Charles D.B. King
(
)
Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It
by James Ciment
Hill and Wang
During Revolutionary times, to be “enlightened” often meant having enough compassion that you were willing to free your slaves — but only upon your death.
So when founding fathers such as George Washington began to pass away around 1800, their slaves were set free into a country that had no desire for them. The result, as James Ciment writes in this thorough account of an experimental nation, was to send free blacks whence they came, to Africa.
Liberia was the country created by freed American slaves who, perversely, became slave owners themselves.
The American Colonization Society (ACS) was founded in 1816 for the purpose, said founding member and US Speaker of the House Henry Clay, of “rid[ding] our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population.” The ACS viewed such repatriation as a noble mission that would also civilize the “ignorance and barbarism” of Africa.
But freed blacks modeled their country almost exactly on the one they’d left.
“They endeavored to recreate the only social and political order they knew, that of the antebellum South — with themselves as the master class,” writes Ciment. “They erected buildings in the style of plantation mansions and dressed in formal 19th century clothes, despite the equatorial climate.”
Then they colonized the natives.
These new settlers, who came to be called Americoes, often took in “wards” — the children of natives — to educate them, have them help with chores and to generally “civilize” them. One white physician wrote, “These [wards] are as much slaves as their sable prototypes in the parent states of America.”
In 1855, the free black writer William Nesbit wrote of Liberia, “Every colonist keeps native slaves (or as they term them, servants) about him, varying in number from one to 15. These poor souls they beat unmercifully, and more than half starve them, and all the labor that is done at all, is done by these poor wretches.”
These atrocities peaked in the 1920s. By then, Liberian natives were being “leased out by private Americo labor contractors,” mostly to harvest cocoa on an island in the Gulf of Guinea called Fernando Pó.
“By all accounts, the conditions on the island were appalling,” writes Ciment. “Twelve-hour workdays, nights spent locked in crowded barracks, a few yams and dried fish for sustenance, and for those who stole, shirked or protested, brutal punishment. There were even reports of overseers flogging men to death.” And, “those who survived and returned to Liberia often went unpaid.”
Around this time, a Liberian governor named Allen Yancy — described as “a small ferret-like individual” with a “Napoleonic complex” — regularly used “free labor” to develop his personal farms, “designating this as public work,” and having roads built utilizing “brutality, extortion and general exploitation.” He was also paid for every laborer he shipped off to Fernando Pó and got full control of their pay should they survive and return.
When a local chief had his men kill members of a rival tribe, President Charles D.B. King, who’d won the office in a rigged election, had the chief imprisoned, while Yancy made a deal to free the chief in exchange for 500 tribesman to be sent to Fernando Pó.
The trafficking escalated over time, with Yancy and another governor “shipp[ing] more than 2,400 men to the island between late 1928 and the end of 1929.”
When this first became public, not only were there no consequences, but Yancy was made vice president.
An American investigation of Liberian slavery exposed Yancy’s crimes. There was worldwide outrage — Britain threatened to send a warship — but in the end, while King and Yancy were forced to resign, neither suffered any real repercussions, and Yancy lived another 11 years a free man.
In 1930, King officially banned such “labor exports.”
“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,” Ciment writes. “If there was any lesson to be taken from Liberian history, it was a general one about human nature: an oppressed people could readily become oppressors.”