B E H O L D THE PROMISED LAND: A HISTORY OF A F R O - A M E R I C A N SETTLER

SOCIETY IN N I N E T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y LIBERIA

By Tom W. Shick

(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, 280 pages plus xv, $16.00)

After an April morning witnessing presidential campaigning gymnastics, the spokesman for one hopeful reminded the audience that it was the Republican party that freed Blacks from slavery. At a later nuts-and-bolts afternoon work- shop on financial management strategies for the survival of black colleges, the weary conventioneers from the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education - - the venerable black college lobby - - were informed that "the Honorable William R. Tolbert, President of Liberia, the First African Republic," had been assassinated.

The shocked response had very real roots. Black colleges in America have played a major role in educating the descendants of the Afro-American settlers in the West African republic. The ruling elite in Liberia had close personal and professional ties with many of the black educational leaders assembled at their annual meeting.

Perhaps the dismay was not very deelr--at most, an obligatory public display of emotion for the loss of an old friend. Privately, one educator suggested that what Liberia had needed all along was a good revolution to throw off the shackles of American imperialism that had become synonymous with Americo-Liberian rule. He also pointed up the irony of the Republican spokesman's comments on the day that was to become the first day of the new Liberian "revolution." Abolition of slavery in America destroyed the raison d'etre of the Liberian Republic; it guaranteed that in spite of what Harvey Firestone might do more than half a century later, Liberia would remain cloistered in the nineteenth century.

Some books bear an important message, are timely, or are provocative. Al- most by a twist of fate, Tom Shick's often sketchy historical account of the rise, and in some respects the fall, of the Afro-American settler society in Liberia

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manages to be all three. Professor Shick, a historian at the University of Wiscon- sin, had no way of knowing, I suppose, that virtually before the printer's ink was dry the racial and cultural dynasty that he so vividly describes would topple. Yet he weaves out of U.S. and African history a fabric within which we inescapably see the folly of imperialism, whether European, American, or Afro-American.

The message that Shick bears is of more than passing interest to the study of black economic development. Just as the settler societies brought their own kind of technology, values, and social hierarchies to Australia, South Africa, and Argentina, so too did the Afro-Americans to Liberia. Isolationism and a desire for capitalistic growth are shared experiences among these dissimilar nations. The isolation may have been externally imposed, but the economic system was freely chosen. And as each had massive stocks of natural resources, there were similar designs to exploit them profitably. But how is it that Argentina, Australia, and South Africa have emerged shining with their gold, diamonds, wool, and cattle to justify their capitalist dreams, while Liberia, with a head start over powers like Nigeria and Kenya, still lags behind? Shick argues that most of the nineteenth-century history of Liberia is the story of former American slaves trying the best way they could---often with only the archaic models of the plantation South as their guide--to ward off simultaneously the encroachment of would-be European colonization and carve out of the camwood forests a new home in the "promised land" for themselves. This sympathetic portrayal, I think, derives from an ambition to demonstrate that early Liberians generally sought to develop an all-black capitalist mecca, a sort of black Israel, to which the uprooted sons of Africa could return. The intricate details of why it never happened provide fascinating food for the thought Shick does not quite entertain: even if the Afro-American settlers had not raped and plundered the virgin African soil, recklessly lived an urban, aristocratic lifestyle, developed a peonage system that fostered corruption in government and business affairs for generations to come, the goal of a black promised land in West Africa would still be elusive. Americans and Europeans bickered and dickered among themselves about pre- cisely where the promised land would be. And then there was little consensus about whether the U.S. government would foot the bill for the mass exodus of the most important source of low-wage labor in America.

At the risk of being too soft on the excesses of the autocratic rule of the nineteenth-century Afro-Americans, Professor Shick provides a welcome con- trast to the "Emperor Jones" view of black leaders as either totally inept, outright greedy, or egomaniacal. There is the vision of the upriver settlement leaders who built strong, mutually beneficial economic ties with the indigenous tribes and traders. There is the portrayal of twice President Joseph J. Roberts, who bequeathed part of his enormous wealth for the establishment of an edu- cational endowment.

A recurring theme in BehoM the Promised Land is the image of Liberian settlers paving the way, literally building the roads and the trenches, for future

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generations of Africa's kidnapped children to return home. This theme is not a convenient vehicle by which to chronicle Liberia's history. Indeed, Shick's extensive bibliography points the curious, or confused, reader to many volumes in which that history is related, dryly, one date at a time. But it is a vivid and informative instrument by which to add to our understanding of black diaspora. When slavery was official in the United States, Liberia could not be recognized as a sovereign state; although many American leaders like Thomas Jefferson wished to send freed slaves to some far-off place, government financing of such ventures proved unreliable. True, Africans on captured slave ships were trans- ported to Liberia by the U.S. Navy. But this population influx represented a meager fraction of the new immigrants. When slavery was no longer official in the U.S., the expected flood of immigrants to Liberia did not materialize, and not only because, as Abraham Lincoln claimed, "they did not seem so willing to migrate there." The Liberian economy of the mid-nineteenth century needed a stimulus of the sort that a large influx of immigrants could have provided. It was a labor-scarce, capital-poor nation, rich in land and natural resources, without extensive international markets. Little hope existed that Liberia, a weak political power, could gain its wealth through international trade. The capitalistic model successfully applied in South Africa, Australia, and Argentina simply could not work in the Liberian "co lony ," though this may be less true today than it was in 1860.

There are a number of parallels and analogies that Professor Shick does not draw, but the outlines are there to see in Behold the Promised Land. Black colleges in America, for example, are very much the product of the kinds of ambiguities and conflicts that resulted in Liberia. The arguments for and against gilded black ghettos seem strangely similar to those for and against the federal economic support of Liberia in the 1800s. Tom Shick cannot be faulted for not drawing all of the conclusions from the clues he provides. But those clues should stimulate a whole new line of inquiry among political economists who inspect these fascinating historical patterns.

Samuel Myers, Jr. Federal Trade Commission