Word: tubman
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...turn, that just before last week's election he announced over the radio that he would vote for his organist opponent himself. He could well afford the gesture; of all Africa's political figures, none except the Emperor of Ethiopia has shown greater staying power than "Shad" Tubman...
...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...
Know Thy Place. When Tubman took over in 1943, just a little less 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...
...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...
...Tubman has eagerly thrown his country open to foreign investment, which he much prefers to gifts or loans ("That old Scriptural saying that a borrower is servant unto the lender holds true in every instance"). With a generous tax policy and no currency restrictions-the U.S. dollar is the medium of exchange-Liberia has attracted more than $120 million in foreign capital. The Italians are building roads, the West Germans are helping to develop a new port along the southern coast, and the Israelis are putting up a new hospital, hotel, treasury building and executive mansion. Goodrich is planting...