Timeline of Liberian History

Here are a few takeaways and some thought-provocative ideas before we get to the Timeline.

An accurate and comprehensive Liberian history is supposed to be divided into the following segments or periods: The pre-Transatlantic Slave Trade period. The Transatlantic Slave Trade Period. The settlement of the free slave immigrants or the Commonwealth period.  The end of the First Republic or what happened after independence. The beginning and end of the 2nd Republic. And the end of the civil war and ushering in of the country’s first female president.

Liberia’s so-called modern history started with the arrival of about 20,000 freed slave immigrants on Dozoa, meaning in Gola dialect, land in the center of water that the new settlers and new generation of Liberians called Perseverance Island and Providence Island, respectively. The American Colonization Society headed, supported, guided, maintained, coordinated, and governed the settlement of these freedmen and recaptured enslaved people until Liberia declared itself a sovereign nation in 1847. The ACS’s intermittent financial support influenced and guided Liberia long after independence. Though the settlers only constituted about 5 percent of the population of Liberia, the free stave immigrants did not integrate with the 95 percent of natives. They never refrained from the culture and way of life of their enslavers.

Liberian historians and many scholars have narrated every detailed account of free slave people, including immigrants and refugees who tangentially or accidentally arrived in Liberia under the auspices of the American Colonization Society and the Republic of Liberia. Unfortunately, we do not understand the aboriginal tribes, their customs, lifeways, communities, kingdoms, kingships, and points of view of the universe. Mainly, what Liberian history books teach us about king Boatswain, King Old Peter, King Long Peter, King Pepel, Kings Bromley, the Dey kings, the Gola Kings, King Willy, King Bristol, King Jimmy, King Allen, King Bob, King George, King Tom among a host of others are sparse, lukewarm, superficial, and derogatory.

The aboriginal tribes had built sophisticated social institutions governed by norms and were self-sufficient in food production. They may not have had machine guns or cannons. Still, the natives constructed complex military and fortification walls and were engaged in the internal and external trade-exchanging goods and providing services with other kingdoms before the ACS arrived.

Three groups: the Transatlantic Slave Traders, the American Colonization Society, and the settlers, variably apply a common strategy or platform to direct the course of Liberian history. The ultimate design of the three groups was to marginalize or reduce dark-colored people, especially the enslaved people or native people, to inhuman status. The tactics employed included dehumanizing them, altering their personality through indentured servitude, and making the white-colored people superior and the dark-colored subservient. They also used religion to achieve their strategic goals.

After four centuries of slavery, subjugating generations of enslaved people formerly enslaved people under the most dehumanizing conditions, the personality, mentality, and behaviors of the formerly enslaved people that arrived in Liberia were consciously or unconsciously shaped or mentally and culturally subjugated. However, instead of breaking loose of the shackles of slavery and the mentality of the superiority of one race over another, from 1847 to 1971, most Liberian government officials used aspects of the slave-master psyche or agency to control and mistreat the native tribes, reduce them to second-class citizens, including (in most cases) dark-colored immigrants that arrived in Liberia. The native people today suffer from the country’s highest poverty rate and lowest life expectancy.

We hope the future generation of Liberians continuously deep dive into the past, look for different sources and answers, write differently but comprehensively, and ask new questions.

We outlined the answers to some of these concerns and more in the Timeline of Liberian History. We sorted events and organized them based on the century they occurred.  

The Transatlantic Slave Trade  

Transatlantic Trade was a booming international business connecting Africa, Europe, and America. In most cases, ships set sail from Western Europe loaded with goods for Africa in exchange for the captured, including men, women, and children, to work on sugarcane and cotton plantations. Brazil started its first sugarcane farm in the 16th Century, around 1515.

Today, Brazil is the world’s largest sugarcane producer. Sugarcane produces sugar, blackstrap molasses, and ethanol, whereas cotton produces fiber as a raw textile material. It’s a significant cash agricultural crop — over 150 countries export or import cotton. The sale of cotton towels alone exceeds $120 billion per annum.   Today, most companies or countries use cotton pickers to pick cotton gins.