How the Repatriation of Freed African-American Slaves Led to the Creation of Liberia

Liberia is an African country with a rather unique history. Unlike its counterparts which were mostly colonised by European powers, Liberia started out as an American colony and, more interestingly, a dumping ground for liberated slaves from the United States.

From 1816, the American Colonization Society (ACS) sought to create a colony in Africa to house freed African slaves. It wasn’t until 1821 that ACS was able to secure a deal with the local West African leaders to establish their colony at Cape Mesurado. In 1824, they named the colony Liberia, meaning ‘land of the free’. They named the designated capital Monrovia, after US President James Monroe, who himself had been part of ACS.

However, before then, they had already taken a page from the British government’s playbook by dispatching some freed slaves to Sierra Leone, a British colony in West Africa. On 6th February 1820, the ACS, with $100,000 in funding from the US Congress, arranged for the first set of emancipated slaves to leave New York aboard a ship named the ‘Mayflower of Liberia’. The ship, with 88 free Black men and women and 3 ACS agents, traversed the waters for over a month, finally landing in Sherbro Island in Sierra Leone on 9^th March.

However, many of the settlers died from malaria as a result of the island’s swampy conditions. The British governor allowed them to move to a safer area pending ACS’s establishment of their own colony. In 1822, the Sherbro Island survivors made their way to Cape Mesurado to build their own settlement.

From then on, over a period of four decades, ACS sent over 12,000 freeborn and emancipated African Americans to the colony.

The motives behind these repatriations were far from noble. While abolitionists called for an immediate end to slavery and believed the freed slaves were entitled to remain in the society they had built, the ACS posited that the end should be phased out and that the former slaves had no place in American society. It was repulsive to them, the idea that White and Black people should live equally in the same country. Consequently, abolitionists dubbed the colonisation movement anti-Black and loudly opposed it.

Moreso, life in Liberia was hardly utopic. These African Americans weren’t returned ‘home’, but plunged into unfamiliar territory where they had to learn to survive and battle new diseases and the indigenous peoples. Many of them were freeborn or slaves who were born in the US, so the American way of life was all they knew. Even those who were born in Africa had become accustomed to American lifestyles.

In 1854, future US president Abraham Lincoln himself said,

“If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing insti­tution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,–to their own native land. But a moment’s reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope, (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days."

However, unlike what Lincoln ignorantly expressed, this was not the slaves’ ‘native land’. The mere fact that it was on the same continent did not qualify it as home. They were still not on their ancestral lands or among their ethnic groups.

Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a man who was born free in the US State of Virginia, became Liberia’s first Black governor in 1841. The ACS, now near bankrupt and facing disintegration, urged the settlers to declare independence. In 1847, Roberts granted them their request and declared Liberia an independent nation, making it the first independent African colony.

In its Declaration of Independence, Liberia levied accusations of injustice against the US and urged other nations to recognise its sovereignty. Yet, it wasn’t until 1862, during the American Civil War, that the US finally recognised Liberia as an independent nation and developed diplomatic ties with it.

Lingering Effect

It’s important to explicitly note that Cape Mesurado and other lands that were later absorbed into Liberia were not empty when the settlers arrived. There were indigenous ethnic groups who were relegated to second-class citizens of their own land by the Americans. Consequently, Liberia has been plagued by discord between the indigenes and descendants of the returnees, called Americo-Liberians.

For over a century post-independence, the indigenes, who ironically formed the majority of the population, were denied the right to vote until a constitutional referendum was finally held in 1946. Still, their right was contingent on the payment of a property tax for the huts they possessed. The same referendum gave women the right to vote, making it one of the first African countries to grant women suffrage.

In 1980, Samuel Doe became the first indigenous president through a coup d’etat, dramatically changing the political landscape of the nation. 9 years later, the First Liberian Civil War broke out as the opposition, led by Charles Taylor, sought to overthrow Doe. The war was one of Africa’s bloodiest civil wars, claiming over 200,000 lives and displacing a million others in refugees camps in neighbouring nations. To put this in context, Liberia’s population was just over 2 million.

Then in 1999, just 2 years after the first war ended, another civil war was initiated by anti-Taylor rebel groups. This war claimed another 50,000 lives from Liberia’s dwindling population. The wars also wreaked a lot of havoc on the country’s economy, which it has yet to recover from as Liberia remains one of the poorest countries in the world.

Peace was finally restored in 2003 and 3 years later, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the first female African head of state.

Today, Americo-Liberians and Congo people (descendants of liberates slaves from the Caribbean) make up only 5% of the Liberian population. Aside from those who were killed during the wars, many of them went into exile abroad, of course especially to the US.

In 1991, US President George H.W. Bush granted them immigration protection under ‘temporary protected status’. Understandably, it was not too difficult for them to integrate into African-American communities since they had held on to the culture of their ancestors.