As pretty much all kossacks know, Liberia has been in the news a lot lately, and not in a good way.
Ebola has taken root there, in a country with broken infrastructure and a damaged yet resilient people.
I have been lucky enough to visit Liberia (unless you have medical qualifications, now is probably a bad time, although I am looking to volunteer my non-medical skill set if it would be of any use), but unless you were there too or are intimately knowledgable about the history of slavery, you are probably unfamiliar with the full horror of Liberia's past.
Jump down below the fold if you can stomach it.
I should have posted this a couple of years ago, but I was too cowardly. I apologize, but that isn't worth a bucket of warm piss. Liberia is such a tangled knot of racism and exploitation, I doubt I can do it justice, even as I write this. I hoped Denise Oliver Velez or Egberto Willies or Meteor Blades or Hunter, well pretty much anyone, would do it instead, would do it for me. Pathetic, I know.
So here I go...
From its inception there was tension between those that supported slavery in the former British colonies and those that thought it a cancer upon the new nation or nations. What is often glossed over, however, is that many Abolitionists, at least in the beginning, saw no more room in the United States of Americans of European Descent for 'Africans' than slaveholders did. One may posit that a few of them thought free 'Africans' would hinder the end of slavery, or that the 'Africans' deserved to go 'home', or that 'Africans' were doomed to be second class citizens in the place they had been shipped to like animals, chattel. The real reason, of course, was that a sizeable population of American 'Africans' was anathema to most of them. Slavery was bad, black men walking around unchecked was bad too, maybe worse (according to them). Out of this poisonous mix, Liberia was born.
Rightly angry ex-slaves deported to a 'homeland' they had never known or seen, thanks to white arrogance, selfishness and barely disguised hypocrisy... What could go wrong? If you answered "a lot", or "pretty much everything", I can't much argue.
So back to the past... In 1820, The American Colonization Society 'bought' a small piece of land where it hoped to get rid of dump hand out unicorns to 'resettle' former slaves. Twenty seven years after that 'The Republic of Liberia' - bravo for the Orwellian name for the country - gained independent status (but not, it should be noted, independence), but even twenty years after that ACS had sent just 13,000 'Africans' 'back' to Africa, i.e. their outpost in what is now Liberia. They did succeed in swallowing up even less successful 'resettlement' efforts such as Mississippi-in-Africa and the Republic of Maryland. Of course such tiny numbers offered no 'solution' to the 'African problem' in America and a bloody, fratricidal war would be required to end the evils of slavery, but enough former slaves were dumped in Liberia to cause almost two hundred years of immeasurable suffering.
After the Civil War and the assassination of A. Lincoln -a supporter of the ACS project- no one in the US cared much about Liberia. The slaves had been freed, relocation of 'Africans' to Africa had been a failure, and even if it hadn't it was too expensive and the war-torn United States required labor, preferably cheap labor. Liberia was no longer 'a thing'. But it couldn't escape the manner in which it was born.
The former slaves, however, were more than smart enough to learn the ways of their abusers. The "Americo-Liberians" would use all the tools of violence, intimidation and force of arms to exploit and subjugate the indigenous peoples. The horror of slavery had lead to more horror, for more people. But the worst was yet to come.
After more than a hundred years of "Americo-Liberian" rule, which included cutting down forest to establish rubber plantations (yes, that is the right word), for which I think we can all say "Thanks for being a shit, Mr. Goodyear!", ordinary Liberians had had enough. But instead of a better future they got Samuel Doe (evil bastard) and then Charles Taylor (on trial in the Hague for various crimes). Two killers whose psychopathic tendencies can be traced back to the bad choices of few white guysa couple of centuries ago.
Not that Doe or Taylor deserve sympathy; they don't. I hope Taylor gets life in prison and eternal disgust from the people of Liberia (Samuel Doe is dead).
Note: I used the term 'Africans' because that was the least bad choice.