° Benin
° Cameroon
° Congo
° Cote d'Ivoire
° Gabon
° Ghana
° Guinea
° Kenya
° Liberia
° Mauritania
° Mozambique
° Nigeria
° Senegal
° Sierra Leone
° Somalia
° Tanzania
° Zanzibar
Portuguese explorers established contacts with Liberia as early as 1461 and named the area Grain Coast because of the abundance of "grains of paradise" (Malegueta pepper seeds). In 1663 the British installed trading posts on the Grain Coast, but the Dutch destroyed these posts a year later. There were no further reports of European settlements along the Grain Coast until the arrival of freed slaves in the early 1800s. Liberia, "land of the free," was founded by free African-Americans and freed slaves from the United States in 1820.
An initial group of 86 immigrants, who came to be called Americo-Liberians, established a settlement in Christopolis (now Monrovia, named after U.S. President James Monroe) on February 6, 1820.
Thousands of freed American slaves and free African-Americans arrived during the following years, leading to the formation of more settlements and culminating in a declaration of independence of the Republic of Liberia on July 26, 1847. The drive to resettle freed slaves in Africa was promoted by the American Colonization Society (ACS), an organization of white clergymen, abolitionists, and slave owners founded in 1816 by Robert Finley, a Presbyterian minister. Between 1821 and 1867 the ACS resettled some 10,000 African-Americans and several thousand Africans from interdicted slave ships; it governed the Commonwealth of Liberia until independence in 1847.
Adams Sentinel, November 17, 1851
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA
Africa—Colonization. The region of country which includes Liberia in Africa, occupies the most Western point of the African Continent; it extends from North to South some eight hundred miles, with a width of eighteen hundred miles and an area of more than a million of square miles. A writer in the National Intelligencer thus speak of it.
This is the region which has gained political, individual importance, by being the seat of the United States colony of Liberia, and ought in our books to receive, what no region of Africa of anything like equal extent ever has received, a general definite name, but which, to save circumlocution, we here call Liberia. It is to all habitable purposes an island, bounded on two sides by the Atlantic ocean, and on the two others by oceans of sand — Longitude 1-0 deg. west and 6-1/1 deg. north traverses Liberia near Monrovia. It is drained by two rivers, each of considerable length, of course: the Senegal flowing into the Atlantic ocean, very near the extreme western cape of Africa, and the Joliba, Niger, or Black river, rising about two hundred miles from the northern part of Liberiam, flows directly inland upwards of one thousand miles to Timbuctoo, beyond which its course is uncertain, but supposed to be the same river called the Quarra, falling into the Gulf of Guinea, and if so it must have an entire course of two thousand miles.
We have regarded Liberia, as we have extended the term, as in all essential respects an island, with the exception, that it is accessible only from the Atlantic. To illustrate this observation we may state that in every direction inland the region under review is followed by a circle of desert from one to two thousand miles; and, to traverse an expanse of such desert as those of Central Africa, one thousand miles. is far more difficult than three thousand of an ocean. But to return to our general review.
From the region of Liberia to the Cape of Good Hope, the western coast of Africa, in a general distance of two thousand six hundred miles, has only made ten degrees of longitude eastward, and with not a single deep bay or the reception of a river of any noticeable magnitude or length or voluntune. In this distance the the continent is crossed by the equator over an unbroken expanse, thirty degrees of latitude wide, of desert. Southwardly from the equator, th'e geographical character of Africa is fully maintained. Scattered and very limited tracts, which are in themselves deserts, skirt the coasts, whilst all within are, and have been in all known past time, swept over by the winds of desolation. Such is the character of a section of tbe land stirface of the earth spreading over two millions two hundred thousand square miles.
Taken us a whole, Africa, is far as we can retrace its colonization by man, was among the first seats of civilization. Egypt, on the only river of the first claw it contains, was from the dawn of time to this day only a lengthened oasis, extended southward, and followed by Ethiopia, (Abyssinia) and as yet by tracts unknown southwardly. But, to close this rather long article, and taking Africa as it really is, it is a vast sand surface, but, for means of human residence, a congeries of islands over a vast sea of sand. One or more of those islands offers home to the race whose parents were the primitive inhabitants. The very mention of such return opens views of the past and future too vast to admit even a glance at the present. It is the great idea of this age.
Anglo American Times, March 11, 1892
London, United Kingdom
Position of the Negro
A negro Convention met at Montgomery (Alabama,) on February 24 to consider tho position in relation to the colored community. They describe the locality as the heart of the South, and call their inheritance the Black Belt. The resolutions are couched in moderate and earnest language, as are their opinions on their industrial, moral, educational condition. They describe themselves as liberated with only their bodies, untrained in self-dependence thrown into the vortex of commercial, civil and political life. It is a matter of thankfulness that their condition is so good, and that such a degree of harmony exists between them and the whites. They are mostly agriculturists living on rented lands mortgaging their crops for their food and the supplies of the year;—a system which checks progress, for it tempts them to buy on credit more than they would, were cash payments demanded, and encourages their white friends to advance provisions and money at ruinous rates . . . Their county schools have only a session of 3-1/2 months in each year, and the Gulf States are unprovided with school houses. The teachers are ill paid, and often unqualified for their work, so parents and scholars take little interest in the schools, and bearing these facts in mind they suggest the following remedies: . . . That we discourage any efforts at wholesale emigration, and, recognizing that oar home is to be in the South, we urge that all strive in every way to cultivate the good feeling and friendship of those about us in all that relates to our material elevation."
The prudence of the last suggestion was illustrated at the time the Convention met, by a body of negroes, who had reached New York from the Indian Territory, en route for Liberia, Africa. The police had to take charge, carrying them to a Mission for shelter from the rain, and for food. They had left Red Land in the Cherokee Nation, 16 miles from Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Dissatisfied with the cultivation of the land they owned, as the crops of last Summer failed, they determined, under the leadership of thoir pastor, to proceed to Africa. He had told them it would cost $1,500 to get to New York, whence the passage to Liberia would be free. Their little holdings were sold at a great sacrifice, and the money given to the Reverend Mr. Hill, who told this story of their experience
"Some time ago he received a circular from a man named Coppinger, of Washington, manager of the American Colonization Society. The circular stated that negroes could go to Africa free of charge after taking the oath of allegiance to the African Government administered at New York at the Custom House. This they found was untrue. The pastor and his people are now all without means and bereft of home and farms."
The Colonization Society sent two officials to inquire into the grievance, and decided to call a meeting in New York to get funds to forward the emigrants to Liberia. In ail, $20,000 are required, as the Society supports its emigrants for six months, and regards Liberia as the best place. Several ministers, however, oppose the wholesale emigration, not now desired by many of these negroes. They think that it would be wrong to pack off these poor people to a strange country to shift for themselves, and telegrams have been sent to coloured pastors in the West and South to persuade the coloured people not to start East with the intention of going to Liberia.
