Word: liberians
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...town of scarcely 15,000 people sporting only four blocks of paved streets, no sewage system, no streetlighting, no radio nor telephones. Liberia's annual budget came to $750,000, and government departments were quartered in shabby, corrugated-metal reproductions of Southern U.S. ante-bellum mansions. An Americo-Liberian elite, descendants of the American slaves who declared Liberia independent in 1847,* was in power, ruling with little regard for the tribal people of the bush, whom they called aborigines. The economy was dominated by the Firestone company, whose rubber plantations stretched deep into the hinterlands. There was, in short...
Termites & Wine. When Liberian President William V. S. Tubman's sixth inauguration ceremony produced drowsy Monrovia's quadrennial traffic snarl, ambassadors fumed in their stalled limousines. But not Humphrey. Glowing in white tie, top hat and tails, he footed featly through the dust to get to the palace on time. Buses broke down bearing his entourage of 60 (including Wife Muriel, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, a personal photographer, and an official in charge of "the box" of codes needed to respond to a thermonuclear war in case Lyndon Johnson should die). Soviet Diplomat Alexander Alexandrov found...
...week's end Humphrey motorcades had accounted for two dogs and a pig. Termites fell into the wine during a Congolese banquet, and his entourage brushed their teeth with beer rather than risk the water. Humphrey handed out tickets to the U.S. Senate gallery to Liberian youngsters and implied in Kinshasa that he would seek a second vice-presidential term, promising Congolese President Joseph D. Mobutu to wear a leopard-skin cap on the campaign trail...
Despite the fact that Liberian politics are not exactly democratic-Tub-man's True Whig Party has no effective opposition-"Uncle Shad" has never kept himself aloof from his people. He hears hundreds of petitions each week in his $6,000,000 sun-reflector-coated palace, settles even minor matters in his government, including the marital disputes of his staff. He finds time to dance a spry quadrille at soirees in the palace and is much less a stickler than he used to be about top hats and cutaways at state functions; at a dam dedication last year...
...freed after the Civil War. Some of his story seems to check out: Watkins was a common name in Liberia in the 1840s, and slave-ship records actually list two slave-ship captains named Legree. Charlie also recalls a few words of what has been identified as a Liberian dialect...