Rethinking the Liberian Predicament in Anti-Black Terms: On Repatriation, Modernity, and the Ethno-Racial Choreographies of Civil War

Abstract

Liberia’s protracted civil war was sustained for a period of 14-years (1989-2003), killing approximately 250 000 Liberians and displacing half of the population. Liberia’s war, like other contemporary African conflicts, has been persistently represented as an example of wanton violence, political tribalism, chaos, or an amalgamation of such elements. Founded in 1822, the Colony of Liberia was annexed by the American Colonization Society to expatriate and colonize ‘free’ negros and their descendants on the coast of West Africa. ‘Re-colonization’, as it was called by the ruling U.S. Southern class, was rendered a compromise between the absolute abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and perpetual black servitude. Yet, repatriation was superficially crafted by abolitionists and their pro-slavery contemporaries, alike, as a fugitive project, an opportunity for ‘free’ blacks to experiment with emancipation and take refuge from the socio-political and economic conditions which amounted to what was effectively American slavery by another name. Formerly enslaved and free-born Africans imagined Liberia as a space unmarked by anti-black racial logics that possessed the North American continent. Indeed, the West African settlement was rhetorically propagated as a pre-racial site - of sorts - in which stolen peoples could escape the violence of American racialism. Such rhetoric has made articulable contemporary theorizations of the Liberian civil war as a paradigmatic example of the negro’s irresponsible experimentations with freedom. This dissertation offers a re-contemplation of Liberian historiographical accounts, one that attends to the racialized global orders against which this national crisis has developed and limns the im/possibility of freedom in the afterlife of slavery, where anti-black terror is not only temporally unbounded but transgeographical.