The First 100 Years

When President William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman wanted his Executive Mansion refurbished for last week's 100th anniversary of Liberian independence, he applied to a Manhattan department store, R. H. Macy's. "We went and got," said Macy's Decorator in Chief Betty Gallagher Ormsby, "everything." That included bedspreads, crystal goblets, hand-cut chandeliers, a merry-go-round, toothpick frills, a steak masticator, a fish refrigerator, a headboard of pale cafe-au-lait satin for President Tubman's bed. From Monrovia, capital of Africa's only Negro republic, Macy's was flooded by radiograms: "Engraved glassware imperative;" "Ship constitutional range" (that was supposed to mean "institutional," i.e., big enough for a large institution); "ship painted steel butts, delete lavatory hinges."

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 who regularly sold native laborers to Fernando Po in Spanish Guinea. The women of Liberia's Wedabo tribe still sing:

We were here when trouble came to our people

For this reason Yancy came to our country

He caught our husbands and our brothers,

Sail them to 'Nana Po'

And there they died!

Tell us why, Yancy why?

"That Man." World War II brought changes. The U.S. established an airport (Roberts Field, now not in use) and a seaplane base at Fisherman's Lake.* President Tubman, an energetic, intelligent lawyer, now works tirelessly to carry out social and technological reforms. He champions the natives against the frock-coated, white-helmeted elite of Americo-Liberians, to whom he is known as "That Man in the Executive Mansion."

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).

*An old legend goes that Fisherman's Lake was created centuries ago when doves, tired by a long flight, sank down at evening and started to scratch the moist soil. They found water, and at last the lake appeared. But when the slave traders came, the doves left and the place was pervaded by evil. Yet a prophecy promised that when the doves returned, so would the good times. One day in 1941 a huge silvery Pan Am seaplane came circling over the water. The oldest chief squinted and declared: "The doves have come."

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