Race and the articulation of difference Leila Lohman – MAHuman Rights

Dec.14th 2011

Liberia: One “Race,” Two Cultures

This paper will contribute to the understanding of the

socio-political formation of identity in Liberia resulting from

the arrival of freed men and women in the early 19th century

with the technical support of the American Colonization Society

(ACS). I wish to analyze the socio-political outcome, which

occurred between the indigenous Liberians and previously

enslaved persons, and uncover reasons and ways for their

relationship to be historically known as prejudicial,

discriminatory and based on unequal power-relations. In fact,

freed men and women, later called Americo-Liberians, ruled the

country from 1847 until 1980, even though they only comprised

10% of the Liberian population. This paper discusses some of

the reasons scholars have elaborated to explain why Americo-

Liberians “(…) created the social hierarchy they had

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experienced in the ante-bellum (of the United States) but with

themselves as the socially dominant, land-owning class.”1

Thereafter, I present different ways and forms

discrimination was imposed upon the indigenous Liberians, from

deprivation of automatic of civil and political rights to more

social expressions of differentiation. These articulations of

difference were thoroughly based on Americo-Liberians’

perception of moral and cultural superiority to the indigenous

Liberians. Some scholars have said that the fact that the

reference point being Western civilization for political,

social and cultural forms of expression can further explain how

a form of “Black Imperialism,”2 was created.

Liberia, a small country situated in Sub-Saharan West

Africa, bordering Sierra Leone to the west, Côte d’Ivoire to

the east and Guinea to the north, was founded as a new colony

for freed men and women from the United States in 1824, by the

American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the

1 Wippman David, Liberia, Enforcing the Peace: ECOWAS and the Liberian Civil War, In: Enforcing Restraint , Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts, Council of Foreign Relations Press, 1993, Cited In: Alao Abiodun, Mackinlay John and Olonisakin ’Funmi,Peacekeepers, Politicians and Warlords, The Liberian Peace Process, United Nations University Press,1999.2 “Culture in Liberia An Afrocentric View of the Cultural Interaction Between the Indigenous Liberians and the Americo-Liberians,” Santosh C. Saha, in African Studies, Vol. 46, 1998.

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United States, also known as the American Colonization Society

(ACS, est. in 1816). A few powerful White men working for the

ACS would live in the colony and govern it during the first

decades of its existence. Liberia’s history is in fact so

closely connected to social and political events in the United

States, that the country has been called “America’s Black

Stepchild.”3

The enterprise of shipping previous enslaved persons is

not however, to be interpreted as an act of pure altruism on

behalf of the southern plantation owners. On the contrary, it

was believed that “black and white populations could not live

together on an equal basis in America.”4 In fact, Thomas

Jefferson consistently argued over decades, that the

emancipation of Black slaves could not be conceived without

colonization “beyond the reach of mixture.”5 In Virginia, for

example, slaveholders required that all “free Negroes” ought to

be expelled from the state, because they represented a “source

of danger” to slave holders and a “source of inspiration,” to

3 G. E. Saigbe Boley, “Liberia, The Rise and Fall of the First Republic,” Macmillan, 1983. 4 “Liberian Dreams Back-to-Africa Narratives from the 1850’s,” Ed. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. 5 Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Peterson, 1487.

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slaves.6 Furthermore, even though the ACS included several

liberal members, its aim was to rid the United States of “free

people of color,” and not to abolish the institution of slavery

as a whole. The idea behind the latter position was that “(…)

free African in the United States was an anomaly.”7 The motives

of the ACS’s can also explain why most Black leaders did not

endorse emigration to Africa at the time, and created the

American Society of Free Persons of Color, in Philadelphia in

1830. Moreover, the Americo-Liberians would later go on to

officially criticize the ACS’s enterprise through a resolution

passed in 1848, describing it as the “most hypocritical” and

“deceptive” channels of oppression against Blacks in the United

States.8

The colony would face multiple challenges in its first

years of existence. The first settlers would desert, and many

died as a consequence of the extreme heat, the prevalence of

diseases (mostly malaria) and sporadic attacks by native

Liberians. In 1832, a paper published in The African Repository

described Liberia’s capital Monrovia9 in the following terms: “

6 Stanley A. Davis, “This is Liberia,” The William-Frederick Press, New Work, 1953.7 “Liberian Dreams Back-to-Africa Narratives from the 1850’s,” Ed. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.8 Idem9 Monrovia was named after U.S. President James Monroe.

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(…) Monrovia could not be called a town, village, or city, the

term settlement only being applicable. (…) The streets had the

appearance of a young forest of second growth (…).”10 In 1847

mounting discontent from the Americo-Liberians, due to poor

conditions in the settlement resulted in the ACS leadership on

the ground declaring “the time had arrived when it was

expedient for the people (…) of Liberia to take into their own

hands the whole work of self-government, (…).”11 Thus, in 1847,

commenced a period known as the first Republic, which lasted

until 1980. Shortly after declaring independence and becoming

self-governing, Liberia was negotiating with France, Great

Britain and Belgium.

Some historians have argued that the first Republic’s

political, religious and economic institutions were very much

based on the same values and thus gross extensions of the local

institutions put in place by the ACS between 1824 and 1847.12

The latter fact is key to understanding how and why the

Americo-Liberians, as inheritors of White colonizers’ socio-

political discriminatory structure, were able to rule over10 Article published in The African Repository in 1832, in Stanley A. Davis, “This is Liberia,” The William-Frederick Press, New Work, 1953.11 Stanley A. Davis, “This is Liberia,” The William-Frederick Press, New Work, 1953.12 “The American Colonization Society and the Creation of the Liberian State A Historical Perspective, 1822-1900,” Amos J. Beyan, University Press of America, 1991.

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Liberia’s first Republic. Indeed, not only did White colonizers

employ the native Africans to do all their “drudgery,” they had

also developed a system by which they would teach native

children “the fashion of white man,” through networks of

dependence based on paternalism.13 Furthermore, Olonisakin

argues that “the weaknesses in the laws of Liberia and in its

political institutions,”14 was in part what made it possible

for Americo-Liberians to regard themselves as superior to

indigenous Liberians. It would be highly controversial to state

that Liberia was an American colony between 1822 and 1847, in

part because Liberia’s self-representation has not taken this

course, but also because the United States has constantly

accelerated or skipped this part of history to the beginning of

Liberia’s first Republic. However, due to the close ties

between the ACS and the United States’ government at the

time,15 this idea is not completely unfounded and there are at

least three ways that Liberia’s first years experienced

symptoms of colonization: 1) dichotomization

(civilized/uncivilized, traditional/modern), 2) political

13 Claude A. Clegg III, “The Price of Liberty.” The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 2004.14 Idem15 Thomas Buchanan (cousin of President James Buchanan) was Liberia’s second governor from 1839 until his death in 1841.

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domination by the minority group as a “medium for the

articulation of the civilizing mission,”16 and 3) the

fabrication of hierarchical identities to justify unequal

treatment and forced labor. Thinking of Liberia as a colony

ruled indirectly by the United States before its independence

in 1847, would allow for a long overdue post-colonial analysis

of the country, and a “new form of historical imagination.”17

The primary ideology or “status consciousness,” in the

foundation of Liberia at the time, was very much influenced by

the European movement Les Lumières (1670-1820), in that it sought

to spread Western civilization and religious beliefs in Africa;

“[like] all other invading migrants and settlers, the Americo-

Liberian minority came with the idea of civilizing the majority

indigenous population, which comprised at least sixteen major

tribes.”18 Not only did the settlers bring Christianity

declaring:19“(…) in the name of (…) religion, in the name of

the great God, our common creator, we appeal to the nations of

16 “After Colonialism, Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements.” Edited byGyan Prakash, 1995. 17 Idem. 18 “Culture in Liberia An Afrocentric View of the Cultural Interaction Between the Indigenous Liberians and the Americo-Liberians,” Santosh C. Saha, in African Studies, Vol. 46, 1998. 19 Before the arrival of the Americo-Liberians, at least two tribes, the Vai and theMandigo were Mohammedan.

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Christendom (...),”20 but a Western-style republican

government, and the English language. Local toponyms were

modified and indigenous Liberians would have to adopt Anglo-

Saxon names in order to become “civilized.” Dennis has said

that this form of cultural racism that dominated and exploited

the native Liberians was equivalent to the racism that had

justified slavery in the United States; he further argues that

in both contexts, racism superseded Christianity.21

Moreover, “the natives of the inferior culture were

nothing. Like Negroes in America, their lives had no value.”22

This sense of cultural superiority was what incited the

settlers to re-create American society “(…) in which both

master and slave were Negro.”23 Other authors point to less

radical intellectuals and Americo-Liberians, to argue that

there had been attempts to include the natives in the political

institutions, earlier than generally understood. For example,

during President Payne’s inaugural speech in 1868, he recalled

Liberia’s duty to integrate the native Liberians: “[it] is the

20 Extract found in Liberia’s Declaration of Independence from the ACS (1987). In Stanley A. Davis, “This is Liberia,” The William-Frederick Press, New Work, 1953. 21 Benjamin G. Dennis and Anita K. Dennis, “Slaves to Racism, An Unbroken Chain FromAmerica To Liberia,” Algora Publishing, New York, 2008. 22 Idem. 23 Ibidem.

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duty of the Republic to prepare the aborigines for the rights

of citizenship.”24 These early signs of aspiration for

integration coming from political leadership indicate that

there must have been other sources of disagreement between the

Americo-Liberians and the indigenous people to explain the

divide. Gershoni has claimed that in addition to cultural

imperialism, low integration between the two groups can be

interpreted as a consequence of three disputes, namely: the

pre-colonial African slave trade, land use and trade routes.

Analogies can be drawn around the “native question,”25 faced by

white colonial rule (post-1895) and Liberian rule since the

French and British colonial governments equally faced

resistance regarding land control, abolition of slavery and

control of trade: “[the] similarity of issues faced by the

colonial regimes and those faced by Liberia explains the

colonial like reactions from the Liberian government in

response to several crises.”

The Americo-Liberians also brought with them their

previously acquired notions about agriculture and some

24 This is an excerpt from President James S. Payne’s inaugural speech in 1868. In Stanley A. Davis, “This is Liberia,” The William-Frederick Press, New Work, 1953.25 Mahmood Mamdani, “Citizen and Subject,” Princeton Studies in Culture/Power History, 1996.

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historians such as Santosh C. Saha have argued that it remained

a “chief occupation” among Americo-Liberians, and that they did

not all engage in trade.26 More recently, Clegg III has

described the Liberian landscape as having been highly

challenging to carry out forms of Western-like agriculture:

“[congested] stretches of intractable forest covered most of

the hilly peninsula, and rocky terrain made any substantial

agricultural activity impossible.”27 The latter theory not only

serves to elucidate the rise in disputes, between the Americo-

Liberians and the indigenous people, over land use, it also

implies the existence of disputes over the control of trade

routes, which deepened the general absence of integration

between the two groups. Some African-American immigrants simply

found trading “irresistible” because it offered better wages

for less physical exhaustion. Other Americo-Liberians

associated agriculture with slavery, and therefore avoided

working in the fields.

Saha has attempted to objectively question the nuance

between Americo-Liberian and indigenous Liberian cultures and

states: “[the] cultural gap between Americo-Liberians and

26 Idem 27 Claude A. Clegg III, “The Price of Liberty.” The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 2004.

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indigenous Liberians was not as great as the Americo-Liberians

would have liked to believe.” Saha further argues that although

Americo-Liberians regarded themselves as culturally

“civilized,” most of them were in fact “materially poor” and

“ignorant in international affairs.” Regardless, the poor

Americo-Liberians, still defined themselves as morally superior

to indigenous Liberians even though: “[the] ruling Americo-

Liberians were probably aware of the fact that they did not

truly represent the culture they presumed to represent (…).”28

In fact, Saha’s theory implicitly alludes to the psychological

strategy of overcompensation,29 which explains Americo-Liberians’

emphasis on external aspects of Western civilization such as

clothing, housing and food, Christianity, and legal and

political structures. Overcompensation of Western lifestyle was

especially present among Americo-Liberians who lived among

indigenous Liberians, because this was the only way to

distinguish themselves from their “uncivilized” neighbors and

their only “way to claim fame.”30 Particularly insecure and

28 “Culture in Liberia An Afrocentric View of the Cultural Interaction Between the Indigenous Liberians and the Americo-Liberians,” Santosh C. Saha, in African Studies, Vol. 46, 1998.29 In psychology, “overcompensation” is seen as a form of negative compensation, based on (conscious or unconscious) low self-esteem and desire for superiority, 30 Benjamin G. Dennis and Anita K. Dennis, “Slaves to Racism, An Unbroken Chain FromAmerica To Liberia,” Algora Publishing, New York, 2008.

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aggressive Americo-Liberians would develop more perverse ways

of differentiating themselves from native Liberians;

“[although] the Americo-Liberians already had power, they used

force and cruelty — without shame.”31 Indigenous Liberians

often commented about such extreme forms of behavior in the

following terms: “[white] people must have made them demons.

They don’t behave like human beings.”32 And nevertheless, in a

similar manner that Americo-Liberians’ “status-consciousness”

was oriented to the West, indigenous Liberians would orient

theirs to Americo-Liberians, forming a sort of racist pyramid,

with the Whites on the top and the indigenous Liberians at the

bottom. This phenomenon continued in the mid-20th century; as

the Indigenous Liberians would get an education oversees they

would subsequently reject their native origins.

The idea that Americo-Liberians emphasized Western

lifestyle, demonstrates at least implicitly the existence of

attachment to their place of birth. Questions of self-

conception following Diaspora are also relevant to note in this

context. It appears that the Americo-Liberians were caught in a

form of bi-diasporic state of being, between Africa and the

31 Idem. 32 Benjamin G. Dennis and Anita K. Dennis, “Slaves to Racism, An Unbroken Chain FromAmerica To Liberia,” Algora Publishing, New York, 2008.

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United States, in which they created their physical home in

Liberia and their mental and inspirational home in the United

States. It comes as a surprise that the human being is capable

of developing forms of attachment toward systems and cultures

that degrade him/her and consider him/her inferior. The

attachment in the case of Americo-Liberians is both practical,

in the use of language with for example, the expression “where

is my Saturday?” which derived from depending on the master for

food-supplies, every Saturday, during slavery. An example of

emotional attachment is seen through Americo-Liberians’

community fostering through American Southern music and dances

whereby: “[attention] to Southern ritual meant you were

civilized.”33 Regardless, the Americo-Liberians had survived

slavery and they had suffered such inhumane treatment in the

past that this reality could never be reconciled to becoming

yet “another African” again. Therefore, a new identity had to

be created to make sure that the people who had suffered in

their previous lives in the United States, would become the

dominant group in Liberia. This form of American chauvinism

eventually led the political leadership in the late 1800’s to

use two distinctive identifying labels for Americo-Liberians

33 Idem.

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and the indigenous Liberians, in order to culturally and

politically differentiate the ruling minority from the ruled

majority.

As demonstrated above, an important characteristic of the

first Republic was the socio-political division of the

population into two groups, namely the Americo-Liberians and

the indigenous Liberians, as a consequence of cultural

imperialism by the first group. I now turn to see what forms

this cultural imperialism took in practice, and how

discrimination against the indigenous Liberians was played out

on social, legal and political levels: “[the] power of racism

lay not only in the myth, but in the enforcement of that

myth.”34 For clarity’s sake, I have structured the following

section of the paper into three social spheres where I have

found indigenous people were particularly discriminated by the

Americo-Liberians: education, political landscape and judicial

system. I then follow up with examples of more basic and

generally omnipresent forms of social discrimination imposed

upon the indigenous Liberians.

34 Benjamin G. Dennis and Anita K. Dennis, “Slaves to Racism, An Unbroken Chain FromAmerica To Liberia,” Algora Publishing, New York, 2008.

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Due to the lack of financial resources, plans to build

school networks were generally abandoned by the Liberian

government, and the few schools that were built were often far

away from indigenous villages. In 1872, with no educational

system in place, Christian missions took up the task of

educating Liberian youth, with the initial “blessing” from the

government. However, the Americo-Liberian led government soon

discovered that education could be a vector for indigenous

nationalism, and therefore restricted missionaries’ activities,

as well as prevented the development of missionary schools near

indigenous villages. Thus, throughout the second half of the

19th century, education facilities were “initially restricted

to Americo-Liberians.”35 In 1922, although Liberia’s first

college for higher education had been established, a report by

a commission of experts highlighted that many indigenous

Liberian children were still receiving no education at all.36

Around this time, American philanthropists and missionaries

started pushing for the “incorporation of technical education

for Liberian interior students,”37 similar to what was being

35 Idem. 36 Yekutiel Gershoni, “Black Colonialism.” Westview Special Studies on Africa, 1985.37 “Culture in Liberia An Afrocentric View of the Cultural Interaction Between the Indigenous Liberians and the Americo-Liberians,” Santosh C. Saha, in African Studies, Vol. 46, 1998.

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done at the Booker T. Washington Institute in Tuskegee,

Alabama. Shortly thereafter, the Booker T. Washington Institute

was founded in Kakata in 1929, with the help of the Liberian

government and the Firestone Corporation. This cooperation

eventually led to the conscription of indigenous students by

the government to work for Firestone, confirming Du Bois’

initial concern that this project would “degrade Africans.”38

Indigenous Liberian’s exclusion from the political

landscape was also prevalent during the first half of the first

Republic’s existence. As mentioned above, the Americo-Liberians

inherited the fragile and discriminatory political system left

behind by the ACS in 1847: “the new government was founded

without sufficient study or knowledge of the conditions to be

met.”39 In a sense, Mamdani’s description of the colonial state

being “in every instance a historical formation”40 can be

applied in the case of Liberia. In 1877, Liberia’s True Whig

Party, after a brief loss of power to the Republicans, became

the country’s sole political party until 1980. Therefore,

38 Idem. 39 Sidney De La Rue, “The Land of the Pepper Bird.” G.P. Putnam and Sons, New York, 1930. In G. E. Saigbe Boley, “Liberia, The Rise and Fall of the First Republic,” Macmillan, 1983.40 Mahmood Mamdani, “Citizen and Subject,” Princeton Studies in Culture/Power History, 1996.

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although “Liberia had the image of a Western democracy with

three branches of government [,]”41it was in fact ruled

exclusively by members of the True Whig Party, which mostly

comprised Americo-Liberians. Indigenous villages were deprived

from having any municipal standing while Americo-Liberian

villages were called “civilized settlements,” and had political

status.42 Furthermore, as Dennis has stressed one of the

“bedrocks” of Americo-Liberians’ cultural unity was Masonry:

“[the] Prince Hall Lodge in Monrovia was sacrosanct. No native

dared enter it. The very few natives allowed to join, did so at

great expense.” The latter fact is significant in the context

of political expressions of cultural imperialism, since

membership to a Masonic lodge was a form of “Americo-

Liberianism” and was “the only way to get (…) a government

position.”43

Professor Simon Greenleaf, an American scholar from

Harvard, drafted Liberia’s first Constitution. According to

Boley, the country’s first Constitution was ineffective due to

41 Benjamin G. Dennis and Anita K. Dennis, “Slaves to Racism, An Unbroken Chain FromAmerica To Liberia,” Algora Publishing, New York, 2008.42 “Culture in Liberia An Afrocentric View of the Cultural Interaction Between the Indigenous Liberians and the Americo-Liberians,” Santosh C. Saha, in African Studies, Vol. 46, 1998.43 Benjamin G. Dennis and Anita K. Dennis, “Slaves to Racism, An Unbroken Chain FromAmerica To Liberia,” Algora Publishing, New York, 2008.

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three main reasons; first it “(…) did not evolve out of natural

conditions and surroundings and/or orientations of the Liberian

experience;” secondly, “ (…) leadership of the country at the

time had no experience of the education of the schools from

which the organic statutory laws of the adopted constitution

evolved;” and lastly because “[for] the natives, the term

constitution or its content was incompatible with their

traditional political philosophies.”44 Furthermore, within the

Americo-Liberians judicial system, one could find implicit ways

in which the indigenous Liberians were discriminated such as

having “barely refined native chiefs as judges,”45 and the fact

that “[a] native’s complaint against an Americo-Liberian wasn’t

brought to court.”46 However, explicit discriminatory laws

were to be found as well, in the absence of automatic

citizenship and equal rights for indigenous Liberians,

supported by Liberia’s first three Constitutions: “[the]

Africans had to pass certain clearly defined criteria in order

to receive these rights.”47 Some authors have stressed that the

44 G. E. Saigbe Boley, “Liberia, The Rise and Fall of the First Republic,” Macmillan, 1983.45 Benjamin G. Dennis and Anita K. Dennis, “Slaves to Racism, An Unbroken Chain FromAmerica To Liberia,” Algora Publishing, New York, 2008.46 Idem.47 Yekutiel Gershoni, “Black Colonialism.” Westview Special Studies on Africa, 1985.

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possibility of upward social mobility, through rituals, is the

core difference between the racial structure in the United

States and in Africa’s colonies, because the latter provided

little to no possibilities for the oppressed to climb the

social latter.

I now review certain more pervasive forms of social

discrimination the indigenous Liberians faced in the realm of

personal relations. Feelings of superiority by Americo-

Liberians translated into a form a social segregation between

them and the “bushman.” For example, “[the Americo-Liberians]

were not willing to sit next to the natives in church,”48 and

unfamiliar natives were not allowed to walk through certain

parts of towns on Sundays. Indigenous Liberians were also to

enter Americo-Liberian owned houses through the back door. In

“The Souls of Black Folk,” Du Bois wrote, “[the] problem of the

twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, the

relation of the darker to the lighter races of men (…).”49 The

idea of a “color-line” was existent in Liberia from its

foundation until mid-1940: “[there] was strong Negro racism

across the board (…). Light skin was prized and desired,” and

48 Idem. 49 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk.” Vintage books, New York, 1990.

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“[to] marry a light-skinned woman, a dark-skinned man had to

have some means of distinction such as a farm.”50 It is also

worth commenting on the prevalence of gender-based violence

faced by Liberian women and girls, especially the indigenous

Liberians. Most Americo-Liberian leaders were commonly known to

be aggressive womanizers: “[President Tolbert] (…) was said to

specialize in virgins — a new one every night,” and “[church]

leaders and ministers of the gospel exhibited brutality,

viciousness, and ruthless womanizing.”51

The scope of discrimination against Indigenous Liberians

in areas such as education, politics, civil rights, social

relations, appears to have been ingrained in Liberian society

from the very beginning, in no small measure, due to the

institutions established by the ACS and thereafter inherited by

the Americo-Liberian settlers. Moreover, the Liberian context

could be described as a “caricature of Southern society,” where

the “sins of the master were inevitably passed on to the

slave.” 52 In conclusion, no words describe Liberia’s faith

better than the following, because they speak to Americo-

50 Benjamin G. Dennis and Anita K. Dennis, “Slaves to Racism, An Unbroken Chain FromAmerica To Liberia,” Algora Publishing, New York, 2008.51 Idem. 52 Ibidem.

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Liberians’ tendency to overcompensate, as well as the Southern

American model they inherited: “Liberia not only represents the

worst of Negroes, it represents the worst of whites taken to

its obvious conclusion. When the Free Negroes and the freed

slaves went to Liberia in 1822, slavery and racism were at

their zenith. The Americo-Liberians not only displayed the

circumstantial inferiority of slavery, they had a flawed white

social model.”53 We might add however, that the impact of the

colonial institutions left behind by the ASC in 1847, is an

under investigated part of history that we can say, to the very

least, also contributed to the creation of two distinct and

unequal socio-political identities.

Bibliography:

“After Colonialism, Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements.” Edited by Gyan Prakash, 1995.

Benjamin G. Dennis and Anita K. Dennis, “Slaves to Racism, An Unbroken Chain From America To Liberia,” Algora Publishing, NewYork, 2008.

Claude A. Clegg III, “The Price of liberty: African Americans and the making of Liberia”, (2004).

G. E. Saigbe Boley, “Liberia, The Rise and Fall of the First Republic,” Macmillan, 1983.

53 Benjamin G. Dennis and Anita K. Dennis, “Slaves to Racism, An Unbroken Chain FromAmerica To Liberia,” Algora Publishing, New York, 2008.

21

“Liberian Dreams Back-to-Africa Narratives from the 1850’s,” Ed. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.

“Liberian Dreams Back-to-Africa Narratives from the 1850’s,” Ed. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.

Mahmood Mamdani, “Citizen and Subject,” Princeton Studies in Culture/Power History, 1996.

Saha Santosh, “Culture in Liberia: an Afrocentric view of the cultural interaction between the indigenous Liberians and the Americo-Liberians”, (1998)

Stanley A. Davis, “This is Liberia,” The William-Frederick Press, New Work, 1953.

Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Peterson, 1487.

Sidney De La Rue, “The Land of the Pepper Bird.” G.P. Putnam and Sons, New York, 1930. In G. E. Saigbe Boley, “Liberia, The Rise and Fall of the First Republic,” Macmillan, 1983.

W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk.” Vintage books, NewYork, 1990.

Wippman David, Liberia, Enforcing the Peace: ECOWAS and the Liberian Civil War, In: Enforcing Restraint , Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts, Council of Foreign Relations Press, 1993, Cited In: Alao Abiodun, Mackinlay John and Olonisakin ’Funmi, Peacekeepers, Politicians and Warlords, The Liberian Peace Process, United Nations University Press, 1999.

Yekutiel Gershoni, “Black Colonialism.” Westview Special Studies on Africa, 1985.

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