Liberia: two centuries ago, the first freed slaves arrived from America

View of the Westpoint district in Monrovia, in the distance, the autonomous port © Carol Valade

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2 mins

The festivities officially start this Monday, February 14, 2022 during a ceremony chaired by the Head of State George Weah.

Conferences, festivals and other events will follow one another throughout this year 2022. The country actually commemorates the arrival in the territory where Monrovia will be founded, two centuries ago, of the first freed slaves from America.

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With our regional correspondent in Abidjan

,

Pierre Pinto

If Liberia declared its independence in 1847, 25 years earlier, in 1822, the first freed slaves from the United States landed on Providence Island, a piece of land purchased a few months earlier from indigenous populations by the American Colonization Society .

The country's elite

Thousands of other immigrants will follow until the end of the 19th century.

Freedmen and their descendants who over the decades will constitute the political and economic elite of Liberia, establishing for nearly 150 years a system of domination over the indigenous populations.

This system, which resisted the wave of African independence in the 1960s, ended up collapsing in 1980

with Samuel Doe's coup.

His assassination in 1990 after ten years of chaotic management then precipitated the country into a 14-year cycle of civil wars.

National unity and reconciliation

Today the situation has changed

," explains Dr. Laurent Assouanga of the University of Cocody.

The duel between the American-Liberians and the natives no longer exists.

This American-Liberian elite was decapitated by the civil war.

Many have left Liberia.

But they still retain a certain economic power,

 ” he adds.

These bicentenary commemorations were placed under the sign of national unity and reconciliation.

They are also an opportunity for the authorities to call for the return of the diaspora and its capital to a country that is still struggling to recover economically, 19 years after the end of the civil war.

Also to listen: Liberia: "Each of the current actors bears their share of responsibility"

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  • Liberia

  • George Weah