Monrovia – There’s a line about Liberia that gets repeated so often it has hardened into fact: alone among African nations, it was never colonized. Fred van der Kraaij doesn’t buy it, and he’s spent nearly 240 pages — a third of them notes, bibliography, and index — building the case against it. Liberia was colonized, he writes plainly in his introduction, just not by a European flag. It was colonized by the United States, working through a private society whose board was thick with slaveholders, using free Black Americans and freed slaves as the settlers on the ground. He lays out the paper trail in enough detail that the old myth doesn’t have much room left to stand in.
By Rodney D. Sieh, rodney.sieh@frontpageafricaonline.com
Fifty Years in the Making
Van der Kraaij didn’t come to this cold. He landed in Monrovia in 1975 to teach economics at the University of Liberia, after meeting a Liberian dean by chance in the Netherlands, and stayed five years. He taught men who went on to become government ministers; one of his students later became a notorious warlord. He wrote a two-volume doctoral thesis on the country’s economic history and left only when the 1980 coup ended his family’s time there. Everything since has apparently gone into this book — decades spent in nineteenth-century American newspaper archives, ACS annual reports, and Liberian sources that, by his own account, most historians never bothered to open. It doesn’t read like a tidy survey. It reads more like a case being built, brick by brick, with the author occasionally stopping to tell you when a long-accepted story simply doesn’t hold up.
A Name Two Years Older Than the History Books
The book’s best piece of detective work is also its smallest, in a sense: where did the name “Liberia” actually come from? Every history of the country repeats the same story — that ACS board member Robert Goodloe Harper proposed the name at the Society’s February 1824 annual meeting, with Monrovia named for President Monroe on the same day. Van der Kraaij went looking in old newspapers and found five of them, from Maryland to Maine, already calling the colony “Liberia” in December 1822 — more than a year before Harper supposedly coined it. He even finds the ACS’s own 1823 annual report using the name as if it were already settled, a document Harper almost certainly read before he stood up and “proposed” it. Then, rather than simply crowning himself the man who solved the mystery, he goes looking for who actually did coin it, checks the two obvious candidates, and admits neither one quite fits. It’s a small thing to leave unresolved, but it’s the kind of honesty that makes the rest of the book easier to trust.
Freedom, With an Asterisk
The larger argument isn’t really a discovery so much as an accumulation. Van der Kraaij shows, case by case, that the American Colonization Society — which sent something like 17,500 free Black Americans and manumitted slaves to Liberia between 1820 and the 1860s — was run disproportionately by slaveholders, and that a great many of its “colonists” never really had a choice. He’s careful here rather than righteous about it. He quotes ACS founder Henry Clay telling the Society outright, in 1839, that its purpose was never abolition but the “separation of the two races.” He pulls up wills — a Virginia slaveholder freeing 46 people on condition they leave for Liberia within a year, a Mississippi cotton planter whose 200 slaves only made it to Africa after his heirs spent years in court trying to keep them, a Louisiana owner in 1842 freeing “80-85 slaves for the purpose of sending them to Africa.” Read enough of these back to back and the word “colonist” starts to feel like a euphemism. Most of these people weren’t choosing freedom so much as choosing which kind of unfreedom to leave behind.
A Republic Built on Exclusion
The settlers’ own founding document gets the same unsentimental treatment. The 1847 Constitution reserved citizenship and land ownership for “persons of color” — genuinely radical, from an American vantage point in 1847 — while shutting out the indigenous population, who actually made up most of the people living in the territory the new republic claimed. Van der Kraaij calls this a “huge defect,” not a footnote, and says it’s a wound the country never fully closed. To his credit, he’s upfront about what his own book won’t do. He says outright in the introduction that he’s deliberately kept the indigenous population “barely mentioned,” on the grounds that their history deserves its own book by someone better placed to tell it, and that he’s leaving out corruption and religion for the same reason. Fair enough — it’s a disclosed choice, not a hidden one. But it does mean this is a history of the colonizers, told mostly in their own words, and readers hoping for the fuller picture will need another book to go alongside it.
The Color Line Within the Colony
Where the book really comes alive is in showing that the settlers were never the single, unified group the word “Americo-Liberian” makes them sound like. There was a running split between light-skinned, often wealthier “merchant princes” who ran politics for decades and darker-skinned colonists — many of them former field slaves — who made up most of the population. That crack runs right through the book’s best chapter, on the 1871 overthrow of President Edward James Roye, Liberia’s first coup, sparked by a disputed British loan and a scheme to extend his own term. Van der Kraaij lines up five different, contradictory accounts of how Roye actually died — drowned fleeing with the loan money strapped to him, beaten to death by a mob, shot by a fellow colonist — and instead of picking a winner, just lets the contradictions sit there. It says something about how thin the record-keeping was, even for the men running the country.
The Verdict
This isn’t a comfortable book, and it isn’t really a casual one either — the footnotes and source disputes stay close to the surface the whole way through, and van der Kraaij clearly expects his readers to want the argument as much as the story. But what he pulls off is rare: turning a national origin myth inside out using nothing but the colonizers’ own newspapers, without ever needing to raise his voice to make the point land. Liberia’s motto asks whether the love of liberty brought its founders here. Van der Kraaij’s answer, built footnote by footnote, is that liberty was only ever half the story — and the other half has been sitting in American newsprint for two hundred years, waiting for someone to go and read it.
1)To order the book:
The following two links bring you to the webshop of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands, where visitors can order a book:
https://ascleiden.nl/news/liberia-19th-century-american-colony-african-republic
And (a direct link):
https://ascleiden.securearea.eu/Liberia-in-the-19th-Century-:-From-American-Colony-to-African-Republic
2) Availability in open access:
The ICT department of Leiden University is working on making the ‘Open Access’ mode work. At the moment downloading is still blocked.
Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after tomorrow, it will be possible to read and/or download the publication free.
The following link will lead to the online version of my book, in open access (free).
https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/4307890
