The history of Liberia

Liberia, on the rainforest coast of West Africa, is Africa's oldest republic. For centuries before it had that name, the land was home to Kru, Mande and other peoples who farmed, fished, traded along the coast and governed themselves through chiefs and powerful initiation societies. In the 1820s an American society began settling free and freed Black Americans there, and in 1847 the settlers declared an independent state. For more than a century their descendants, the Americo-Liberians, ruled over an indigenous majority that was largely excluded from power. A coup in 1980 ended that order, and it was followed by two civil wars that killed around a quarter of a million people. Since 2003 Liberia has rebuilt under elected governments, surviving the Ebola epidemic of 2014.

Little archaeology has been done in Liberia's forests, but stone tools show a long human presence, and by the twelfth century the region was settled by peoples speaking languages of the Niger-Congo family. Along the coast lived the Kru, Grebo, Bassa and Dei, who fished, farmed rice and cassava and traded by canoe. Inland, waves of Mande-speaking peoples moved south and west from the savanna, among them the Kpelle, the Loma, the Mano and the Dan, or Gio, pushing earlier inhabitants towards the sea. The decline of the Mali Empire and later of the Songhai Empire, and drier conditions in the interior, added to these movements, and migrants brought skills such as cotton weaving, iron smelting and the farming of rice and sorghum.

In the sixteenth century Mande-speaking warriors known as the Mane invaded the north-west coast and the lands of modern Sierra Leone, and the Vai, coming from the interior, settled around Grand Cape Mount. Most societies were organised in small chiefdoms, but the Poro society for men and the Sande society for women, secret initiation associations found across the region, regulated education, law, trade and war and could bind many villages together. Muslim Mande traders, the Mandingo, brought Islam and long-distance commerce. Kru sailors became famous along the whole West African coast, working on European ships from the eighteenth century onwards. In the 1830s a Vai man, Momolu Duwalu Bukele, devised a syllabic script for his language, one of the few writing systems invented in sub-Saharan Africa.

Portuguese navigators of the Age of Discovery reached the coast around 1462 and called it the Costa da Pimenta, the Pepper Coast, after the melegueta pepper, or grains of paradise, that was its chief export. Europeans also called it the Grain Coast. The Dutch briefly built a trading post at Grand Cape Mount in 1602, and English traders appeared later in the century, but no lasting European colonies were founded. The coast did take part in the Atlantic slave trade: local rulers sold captives to European ships, and in the early nineteenth century slave-trading stations operated at Gallinas and Cape Mount, even after Britain and the United States had banned the traffic.

The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816 by an uneasy alliance. Some members opposed slavery and believed free Black people could never be treated as equals in America; others were slaveholders who wanted free Black people removed because they were seen as a threat to slavery. The idea of colonisation had earlier been promoted by Thomas Jefferson, and the Black shipowner Paul Cuffe had taken settlers to the British colony of Sierra Leone in 1816. Most free African Americans rejected the scheme, and abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass denounced it as a plan to protect slavery rather than end it.

The first ship, the Elizabeth, sailed from New York in 1820 with 86 emigrants, many of whom died of disease on Sherbro Island. In December 1821 the society's agents obtained Cape Mesurado from local rulers, including King Peter, under a treaty signed, by most accounts, under threat of force, and settlers landed there in 1822. They named their settlement Monrovia after the American president James Monroe. Mortality was terrible: of about 4,500 emigrants who arrived between 1820 and 1843, fewer than 2,000 were still alive by the end of the period, most killed by malaria and other tropical diseases. Other state societies set up separate settlements, and in 1838 most of them joined to form the Commonwealth of Liberia. In 1841 Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a free man of mixed race from Virginia, became its first Black governor. Settlers also included Africans freed by the United States Navy from slave ships, known as Congoes.

Short of money and unable to collect customs duties that British traders refused to recognise, the society encouraged independence, and on 26 July 1847 Liberia declared itself a sovereign republic with a constitution modelled on that of the United States. Roberts became its first president. Britain recognised the new state in 1848 and France in 1852, but the United States did not do so until 1862, during the American Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln's administration established relations. The separate settler Republic of Maryland, around Cape Palmas, was annexed in 1857 after a war with the Grebo.

The settlers, who never numbered more than a few per cent of the population, built a society modelled on the American South they had left, with Protestant churches, Masonic lodges and plantation-style houses, and they kept Christianity and English as marks of civilisation. They reproduced some of the hierarchy they had known: indigenous people were denied citizenship and the vote, many indigenous children were raised as wards and servants in settler households, and settler leaders married among themselves. The True Whig Party, in power from 1878, ruled without interruption for more than a century. The Grebo, Kru and other peoples rose against Monrovia's rule repeatedly between the 1850s and the 1930s, and the government put down the revolts with the help of American warships.

During the Scramble for Africa, Liberia lost large claimed territories to the British Empire, which pushed the Sierra Leone border south, and to France, whose colonies of Guinea and Ivory Coast took land in the north and east. Its independence survived, partly through American diplomatic protection. Debt was a constant danger: after defaults on foreign loans, an international receivership controlled Liberia's customs revenue from 1912. Liberia joined World War I on the Allied side in 1917, expelling the German merchants who had been its main trading partners.

In 1926 the American Firestone company received a 99-year concession of up to a million acres to grow rubber, together with a loan to the government, and its plantation at Harbel became the largest in the world and the backbone of the economy. Soon afterwards a scandal broke over officials who had forcibly recruited indigenous men and shipped them to the Spanish island of Fernando Po under conditions a League of Nations commission in 1930 compared to slavery. President Charles D. B. King and his vice-president resigned.

William Tubman, president from 1944 until his death in 1971, transformed the country. His Open Door policy invited foreign investment, and iron ore mines, rubber estates and the registration of foreign ships under the Liberian flag brought rapid growth; by the early 1970s Liberia was among the world's leading exporters of iron ore and rubber. During World War II Liberia gave the United States bases and airfields, and in the Cold War it was Washington's closest ally in Africa. Tubman's Unification policy extended the vote to indigenous Liberians and women, brought the hinterland into the political system, and gave him a large personal following. But he ruled through patronage, a secret police and rigged elections, and wealth remained concentrated in a small elite. During the decolonisation of Africa he helped lead the moderate bloc of states that founded the Organisation of African Unity in 1963.

His successor, William Tolbert, attempted cautious reforms and opened relations with Communist states, but falling rubber prices hurt the economy. In April 1979 a proposed increase in the price of rice, the staple food, led to protests in Monrovia, and security forces killed dozens of demonstrators.

On 12 April 1980 a group of non-commissioned soldiers led by Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, a Krahn, stormed the executive mansion and killed Tolbert. Ten days later thirteen senior officials were publicly executed by firing squad on a Monrovia beach. The coup ended 133 years of Americo-Liberian rule and was greeted by many indigenous Liberians, but Doe's People's Redemption Council soon became a corrupt and brutal dictatorship that filled the army and government with Krahn. The Reagan administration in the United States poured in aid, seeing Doe as a Cold War ally. In 1985 Doe declared himself the winner of a rigged presidential election, and after a failed coup by his former comrade Thomas Quiwonkpa, soldiers took revenge on the Gio and Mano people of Nimba County, Quiwonkpa's home region.

On 24 December 1989 Charles Taylor, a former Doe official who had escaped from a prison in the United States, crossed from Ivory Coast into Nimba County with a small force, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia. Gio and Mano recruits flocked to him, and the war quickly turned into ethnic slaughter, with Doe's army killing Gio and Mano and the rebels killing Krahn and Mandingo. In 1990 hundreds of civilians sheltering in St Peter's Lutheran Church in Monrovia were massacred by government soldiers. A West African force, ECOMOG, led by Nigeria, landed in Monrovia in August 1990. In September Prince Johnson, whose faction had broken from Taylor, captured Doe at the ECOMOG headquarters, and his men tortured and killed him on video.

The war dragged on for seven years as factions multiplied, fighting over diamonds, timber and rubber, with widespread use of child soldiers, mass rape and the looting of Monrovia. Taylor also backed the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone's civil war. A peace agreement signed at Abuja in 1996 led to elections in July 1997, which Taylor won with about 75 per cent of the vote, many voters fearing a return to war if he lost. The first war had killed more than 200,000 people, roughly one Liberian in seventeen.

Taylor's rule brought only a brief pause. In 1999 a rebel movement, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, backed by Guinea, attacked from the north, and in 2003 another group, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, advanced from Ivory Coast in the south. Women's peace activists led by Leymah Gbowee staged mass sit-ins demanding an end to the fighting. In June 2003, as rebels besieged Monrovia, the Special Court for Sierra Leone unsealed an indictment against Taylor. Under international pressure he resigned on 11 August 2003 and went into exile in Nigeria, and a week later the warring parties signed a peace agreement in Accra, capital of Ghana. A large United Nations peacekeeping mission followed.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former finance minister and World Bank economist, won the 2005 election against the footballer George Weah and took office in January 2006 as Africa's first elected female head of state. Her government won cancellation of most of Liberia's foreign debt and attracted new investment in iron ore and palm oil, and she shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 with Leymah Gbowee. Taylor was handed over in 2006; in 2012 the Special Court, sitting in The Hague, convicted him of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone, the first conviction of a former head of state by an international court since Nuremberg, and sentenced him to 50 years. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported in 2009, but for many years no Liberian court tried those responsible for crimes during the wars.

In 2014 the Ebola epidemic swept through West Africa and devastated Liberia's weak health system, killing thousands before the country was declared free of transmission in May 2015. The UN peacekeeping mission ended in 2018. Weah won the presidency in 2017, and his inauguration in January 2018 was Liberia's first peaceful transfer of power between elected leaders in more than seventy years. In the November 2023 run-off Joseph Boakai, Sirleaf's former vice-president, narrowly defeated Weah, who quickly conceded, and Boakai was sworn in on 22 January 2024. In June 2025 Liberia was elected to a seat on the United Nations Security Council for 2026 and 2027, and in July 2025 Boakai issued a formal apology to the victims of the civil wars.