Word: liberia
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TIME'S usually keen sense of history seems to have slipped a cog in its story (TIME, Aug. 4) on Liberia's 100th anniversary. You tell us that Liberia was founded by the American Colonization Society "as a home for freed slaves from the U.S."; and you tell us that Liberia's current President is named Tubman; but you never tie these two facts together. If you did, you might find they had an exceedingly interesting background...
This eager import of modernities (even a grandfather's clock that Liberia ordered had to be modern) was an expression of the country's deep desire to catch up with other nations...
Barefoot Cops. During its first 100 years, Liberia has been bypassed by history. Macy's steak masticator is chomping away in a country which has no sewage system, no railroads, few wheels. Monrovia is a town whose policemen go barefoot and whose telephone poles are constantly devoured by insects. Until recently, Monrovia had no proper docking facilities; visitors were carried ashore in sedan-like contraptions called mammy-chairs...
...Liberia never had much of a chance. Founded by the American Colonization Society as a home for freed slaves from the U.S., it got its independence in 1847 chiefly because nobody was looking. It was ridden by sleeping sickness and plagued by the Harmattan wind from the Sahara Desert, whose parching breath cracks furniture and leaves books curled up. Some 15,000 freed American slaves and their descendants had established a ruling class. As late as 1930, a League of Nations commission discovered that Liberia's Vice President Allen Nathaniel Yancy himself was head of a ring of slavers...
Last week, Monrovia was flag-decked and floodlit as it embarked, with prayer and fireworks, on three weeks of fortissimo festivities. The era of the mammy-chair formally drew to a close; the U.S. made Liberia a birthday gift of a brand-new, $18,000,000 port (a miracle financed by Lend-Lease funds...