Reviewer: John Stauffer

Publishers: Hill and Wang,

296 pages

Similarly, Liberia itself has often been regarded as "another America," as James Ciment emphasizes in his elegant story of Africa's first republic. Concise and yet comprehensive, "Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It" is the first popular history of Liberia. The scope of Mr. Ciment's narrative is an important part of his story, for Liberia's origins in the early 19th century planted the seeds of its late-20th-century civil war.

Liberia was the brainchild of America's leading statesmen, including Henry Clay, John Randolph and Daniel Webster. In 1816, they founded the American Colonization Society as a means of ridding the U.S. of free blacks, whom Clay called "useless and pernicious, if not dangerous," and to bring Christianity to Africa.

America's free black population had burgeoned since the Revolutionary War. Slaves had freed themselves during the war, and in its wake whites began acting on the new nation's ideals. Northern states passed abolition laws, and enlightened Southern masters freed slaves in their wills.

Most free blacks hated the idea of colonization, which would later be called a form of ethnic cleansing. But from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln (until the Civil War), many if not most whites who sought a gradual end to slavery found colonization quite appealing. Defining America as a white man's nation, they couldn't imagine blacks and whites living together as citizens. Colonization, they believed, would solve the "problem" of free blacks and encourage masters to emancipate their slaves.

With funding from Congress and wealthy whites, the American Colonization Society sent its first group of emigrants to Africa in 1820. Of the 87 free blacks on board the "black Mayflower," most were literate farmers or artisans from New York and Pennsylvania. Also on board were three white men, agents of the ACS and federal government, who assumed, Mr. Ciment says, that free blacks "were not ready for meaningful self-government," even in Africa.

The "black Mayflower" was a disaster. The emigrants settled on an island off Africa's Windward Coast, north of what is now Liberia. It was a mosquito-infested swamp and a breeding ground for malaria. By the end of the rainy season, almost a third of the emigrants had died. The survivors found refuge in Sierra Leone, Britain's colony for free blacks.

Undaunted, the ACS continued sending expeditions of emigrants. It purchased land from natives south of Sierra Leone. In 1824 it named its colony Liberia (from the Latin for "free") and its largest community Monrovia, after President James Monroe, who had helped secure funds from Congress to make colonization possible. By the Civil War, the ACS had sent more than 10,000 American blacks to Liberia; another 5,000 would emigrate by 1900.

As Mr. Ciment tells us, settlers faced three major obstacles. The first was disease. The ACS assumed that African-Americans would be immune to the fevers afflicting newcomers to the Windward Coast. But between 30% and 40% of emigrants died from disease or warfare with native tribes. As word of the high death rates spread, the ACS had difficulty recruiting free blacks. Thus, the organization became more coercive, targeting masters who would free slaves on the condition that they emigrate. Of the 10,000 emigrants who arrived by the Civil War, 60% were manumitted slaves.

The second obstacle was Liberia's lack of sovereignty. The U.S. never recognized it as a colony. Settlers "had no rights which the laws of nations could respect," Mr. Ciment writes. And many settlers considered the ACS their enemy rather than their protector. They had emigrated in the hope of governing themselves. Yet many ACS agents acted as tyrants, unilaterally distributing lots and dispensing food and supplies.

Liberians resolved their lack of sovereignty in 1847 by declaring independence from the ACS. They ratified a constitution and established themselves as the second black republic, after Haiti. Since then, Mr. Ciment observes, the U.S. has supported Liberia "only when it was in its own self-interest to do so."

The third obstacle for emigrants was settler-native tensions, which Mr. Ciment calls Liberia's "original sin." These tensions would persist through the 20th century. There were vast cultural differences between the two groups. Settlers and their "Americo" descendants identified with the U.S. and viewed natives as savages. Natives considered Americoes rapacious and arrogant. Indeed, they called them "whites," or "black-white" men, since settlers spoke English and dressed like Victorians.

One source of antagonism was the slave trade. Native tribes traded slaves among themselves and illegally with Europeans. It was a business for them, as Mr. Ciment notes, "but an abomination to the settlers, who were determined to wipe it out as soon as they had the means to do so."

And yet settlers and their Americo descendants practiced forms of exploitation that closely resembled slavery. They took native women as concubines. They adopted native children and provided them with food, shelter and schooling in exchange for work without pay. To some observers, this "ward system," as it was called, was another form of slavery. "These pawns are as much slaves as their sable prototypes in the parent states of America," wrote one white physician.

In the 1920s, Americo-Liberians were widely accused of trafficking in slaves. They leased out natives to Fernando Pó, in the Gulf of Guinea, to plant and harvest cocoa. Many died before their contracts were up, and others were never paid. The Liberian constitution prohibited slavery, but it also denied citizenship and suffrage to natives, who constituted more than 90% of Liberia's population.

In essence, Americoes tried to re-create a social order that resembled the antebellum South, with themselves as the master class. They took great pride in surviving as a sovereign nation and for over a century ruled the country under the True Whig Party. In flush times they got rich while the natives remained poor.

It was an Americo who first empowered the natives. William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman, Liberia's president from 1944 until his death in 1971, was a brilliant, modernizing demagogue. He built schools and hospitals, paved the roads and sent hundreds of students to the U.S. for college. He financed his public-works projects by selling Liberian iron ore and rubber to American auto makers.

Tubman recognized that the newly educated natives, increasingly steeped in revolutionary ideologies, would be difficult to control. "I'm committing political suicide," he said. And indeed, in 1980, natives led by Samuel Doe, a sergeant in Liberia's army who had been radicalized by Tubman's public-school system, overthrew the True Whig Party in a coup.

By overthrowing the True Whig Party, Doe's regime also destroyed the delicate alliances that had long existed among different native ethnic groups under True Whig rule. Civil war erupted in this power vacuum. Mr. Ciment shrewdly notes that "putting survival ahead of idealism, a tenable strategy for its time, was what ultimately led to the demise of the Americo-Liberian rule and the Americo-Liberian way of life."

But one might also say that survivalism constitutes Liberia's central ideal. Stability has returned with the election in 2005 of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Nobel laureate and Africa's first female head of state. Mr. Ciment's poignant history highlights perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Liberia: that in spite of so many barriers, it has endured for almost 200 years. In this sense, "Another America" is a modern morality tale.

Mr. Stauffer, who teaches history and literature at Harvard, is the author of "The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race " and, with Benjamin Soskis, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324094704579068902901092472

Broadway Books;

1st edition (May 4, 2004)

Reviewer: Abdoulaye W. Dukulé

The Perspective, Atlanta, Georgia

August 6, 2004

Very few in the world would ever establish any connection between grocery coupons and the funding of terrorism. And even a fewer would ever imagine that a Senegalese émigré and used-car salesman in dusty Ouagadougou, in landlocked Saharan country Burkina Faso in West Africa lives off American taxpayers because he held the key to the financial activities of the world most known terrorist group Al Qaeda in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Or what about infant meals or cigarette trafficking as a means to finance terrorist groups around the world? As surprising as they may sound, all these activities are linked to the gigantic financial web terrorists have resorted to to move money around the world, almost legally, to support their members and carry out their deadly activities. 

These are among many of the revelations readers come across in the recent investigative book written by veteran Washington Post reporter and former West Africa bureau Chief Douglas Farah. Since September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda has become the number one target of national and international security policies the world over, much more so than any one group has ever been. Since September 11, 2001, terrorism has dominated American politics more than any other issue and it is through this prism that America looks at the rest of the world. Many have come to consider September 11 as the date that prompted the world into the 21st Century, with a new world order as seen from Washington, DC. After the Cold War came the drug war and now it’s the decade of fight against terrorism, a fight in darkness against very elusive characters that pop up and disappear now and then, an unconventional warfare with a faceless enemy.

Blood From Stones tries to find an answer to the number one question intelligence services and law enforcement agencies have been battling with since 9/11: How do terrorist groups pay for their activities? The belief is that once their finance is crippled, terrorists would be out of the business. This would not be easy, because, as Mr. Farah writes, "the interlocking web of commodities, underground transfer systems, charities, and sympathetic bankers is still in place. The financial resources of al Qaeda are carefully hoarded and scattered around the world, but accessible." (Page 8).

In his meticulously researched book that reads like the best of spy novels, Douglas Farah goes deep inside the world of arms dealers, spies, dictators and child soldiers as well as international financiers to uncover the trail of blood money. Blood Diamonds is the story of how, in this 21st century, a group of political extremists using religion as the foundation of their ideology, work tirelessly to unleash terror on America and its allies.

From the Indian subcontinent to Dubai in the Arab Emirates to the diamond mines of Sierra Leone and the dark alleys of Monrovia, the reader moves about in a spiraling world of shadowy characters that live in a parallel world, where greed for money, political corruption and the hatred for America and its allies are all intertwined. What seems so distant and unconnected come together as a coherent mode of thinking and operation, with money being the underlying factor and anti-Americanism the fundamental belief.

For Farah, the trail starts in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire while he was having lunch with Cindor Reeves (CR) one of his Liberian contacts, a relative and agent of former dictator and president Charles Taylor of Liberia. Charles Taylor has been forced to resign after being indicted for war crimes by the United Nations Special War Crimes in Sierra Leone and is living in Calabar, Nigeria. CR took a look at pictures of Al Qaeda operatives in a magazine the writer was carrying and said that he had met two of the people. CR, who ran errands for Taylor, dealing with arms and diamonds, had met the two Al Qaeda members in Monrovia during a recent trip in the Liberian capital where they spent unspecified amount of money on diamonds. The men had stayed in a "safe house’ spent their time watching videos of young Palestinians blowing up themselves while killing Israelis and had posters of Bin Laden on the walls. To any reporter in the world, this was the "scoop" careers are made of: knowing someone who had met and spoken to two of the most wanted men on the list of international terrorists.

Through the narrator’s contact with CR, we get a close look at the Revolutionary United Front of Foday Sankoh at work in Sierra Leone, mining diamonds for Taylor and his al Qaeda clients. We also get to understand how Taylor operated in Liberia, how he ran a government, that Farahdecribes as "a functioning criminal enterprise." (Page 15) The writer spends much time describing Taylor relationships with RUF, an army that he created and launched on Sierra Leone as an extension of his gang. The readers come in contact with child soldiers who are drugged and brainwashed to the point of forgetting their own names and then unleashed on innocent populations in an orgy of blood and death. Characters like Ibrahim Bah, the Senegalese mercenary and confident of Taylor, Victor Bout, the enigmatic Russian arms dealer and the Kenyan Sanjivan Ruprah are all part of Taylor inner circle and at the top of the world most wanted arms traffickers. But they still walk free.

From Abidjan, the narrator travels to Liberia and later to Freetown in an attempt to get a better understanding of the financial links between Charles Taylor and Middle East terrorist groups. Farah finds out that Al Qaeda and Hezbollah have both been involved with the Liberian dictator in a diamond trade. The groups had cash raised from many sources and in order to put that cash into mainstream financial networks, they bought diamonds in Liberia which they sold in Europe and the US and therefore "laundered" their money the most legal way, in the diamond trade, where, as one Israeli who did business with a Hezbollah Palestinian diamond dealer, said, "nobody asks where a stone comes from." Diamonds were traded for guns and cash. Taylor took the cash and the RUF took the guns and Al Qaeda walked away with stones.

In this underworld of cash and death, the narrator saw first hand the devastating effect of Charles Taylor’s policies. Child soldiers, prostitution, cannibalism in the higher echelon of Charles Taylor’s inner circle and stones that weep blood for the backdrop to this story of terror and greed.

As the reader discovers, the terrorist network put together by Bin Laden transcends nationalities and every possible boundary human beings have erected between nations and people over the past thousands of years. Money, the most potent human factor in this age, flows from one end of the world to the other. People like Charles Taylor, using the most common denominator to all humans, greed, survive by serving as a middleman here and there, taking cash in one hand and delivering death with the other.

Characters that have filled columns in the past years of Liberian history come alive, all orbiting around two men: Charles Taylor, the bloodthirsty petty dictator of Monrovia and Ben Laden, the elusive terrorist whose anger against his home country, Saudi Arabia and the US, has created a new age in international relations. People in the story seem to live in a world of their own and rules of justice and law don’t seem to apply. National leaders lie to protect known criminals while those watchdogs, in the intelligence community, responsible for tracking down the criminals seem to not want to catch them.

Unlike the drug cartel of the 1980s that relied mostly on one product – drugs – usually banned in many countries, terrorists, we learn, work through almost legal means, using a variety of sources and products difficult to trace and when traced, difficult to stop when uncovered. That makes things harder for law enforcement agencies trained to combat "crimes". Grocery coupons, infant meals and diamonds are not on the top of the list of "dangerous and illegal products" anywhere in the world.

The story here is many folds. The narrator finds himself leading on the one hand an investigation to piece together the source of the financial empire of the terrorists networks and paradoxically, he has to battle to convince the intelligence community about his findings.

The intelligence community, at least in the US, seems to have been taken aback by the findings of the journalist. This becomes a frustrating battle where bureaucrats who are used to think in the box refuse to envision new modes of operation. First the contacts to which the narrator first breaks the news of Taylor’s involvement with international terrorism dismiss his charges. Later on, after reaching an understanding about the relationships between al Qaeda, mostly Sunni, and Hezbollah, mostly Shiite, he is almost accused of heresy, because as the West understood it, "these two groups are too far apart and cannot work together." It was certainly this tendency to deny any sophisticated mode of operation on the part of terrorists that allowed them to move freely millions of dollars almost legally, entered the US legally and used American flight schools to learn how to carry out the 9/11 massacres. The recent release of the 9/11 Commission and its indictment of the various security institutions somehow vindicate the theories of the author.

In the wake of the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, instances of the resistance on the part of an intelligence service built and trained to work in the Cold War dominated ideology to conceive new ways of dealing with dangers in the new world are very evident. The intelligence structure was outdated and was not prepared for 21st century challenges. Chasing communist spies or drug traffickers laundering money seem like a Boy Scout picnic compared to trying to dismantle Al Qaeda.

Beyond the close scrutiny of the financial web of the terrorist movement, the book allows the reader to understand how closely Charles Taylor controlled the Sierra Leone killing machine, the RUF. Through his agent Ibrahim Bah, a Senegalese fighter with experiences in the Afghanistan war, the RUF and Foday Sankoh were nothing more than puppets in the hands of the Liberian dictator. They mined diamonds for him, bought weapons from him and trained their fighters under his watch. The RUF was an extension of Taylor’s own rebel army, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) that had gained legitimacy in 1997 through elections in Liberia. Thus, the book leaves no doubt as to the role of Taylor in the atrocities, gun running and theft of national resources of Sierra Leone by the RUF.

Publisher: Xlibris  Pages: 220

Price: (paperback) $19.99

ISBN: 9781493198740

Reviewed: November, 2014

Author Website: Visit Journey-to-the-Promised-Land

You’ve heard of the ship called the Mayflower, but probably not the Azor. History buff and new novelist Dwayne Makala wants to teach readers about an event their history professors likely never mentioned: the 1878 exodus of emancipated African-Americans to a new home in Liberia. Journey to the Promised Land: Voyage of the Bark Azor attempts to fictionalize the little-discussed post-war pilgrimage, though his tale often reads more like a textbook than the historical fiction he sets out to create.

Makala starts off engagingly enough, with the story based on the actual men, women and children who boarded the sailing ship, or “bark,” Azor on April 21, 1878, in Charleston, South Carolina for its maiden voyage to Liberia. Characters include an eager 13-year-old boy, James Tolbert; African Methodist preacher Reverend Thompson, confident captain Blake Carrington, and an assortment of mostly flirtatious women and ambitious men. The one person not on board is a doctor, which becomes a dire problem when sickness sweeps through the ship midway through the trip.

This could be a compelling tale of courage and survival that also illustrates the historical period. Too often, though, the momentum stalls as Makala turns entire chapters over to the political maneuverings happening back in South Carolina, or to reference-like entries on world politics. These diversions offer information that, while valuable, would be more digestible coming through the thoughts, words, and actions of the characters rather than as asides from the author. The writing style itself is awkward, with frequent grammatical errors, missing words, and confusing sentence construction. It’s a lot to navigate to get back to a story that never really gets off the ground.

Like the voyage it depicts, Journey to the Promised Land is a noble idea that holds much promise. Ultimately, though it lacks the attention to detail needed to make it all the way to its destination.

Also available as an ebook.

American racism traps Blacks — even in Africa. Prof. Dennis chronicles the compulsive and repetitious nature of racism and its destructive effects on peoples and societies, Dr. Dennis’s observations of the twists of irony and misplaced pride on all sides will provoke a wry smile as well as dismay.

During the 1990s, Liberia descended into civil war and anarchy. African-Liberian rebel groups roamed the countryside randomly killing as they vied for power. Doe was killed by a segment of these rebel groups and warlord Charles Taylor eventually became president in 1997. In 2003, Taylor was deposed by rebel groups and is now on trial at The Hague for war crimes. Despite Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s democratic election in 2005, Liberia remains in ruins as a classic failed state in Africa. The obvious question is: Why did the Negro experiment planted in Africa in 1822 fail so miserably?

A true African-American, Dr. Dennis writes from a broad historical and social perspective having lived in an African tribe, as a "Negro" in the 1950s and since the Civil Rights Movement as a "black man in America," having moved in international diplomatic circles and having worked as a member of the American academic elite.

About the Author:

A professor of sociology and anthropology, Dr. Dennis is conversant with the dominant and the subordinate groups in both Liberia and the United States.

As the son of a Liberian diplomat, Prof. Dennis spent his school years at the Liberian consulate in Berlin and was accepted among white boys of his age. He spent his summers in Liberia — both in Monrovia and in his father’s Mende village of Vahun and his mother’s Gbande village of Somalahun. Dr. Dennis went on to earn a double PhD in Sociology and Anthropology from Michigan State University in 1963. This varied exposure gave him a cosmopolitan worldview that, along with his education, enables him to analyze the highly-charged issues of racism, discrimination and hypocrisy with humor, grace and understanding.

A hereditary chief of the Mende tribe, Dr. Dennis has resided in the United States since 1950, where he has mixed in black communities and white communities.

His wife Anita K. Dennis has a BA in Sociology with a minor in anthropology and has been accepted into her husband’s Mende tribe. She was instrumental in enabling Dr. Dennis to complete this work.

Reviewer: Caroline Elkins

Illustrated. 354 pp.

Simon & Schuster. $25

In her masterly memoir, Helene Cooper brings us back to the halcyon years when Sugar Beach, her family’s home, embodied the elite privilege and disco-age chic to which Liberia’s upper class aspired. The Coopers’ mansion, 22 rooms in all, rose in solitude out of the plum trees and vines that thicketed Liberia’s undeveloped coastline. Inside was a living homage to the 1970s, complete with velvet couches in a sunken living room, marble floors and a special nook for storing the plastic Christmas tree. Outside, where a carpet of grass stretched to the thunderous Atlantic, multiple servants made their home, and the latest-model American cars — from a Lincoln Continental to a two-tone green Pontiac Grand Prix — awaited their next 11-mile journey into downtown Monrovia.

Fate, so it seemed, handed Helene Cooper a “one-in-a-million lottery ticket” when she was born into “what passed for the landed gentry upper class of Africa’s first independent country.” Both sides of Cooper’s family traced their roots to Li­beria’s founding fathers — freed slaves from the United States who fought disease and the recalcitrant local population to forge a new nation. Their bravery and ingenuity were legendary, and their descendants soon formed Liberia’s upper caste.

At its heart, “The House at Sugar Beach” is a coming-of-age story told with unremitting honesty. With her pedigree and her freedom from internalized racism, Cooper is liberated to enjoy a social universe that is a fluid mix of all things American and African. “None of that American post-Civil War/civil rights movement baggage to bog me down with any inferiority complex about whether I was as good as white people,” she declares triumphantly. “No European garbage to have me wondering whether some British colonial master was somehow better than me. Who needs to struggle for equality? Let everybody else try to be equal to me.”

The young Helene Cooper oozes the awkward confidence of a privileged adolescent, and it is through her bespectacled eyes that we see the carefree decadence of Liberia in the years just before it descended into chaos. They are also the lenses through which we are introduced to Cooper’s distinctly female world. Atop the matriarchy is her maternal grandmother, the unforgettable Mama Grand. Cooper’s side-splitting portrayal of this hard-nosed, self-made landowner is nothing short of brilliant. With her gold-capped tooth glistening, Mama Grand is equally capable of dressing down a Lebanese merchant who “thought he was going to cheat me out of my rent” and berating the entire American government on camera for “60 Minutes.” The women are the backbone of Liberia in its heyday, but they show their true strength when the country collapses.

A subtle, nostalgic ache for a childhood foreshortened is the watermark imprinted on every page of Cooper’s story. The idyll at Sugar Beach, with its Michael Jackson LPs and Nancy Drew mysteries, was shattered when a ragtag group of soldiers — part of the rebel force that brought down the Tolbert government in 1980, and with it over 150 years of old-guard, one-party rule — arrived on the scene. The stench of their inebriation, of their lust for violence, overpowered the tranquility that still lingered in the bucolic air of Cooper’s sheltered world. Her mother would try in vain to exorcise the odor — and the memories — the rebel intruders inscribed on her body and mind after they gang-raped her. Mommee sacrificed herself to protect the innocence of Helene and her other daughters, Marlene and Eunice, locking them in an upstairs room before the soldiers forced her down into the basement.

Cooper soon went into exile, joining thousands of other members of the Liberian elite who managed to escape the rebels’ murderous pillaging. Mommee and Marlene were also among them. Eunice was not. The daughter of a poor upcountry mother, she had been taken into the household at Sugar Beach when Helene was a lonely 8-year-old in need of companionship. She quickly became “Mrs. Cooper’s daughter” and was treated as one of Mommee’s own. Yet over the years there were subtle reminders of Eunice’s different status. And when it was time to flee, painful choices were made. Eunice was not a blood relation, and so she was left behind.

While Cooper’s memoir is mesmerizing in its portrayal of a Liberia rarely witnessed, its description of the psychological devastation — and coping mechanisms — brought on by profound loss is equally captivating. The second half of the book tells the story of Helene’s reinvention. Her aristocratic Liberian pedigree meant nothing in the hallways of her new school. She became the suspicious immigrant, spending lunchtime hiding in bathroom stalls and the recesses of the library rather than face the scrutiny and ridicule of her American classmates.

Cooper’s perseverance and immense talent with language eventually catapulted her into a career as a journalist. Her success at The Wall Street Journal and later The New York Times is nearly as noteworthy as her ability to compartmentalize — or, some might say, dissociate. This mental sleight of hand is what affords her the psychological space to create a new life and cultivate her writer’s craft. It would be a mistake to see her ruminations over race and class in America as the hypocritical ranting of a once-privileged African. They are, instead, a reflection of her internalized journey, part of the process of becoming whole.

The walls holding back the guilt of her early entitlement, the destruction of her childhood, the murder of family and friends, and the abandonment of her foster sister would finally come crushing down under the literal weight of an American tank in Iraq. When the tank destroyed the Humvee in which she was riding, Cooper narrowly escaped death. But once she was extricated from the wreck, her mind traveled to a different war. “At that moment,” she writes, “as I lay in the sand in the desert, my chemsuit soaked with what turned out to be oil, not blood, I thought of Liberia.”

For the first time in over 20 years, she soon returned to her former homeland. There, in the ravaged streets, in the overgrown jungles of yesteryear’s plantations, she confronted the ghosts of the dead — and encountered the living survivors. With much suffering and loss, Eunice had miraculously endured the hell of the Doe era, as well as the civil wars and deep poverty that accompanied the ascent of Charles Taylor to Liberia’s presidency. Eventually, the two sisters were reunited and returned to the house at Sugar Beach. In the defiled shadow of onetime grandeur, Cooper embraced the enormity of her past, and finally came of age.

Caroline Elkins is an associate professor of history at Harvard and the author of “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2006.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/books/review/Elkins-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0