The Mask of Anarchy Updated Edition: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War
by Stephen Ellis
from NYU Press
"Outstanding. . . . A model of lucid writing, thorough research, and penetrating interpretation, this is one of the best books on Africa in recent years."
—Foreign Affairs
"No other available account of the civil war is as concise, accurate, or lucid."
—Christian Scholar's Review
"Cogently argued and supported by a wealth of observation"
—Times Literary Supplement
“By far and away the best on the Liberian civil war. It is difficult to praise it too highly: lucid yet avoiding over-simplification, and entirely free of cant or ideological preconceptions, it is a model of its kind.”
—The Sunday Telegraph
"Ellis has written a very honest and brave book about a ghastly human experience which has, one learns, much less to do with the primordial past than about the future."
—Ecclesiastical History
“…a well-researched and carefully told story of the war…an account of the war as the Liberians experienced it.”
—Books & Culture
Liberia has been one of Africa's most violent trouble spots. In 1990, when thousands of teenage fighters, including young men wearing women's clothing and bizarre objects of decoration, laid siege to the capital, the world took notice. Since then Liberia has been through devastating civil upheaval. What began as a civil conflict, has spread to other West African nations.
Eschewing popular stereotypes and simple explanations, Stephen Ellis traces the history of the civil war that has blighted Liberia in recent years and looks at its political, ethnic and cultural roots. He focuses on the role religion and ritual have played in shaping and intensifying this brutal war. In this edition, with a new preface by the author, Ellis provides a current picture of Liberia and details how much of the same problems still exist.
Liberia Will Rise Again: Reflections on the Liberian Civil Crisis
by Arthur F. Kulah
from Abingdon Press
The Evolution of Deadly Conflict in Liberia: From 'Paternaltarianism' to State Collapse
by Jeremy Levitt
from Carolina Academic Press
This book represents the first attempt to holistically document and analyze the causes of deadly conflict in Liberia from its founding to the present. It reconstructs and examines the root, operational, and catalytic causes of seventeen internal deadly conflicts that transpired in Liberia between 1822 and 2003, including the 1980 coup d'état against the Tolbert regime and the Liberian Civil War (1989-1997) (Great War). The book seeks to answer two primary questions: what are the historical causes of deadly conflict in Liberia, and to what extent has the evolution of settler nationalism contributed to the stimulation of conflict between settler and native Liberians?
To answer these questions, Levitt examines a continuum of circular causation among the state of affairs that led to the founding of the Liberian State, the evolution of settler authoritarianism and nationalism, and internal conflict. By analyzing these processes together, the causes of seventeen conflicts are revealed and thoroughly discussed. The book also has three major objectives: to determine the historical causes of deadly conflict in Liberia, in particular, the underlining historical phenomena responsible for birthing the Great War; to present an alternative framework to comprehend and examine the aged conflict dynamic between settler and indigenous Liberians, and within Liberian society itself; and to produce the first comprehensive study of deadly conflict in Liberia.
This book advantageously spans the fields of political science, history, international law, and peace and conflict studies; it is an excellent interdisciplinary choice.
The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa
by Bill Berkeley
from Basic Books
Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia
by Alan Huffman
from Gotham
For most Americans, Liberia is a remote place in a distant continent with no connection to their daily lives. Few of us know that in the early 19th century, it was, in fact, an American colony, and to this day, contains communities called Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Maryland founded by freed American slaves and populated by descendants of those slaves. Author Alan Huffman tells this story in his remarkable Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia Today. The book begins as the author's attempt to flush out the details of a fascinating Mississippi family story about a prominent plantation owner's (Isaac Ross) desire to repatriate his slaves in Africa, but ends up being a complex and sensitive exploration of the legacy of slavery in the American South and Liberia. As Huffman traces Ross' descendants and those of his family's repatriated slaves, an intricate story of displacement, cultural identity, immigration, oppression, and racial politics unfolds. Ironically, when America's freed slaves immigrated to Africa, they brought with them the only social paradigm they knew, that of the Southern plantation. Overcoming severe hardship, they recreated that culture, and by the time Liberia became Africa's first independent republic in 1847, the minority American settlers had become the country's ruling class. Huffman adeptly shows how this legacy contributes to the current crisis in Liberia.
Mississippi in Africa is at once historical and contemporary, personal and universal, local and global. As Huffman indicates, slavery "has existed throughout Africa's recorded history, and still has not entirely passed from the scene." Its pernicious consequences continue to affect the lives of millions caught in the devastating and endless civil war in Liberia, just as they continue to impact American life. Yet, Huffman repeatedly shows that this extraordinary story cannot be simply reduced to a polemical rendering of white oppression of blacks. It is so much more about the powerful versus the powerless. Thus, Huffman presents the subtleties that have shaped both the politics and human relations in this story with profound humanity and nuance. --Silvana Tropea
The gripping story of two hundred freed Mississippi slaves who sailed to Liberia to build a new colony—where the colonists’ repression of the native tribes would beget a tragic cycle of violence.
When a wealthy Mississippi cotton planter named Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves’ passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa. Ross’s heirs contested the will for more than a decade in the state courts and legislature—prompting a deadly revolt in which a group of slaves burned Ross’s mansion to the ground—but the will was ultimately upheld. The slaves then emigrated to their new home, where they battled the local tribes and built vast plantations with Greek Revival mansions in a region the Americo-Africans renamed “Mississippi in Africa.” The seeds of resentment sown over a century of cultural conflict between the colonists and tribal peoples would explode in the late twentieth century, begetting a civil war that rages in Liberia to this day.
In the award-winning tradition of Slaves in the Family, this enthralling work traces an epic legacy that sweeps from the slave quarters of the antebellum South to the war-ravaged streets of modern-day Monrovia. Tracking down Prospect HillÂ’s living descendants, deciphering a history ruled by rumor, and delivering the complete chronicle in riveting prose, journalist Alan Huffman has rescued a lost chapter of American history whose aftermath is far from over.
An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)
by Marie Tyler-McGraw
from The University of North Carolina Press
The 19th-century American Colonization Society (ACS) project of persuading all American free blacks to emigrate to the ACS colony of Liberia could never be accomplished. Who supported African colonization and why? No state was more involved with the project than Virginia.
Tyler-McGraw traces the parallel but seldom intersecting tracks of black and white Virginians' interests in African colonization. African colonization attracted aging revolutionaries, republican mothers and their daughters, bondpersons schooled and emancipated for Liberia, evangelical planters and merchants, urban free blacks, opportunistic politicians, Quakers, and gentlemen novelists. Tyler-McGraw follows the experiences of the emigrants from Virginia to Liberia, where some became the leadership class, consciously seeking to demonstrate black abilities, while others found greater hardship and early death.
Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction
by Michele Mitchell
from The University of North Carolina Press
Between 1877 and 1930--years rife with tensions over citizenship, suffrage, immigration, and "the Negro problem"--African American activists promoted an array of strategies for progress and power built around "racial destiny," the idea that black Americans formed a collective whose future existence would be determined by the actions of its members. In Righteous Propagation, Michele Mitchell examines the reproductive implications of racial destiny, demonstrating how it forcefully linked particular visions of gender, conduct, and sexuality to collective well-being.
Mitchell argues that while African Americans did not agree on specific ways to bolster their collective prospects, ideas about racial destiny and progress generally shifted from outward-looking remedies such as emigration to inward-focused debates about intraracial relationships, thereby politicizing the most private aspects of black life and spurring race activists to calcify gender roles, monitor intraracial sexual practices, and promote moral purity. Examining the ideas of well-known elite reformers such as Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. DuBois, as well as unknown members of the working and aspiring classes, such as James Dubose and Josie Briggs Hall, Mitchell reinterprets black protest and politics and recasts the way we think about black sexuality and progress after Reconstruction.
The Role of Religion in African Civil Wars
Culture and Customs of Liberia (Culture and Customs of Africa)
by Ayodeji Olukoju
from Greenwood Press
Liberia has a strong connection to the United States in that it was founded by former slaves in 1822. Although Liberia had existed as an independent African nation and a symbol of hope to the African peoples under the rule of various colonial powers, its recent history has been bedeviled by a prolonged upheaval following a military coup d'etat in 1980. In this context, the narrative highlights the distinctiveness of Liberians in their negotiation of traditional indigenous and modern practices, and the changes wrought by Christianity and Western influences.
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