Mary H. Moran - Liberia: The Violence of Democracy

Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Liberia

The Violence of Democracy

Mary H. Moran

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright 2006 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

First paperback edition 2008

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moran, Mar y H., 1957

Liberia : the violence of democracy / Mar y H. Moran.

p. cm. (The ethnography of political violence)

ISBN-978-0-8122-2028-5 (pbk : alk. paper)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Political violenceLiberia. 2. DemocracyLiberia. 3. LiberiaHistoryCivil War, 1989. 4. LiberiaPolitics and government1980. I Title. II. Series

DT636.5 .M69 2006

966.62033dc22 2005042347

In memory of my parents, John F. and

Helen I. Robinson Moran

and

For my Glebo foster family, the late William Sodo Newton, Viola Klade Wesley Newton, and all the Newton family, in the hope of more peaceful days to come for all Liberians.

Introduction:
Liberia, Violence, and Democracy

Violence and democracy are words that do not sit easily together in the same sentence. Indeed, our tendency as Westerners is to see them as opposite ends of an evolutionary scale; the successor to widespread violence, we often imagine, is democracy, a system in which rulers are freely chosen by their people and in which everyone is allowed to voice their opinions and concerns. If such conditions exist, what need is there to resort to violence?

In the 1990s and into the current century, war and genocide in the Balkans, the Middle East, and numerous African countries have been attributed to the absence of democratic institutions. Processes of democratization, including capacity-building workshops and efforts to promote civil society, are prescribed as post-conflict solutions to support the free and fair elections which are the ultimate goal. Indeed, the ability to hold a transparent election is held to be the real test of whether or not democracy has taken root in a formerly troubled society and is seen as a bulwark against further outbreaks of war. Democratic societies, we are told, do not make war on their neighbors, but must be poised to intervene when nondemocratic regimes threaten to overstep their boundaries. But are democracy and violence really separate (or separable) ontological states, or is there violence in democracy and democracy in violence? Can both be viewed as means of communication between higher and lower levels of political organization; for example, between the local community and the state? In what instances does the discourse of democracy, grounded in the expectation of a fair discussion among equals (Guinier 1995, cited in Wonkeryor et al. 2000: 52), fail? When does the state resort to imposing its will by force, and the local population resort to resistance or aggression? Conversely, what conflicts between local and national elites can be accommodated by the ritual forms of elections and designated representatives? How do leaders on both the small and the large scale manage to allow disparate voices to be heard without compromising their own legitimacy? Can a people really be said to choose democracy over war, and vice versa?

Liberia, resting on the great bulge of West Africa, is the setting in which I investigate these questions (see Figure 1). It is in many ways a paradoxical place, often cited as the exception to most sweeping generalizations about sub-Saharan Africa. Unlike the rest of the continent, Liberia was never formally colonized by a European power; its pseudocolonial mother country is the United States. It was born out of the contradictions inherent in the founding of the United States itself; a nation predicated on individual liberty which at the same time condoned and profited by chattel slavery. Although frequently characterized in the Western media as founded by freed slaves, Liberia was initially imagined as a haven for free people of color, descendants of Africans who by luck, birth, or their own efforts were no longer legally enslaved. The country was literally the philanthropic project of a private, white, benevolent organization founded in 1816, the American Colonization Society. Its establishment in 1822 of an American outpost on the West African coast served multiple interests. Slaveowners saw repatriation as a means of removing unwelcome examples of independent, self-supporting free blacks from the view of their slaves. Some white abolitionists who felt slavery as an institution was immoral were nevertheless uncomfortable with the prospect of actually living in a multiracial society. Evangelical Christians, inspired by the Second Great Awakening, envisioned a divine plan to redeem African heathens through the example of black missionaries and Christian communities. American merchants, competing with their European counterparts, welcomed a secure landing place on the African coast and an advantage in the emerging legitimate trade in palm oil, coffee, and other tropical products (see Adeleke 1998; Beyan 1991; for older accounts, see Staudenraus 1961; Shick 1980, among others).

Although most American abolitionists, white and black, rejected the colonization movement, between twelve and thirteen thousand colonists were settled in Liberia between 1822 and 1867 (Liebenow 1987: 19). Of these, roughly 4,500 had been born free, while the others were emancipated from slavery on the condition that they emigrate to Africa. These numbers were augmented by about 6,000 recaptive Africans taken from impounded slave ships before they ever crossed the Atlantic. Along with a few hundred immigrants from Barbados arriving after the abolition of slavery there, this group over time became the national elite known as Americo-Liberians, Congoes, or simply Settlers.

The remainder of Liberias population of between two and three million have affiliation with one or more of over sixteen indigenous ethnolinguistic groups, often glossed as tribes. As is commonly the case in Africa, these groups are not bounded, internally organized, or historically continuous political units, but rough approximations of regional and sometimes religious identity. Intermarriage and internal migration have made it possible for many Liberians to invoke more than one tribal affiliation, despite the fact that all the indigenous groups subscribe to an ideology of patrilineal descent (see dAzevedo 196970: 11112). Although tribalism has been invoked as an explanation for the violence in Liberia in recent years, local histories point to more evidence of conflict within than between ethnic categories.