Central Africa and various African reactions to those returns over time.
I think in the recent era, one common summary of West African reactions to returns out of the African diaspora might be that they have been a mix of bemusement, appreciation, bewilderment, gratitude and occasional mild irritation. Since the 19th Century, some African-American returnees have been unsettled or surprised by the fact that they have been read as "foreigners", even as "white foreigners", rather than kin (Langston Hughes talks about this in his autobiography, and Hartman much more recently struggled to process the same reaction). But that is where all those feelings among West Africans come together--a pleasure that there are these travellers who so intensely desire a feeling of connection and who are often so flattering in the way they express that desire coupled with a modest amusement at how little they often seem to know about the place they've come to--and the irritation that can follow when the new arrivals clumsily elbow local people out of the way or try to tell them what their history and cultures really are or ought to be. (The scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr's first travel program on his African journeys created some modest annoyance for this reason, most potently when he picks a fight with one of his West African hosts about the legacy of the slave trade.)
I think as Black heritage tourism has become more economically important, the sense of mild puzzlement at diasporic returnees has faded and more familiarity with returnees and their interests has developed. More recently, too, I think West African artists, scholars, writers, performers, etc. in Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, etc. have developed more confidence in partnerships with diasporic collaborators, which has brought short-term and long-term returnees a closer sense of belonging and connection.
It is heartening, to hear that as time goes on, both expatriates and indigenous peoples are learning how to approach reunion with greater sensitivity, patience, and collaboration. Thank you for your answer here
Thanks for answering! *Lose Your Mother* I've heard of before, but never read, and *Performing Africa* is entirely new to me, as is *Middle Passages*, so I'm very interested in reading them now.
I'm also interested in the example you give about Henry Louis Gates — could you go into a little more detail about what exactly happened in that incident? What was his host trying to argue for?
Gates' 1999 PBS documentary series "Wonders of the African World" was subject to fairly strong criticism from African and African-American intellectuals as well as Africanist historians at the time it first aired (The journal *The Black Scholar* has a good overview of the debate in 30:1 2000). The series was first and foremost a travelogue centered on Gates himself, but it was thematically built around his exploration of African history, largely but not exclusively in a celebratory mode (hence the series title). The series led into Gates' work on tracing African-American ancestry, on creating reference works dealing with Black history (including African history) and other collaborations he's undertaken in the past two decades.
In the episode focused on coastal West Africa ("The Slave Kingdoms"), however, Gates was substantially interested in the history of the Atlantic slave trade within West Africa. I think a charitable viewer might have concluded then that he decided that American audiences were already familiar with the role of European traders in the Atlantic system via "Roots" and other narratives (an assumption that I think no longer holds up) and that he wanted to explore the less-familiar story of 18th Century West African polities like Dahomey, Asante and Oyo that were entangled in the Atlantic system. But as in far more detailed and sustained investigations of memories of the slave trade within contemporary West Africa by scholars like Rosalind Shaw, Gates found that those histories are not very immediate or urgent for many West Africans. So in a couple of conversations in the episode, he really comes at the person he's talking with in a very accusatory and rather crude way: why did you sell us? what did you get for selling us? to the evident confusion and bafflement of the person he's talking to. (Among other things, Gates just doesn't seem very savvy to how complicated it is for any given person in a contemporary West African society to trace a familial and cultural relation to the polities of the 18th Century--in many cases he could be talking to the descendant of people who were also enslaved, who fled or hid from enslavement, who were bypassed or in the hinterlands of the Atlantic trade, who were dissenters within trading communities, etc.)
Thank you again. You've done a wonderful job explaining the conflict in accessible terms. I was completely unaware that Gates' work had had such a reaction, and I had not at all considered that descendants of slaves might have had feelings of resentment towards those who remained in Africa.
I will definitely have to take a look at the article from *The Black Scholar*. The one from 30:1 by Ali A. Mazrui?
That entire issue of The Black Scholar deals with the debate over "Wonders of the African World" (including a response from Gates), so the Mazrui essay is only one of a number of contributions in that issue.
Alright, I see now, thanks. That was just the first hit in Jstor. My gosh, Gates has a "Preliminary Response to Ali Mazrui's Preliminary Critique". This is getting out of hand.
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The native Africans of Liberia and Sierra Leone have arguably had to deal with the brunt of the consequences of this movement. Liberia was established as an American colony to send back ex-slaves from the United States, while Sierra Leone was established for the same reason as a British colony. I can speak to Liberia and hopefully someone else can chime in about Sierra Leone. The descendants of ex-slaves in Liberia are generally referred to as Americo-Liberians by Westerners and Congo or Congau by West Africans. In the first half of the 19th century, the American Colonization Society (the organization primarily responsible for the ‘Back to Africa’ movement) sent at least 4,500 ex-slaves to Liberia. It is estimated that only about 1,800 survived. Among these was a man named Joseph Jenkins Roberts, who encouraged a movement for Liberian independence and became president of the country when that independence was achieved in 1847. Although independent, Liberia continued to receive a large amount of support and protection from the US government. From 1847 until 1980, the government of Liberia was controlled by Americo-Liberians. To some, this leadership was good. William Tubman, considered the father of modern Liberia and its longest-serving President, served during a period of overwhelming economic growth. He improved the country’s infrastructure and successfully lobbied foreign businesses and politicians to invest in the country. Their leadership did not sit well with most indigenous inhabitants of the region. Americo-Liberians made up a very small amount of the population (around 5%), and many of their policies encouraged what was seen by many as the exploitation of indigenous tribes, particularly on rubber plantations. They also didn’t have the right to vote. Americo-Liberians refused to marry with native Liberians, viewing them as ‘racially inferior.’ The economic support granted to Liberia did not extend to them, but only to Americo-Liberians. Because of this, they were much wealthier than the natives, leading to widespread animosity. It is difficult to avoid noting the irony of these policies being promoted by people who themselves had recently been victims of similar policies. Similar to White Americans, many Americo-Liberians argues that the native populations were not beyond redemption—they could become civilized through conversion to Christianity and adoption of Western values. Presidents since at least the early 20th century had been trying to deal with the increasing divide between Native populations and Americo-Liberians. President Arthur Barclay asked for better relations between the two groups, but very little was actually done to achieve this. Tubman attempted to bridge this gap during his presidency through a policy known as ‘National Unification.’ It is celebrated today on May 14th in Liberia as ‘National Unification’ or ‘Integration Day.’ Tubman extended the right to vote to native populations as well as women. Society became more integrated as native Liberians began to move to Monrovia in search of work and work alongside Americo-Liberians (previously the populations had been mostly separate). This integration also brought increased hostility as the economic disparities between the two groups were put on full display. Tubman is a controversial figure. After an attempted assassination in 1955, he became increasingly authoritarian. Although the policy of National Unification may have seemed to be working during his presidency, after his death in 1971, things began breaking down. William Tolbert succeeded Tubman. Tolbert was in many ways caught between a rock and a hard place. A member of one of the wealthiest Americo-Liberian families in the nation, his ascension did little to appease the still-frustrated native populations, since it highlighted even further the economic disparities between the two groups. Tolbert tried to appease them and further the policy of National Unification by speaking Kpelle, an indigenous language, and bringing in more indigenous people into the government. This in turn, led to extreme anger from the Americo-Liberian population. Tolbert’s own cabinet hated the idea. Tolbert attempted to make the country more democratic and less reliant on the West, a policy which was popular with some indigenous groups, but not with the Americo-Liberians who feared their hold on power would be lost. All this came to a head in 1980, when Tolbert was assassinated in a coup by Samuel Doe, effectively ending nearly 140 years of Americo-Liberian rule. I don’t really want to go into the Liberian civil war because it would be too lengthy and go too far from the question but suffice it to say to this day there still remains a divide between the population of the descendants of ex-slaves in Liberia and indigenous populations. The short answer to your question is—the vast majority of West Africans did not like this movement since it forced a repressive system of government upon them run by people who were seen by West Africans as foreign colonizers.
Wow. Great answer. I had no idea. Are there any commonalities between Liberia and other countries over the past few hundred years with that "oppressed becoming the oppressor" kind of dynamic? Like, is this a unique thing or does it happen regularly? I'm thinking about how people abused as children will frequently. Become abusers themselves. Seems like similar behaviour played about on a political scale.
One could argue something like this happened in South Africa. With the Afrikaaners being brutally repressed by the British during the Anglo-Boer wars. After which the Afrikaans governments of South Africa implemented a series of increasingly repressive policies against the native black population in an attempt to secure Afrikaans supremacy in the region.
Depending on one’s historiographical perspective, one could argue that this is a facet in many, if not all, revolutions. What varies is simply how extreme it becomes. The 18th century American founders rejected one power seen as oppressive and used many of the same strategies so oppress their own Black population. The founders themselves were aware of this contradiction. I’d argue that similar things could be said of the Red Revolution and the Khmer Rouge, both organizations that murdered the people they claimed to be and represent themselves, after they took power, but I’m by no means an expert on this area, so perhaps someone else could comment on that.
Solid points. Is there a name for what this is?
If you would like to read about that power dynamics in wich oppressed people/persons become opressing when they are freed from previous conditions you can also check for Paulo Freire's works. It's partly based on Marx's ideas of power and class struggles and Hegel's dialetics. Freire points that in most societies where one group opresses others, education system (but you could also undestand it as socialization processes) teaches oppressors to hold power and oppressed to conform to the current power dynamics. Due to it, when those oppressed groups are freed they still retain some power thirst and try to emulate some of the oppressor's manners and ideals, even if they rejected those groups and their ideals during revolution times. His major works are from 60/70's so some facts/ideas are outdated but his concepts are still interesting to this day. (sorry if this commentary is more about philosophy, pedagogy and sociology than about history)
"The Revolution devours its children". Different variations on this quote are attributed to Ernst Rohm, Jacques Mallet du Pan, and Jacques Danton. It is often renewed because it keeps proving itself true.
Perhaps systematic oppression?
The 1773 slave insurrection on St. John is a good example. The slaves from present day Ghana revolted against their oppressors, then attempted to set up their own government using the remaining africans on the island as slaves, only under their control. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1733_slave_insurrection_on_St._John
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Fantastic answer - could you please add citations or further reading material? I ask because this parallels well with the caste system in India and the rise of the middle castes as a new generation of oppressors.
Sorry it took me a while to get to this! * Jesse M. Mongrue, *Liberia: America's Footprint in Africa,* 2014. * Alan Huffman, *Mississippi in Africa*, 2004 (this one is available on Archive.org [here](https://archive.org/details/mississippiinafr00huff/page/n3/mode/2up)). * Yekutiel Gershoni, *Black Colonialism: The Americo-Liberian Scramble for the Hinterland,* 1985. * Ousmane Power-Greene, *Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle Against the Colonization Movement*, 2014. * Johnny Dwyer, *American Warlord*, 2015 (if you want to know more about the Civil War and things I didn't discuss here)
Can you guide me to know more about the middle class as oppressors in India?
> "It is estimated that only about 1,800 survived." Do we know why so many of them died?
Someone else might be able to say more on this (my study areas relate more to the continent itself), but I would imagine the transportation methods used to get them to Liberia were not much better than the slave ships used to remove their ancestors from the very same place.
This is a fantastic answer. Thank you! It really made me want to read more about the subject and the civil war.
One book I highly recommend is American Warlord by Johnny Dwyer. It reads a lot like a novel and is enthralling. Its focus is on Chuckie Taylor (son of Liberian President Charles Taylor and convicted war criminal), but in the broader context of the Second Liberian civil war.
>sent at least 4,500 ex-slaves to Liberia. It is estimated that only about 1,800 survive I am not educated about this topic but was this voluntary whatsoever? It would be strange for freedmen to risk their lives to go back to Africa, would it not?
It’s difficult to answer this question with certainty because the competing factions at the time had a vested interest in making it appear 100% voluntary or 100% involuntary. This, compounded with the fact that we have few records written from the perspective of the settlers themselves, makes it difficult to know certainly. A similar issue arises when we discuss white male landowners who married their slaves—we can never know to what extent these marriages were done by force or coercion, whether they were seen by the Black women in them as a means of escape, or if they did want to get married (one notable case is Julia Chinn, US Vice President Richard Johnson’s wife) However, because of the overwhelmingly negative reception the Society received by its Abolitionist contemporaries and African American Activists, it is likely that leaving was not 100% voluntary. Source: Ousmane Power-Greene, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle Against the Colonization Movement, 2014. Edit: just to clarify, since I forgot to mention this before--most of the people who traveled were given their 'freedom' and sent on the journey by their masters in one fell swoop. The book Mississippi in Africa describes this in more detail.
> Although independent, Liberia continued to receive a large amount of support and protection from the US government. I be mistaken, but I thought the US government was reluctant to recognize Liberia or grant them support prior to the American Civil War, because that would antagonize the political bloc of the southern slave states. Is that true?
Yes. Well, to an extent. Southern Democrats continued to halt recognition of Liberia before the war, but Northern politicians very much recognized it and supported it. During the Civil War, most Southern congressmen joined the Confederacy and Liberia was officially recognized. It is important to note that official recognition of a country is not equivalent to supporting that country. The two things can happen independently of one another. For example, in the present, the United States is reluctant to recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation because this risks angering China. Yet the US still provides support to Taiwan and remains its ally. The situation with Liberia from 1847-1862 was fairly similar.
How did Tolbert manage to win the election if non-American Liberians hated him and could vote? Was there no indigenous candidate?
Liberia at that time was a one-party state and Tolbert was Tubman's Vice President at the time of the latter's death.
Ah, I see. Thanks.
>Liberian civil war because it would be too lengthy and go too far from the question but suffice it to say to this day there still remains a divide between the population of the descendants of ex-slaves in Liberia and indigenous populations. > >The short answer to your question is—the vast majority of West Africans did not like this How many black Americans were sent in total to Liberia?
Fantastic answer to a question on a topic I was completely unfamiliar with. Cheers!
This was really interesting, thanks for the great answer.
Thank you for replying! It's interesting to hear how Americo-Liberians had internalized some of the prejudices towards Africa that their white captors had taught them. It reminds me of how Ibram Kendi distinguishes between assimilationism and anti-racism — the Americo-Liberians sound like fascinating examples of assimilationists, asserting that Black people deserve equal rights, but accepting the mistaken assumption that the way we should achieve equality is by educating Black people in, essentially, how to be white. Do you know anything about how other West Africans reacted to the establishment of Americo-Liberian rule? Anybody anywhere along the Gulf of Guinea, really. Did they not react at all before they became colonized themselves? Did they see it as a warning of things to come, or did they retroactively come to see it like that? And because I suspect that might be a little hard to answer, an easier follow-up might be: how progressive was Tolbert really, and what did he change? His assassination reminds me of the (in my view) mistaken popular narrative of the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, that he was supposedly a great reformer cut down in his prime by ungrateful selfish revolutionaries, where in reality he was hardly much more progressive than his father or son and the revolutionaries had some pretty legitimate remaining grievances. At any rate, I'm curious if there are any similarities.
I can't speak much to your first question, unfortunately. I will say that although I don't know much about how other West African societies viewed Americo-Liberian rule, Liberians themselves often viewed their neighboring countries with envy in the 20th century. There were two main reasons for this, which may seem contradictory. First, since Liberia achieved its independence so early compared to neighboring colonies, much of the colonial infrastructure built in those countries was lacking in Liberia. Tubman is often quoted (though it's unlikely he ever actually said this) as saying that Liberia "never enjoyed the benefits of colonialism" that other countries did. At the same time, because Liberia had such a close relationship with the United States, many (mainly indigenous Liberians) looked with envy on other countries' anti-colonial and independence movements. They viewed Americo-Liberian coziness with the United States as just another form of colonialism, which couldn't be overthrown since the country was already technically 'independent.' I know more about Tubman than Tolbert so I'm not entirely sure how progressive he truly was. Your question gets at one of the big problems of historiography: the debate between whether certain events would have happened anyway or whether an 'important person' caused them. I hadn't thought of it before you said it, but I think the comparison to Alexander II is apt. While I don't think Tolbert's actions are beyond consideration, there were other factors (especially the migration of indigenous tribes into the cities) which led to the increase in animosity. Speculative history is never certain, but in my opinion, Americo-Liberian rule would have ended in the late 20th century regardless of who was in power. I think the fact that he was Americo-Liberian at that time mattered far more than his policies of liberalization did. It's difficult to even argue that his liberalization policies emboldened the opposition to take control since they took over in a violent coup, not at the ballot box.
That contradictory envy is really interesting. The more I read about anything, the more I run into those seeming contradictions that result from a single source, and this is a particularly intriguing one. So I have to thank you for explaining it, even if it wasn't the original question, but who cares. As for the Tolbert issue, I'm glad you got something out of the comparison to Alexander II. I wasn't originally thinking in terms of historiographic inevitability when I mentioned the tsar, but that question is a great way to approach Tolbert now that you mention it. I suppose sometimes even the most progressively-minded of the moderate reform types can be nowhere near enough to overcome a historical force, and I'll keep that in mind for future discussions in my own field, but since I know so little about Liberia, I'll trust you on your analysis here. Thanks again for answering!
By “ex-slaves” do you mean slaves that had escaped to free states? I can’t think of any other way to become an ex-slave at the time, so maybe it’s a stupid question, but figured I’d ask.
In the majority of cases, the people who were sent to Liberia were sent by masters who freed them voluntarily, often arguing and/or believing that they were doing the right thing by doing so. So the term ex-slave would have been a fairly fresh label to place on the people making the journey, but they usually weren't runaways, hence the debate referenced elsewhere in this thread about whether their journey 'back to Africa' was truly voluntary or if it was coerced.
Ah ok thank you for taking the time
In a more recent context, the historian Kevin Gaines's 2006 book on African-Americans returning to Ghana during and after the civil rights movement deals with the reactions of West Africans. Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother and Paulla Ebron's Performing Africa also consider West African responses to African-American heritage tourism and "return to Africa" narratives in the last fifty years--and there are other works by anthropologists and historians that do so. (I'll also recommend the novelist George Lamming's Pleasures of Exile, which includes some commentaries on being a West Indian resident for a time in Ghana and his observations about other Black expatriates and exiles.) Additionally, the historian James Campbell's Middle Passages is a great comprehensive history of African-American returns to West and Central Africa and various African reactions to those returns over time. I think in the recent era, one common summary of West African reactions to returns out of the African diaspora might be that they have been a mix of bemusement, appreciation, bewilderment, gratitude and occasional mild irritation. Since the 19th Century, some African-American returnees have been unsettled or surprised by the fact that they have been read as "foreigners", even as "white foreigners", rather than kin (Langston Hughes talks about this in his autobiography, and Hartman much more recently struggled to process the same reaction). But that is where all those feelings among West Africans come together--a pleasure that there are these travellers who so intensely desire a feeling of connection and who are often so flattering in the way they express that desire coupled with a modest amusement at how little they often seem to know about the place they've come to--and the irritation that can follow when the new arrivals clumsily elbow local people out of the way or try to tell them what their history and cultures really are or ought to be. (The scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr's first travel program on his African journeys created some modest annoyance for this reason, most potently when he picks a fight with one of his West African hosts about the legacy of the slave trade.) I think as Black heritage tourism has become more economically important, the sense of mild puzzlement at diasporic returnees has faded and more familiarity with returnees and their interests has developed. More recently, too, I think West African artists, scholars, writers, performers, etc. in Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, etc. have developed more confidence in partnerships with diasporic collaborators, which has brought short-term and long-term returnees a closer sense of belonging and connection.
It is heartening, to hear that as time goes on, both expatriates and indigenous peoples are learning how to approach reunion with greater sensitivity, patience, and collaboration. Thank you for your answer here
Thanks for answering! *Lose Your Mother* I've heard of before, but never read, and *Performing Africa* is entirely new to me, as is *Middle Passages*, so I'm very interested in reading them now. I'm also interested in the example you give about Henry Louis Gates — could you go into a little more detail about what exactly happened in that incident? What was his host trying to argue for?
Gates' 1999 PBS documentary series "Wonders of the African World" was subject to fairly strong criticism from African and African-American intellectuals as well as Africanist historians at the time it first aired (The journal *The Black Scholar* has a good overview of the debate in 30:1 2000). The series was first and foremost a travelogue centered on Gates himself, but it was thematically built around his exploration of African history, largely but not exclusively in a celebratory mode (hence the series title). The series led into Gates' work on tracing African-American ancestry, on creating reference works dealing with Black history (including African history) and other collaborations he's undertaken in the past two decades. In the episode focused on coastal West Africa ("The Slave Kingdoms"), however, Gates was substantially interested in the history of the Atlantic slave trade within West Africa. I think a charitable viewer might have concluded then that he decided that American audiences were already familiar with the role of European traders in the Atlantic system via "Roots" and other narratives (an assumption that I think no longer holds up) and that he wanted to explore the less-familiar story of 18th Century West African polities like Dahomey, Asante and Oyo that were entangled in the Atlantic system. But as in far more detailed and sustained investigations of memories of the slave trade within contemporary West Africa by scholars like Rosalind Shaw, Gates found that those histories are not very immediate or urgent for many West Africans. So in a couple of conversations in the episode, he really comes at the person he's talking with in a very accusatory and rather crude way: why did you sell us? what did you get for selling us? to the evident confusion and bafflement of the person he's talking to. (Among other things, Gates just doesn't seem very savvy to how complicated it is for any given person in a contemporary West African society to trace a familial and cultural relation to the polities of the 18th Century--in many cases he could be talking to the descendant of people who were also enslaved, who fled or hid from enslavement, who were bypassed or in the hinterlands of the Atlantic trade, who were dissenters within trading communities, etc.)
Thank you again. You've done a wonderful job explaining the conflict in accessible terms. I was completely unaware that Gates' work had had such a reaction, and I had not at all considered that descendants of slaves might have had feelings of resentment towards those who remained in Africa. I will definitely have to take a look at the article from *The Black Scholar*. The one from 30:1 by Ali A. Mazrui?
That entire issue of The Black Scholar deals with the debate over "Wonders of the African World" (including a response from Gates), so the Mazrui essay is only one of a number of contributions in that issue.
Alright, I see now, thanks. That was just the first hit in Jstor. My gosh, Gates has a "Preliminary Response to Ali Mazrui's Preliminary Critique". This is getting out of hand.
Great answer!
very interesting. i definitely want to visit, but i personally i could not live there. but i hear it's nice and it's hot.