Word: liberia
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There was scarcely a campaign poster to be seen or an election speech to be heard, and the one opponent to Liberia's President William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman, 63, had his own typically Liberian reason for bothering to run at all. "Not being particularly opposed to the continuation in office, of President Tubman," a church organist had said in his formal platform, "this venture of mine is divinely inspired. It is purely sportsmanlike, and is in response to the ardent desire of Dr. Tubman for fair and friendly competition...
Tubman's father is a Georgia-born Methodist minister who became Speaker of Liberia's House of Representatives. Tubman himself is a cigar-chomping ban vivant who likes to have the towers of Monrovia's Saturday Afternoon Club specially illuminated whenever he drops in at night. He runs his Ohio-sized country with the benign shrewdness of an oldtime U.S. city boss and a good many of the trappings of an African autocrat. If Liberia is still one of the most backward countries in Africa, its pace of advance is now among the fastest...
...than a century and a quarter had passed since 88 former U.S. Negro slaves, backed by President James Monroe, the Congress of the U.S., and an idealistic organization 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...
...single taxi. Electricity burned feebly two hours at night, the city had no running-water system at all, and the whole country was dependent on the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. and its vast (100,000 acres) rubber concession. Elsewhere in Africa, schools, roads and hospitals were being built, but Liberia, as one Liberian diplomat wryly explained, "had not had the benefits of colonialism...
Though the people of Guinea rejoiced, Touré banned all demonstrations, announced: "This is no time for dancing." More than any other African state, Guinea was on its own. The British had bequeathed to Nkrumah a prosperous Ghana. President Tubman. who runs Liberia as Boss Pendergast once ran Kansas City, has the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. as the biggest employer in his land. The Sudan, after getting its independence, is calling back British technicians. Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia has Swedes training his air force, Indians running his state bank, Americans running the airline, and French Canadian Jesuits running...