© I. Fornasiero
A special history runs through Liberia, not found in any other African country. A visit to the decadent Monrovia today means immersing oneself in the authentically African chaotic atmosphere of a “differently” ordered and fascinating city, but it also means retracing the sad memory of an oppression that in turn generated oppression.
It was in 1822 that the first expedition of freed African-American slaves, under concession from the American Colonization Society, landed on Providence Island, the river heart of what is now Monrovia, effectively starting the first colonisation by former slaves of African origin on their own brothers, the indigenous peoples who had lived for centuries on these green lands and who were in turn enslaved.
A mosaic of ancestral peoples Malinké, Kru, Bassa, Kpelle, Krahn, who in past centuries escaped the incursions of the Mali Empire in the north and the Portuguese and European trade routes in the south, suddenly finding themselves oppressed by the imposition of a Liberian-American government.
A symbol of this all-African colonial history is the Masonic Temple in Monrovia, a lodge that is still active today, the gateway to African-American Freemasonry on the continent.
The Waterside Market is the beating heart of the city, a commercial district with a typical informal economy. It is a chaotic jumble of street vendors, improvised stalls and tin shops, a concentration of life and an all-African atmosphere. Goods and fabrics of all kinds, the bustle of motorbike taxis and public transport, a hive of daily activity in which the past seems like a sad memory.
Monrovia stands on a picturesque and strategic port peninsula, surrounded by water, the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the mouth of the Mesurado River to the east, a name given to it by the first Portuguese explorers who ventured onto these lands in search of peppercorns between the 15th and 16th centuries.
Today, the main source of Liberia’s economy is the export of rubber, of which the Firestone plantation, established in 1926, not far from the capital, appears to be the largest in the world.
Some of Monrovia’s elegant buildings still show signs of history and the wounds of the civil war that plagued the country throughout the 1990s. The National Museum, the Monument to Joseph Roberts, the Ducor Palace Hotel, the Broken Bridge, the administrative buildings on Capitol Hill, the Methodist Church, are the landmarks of a bustling and disorderly capital, with a decadent charm, but with a great desire to start again. A visit to the capital is a must if you want to enter Liberia’s complex historical reality and its surprising wilderness.
