Liberia

Liberia which used to be hailed as the first independent modern black nation in Africa (Ethiopia was not considered modern, and miserable Haiti, which became independent as a result of the French revolution, is situated in the Americas) was in actual fact one of the last remaining colonial regimes on the continent. The main difference between Liberia and Rhodesia or apartheid South Africa was the fact that the Liberian ruling class was black. The early Americo-Liberian settlers who were deported from the United States during the first half of the 19th century had the same attitude to "primitive" native Africans as their former white masters in the United States. They conquered a little piece of territory on the West African coast, negotiated with the local "native" kings and in 1849 established their own independent state, under the protection of the United States, later also of the Firestone company which built giant rubber plantations. When Liberia in 1949 celebrated its centenary, Duke Ellington had been invited to perform his "Liberian Suite", composed especially for the occasion. Hundreds of African, American and European dignitaries were sweating it out in tuxedoes in the tropical heat. In the early 1960s, Liberian president William Shadrach Tubman, initiating his "Open Door Policy" to foreign capital, was pleased to welcome LAMCO, the Liberian-American Mining Company, which was essentially a joint venture between Bethlehem Steel and the Swedish Grängesberg Corporation, part of the Wallenberg economic empire. LAMCO opened an iron mine in Yekepa in order to exploit the fabulous mineral resources of Mount Nimba, on the border with neigboring Guinea. The Grängesberg Company, which was in direct charge of the operations, soon built a little Swedish company town next to the mountain. "Liberia means Freedom", said the Swedish king greeting President Tubman on the latter´s arrival in Stockholm for a state visit in 1962 . It came as a great surprise both to the Grängesberg Company and the Liberian government, that the mining project also, dialectically, gave rise to trade union activity and increased political militancy in Liberia. When a Swedish television team in 1966 arrived to do a feature on successful economic cooperation between Sweden and Africa, they suddenly found themselves smack in the middle of the first serious strike at LAMCO´s Nimba operation. Pictures on Swedish Television showed the leader of the strike, manacled to the railing of the company guest house in Yekepa. In 1980, Tubman´s successor as president, William Tolbert, who also belonged to the Americo-Liberian upper crust of society, was overthrown by soldiers belonging to the "native" population who had for so long been kept out of Liberian politics. The country finally caught up with history and had to go through its own "French revolution". There were no guillotines. Instead members of the ruling class were shot, tied to poles on the beach outside Monrovia, the Liberian capital (named after the US president James Monroe, father of the Monroe doctrine). The revolutionary leader, Sergeant Samuel Doe, was later, challenged by a Liberian politician belonging to the old Americo-Liberian elite, Charles Taylor, in what became a very nasty civil war. Rebel troups captured President Doe, whose ears were cut off in front of a video camera, before he was finally killed. A quarter of Liberia´s population fled to neighboring countries, particularly the Ivory Coast. By that time the iron ore in the LAMCO mine was exhausted and Mount Nimba had been practically levelled to the ground. What the foreign investors had praised as an important development project, a symbol of the future for Africa, was at an end, and Liberia had been liberated of one of its most precious resources. In 1997 Charles Taylor, the successful war lord from the civil war, was elected president of Liberia. In 2003, another rebellion and international pressure forced Taylor into exile in neighboring Nigeria, while UN troops and filantropic organizations started the difficult task to rebuild his devastated country.Feb 21, 2002 – Importprogram Importprogram