Word: tubman
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...Baptist church wore flowing skirts and bandannas; and everybody spoke in an exaggerated Deep South drawl. In these mannerisms they imitated both their forebears, freedmen who returned from the U.S. in 1822 and subsequently founded Africa's first republic, and their president, William Vacanarat Shadrach ("Uncle Shad") Tubman, who ran the country with a kind of dandified despotism from 1944 until his death...
Today the old ways are changing. Monrovia is still beset by some of the worst slums in Africa, and they lie within 500 yards of Tubman's splendiferous $15 million Executive Mansion. But the man in the mansion today, William Richard Tolbert Jr., 59, has plans for reform, and he seems to mean business. Very few Liberians expected anything like that. Tolbert had served 19 silent and subservient years as Vice President under "Uncle Shad." He also came from the same small elite of "Americo-Liberians" who have ruled the country pretty much in their own interests for more...
Despite the comic-opera façade, however, Tubman made some substantial contributions to Africa's oldest independent black state. His rule was characterized by both stability and a medicum of physical progress. By means of education and arm-twisting, Tubman did all he could to wipe out the differences between native tribesmen and the elitist Americo-Liberians (descendants of Liberia's freed-slave founders...
...mentor, but who can never hope to emulate Old Daddy's style. Tolbert's mandate will run until elections are held in January. Then he may have to compete with, among other rivals, a 38-year-old Harvard graduate with the potent name of William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman...
Died. William Tubman, 75, ruler of Liberia since 1944 (see THE WORLD...