How Liberia Was Built On Liberty And Exclusion

A Motto With A Trapdoor

SPEAKER_00 0:11

The love of liberty brought us here four wars. That is the national motto of Liberia. It is curved into the country coat of arm. It has been there since the Republic begins. Now hear it again slowly because four small wars are hidden. The love of liberty brought us here. Whose love whose liberty? And who exactly is that us? Let me teach you what that sentence really means because nobody ever read you the second half. The us was not the African. The us was not the settlers. Free and free black Americans who crossed an Atlantic in the 1800s to escape the chain of the United States. Their love of liberty was real. I honor it. I will not mock it. But when they landed on the coast, they landed on a coast that was already fought, already home, already ancient. The Pede, the Basel, the Krub, the Gulan, the Grebut, whole nations, all of them the Republic but centric in the liberty the settlers came to farm because for those millions it brand new kinds of bondage. So the motto does not lie. The love of liberty did bring them there. It just never tells you what that liberty cost everyone already standing on the show. The gap between the permanent curve on the course of arms and the prayers paid by the people of the land. That gap is tonight's whole episode.

A War Remembered In The Body

SPEAKER_00 2:07

I am not ready to you from the outside. I was born in Liberia. I need you to hear that before anything else. Because everything I am above to tell you, I did not read it in a book, I left it. I was there when the country came apart for 10 years from 1989 when the war crossed the border started eating us alive. 14 years of my life, I do not recite this date the way the historian does, cold and clean. I condemn the way you count the people who did not make it at the end. Let me tell you what 14 years of civil war actually is. So you do not picture it for a movie. It is a checkpoint made of a rope and two boys. Boys are me 12 and 13 years old with Rafford because then they are hard on something or sustain deciding whether you live or die because your fix, your trap, and the sound of your name. It is your mother teaching you which road not to walk down, and then that road is the only road left. It is the electricity gone, the water gone, the school gone, the hospital turned into place, you go to die instead of healed. It is the homecore that stopped being a feeling and become a weather. Always there, always around you. People ask me about the fear, about the ghosts, and I tell them the truth. The guns are not what I carry. What I carry is my mother. I carry the day the food ran out, not rule out, and she did what a good mother did in the war. She ran out to find some food into the open street and on the firing, so her children could eat one more days. She found food on the way home and men found her. I will say it plainly the way it deserves to be said, and not one word more. They raped her. The same kinds of men the radio was calling Laboratory. She came home, she fell us, and she was never all the way home again. They do something for her that no ceasefire ever gave back. That is the memory that owning, not the sound of a gunt, the sadness in my mother after that. And there are more mothers like that. So many more I cannot fit them in one telling. Because that is what a war ready is. It is not a hellarm. It is what they do to the people that you love. While you stand there, too small, too powerless to stop it. I watched warlord who were collaborators, strip this country to the bone. I watched them sell our damners and our timber to buy the bullet they fired at us. I watched the wild war look at Liberia, shake its head and change the channel. The same wild war who think of pain as you were here tonight, run this country long before the first shot was ever fired. So no, I am not a neutral voice in Liberia. Neutral is a luxurious for people who rush from the far away. I carry this in my body, and that is exactly why you should listen. Because what I am giving you is not a summary, it is a testimony.

Why This Story Is A Testimony

SPEAKER_00 5:56

This is Africa decoded. I am your host, Paul Thomas. They show them take the history you were handed, turn it over and read the fine print on the back. No flinching, no polishing, no softening it for comfort. We follow the money, we follow the power, and we see the path but loud that the test was buried in the footnote. And tonight I am not decoding some far-off place. I am decoding home Liberio, the first republic, the country that was never colonized and was controlled anyway. The country that helped free a whole continent while it kept its own people in chain at home. The country whose presidents again and again were chosen less by the people who bleed for it than by power sitting across an ocean. The country I was born in, the country that raised me and then nearly killed me. I know how this story ends because I lived through the ending. And now let me take you back to how it began because the war as survival did not start in 1989, 1882. It started in 1822. Sit with me. This war is personal. Let's start with the world.

The ACS And Liberia’s Founding Deal

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Everybody knows liberative. Liberia from the Latin was liberal means free. The name is a promise, so let us ask the only questions that matter about a promise free from who? Go back to the 1820s. In the United States, it is the law across the south and even the north. A free black person lives a half-life, no full citizenship, no security, no future into that reality, step and organizations called the American Colonization Society. Write that name down. The American Colonization Society, the ACS. Now, here is the taste they did not teach you cleaning. The ACL was not one movement, it was two motive sharing one board. Genuine abolitionists. Some member was genuine abolitionists and free leaders who believed black people could never be treated as equal in America. In that, their only dignity available was in nations of their own African sort. That was real. That conviction was sincere. But sitting right next to them were slaveholders, softened, planted, and their motive was the opposite. They looked at the growing populations of free black Americans, and they saw it said a living argument against slavery, an example that could inspire the enslaved to rebuild. The solution was not free, the solution was removal, ship the free black population out of the country, so slavery could sit undistributed. So the funding of Liberia carried the double gene from breath, laborations and explosions, a homebraying and a dumping ground, both at once. In 1832, the first settlers landed, first settlers landed at Cape Mosserado on the coast of what could become Moravia. Name with Ot Aronic after James Moron, the setting American president whose government helped fund the project. Think about that. The settlers came in wave, free-born black Americans, formerly enslaved people, some free on the condition that they live. The recaptive African pull-off illegal slave ship by Novart Patrol and deposited on Liberia's show, sometimes called the Congo, different origins, thrown onto the same beach. And in 1847, July the 26th, the day this Republic still marked, La Bible declared independent, the first republic in Africa, a written constitution moderate almost land for land on their American wants. A president Joseph Jingura, a cynic, a Supreme Court, on people, a full modern state, 40 years before the European power even sit down in Berlin to craft up the rest of the continent. Here is a detail that tells you everything about the war Liberia was born into. Why that wait? Because Washington could not stumble receiving a black ambassador in the capital while slavery was still legal. It took a civil war in April Lincoln for the United States to admit that the country it has built existed. So that is the funding. Hold on to that fact. Because the whole rest of this episode grew out of them.

Settler Rule And Stolen Franchise

SPEAKER_00 11:50

Facts 1. Namibia was never formally colonized by European empires. It is one of the two African states, Ethiopia is the other, that kept its flare flying through the entire colonial era. Facts 2. The people who founded it and run it were not indigenous to it. There were settlers from across the sea, carrying another nation language, another nation's religion, another nation's constitution, and this is the womb, another nation's habit of hierarchies. That second fact is where the martial last people come in. So let go there. And for over a hundred years, the 95% have almost no voice in the state that governed. Let me define a war so we can proceed. Because precision is respect. Franchise. From most of Liberia history, the additional majority did not have full franchise. They could not vote in any meaningful ways. Seriously, it's self-full legal parenthood in that republic was bound to favor the settlers class. The people of Ghanaian were treated as subject to be a minister, not citizens to be represented. The term is capitulated. The term is competent from the Portuguese for bias, a competitive into the system of the oxadot and sell out the people beneath it. The American Liberians, the elite, functions in many ways as exactly that a settlers aristocratic that ran the coast, control the government, and look down on the interiors as backward, has its resources, has labor. And it was labor. This is the part that should make you sit up. In 1929 and 1930, the League of Nations, the war body that came before the United Nations, sent an in it from was informed that Liberian officials, the government of the Black Republic funded on the memory of slavery, was participating in forced labor and was bringing around up in the interiors and shipped to Spanish-owned coconut plantations on the islands or friendle port on the conditions that conventions the crowd has barely distinguishable from slavery itself. Read that again. A country funded by people escaping slavery was caught running a labor system that looked like slavery against its own indigenous populations. The skindom was so large that in 1930 the presidents of Liberia, Charles D B. King and his vice president resigned. The nations found their own liberty have to be investigated by Osadon for practicing bondage. That is, the contradictions are the center of everything, and I will not let you look away from it. It is one of the longest running single parties, monopolies in history of the modern world. If you were not connected to it by blood, by marriage, by church, mercenary lodge, you did not enter the role where the country was decided. And that luck held until it broke, vowel in it. In April 1980, a group of soldiers formed the indigenous rank led by a master sergeant named Samuel Du of the Crown people, stood the executive martials. They killed President William Tuckman in his beard. They later on a beach in Morovia in front of Cameros. They tied 13 or 13 of the old regime top officials to a port and executed them by fiery squad. That was boot. That was a horror. And that was also for millions of indigenous Liberia, the first time in over a century, that won off their own hair, the top of the state. That is the terrible aromatic of long oppressions. When the release finally came, it often comes soaked in blood because peaceful door was blooded short for hundreds of years. But here is the trap and history spring it perfectly. Duel did not dismantle the missionary of marginalizations. He inherited it and turned it into fear, his own group. He feed the army and the government with fellow crown and their allies, old settlers versus the additional divided, simply mutated into a new group of ethical fairitism and ethical fear. And that fear, crown against Gil and Mandel, group against groups, is the drag tender that the Civil War of 1989 to 2003 could set alarm, scaling something on the order of the quarter of million people and slaughtering the country. So

Concessions, Debt, And Extraction Economics

SPEAKER_00 19:14

when do you hear the marginalized people of Liberia through not picture a phone note? That is the next dual following. It is the resources, the resources in the art of extractions. Labor is not a pro lane. Let me say that has plainly has a king because the whole trip of this story depends on you believe in the wood, damn, timber, and coastline that became one of the most valuable pieces of people in global shipping. Liberia is rich. Liberians, for the most part, are not hold that gap in your mind. The gap between the worth of the land and the property of the people. Because that gap is not an accident, it is a design economists have a name for. Start with one company, firestone. In 1926, the firestone tire in rubber companies, an American company sign and in concessions with the Liberian government. Let me define concessions because it is the master key to this whole continental expectations. A concession is a deal in which a government hearing a private company the right to use a huge stress of land or resources for a long time, altering the company mostly right. It is sovereignty rail. That is ridiculous. They built and harvarded what became for decades the largest rubber plantations on the face of the earth. American car style voting on American highway were growing out of Liberian sort, tended by Liberians' hand for the enrichment of Ohio shareholders. But the concessions was only half the trap. The other half was the loan, bundled with the rubber deal. Dallas loan arranged through a firestone link financial corporations. And the loan came with strained that let the lender agent sit in Liberia on treasures, supervise the country finance. Here is the terror for that conditions. Deb bondage. Debt bondage. At the level of a nation, sovereignty debt bondage. When a country loans repayment and it landed over so heavy that the country can no longer set its own economic policy. The debt stopped being a loan and become a leash. Liberia spent years with a foreign company finger inside its budget. The Republic was independent on map and mockish in the ledger. After the Second World War, geologists confirm what the health of Liberius has been hidden. In numerous deposits of high grey iron ore foreign concessions moved in. American Swedish German capitals operations with names like Lanco and the Bump Money Company. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Labura became one of the largest iron ore exporters on the planet. Money pulled in growth rate was among the highest in the entire world. Growth with all development. It's studying this exact country. Growth with all development means the normal grow up and the left do not. The gross domestic products, the total values of everything the country produces. So but the schools still empty, the cleaning still buried, the interior still death pool. Why? Because the iron left the country almost the movement it came out of the ground. That is a structured economist called an enclift. An enclift is a seeded pocket. The mine is a foreign island blotted onto Liberian salt. Foreign companies own it, foreign engineers run it. The iron goes straight from the pith onto the foreign own roadway, onto the foreign own ship, to the foreign steel mill. The unit that touches the Liberian economy is a thing layers of low wages at the bottom, and a three level of breath and royalty at the top. The wealth never circulates. An economy built on selling wall of iron, raw rubber, wall locked, and the cruel mathematics of that global market is that the price of raw materials tend to fall over time relative to the price of finished goods you have to buy back. You sell iron cheap and buy steel. You sell rubber cheap and buy tire. Trade economists call that the decline in the time of tree. It means a country like Liberia has run faster every year just to sit still. It is the trackmill wearing the mask of the market. Third, the peace almost nobody mentions the flare of convenience. Here is the game. A Greek magnet, an American oil company can register their vessel under the Liberian flare. In return, they get lower taxes, light regulations, a few questions about wages or safety. That is a flare of convenience. A national flare rented to foreign ships so they can escape their own country routes. Liberia Red Street grow into one of the largest merchant fleets in the war. Towers of ships that never touched Liberia, cruised by people who never met the Liberians belonging to a country most of them could not find on the map. It brought it feast. It also made the sovereignty of Liberia into a product of shelf, so to whoever could pay. And finally, the resources that turned into rivers of blood, diamonds and timber. When the civil war came, this became the field. Warlords seized mines and forests, so damn on the black market and brought guns with the proceeds. The war learned from the phrase black dam and liberal, especially Monachastillo, whole traffic in Damas of neighboring Several Moon War was at the dark center of it. The same world that could have built a country was melted down into the means of destroying it. So here is the resource story. Top rich land, extractive concessions, debt as a leash, growth that never became developments, an economy that was a corridors for other liberal world.

Liberia’s Pan-African Power Abroad

SPEAKER_00 28:05

This is not Liberious failure development of someone else, the West at Liberal expense. Now I could leave you here angry and clear eyes, but that could be a lie by omissions because Libera was not only acting upon Labiro acted and on the biggest stage of the 20th century, the elaborations of an entire continent. Let me tell you the part that will surprise you. The freedom Labiro gave to others is the paradox that make this country impossible to fire on one heading. That the same Liberia that cast its own indigenous majority was on the war stitch of the lardiest African wars for the freedoms of others. Both things are truth. For most of the first half of the 20th century, when you look at the map of Africa, it was a quart of European empires, British year, French year, Belgian year, Portuguese year, Italians, only two patches on the whole vast map, govern themselves, Ethiopia and Liberia. Do you understand what that means to a colonized African? Or to a black man in Mississippi or in Kingston or in London? It means proof, proof that a black nation could exist, could hold a seat, could fly a flood in an era when the entire missionaries of empire was built to insist that Africans could not govern themselves. Liberious merry survivors was an argument, a living rebirth of that is a class of contributions that does not show up in any ledger and it mattered innumerable. The movement that carry these ideas have a name. Let me define it because it is the spin of this whole show. Pan-Africanism is the belief that African people on the continent and across the diaspora share one destiny and should unite to win their freedoms and dignity together. And Liberia sit close to the beating heart of it. Marcus Gavi, the great Jamaican organizer, whole back to Africa movement, still millions of black people in the 1920s to plant his colony, his black star land destinations in Liberia that visions echo forward when Ghana won its independence and choose a black star for its flare. That star traced back to Gavi to the dreams of an African homeland. And Liberia was that dream earliest living address. Now watch Liberia move from Simbo to Athos. The United Nation was funded in 1945. Liberia was there. A founding member, one of the only small handful of independent African states in the room. One of the earliest UN's broker. The Morovia group fast forward to 1961. Africa decolonizing fast and nearly free states are arguing about how to unite. Two camps forms, one the Casabanga group, Ghana Kluman, Guinea, Mali, and Egypt went abroad. Immediately political union, a United States of Africa now. The other camp gathered in Morovia, Liberia capital, and it included Liberia, Nigeria, and many others who wanted unity built more gradually. Through cooperations and shared institutions, the second camp was literally called after Liberia capital, the Morovia groups. And when the two camps finally reconciled, their fusions produced a single most important continental bodies of the century, the organization of African Unity. In 1963, in Adi Ababa, the OAU was born, the ancestor of today's African Union, and Liberia was a founding member, one of the states that convinced it. President William Tuchman of Liberia was one of the earliest statements in the room. The OAU coordination was bright and blurred, finished the job, raid the continent off the last colonies and destroyed apartas. It ran a laborations committee that funded support to freedom threatened across Southern Africa and honor President William Tober. In the 1970s, Labiro joined that committee and pushed a more radical, more pan-African land than it ever has before. The regional bloc that still bound 15 West African nations together. Liberia helped build the host that West Africa still live in today. And then the bodiest move of all, Liberia stood apart to quote. In 1960, Liberia and Ethiopia, the two never colonized states, the two earliest survivors, fired a case at the International Court of Justice in the Hague against South Africa. The charge that South Africa was legally holding the territory of Southwest Africa, the land we now call Namibia, imposing apart on its people in violation of international mandate. Two African nations dragging the apartheid regime before the highest court on earth. Now, I have to give you the honest ending, because this show does not sell your fairy tales. Kills dragged on for six years, and in 1966, the court split evenly 7 to 7, decided by the casting vote of its president. Dutch, it ruled that Liberia and Ethiopia has no legal standing to bring that claim on a technicality. The court refused to rule on the party itself. The God punch avoided that to the war the international legal system could twist itself in lack to evolve conforting white minority rules. But watch what that defeat actually did. The outrage was so total, so global that it led a fire on the United Nations. Within months, the United General Assembly vote to terminate South Africa mandate over the territory upright. The case that loss in the courtroom won in conscience of the war and it put Numibia on the wrong road that ended in independence in 1990. Liberal fingerprint was on that freedom. A small compromised republic on that far west coast helped pride apartheid grips of a nation's on the far southern tip. So here is Labiro role in Africa Independent. And I want you to feel the full weight of that contradictions abroad. Liberal was the founder of Pan-Africa Unitive. It was at the unified colonies, a co-artitect of the OEU in ECOWAS and a plantil against Apart itself. At home, the same government denied the vote to its own indigenous majority, and how once being caught, running force labored against them, a champion of freedom on the wall stitch, and a jail of freedom in its own interiors, both

Who Chose Liberia’s Leaders

SPEAKER_00 37:37

truth. That is not hypocrisy. I am alleged to be clever. It is the archership of the things, and you cannot understand Liberia until you can hold both halves without dropping either ones. Which brought us to a difficult question of all. If Labor was independent, never colonized a sovereign voice in the war, then who already was choosing a ruler? Because the record is not current to the war. Let's decode it. Who pick the presidents? I want to be careful here. I want you to be careful with me because this is where truth and conspiracy live next door to each other, and it is scary and it is easy to knock on the wrong door. So let me draw the line clearly. I'm not going to tell you a secret cover, him pick and free Liberia's Lilo by candlelight. I'm going to show you something more disturbing because it is documented, a pattern stretching from the funding to the present, in which extended power above all American power has repeatedly shaped who rules Liberia through five levels Creations, money, recognitions, aid and pressures. We already cover it, but frame it right. Liberia state itself was created by the American organizations, populated by American migrants, governed by an American star constitutions. The ruler class that held power for a century was in that origin and its loyalty and extensions of American design before you ever get to any single elections. The entire bowl was set up abroad. Levels 2. Money. Remember Firestorm 1926 loan with a foreign agent installed itself. The Liberian Treasury, a government whose butcher is supervised by a foreign corporation, is a government who rums to marvel is defined by that corporation. You do not need to rake an election if you already control the finance of whoever wins it. That is the quiet level. The hilarious debate in a legislature means little if the money answered to someone else. Level 3 Recognitions and the Cold War Embrace. Fast forward to the Cold War, roughly 1947 to 1991, the global state of between America and the Soviet Union, Africa became a chess pool, and Liberia became one of the American most reliable pieces. And honored President Tuckman and Topo, Liberian through a donors open to Western capitals and western strategies, and in return, it sought filled up with American installations, a voice of America radio stations bending US broadcasting across the continent, and Omega navigation stations, a major CIA regional communication hub, one of the largest US embassy on the continent. Raoul International Airport built by the American in the Second World War. Liberia Wars for Washington, a friendly aircraft carrier that happened to be a country, and a clan that needs to get its friendly rulers protected. Levels 4 8 and the certified last. Now we reach the Ockless Chapter and the one the receipt on the table. 1980 Samuel Du sees power in that British execution call. At first, Washington is nervous, then it does the math, though he is anti-communist, and he will let the American installations stay and grow. So the Reagan administration adapted through the 1980s, turning Liberio became one of the largest per capita recipients of USAID in all of South Sahara Africa, on the order of half a billion dollar full to dual regime across the decade. That money did not ban Democrats, it bought a base. And in 1985, the mass slip completed, though heard an elections, it was banned essentially every independence account wreak. The vote content was seized and manipulated to handle a victory, and the United States which knew certified it anyway. A senior American official stood up and blessed the flood, tracing it as a step forward to democracy. Read that slowly. And because the thief was it ally, it called the thief a tramion. That is level 4 in the PS form, eight and diplomatic certifications news to land that and it legitimately ruled us into and accepted one. And the shadow in the shallow level, Charistelo. Here is where it gets almost too dark for daylight. But it is on the record. Full Charles began the war law and then the president who to mental Liberia and Several. He had been arrested in the United States in Massachusetts and held pending expeditions to Liberia or Corona. Charges in 1985, he escaped walk-up of the American jail on circumstances he never fully understand or explained. For years that was a mystery was put above. Then in 2004, the United States government itself confirmed in response to the freedom of information requests that charged off have worked with the American Intelligence Agency, the CIM. The men who launched the war that killed a quarter of a million Liberians have at some point been an asset of the United States intelligence. I'm not going to embedded that. Move to the 2000s. The West did not just influence who hosts. This time it copied who have to fall. In 2005, after the war, a little whole lemon elections. A half of educated, a veteran of war banks, the United Nations and City Banks, forests in language of Washington's and the international financial institutions. She won and became Africa's first elected female head of state and later a noble laureate. Genuine achievement. But let us be clear about the dynamic. Sally was unmistakable. Trusted until the next time. Stay awake, stay on boss, and keep decoding. And this is the African decoder broadcast.

The Pattern That Outlives The War

SPEAKER_00 46:38

God bless Africa.