Message in a Bottle #9 – Liberian Blindspot
The following was submitted by a Pirate supporter using the pseudonym “Publicola”, presenting the case for a greater responsibility towards Liberia. This article is apart of the project “Message in a Bottle”, allowing supporters of the US Pirate Party to submit editorial articles to the United States Pirate Party website.
Liberia is the result of the United States of America.
That is not hyperbole, and that is not something that requires historical revisionism or requires you to connect the dots.
Without the United States of America, and specifically the American Colonization Society, Liberia as it exists today would not be here today.
In the early part of the 19th century, the American Colonization Society would be founded with the explicit goal of having a place in Africa for free African Americans.
Members included peace-loving Quakers who thought the United States was too racist to black people and couldn’t possibly see their integration into WASP dominated society, slaveholders that fears a slave rebellion with too many freedmen running around, and some of the most powerful politicians of their day.
People like [slaveowner] President James Madison, who actually served as President of the American Colonization Society in the early 1830s (AFTER having been a two-term United States President) and [slaveowner] Senator Henry Clay, perhaps the most consequential man of the early ACS and, in turn, Liberia.
The ACS had its detractors; Frederick Douglass viewed it as a prejudice-driven scheme that he opposed because Black Americans have just as much a right to claim the United States as White Americans. William Lloyd Garrison, initially a good-faith member, came to view it as a scheme to get rid of Black Americans instead of slavery.
Martin Delany, who came to conclusions of despair over the prospect of Black Americans following a decade of Fugitive Slave Acts and Dred Scott rulings, viewed the American Colonization Society as a white man’s project for what should be a black man’s cause.
To be clear: this project was racist as fuck. There’s no defending it; abolitionists in their day saw the American Colonization Society for what it was and what it was a “send them back instead of integrate them” scheme, dominated by slaveowners and deeply unpopular with many Black Americans.
That, of course, doesn’t change the fact that the American Colonization existed and carved a piece of West Africa for their project. They named the colony “Liberia” and its capital “Monrovia” after [slaveowner] President James Monroe.
[Slaveowner] Henry Clay, Mr. Whig Party himself, was always a driving force behind the project. It hindsight, it becomes no coincidence that the Americo-Liberian-dominated “True Whig Party” (TWP) was the ruling party of Liberia for over 100 years.
Future Liberian President Edward James Roye, born to landowning freedmen in Ohio, university-educated and a business owner, moved to the Colony of Liberia in 1846, a year before independence, aged 31 before immediately rising to the top of Liberia’s political system. He became Speaker of the House during the 1849-1850 session, and would go on to unsuccessfully run for the Presidency under the “[Old] Whig Party” ticket in 1855.
Something tells me they weren’t calling themselves the “Old Whig Party” at the time. That’s also a much sooner presence of a “Whig Party” in Liberia than the 1869 “founding” of the TWP implies.
One could make the argument that the Whig Party of the United States had become transatlantic, and while they might not have been in collaboration with their American counterparts, they certainly carried on the Henry Clay tradition of “Whiggism” into Liberia, not merely being inspired by it.
So even as the Whig Party died in the United States, it survived before experiencing their own true rise as the True Whig Party in Liberia.
One would assume that the project, perhaps, died after Liberia gained its independence. Maybe after slavery was abolished by the United States? Surely the project lost all its credibility and luster by the end of Reconstruction at the latest.
Well, the last boat carrying African-Americans from the United States to Liberia? 1904.
When did the ACS finally die? 1964.
The final President of the American Colonization Society lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy assassination.
So mind you, Liberia was carved out of West Africa. Did the Native West Africans have any say? No; they were largely treated in a similar fashion to how Native Americans were treated.
And former slaves, too. Many of the Americo-Liberians became slaveowners themselves, enslaving the local population.
Colonization Society indeed.
The imposed power structure onto the local population by first the ACS, then the settlers, is entirely the result of the United States. Presidents from Liberia were U.S.-born from 1847 to 1884. Native Liberians weren’t granted citizenship in their own land until the 1904, and couldn’t meaningfully vote until 1946 (even then, under property qualifications that excluded most). Even when it transitioned from U.S.-born to Liberian-born Presidents, the Americo-Liberians, only ~5% of the Liberian population, remained the dominant class until the coup that killed William Tolbert in 1980.
1980.
So from the moment of Liberia’s inception in 1821 until 1980, it had American DNA written into its very existence.
This is not a rallying cry to say “We have a paternalistic responsibility towards Liberia,” as that’s absurd and paternalistic governance often gets stripped down to imperialistic oversight. In no way should this be used as an excuse to extract Liberian resources, exploit Liberian labor or gain economic or military advantage in the region through Liberia.
What I am saying, is that the way the Pirate Party says they have a unique responsibility towards Latin America, I also believe we have just as much a unique, but entirely unique in its own right, responsibility towards Liberia.
This party often writes about self-determination. This party wrote about the “bastardization of self-determination.” I feel like the ACS is one of the greatest cases of that in modern history.
In direct comparison to Zionism, there was a need to have the mistreated go to their “homelands” and create a new nation for them. This creation would lead to genocide and apartheid, and created an in-group and an out-group. Supporters of both haven’t always been those who are sympathetic to their plight; while some were, some simply sought to get rid of them.
Hitler was supportive of the Zionist cause in the same way slaveowners were supportive of the American Colonization Society.
The entire nation of Liberia is a reflection of that that aforementioned bastardization. It was our project, our settlers from our country escaping our racism. It imposed our systems of oppression, governance and dominance over a native peoples who never had a say in the matter.
I like to think the Pirate Party would allow every single American Indian Reservation to have a seat at the table, much like they do with the U.S. territories.
I hope the United States Pirate Party would do what they can for a Liberian Pirate Party, and perhaps even allow them a seat at the table.
I also hope that, should the day finally come that the United States Pirate Party comes to power in the United States federally, the USPP keeps the promises they made to Latin America, and I hope they extend those promises to Liberia as well.