James Ciment, Another
America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It,
Hill and Wang, 2013, 296 pp., $30.00.
The modern era has seen many variations of black self rule. The
earliest example is Ethiopia, which, aside from occupation by the
Italians from 1936 to 1941, was never run by outsiders. The second
began with the Haitian Revolution, the third was the founding of
Liberia, and the 1960s saw most of black Africa achieve
independence. Government by blacks of American cities such as
Detroit and Newark is another form of black self-rule, as are the
independent islands of the Caribbean.
The circumstances of these different efforts could not be more
different; blacks have arrived at self-government by virtually every
route imaginable. But the results are the same: poverty, corruption,
violence.
Another America is a serviceable history of Liberia but it
has a bad title. It should have been called Another Haiti.
Liberia has had a few unusual turns in its history—its flirtation
with Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement and a League of Nations
investigation into allegations of slavery—but its history is a
dreary confirmation of the nature of blacks.
What eventually became Liberia was established by the American
Colonization Society (ACS), established in 1816 to solve America’s
racial problem by sending blacks back to Africa. As Henry Clay said
at the society’s inaugural meeting:
Can there be a nobler cause than that which, whilst it
proposed to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not
dangerous portion of its population, contemplates the spreading
of the arts of civilized life, and the possible redemption from
ignorance and barbarism of a benighted quarter of the globe?
Many great Americans were society members—James Madison, Andrew
Jackson, Daniel Webster, James Monroe, Stephen Douglas, John
Randolph, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, General Winfield Scott,
John Marshall and Roger Taney—and no less a figure than Bushrod
Washington, George’s nephew, was its figurehead president. Finding a
home for blacks outside the United States could not have been a more
respectable cause. The ACS managed to persuade Congress to give it
$100,000, and raised money from private sources.
James Madison’s membership certificate, issued in 1816.
The ACL was not the first to think of repatriation. In 1815, the
black whaling merchant, Paul Cuffe, paid most of the costs to
resettle 38 blacks in the British colony of Sierra Leone,
established by Britain as a haven for blacks freed from the slave
trade. Cuffe, who did not have enough money to finance a second
voyage, considered cooperating with the ACS, but didn’t like its
anti-black motivations.
The first ACL voyage left from New York in 1820. Of the 90
passengers who set sail on the Elizabeth, all had been born
free, and therefore would have been from the high ranks of black
society. Many were as eager to teach Christianity to benighted
Africans as they were to manage their affairs free of whites.
The Elizabeth sailed to Sierra Leone, which the ACS
thought would welcome the settlers. Instead, the British authorities
packed them off to Sherbro island, an undeveloped malarial swamp 100
miles from the capital of Freetown and a hopeless backwater even
today.
Sherbro Island airstrip today.
The ACS had assumed American blacks would be racially prepared
for Africa and immune to fevers that killed white men, but they were
wrong. About a quarter of the settlers died. Nor did the natives
welcome back their prodigal sons; Africans stole everything they
could.
There were three white agents of the ACS on board the
Elizabeth who, the blacks were surprised to learn, had final
authority. The agents did their best to help the blacks scratch out
a settlement, but all three died of disease. The last one turned
over authority to a mulatto whom the other blacks considered a white
lackey, and the settlement collapsed into chaos. The British
reluctantly let the survivors move back to better developed land
near Freetown.
It was only after the second ACS voyage arrived in 1821 that the
society’s representatives fully understood that Sierra Leone did not
want American blacks. The ACS men sailed south to what was known as
the Windward Coast and landed on Cape Mesurado, a bite of land that
was to become Monrovia. In December 1821, they struck what they
thought was a deal with a group of chiefs to exchange $300 worth of
trade goods for title to the land.
In fact, the chiefs had no intention of turning over the land.
They were smuggling slaves for a living, and knew that “the black
white men,” as they called the settlers, would try to stop them. On
Nov. 10, 1822, shortly after the colonists and a few white leaders
had established themselves on Cape Mesurado, natives tried to wipe
out the colony. The colonists managed to drive off the attack with
canon fire, but the natives returned on Dec. 1 in even larger
numbers. This was an even harder fought battle, and gave rise to one
of the founding myths of Liberia. A pipe-smoking woman by the name
of Matilda Newport is supposed to have touched off a canon at just
the right moment, saving the colony. For more than 100 years,
Liberia celebrated December 1 as Matilda Newport day, with
reenactments of the slaughter of natives.
Matilda Newport monument in Monrovia.
This was not the last time natives tried to wipe out the colony
but it was the attack that came closest. Many Americo Liberians
(ALs) as they came be called, despised the natives and the natives
hated them. Intermittent warfare with them continued well into the
20th century. And despite the early evangelistic fervor of the
settlers, very few natives took to Christianity.
Life was hard even without hostile natives. The ACS provided
enough supplies with each voyage to maintain the newcomers for six
months, but many spent most of that period that fighting disease.
Some settlers had been farmers, but most were reluctant to try to
grow crops in an unfamiliar climate. Many tried to make a living
trading forest products from the interior, but had to compete with
hostile chiefs who controlled the trade.
The colony was a graveyard. Of 2,887 blacks who emigrated between
1831 and 1843, 42 percent died of disease, war with the natives, or
accidents. There was also much poverty. Many letters home to former
masters were filled with pleas for gifts of food and other supplies.
Some former slaves asked to be taken back into bondage.
Only a few thousand American blacks ever emigrated to Liberia.
Between 1820 and 1833, 3,160 colonists arrived, of whom 1,700 were
free, and 1,100 had been freed specifically for colonization. Later,
the proportion of free and former slave reversed. From 1833 until
independence from the ACS in 1847, only 200 free blacks but 1,500
manumitted slaves arrived. Fewer free blacks came because it had
become impossible to conceal the truth about disease, violence, and
hardship. The freed slaves were often unskilled and illiterate.
Very early, the colonists established the practice of taking
“wards.” Natives would place a child in the household of an AL in
the hope he would learn Western ways in return for domestic service.
Some ALs treated their wards well, but others treated them as
slaves.
In 1824, three years after the first settlement on Cape Mesurado,
the ACS first started calling the colony Liberia. It called the town
Monrovia, in honor of James Monroe, who played an important role in
persuading Congress to vote the first $100,000 to resettlement.
The ACS kept firm control over the colony until 1841, when it
declared it a semi-autonomous “commonwealth.” By then the society
had been weakened by declining contributions and the propaganda of
free blacks who tried to persuade freemen to stay in the United
States rather than emigrate. The ACS granted Liberia full
independence in 1847, and Britain immediately recognized the new
country. The United States withheld recognition for 15 years.
According to Another America, this was because recognition
would have meant accepting an ambassador, and it would have been
awkward to make a black ambassador eat in the kitchen.
The Liberian constitution made citizenship possible only for
“persons of color,” and only citizens could own land. Only ALs could
vote, however, and property qualifications restricted the franchise
to about 10 percent. Natives were subject to Liberian law but were
not citizens. If they learned English, shed their tribal customs,
and dressed in Western clothes, they could be made citizens.
The first Liberian president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts was an
octoroon so light-skinned that he could have passed for white. He
was typical of the mulatto, free-born elite that ruled over the form
slaves and fully black settlers. Some of the black ALs hated
mulattos and thought they were traitors to their race and to the
very idea of a return to Africa. One black even wrote to the ACS
asking that it stop sending mulattos.
Joseph Jenkins Roberts
Many free American mulattos, who enjoyed the society of their own
kind and kept blacks at a distance, refused even to consider
emigrating because they could not conceive of having to deal with
blacks ALs as equals. One mulatto slave, William Kellogg, told his
master that he would rather remain a slave if going to Liberia meant
falling “into the hands of my inferiors.” Some mulattos petitioned
the ACS to establish a separate colony for them, free of
dark-skinned blacks.
After Liberia was established as an independent country, it went
through no fewer than four constitutional changes of administration;
this may be a record for a black republic. In 1872, however, there
was a disagreement about the legality of a constitutional amendment
to extend the presidential term from two to four years. The
incumbent, Edmund Royce, was a natural partisan of the amendment,
but the two-years faction rioted, arrested Royce, tried him for
treason, and condemned him to death. Royce broke out of jail but
drowned trying to swim to a British ship off the coast.
Liberia shrank during the 1880s as Europeans were carving out
empires in Africa. The ALs could not establish control of the
territory they claimed, and lost one third of their coast and two
thirds of their hinterland.
The country that was emerging was a perfect precursor to
independent African nations of the 1960s: hopelessly corrupt and
badly managed. In the back country, underpaid officials invented
taxes to impose on natives and pocketed the proceeds. In the cities,
practically no one paid taxes, and most government revenue came from
import duties.
Liberia once more came to the attention of American blacks during
the first half of the 1920s, when Marcus Garvey tried to make it the
headquarters of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
As a pan-Africanist, Garvey thought Liberia was the perfect base for
a movement that would draw millions of diaspora blacks to Africa,
unite all black people, and drive the colonial powers from the
continent. He planned to bring over only the best blacks. “We do not
want all the Negroes in Africa,” he explained. “Some are no good
here, and naturally will be no good there.”
The Liberians strung Garvey along for four years, encouraging him
in the hope of getting some of his money, while assuring the British
and French they would never let him agitate for black rule in their
colonies. Nor was the Liberian regime eager to accept a large number
of Americans who might establish an independent power base. Garvey
never got it though his head that ALs were not pan-Africanists, and
he drew up elaborate plans for the cities that a million returning
American blacks would build in their new homeland. However, the
agents Garvey sent to Liberia saw through the regime’s pose. UNIA
men thought the ALs were degenerate, and considered going around
them and appealing directly to the natives. Reports to this effect
eventually got back to the Liberians, and in 1924 they banned the
UNIA.
Marcus Garvey in a military uniform as the “Provisional
President of Africa” during a parade for the annual Convention
of the Negro Peoples of the World, 1922.
Not long after this, Liberia conducted what the Guinness Book
of World Records calls the most fraudulent election in history.
In 1927, incumbent Charles King crushed challenger Thomas Faulkner
235,000 votes to 9,000. This was a remarkable achievement, given
that the republic had only 15,000 eligible voters.
The 1920s were also the time of the great slavery scandal. The
Spanish were cultivating cocoa on the island of Fernando Po, about
1,200 miles east of Liberia, but could not get enough labor. All the
men on the continent closer to the island were needed by colonial
regimes for infrastructure projects and plantation work. Beginning
around 1900, Liberia started supplying native workers, who were kept
in pestilential barracks where many died. The government made a
commission on every man shipped off to Fernando Po, and was not
particular about how they were persuaded to go. Entrepreneurs would
march into the bush and explain to a chief that if he did not
furnish several hundred men they would burn his village.
Word got out, and in 1929, the US ambassador to Liberia denounced
what he called a slave trade. In 1930, the League of Nations sent a
team through the Liberian interior and concluded that there had
certainly been forced labor recruitment, but that the practice did
not meet the official definition of slavery. What the league found
was so bad, however, that there were calls for Liberia to be put
under European rule, but the ALs managed to fend off any practical
changes.
As Another America notes, it was independent Liberia that
set the precedent for the African “big man’s” distinctive governing
style. A pioneer in the field was William Tubman, who became
president in 1944 and ruled for 27 years. He rigged elections to
stay in office until he died. He set up a brutal secret police force
and a network of informers. He paved the highway as far as his
country estate but no further. He made his birthday a national
holiday and insisted on ever more grandiose celebrations. He was an
inveterate womanizer. After he built a fancy, seaside executive
mansion, Time Magazine reported that it “combines the comfort
of a garish four-star hotel with the appearance of a department
store the week before Christmas.”
Tubman was, however, very dark and proud of it. He helped
downplay the importance of white blood in Liberian society, though
AL family connections continued to be the key to any kind of
success. In 1964, he even extended the—essentially useless—vote to
the natives, who were 95 percent of the population, though only to
property owners.
Tubman helped build the economy by encouraging foreign
investment. There was criticism of the generous terms he offered,
but booming rubber plantations and iron mines meant a huge increase
in the economy. Tubman died in a London hospital in 1971 after a
prostate operation. It was rumored that he had gone to have monkey
gland implants, which were thought to pep up the sex drive.
The system came apart under Tubman’s successor. William Tolbert
tried to reduce the distance between ALs and the natives by taking
the oath of office in a safari suit rather than the traditional top
hat and tails, and by curtailing official celebrations of Matilda
Newport Day. He cut back on the secret police, disbanded the
informant network, and allowed some criticism of the regime.
As so often happens, reform only whetted the appetite for more.
Liberation and communist propaganda was circulating through the
University of Monrovia, and bright young natives who had been sent
for study abroad came back full of radical ideas. In 1979 there were
serious riots over the price of rice, and in 1980, a coup ended 133
years of AL rule.
The details of what led to the coup are murky, but Tolbert, still
in his pajamas, was shot dead in the presidential mansion. The next
day, a Krahn tribesman and soldier, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, went
on the radio to declare a new era. Monrovians danced in the streets,
and hunted light-skinned blacks and known ALs in a rampage of
looting and rape. Doe’s soldiers dragged 13 members of Tolbert’s
cabinet down to a Monrovia beach and shot them before a huge,
roaring crowd. Many soldiers were staggering drunk. It took them
half an hour to shoo away the crowds and clear the firing line, and
then some missed their targets. ALs with money escaped overseas.
Execution of former cabinet members.
Doe, of course, became the next big man. He moved into the
executive mansion, proclaimed national celebrations of his birthday,
and favored his fellow Krahn tribesmen. By 1990, he was as hated as
Tolbert, and was deposed and killed by a warlord named Prince
Johnson. Johnson’s men cut Doe into pieces, cooked and ate him. The
coup was followed by six years of civil war and some of the vilest
atrocities in recent history. The countryside was so devastated that
natives streamed into Monrovia, where they lived in unspeakable
conditions. The city’s population grew from 100,000 in 1980, at the
time of the Doe coup, to 1,000,000.
Foreign intervention finally brought order, and since the
election of Ellen Sirleaf—one quarter white, three-quarters
native—there has been some stability. A different warlord, Charles
Taylor, who ruled Liberia from 1997 to 2003, recently got a 50-year
sentence from an international court for war crimes. Mr. Taylor has
many known children, including Charen, Camille, Charlyne, Charal,
Charmaine, Gritchawn, Charishma, Charmilah, and Charlize.
ALs have drifted back to Liberia and have reestablished
themselves to some degree in the upper reaches of business and
government. Although Matilda Newport Day is dead, the great seal of
Liberia still depicts the Elizabeth and displays the motto:
“The love of liberty brought us here.”
Another America concludes that “freed slaves, given the
chance to govern themselves, had turned out to be no better than the
white imperialists who had descended upon Africa around the same
time.” This is a slur on white imperialists. Blacks made a hash of
Liberia, just as they have every country they have tried to govern.
Black Savages Forced Prisoners To Eat Each Other In The Sudan
[
29 October 2015 ]
QUOTE
Mass graves have been discovered in South
Sudan with evidence of horrific crimes against civilians including forced
cannibalism, according to a report. The shocking
findings were revealed by the African Union Commission of Inquiry which had
been tasked with investigating the civil war that has gripped the country
for nearly two years.
The violence
has left tens of thousands of people dead and the impoverished country split
along ethnic lines – between the Dinka-led government and Neur
opposition...........
'There are
reasonable grounds to believe that acts of murder, rape and sexual violence,
torture and other inhumane acts... have been committed by both sides to the
conflict,' the report added [ If it hadn't it would have been lying - Editor
].
UNQUOTE
The Daily Mail mentions that it is ethnic fighting;
there is no mention of Racism or even tribalism. This
is because the perpetrators are black
Racists, not Englishmen or even
White Men.
The
Daily Mail is Racist, a
Propaganda machine, an anti-English gang of
Racists.
PS The Mail's owner pretends to be
domiciled in France to avoid paying tax on the profits he makes out of patriotic
Englishmen.
Blacks Murdered Englishman Retiring To South Africa
[
29 October 2015 ]
QUOTE
An Army veteran
who retired to South Africa for a better life was clubbed and strangled
while moving house, an inquest heard today.
Retired postman
Robert Mandley, 66, was moving into a new flat near Johannesburg when he was
attacked by his gardener and another man who had been helping him move. Mr Mandley, from
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, was beaten with a hammer before being left for
dead on the floor of his new home in April......
The hearing was
told the South African authorities had provided minimal information to the
coroner. Police have confirmed the death was being treated as murder but are
not commenting further.
UNQUOTE
They are black so they go free; business as usual, corruption as normal.
Blacks Raping, Murdering, Torturing, Eating People In Congo
[ 11 July 2018 ]
QUOTE
Horrific atrocities including mass rape and cannibalism are taking place in a
war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a UN report.
Testimony from the country's Kasai region included boys being forced to rape
their mothers, little girls being told witchcraft would allow them to catch
bullets, and women forced to choose gang-rape or death.
Both rebels and government troops have
committed atrocities during the conflict including dismemberment of
civilians, according to accounts published by a team of U.N. human rights
experts who said the world must pay heed.
The team investigating a conflict in the
region told the U.N. Human Rights Council last week that they suspected all
sides were guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
UNQUOTE
Blacks take over. Blacks act naturally. Blacks destroy.
Joseph Conrad told
us all about it in his little book,
Heart of Darkness
back in 1899. Nothing has changed except, perhaps for the worse.
Congo's Capital Is Being Overwhelmed By 9 Thousand Tons Of Rubbish Every Day
[ 5 December 2018 ]
QUOTE
Congo Capital Chokes on Trash: Garbage Removal
Stops after White Aid Program Ends
The capital city of the Congo, Kinshasa,
is literally turning into a massive trash heap with more than 9,000 tons
of garbage accumulating everyday—because whites from the European Union
stopped an aid program to dispose of the waste in 2015, it has emerged.
According to a report in the Deutsche Welle (DW), the “area in front
of Kinshasa’s main station” is where “everybody has to make their way
through piles of garbage.
“Passing vehicles whirl up plastic and
paper bags. The scenario repeats itself all around town. It is an
everyday torture for the inhabitants of Kinshasa,” the report says....................
“People here live in an environment that
is not clean and not healthy. That’s why there are many cases of
malaria, typhus, cholera and other diseases,” Mututu added.
The reason for the upsurge in the trash
plague is then revealed: according to the report, the city has no
professional waste management and the “European Union used to support a
waste disposal program, but aid was stopped in 2015. The problem got
noticeably worse.” In other words, after the white people
running the garbage disposal system left, the Africans were incapable of
maintaining the system which they had been given.
The reason for this inability to maintain any functioning First World
infrastructure becomes obvious when it is considered that the Congo has
an average IQ of 78............
As science has now proven that
intelligence is wholly genetic, and not environmental
(because intelligence can be determined from studying genes in unborn
embryos), any immigration policy which encourages these people to
come to white countries will inevitable result in the dragging down of
those nations to the level of the Congo.
UNQUOTE
People in the psychology business seem to think that IQ is
50 to 80 percent genetic with the rest coming from environment. I think the
New Observer is on the right lines.