Word: americo
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...true that there were no imperial rulers to leave behind post offices and palaces, schools and hospitals. The population, which the government estimates at around 2,000,000, consists of a 99% tribal majority living in primitive isolation in the back country and a 1% governing minority called Americo-Liberians, descended from a group of freed U.S. slaves sent to the Pepper Coast of Africa with the backing of President James Monroe, the U.S. Congress and philanthropic organizations...
Genial Shad Tubman rules Liberia through his True Whig Party and by the judicious use of jobs and "dash"-the local word for payoffs for favors-to keep the important 20,000 Americo-Liberians happy. He has also originated a unification policy intended to pass out political and economic plums to the hinterland tribes and was the first Liberian President to give them representation in the legislature. Half of the U.S. development grants of $8,600,000 a year is earmarked for teacher training and the construction of schools. Tubman quite frankly caters to the Liberian love of status...
Blood transfusion, he warned, is not only specifically forbidden in the Bible but is unhealthful as well. "Dr. Americo Valeric, a Brazilian doctor and surgeon for over 40 years, agrees: 'Moral insanity, sexual perversions, repression, inferiority complexes, petty crimes-these often follow in the wake of blood transfusion.' " And when Knorr noted that doctors were experimenting with the transfusion of blood from cadavers (TIME, May 26), a horrified groan filled the stadium...
...called the American Colonization Society, landed on the Pepper Coast of Africa to set up a new nation. Except for Haiti, Liberia was the only Negro republic in the world, but that was about its only distinction. The descendants of the first U.S. settlers formed a haughty aristocracy of "Americo-Liberians" who lived along a 40-mile stretch of the coast and kept the natives of the interior firmly in their place. As recently as 1931, there was a flourishing and brutal slave trade, run partly by the Vice President himself...
...Scriptural Saying. To break the stranglehold of his fellow Americo-Liberians, Tubman began what he called a "national unification policy." In 1944, for the first time, tribal Liberians got the vote and even won a few seats in the legislature, where they proved to be reliable members of Tubman's True Whig Party. Later, Tubman extended the suffrage to women, took tribal Liberians into his Cabinet. In the back country, often carried in a hammock, the traditional mode of travel for Liberian VIPs, he palavered endlessly with jungle chiefs. Eventually he set up a network of bush clinics, experimental...