Gunpoint Democracy: Settler Style

By Bodioh Wisseh Siapoe

Something telling about the Liberian Civil Conflict was revealed in Monrovia on July 19, 1993. A Bassa man named Jucontee Tom Woewiyu, former defense minister of the rebel National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), held a press conference to denounce his former boss Charles Taylor, and to confess that the bloodbath in Liberia is aimed at restoring despotic Americo-Liberian rule, by force.

Many Liberians thought Woewiyu had been sniffing and smoking something. Critics reasoned he must have taken crack or cocaine. Or maybe both.

Did he not know, at first, the NPFL intent when Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf flew him out of New Jersey to attend a meeting in Europe where a plot to kill poor, innocent Liberians was in progress?

How come Woewiyu helped strategize the senseless war? Can he be trusted? Is the ex-NPFL war tactician believable, or is Woewiyu a criminal who should be brought to justice, along with other conniving armed bandits?

Maybe, maybe not.

Even so, there may be some truth in Woewiyu’s sudden revelation. When one considers Liberia’s problem-plagued history, he would understand why gun-toting, crack-sniffing hooligans have killed some 300,000 Liberians.

Taylor’s well-contrived liberation struggle has not been to rid Liberians of Samuel Doe per se. The invasion has been skillfully crafted and passionately bent on restoring Americo-Liberian aristocracy.

The plan is so profound. It has heavyweight financial underwriters and political supporters, some of whom are Clarence Simpson, Taylor E. Major, Richard Tolbert, Chu Chu Horton, A. Romeo Horton, Tonia King, Amos Sawyer, D. Elwood Dunn and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

History indicates that with the declaration of the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, some Americans decided to rid their country of former slaves. That declaration was government’s was of saying America was opposed to the infamous slave trade, and that the ugly commercial exchange of human beings had to stop.

The former slaves themselves, says J. Gus Liebenow, an Indiana University political science professor, attempted to establish "black states in places like Louisiana in the South, along the Missouri River, in the Pacific Northwest, and in other places in North America."

That idea irked white slave masters who felt freed slaves could agitate and stir to revolt other Africans still in bondage.

So the American Colonization Society (ACS) and a Philadelphia-based African church appeared on the scene. The ACS worked closely with the church in the early 1800s. They wanted to find a place in West Africa to resettle former slaves.

The first group of six thousand landed on Sherbo Island in 1822. Things were unpleasant when they arrived on Sherbo Island. Many died of tropical diseases and mosquito bites, so Lieutenant Robert F. Stockton of the U.S. Navy helped the resettling blacks emigrate to Cape Mesurado, now called Montserrado County.

In Montserrado, they occupied 140 miles of land on the Grain Coast later to be renamed "Liberia." When the settlers realized their minority status, they invited their relatives and friends in the United States and the West Indies to join them in Liberia. Those settlers must have had some dirty tricks under their sleeves so early.

Responding to the invitation about 200 years ago were Jamaicans, Barbadians and other West Indians then at loggerheads with British colonists. The West Indian migrant figure was put at 400.

The coming of the West Indians was not the end of alien African emigration to Liberia. A subsequent retinue of Ibos, Dahomeans, Congolese and Ghanaians, who were caught on slave vessels intercepted by the U.S. Navy after the Emancipation Proclamation, also came. Those recaptives, who were never actually enslaved on American soil, landed in Liberia and were later called the "Congoes" by the Americos. The Americos abused, misused and enslaved the Congoes more often than settlers did to the indigenes.

From day one, trouble started between settlers and natives. Big time!

The continuing scheme of settlers to depopulate African-Liberians had begun at Cape Mesurado-an exact replica of how European immigrants perpetuated genocide against Indians in America.

For example, U.S. Navy Officer Stockton, at gunpoint, forced King Peter and other Bassa chiefs to accept the settlers as friends, not enemies. At gunpoint, Stockton bought Montserrado County from the Bassa chiefs. He bought the land for settlers. Stockton gave the chiefs muskets, beads, tobacco, gunpowder, clothing, mirrors, food and rum for that piece of land. The unjust deal was estimated at a measly $300.

Adding insult to injury, the invading settlers forced many African-Liberians and Congoes into service as field hands and household domestics-similar positions those former slaves held at their masters’ plantations and residences in America.

Poor African-Liberians, in some instances, were forced to carry on their heads settler big shots, or crooks, in hammocks, from one far-flung destination to the other. Those natives, treated like horses, carried the usually obese human cargo without pay. The denigration and humiliation of Africans by domestic colonialists on the Grain Coast continued well into the late 1970s.

This unresolved palaver that Taylor and Company have put back on the table, began when settlers first landed on the Grain Coast. It started with the sale of land, a process alien to African-Liberians.

Americo-Liberians bought land at very low prices, if any. In other cases, settlers took land from indigenes on alleged insults rained against them by the oppressed.

The questionable sale of land extended to almost all ethnic groupings, but those in Montserrado, Bong, Grand Bassa and Maryland Counties have been documented as principal victims.

With their land either bought at peanut prices or taken illegally by oppressors, African-Liberians were forced to pay hut taxes without representation in national government because they were excluded in the Constitution of 1847. Those laws of 1847 were a resounding analogy of the U.S. Constitution of 1787 that excluded enslaved Africans and Indians.

In 1946, the settler minority community granted natives suffrage. African-Liberians were extended the right to vote on face value only when European colonists threatened to occupy some land in Liberia. It was after 99 years of Americo-Liberian political freedom from slavery that blojlu, or the rightful owners of the land, were cynically extended suffrage. What a tragic historic reality!

The degradation and dehumanization of the indigenous majority, however, did not go heedless. There had been conflicts between Greboes and settlers in 1883.

Quite interestingly, the Taylor-led Christmas eve incursion of 1989 is reminiscent of the Christmas of 1856 when a mentally deranged Baptist minister, B. Jenkins Drayton, saw Greboes as "heathen savages that needed to be swept aside by an advancing civilization." Drayton ordered the Liberian militia to open fire on the Grebo town closest to Cape Palmas.

"In an hour," recalls Richard Hall of the City Paper of Baltimore, MD, "it burned to a heap of ashes. The Greboes were driven into the bush, from which they continued a skirmishing campaign. Over the next month, the war dragged on in a stalemate.

"Finally, the Liberian government intervened and made peace. Maryland’s citizens vowed to unite with the republic."

The Golas waged a serious war against the settlers in 1900 and won. Consequently, they are afraid of the Golas, Greboes and Krus for obvious reasons.

How does this fit into the current scheme of things? How does it relate to the carnage of innocent Liberians?

This feature ties in so well because it forms the basis for the ruthless annihilation of indigenous people. African-Liberians were denied citizenship on their own soil when settlers illegally "grabbed" land at gunpoint, and unilaterally changed the country’s name from the Grain Coast to Liberia.

This article fits because it has been only 50 years since President Arthur Barclay (who emigrated from Barbados) offered citizenship to taxed ethnic African-Liberians. The trouble erupted and continues because impoverished natives, after having been enfranchised, still lacked substantial access to national government until the fateful coup of April 12, 1980.

The April 12 coup gave Liberia her first African-Liberian president: Samuel Kanyon Doe. After 133 years of True Whig Party (TWP) subjugation, Doe nearly delivered freedom to his people.

When he slaughtered 13 former TWP government functionaries in South Beach, Monrovia, it was the beginning of things to come. The Americos would revenge. They would take Liberia at gunpoint again, this time on a Christmas eve-a satanic process they best know how.

They would do so with the help of their former masters. Slave masters, that is. Charles Taylor would be released mysteriously from a Massachusetts prison. He would travel to Tripoli, Libya, and America would literally find herself going to bed with one of her most hated Libyans, Moammar Khaddafi. Khaddafi would teach Taylor guerrilla warfare for an invasion through Nimba County.

Some ethnic dunces, clearly unaware of black imperialism in their backyard, would join Taylor supposedly to replace selfish dictatorship with utopian democracy.

Dictator Samuel Doe would be killed but the war would continue. More than 250,000 lives would be lost; hundreds of thousands starved and diseased. A million others would waste away as refugees. Families of war criminals would enjoy expensive lifestyles, with blood money, in Western capitals. They would be there untouched.

Yes, untouched.

Almost seven years later, Charles Taylor, the notorious marauder in West African political circles, would renege 14 peace accords because he wants to be president through the barrel of the gun, not the ballot box.

Rebels Charles Taylor and Alhaji Kromah would attempt to overpower West African Peacekeepers on April 6, 1996, to assume the presidency militarily. Roosevelt Johnson would frustrate the Taylor-Kromah effort. The April 6th attempt by Charles and Alhaji would have the blessings of invisible hands that come to the aid of resettled blacks in time of trouble.

Frightening.

At gunpoint settlers extended their control into the heartland but with stiff resistance by the Golas, Greboes and Krus. Coastal natives would have thrown the Americos into the sea, but American, British and other alien forces had prevented that. The Americans, therefore, may have helped the highway robbers during the April 6, 1996, military fiasco.

The Americos, as usual, are losing the war. The strangers are panicking because they are scared of true democracy in which voting is done in large numbers. They are running scared because they know politics is a number game, and the ethnic populace comprises an overwhelming majority. Little wonder the war is depopulating the ancestral masses.

Acknowledging the ridiculous caper of April 6, African-Liberians living in the United States, through the National Committee for Peace in Liberia (NACOPEL), staged a massive protest in Washington, DC, to demand an immediate cessation of renewed hostilities and a reconfiguration of Liberia’s interim administration.

But before the Liberian Interim National Transitional Government was reconfigured in Abuja, Nigeria, a cunning coterie of Americos and their indigenous lackeys decided to form an interim national government in exile. They planned to do so in Minneapolis, MN, last August 24. That plan failed ominously.

So much for history. Let us reconsider the Woewiyu press conference. It unveils truths that need to come to the fore if the incessant killings of Liberians and the greedy stealing of their resources must stop.

Both settlers and natives must stop playing games with each other, with one another. They must learn from their mistakes to move forward proactively. Settlers should rethink who they really are.

Are they Africans or Americans? If they accept their Africanness, then "Americos" should act like Africans; but if they cherish their dark history as slaves in North America, then they should be encouraged to pack up and return home.

Meanwhile, African-Liberians should learn how to be themselves. Being what they are not would further exacerbate and prolong the conflict. Educated natives must also learn to be at ease with their background, regardless of their station in society. They must start to discourage their kith and kin from further butchering one another. Once the war stops, then and only then could Liberians rebuild and reintegrate their country.

How can future conflicts be avoided?

No one has a crystal ball to say. However, it would be great were Liberians to return to the traditional African concept of land tenure based on use rather than ownership. The "crocrogee," or questionable, purchase or outright thievery of land by a few has got Liberians where they are. Liberians are Africans. They are not Europeans, who are accustomed to selling anything and everything for money.

To avoid future conflict, those who took land from others at gunpoint, or through "dedebah" (corruption), should return it. God has created the Earth for the benefit of His creatures, not for sale by a rapacious few.

In the Third Liberian Republic, land should not be sold, for its sale in un-African. The sale of land and its illegal occupation have been at the core of Liberia’s anarchy. Despots have bought or stolen too much land out of sheer greed. They must curb their greed-especially the educated few, both settler and native alike.

Before the settlers landed on the Grain Coast, all 16 ethnic groupings existed peacefully among themselves. They lived well as Africans free of any European influence. Taking their land at gunpoint and excluding them in a settler-written constitution, therefore, was, in itself, mean, wicked and mindless. It was only a matter of time Americos would be caught dead at their age-old tricks of manipulation and enslavement of the indigenous masses.

Hopefully, Liberians will write future constitutions inclusively and implement those laws indiscriminately and forcefully, disreputing caste, ethnicity and religion.

Another problem area centers on national symbols. The "love of liberty" did not bring indigenes to the Grain Coast. It met them there. So altering the seal and other national symbols unrepresentative of the masses is quite conceivable.

To Africanize the name Liberia also makes a lot of sense. These issues had been discussed in past eras. It is high time they are carried out without delay.

There is a school of thought bent on African-Liberian liberation from the yoke of Americo-Liberian political suppression.

There is another that believes in maintaining the status quo, the way things are.

Should natives declare independence from settlers? Can the groups coexist?

"We were never included in the founding of Liberia, nor were we considered citizens in their Constitution of 1847," says Kofa Swen of Minneapolis, MN.

"It would be appropriate to declare political and economic freedom from those home-grown neocolonialists."

Swen recalls the visit of former South African president P. W. Botha during the heyday of the Tolbert presidency. "A South African racist killer came to Liberia to the ire of many African countries. Tolbert and his footmen welcomed Botha. That occurred because many Liberians were ignorant of the similarities of domestic apartheid and that of Botha’s South Africa."

James Johnson sees it differently: "Liberia is for all of us. We should let bygones be bygones. Let us put our differences behind us and move forward. There are some country people who act more Americo-Liberian than the Americos themselves. We should continue to celebrate the independence of 1847."

Certainly, there are two thoughts playing out against each other. Awesome.

Meanwhile, the overwhelming Liberian response to the questions of peaceful coexistence and political and economic separation between the oppressors and the oppressed paints a realistically popular picture: If Liberia was founded by the American Colonization Society for free slaves from the North that settled in Montserrado County; by the Mississippi Colonization Society for others that settled in Sinoe County; and by the Maryland Colonization Society for the rest that settled in Maryland County; if settlers expanded their control inland at gunpoint, taking all the land they could, then political separation is the way to go.

If settlers enslaved Nigerians, Ghanaians, Dahomeans and Congolese in the 18th Century; if those black imperialists felt and still think they are more American than African, then the indigenous majority-like other African countries-should declare political and economic liberty from the clutches of Americo-Liberianism at once.

The political idiom of the 21st Century is centered on technological proactivity, not dogged political subjugation and exploitation of one group by the other. No man in Liberia should ever be reduced to an indentured servant in the next millennium.

The Woewiyu press conference has been revealing indeed. It is time the aggrieved unite to revolt against further imperialist domination.

Their eyes are open.

Their time has come.