All right, my fellow American Geograpeeps, America,
do you realize that our country kind of has like a long-lost estranged African stepson?
Yeah. We really need to like visit and follow up with him more.
Because we kind of did in a sense, create him.
I'm just saying.
Hey everyone, welcome to Liberia, the USA's little experimental African resettlement project
and one of the only two nations in africa that never got colonized.
ITALY: "I Beg to Differ!?"
ETHIOPIA: "Okay you tried to colonize us for like five years
but that doesn't really count for colonization."
In many ways, Liberia is incredibly unique on how it became the way it did.
No other African state has their type of story
And it all begins on a little place called the 'Pepper Coast'.
Let's begin.
Okay I'm gonna be honest.
Unfortunately, my first impression of Liberia came from the movie, Lord of War,
in which like most hollywood movies portrays Liberia in a complete war-torn mess.
On top of that, the whole ebola crisis happened which made things even worse.
Which is why Liberia is like the perfect place to visit right now.
I have to bring the tripster bell once again.
Everybody still thinks this place has ebola so they try to avoid it
which means no annoying tourist crowds.
The exchange rate is amazing, you could potentially have like an entire beach to yourself.
People are friendly and like nobody knows about it. It's like Africa's best-kept secret
which i just ruined... Oh shoo.
First of all, Liberia is located in West Africa bordered by Guinea, the Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone
as well as the Atlantic ocean to the Southwest.
The country is divided into 15 counties with the capital, Monrovia
which by the way is named after 5th American President, James Monroe;
located in the upper west coast of the country. By the way,
the flags of the Liberian counties are notoriously famous for being kind of, funny-looking.
-CGP Grey- (this video was by 'mikeburnfire')
does a great podcast explaining how they kind of look like they were made out of Microsoft Paint.
We'll talk more about it on our Flag Friday.
The larger cities after the capital Monrovia are Gbarnga and Kakata.
There's a place called SASStown.
The two busiest international airports are Spriggs Payne, which is literally like downtown in Monrovia
and Roberts International in Harbel, which is the airport most people arrive in when flying to Liberia from abroad
even though it's about 25 miles or 40 kilometers away from downtown Monrovia.
Otherwise, you might be better off hitching a boat ride along the coast to one of the four main harbors:
Monrovia, Bucanan, Greenville or Harper.
Those towns sounds so American.
Greenville (South Carolina), Buchanan (Michigan)
Oh these guys.
Otherwise some notable place of interest might include:
A strange rock formations in Sasstown
The giant Footprint in Pingyan (THIS PLACE IS IN CHINA)
The National Museum
Centennial Pavilion
The Sacred Heart Cathedral,
The Lofa rainforest
Surfing at Robertspot
Sapo National Park
Mamba Point Arts district
The Libassa Ecolodge
Kpatawee Waterfall
and Chimpanzee Island in Marshall.
And the best part is there's like nobody crowding around these places.
Hey Ken.
Yeah?
Go on your phone go to Skyscanner
Check out flights from LAX to Monrovia.
How much the flights cost?
Okay. The cheapest flight is 25 hours long with three layovers in New York and Togo and Ghana
and coming back, it's gonna be thirty three hours long going through Ghana and Ethiopia and Dublin.
Tally up the cost of food and accommodation, that brings us to about...
And that's just for one person?
Okay. If Geography Now makes a lot of money in the next few months, I'll think about it.
Cool, can I come?
Yeah, why not?
Can you guys move on to the next segment please? Some people want to learn stuff.
Shshshshshsh...
Just, don't tell me how to do my job
So anyway,
Liberia was originally called the 'Pepper Coast' by the Portuguese
when they spotted that Malagueta peppers that grew there.
First of all, the country is made up of three main physical regions:
The flat coastal mangroves and swamps and valleys.
The small rolling hills inland and the tallest peaks in the north Lofa county
where you can find the tallest mountain, Mount Wuteve in the Guinea highlands.
Nearby the longest river, the St. Paul comes from the Guinea border
meandering all the way to the Atlantic by Monrovia.
Which is just a skip away, you can find the largest lake, Lake Piso, a brackish water lake.
Brackish water, what does that mean?
Noah, explain.
Alright
In the world of water bodies, a body water that contains any level between 0.05 to 3% salinity is considered brackish.
In the case of lake Piso, a small inlet, it connects the ocean allowing salt to enter.
Awesome. Great job, Noah.
Yeah No problem.
Oh actually you made a mistake. The longest river isn't actually the St. Paul,
it's the Kavala river that goes along the border with the Ivory Coast.
That's good enough that's good enough...
Okay how about this? I'll just walk out of frame.
Yeah, Ok, Alright.
It rains a lot in Liberia. They have a saying in Liberia:
"By the rain or by the sweat, either way you will get wet."
Where have I heard that before?
Yeah, by the rain by the sweat...
Right?
You're gonna get wet.
Basically, Liberia has two seasons: dry and wet.
But even in the dry season, it's still incredibly humid so you're never gonna be completely dry.
Resource-wise, Liberia is kind of like a jackpot country
even though they only have one national park,
Sapo, the second-largest tropical rainforest in West Africa.
However the national animal is no shocker, the lion.
Everybody wants the lion, even the UK took the lion for some reason
and lions have never like naturally inhabited that area anyway.
Speaking of animals, let's address the elephant in the room:
Ebola!
Ken, was that joke distasteful?
Nehhha, I'd say you just barely grace past the boundary.
Good Enough! Yes during 2014,
there was an outbreak of the virus with thousands that ended up dying.
After months of pretty much quarantine and treating the entire nation,
the outbreak was contained and after passing a 42 day time period,
the nation was declared Ebola-free in January 2016 with heightened surveillance.
The whole ordeal left Liberia stigmatized and economically shunned. This was not what they needed.
Nonetheless through some smart decisions, they move forward and continued rebuilding.
Unemployment is only at about 3.5%.
Exports like timber and rubber are at their highest.
GDP growth has overall risen, peaking at 9.4% in 2007
and by 2011, they became one of the fastest growing 20 economies in the world.
They even dramatically reduced their external debt through commercial debt relief from 4.5 billion to 222 million.
That's like deleting 17/18s of your debt.
That's like Noah deleting my weight...
...and replacing it with this messenger bag.
Good for you, Liberia!
Granted, they still need to do some work. Blackouts are not uncommon
and infrastructure and civil engineering projects are still in progress.
But for a country coming out of two civil wars and ebola, not bad.
Oh yeah, we usually talk about food. Food!
Now as the nickname hint, Liberians are famous for making their food spicy.
They love spice. It's even said that people all over but especially from the Kru tribe
put small bits of pepper and their kids noses and mouths to kind of get them to build a tolerance.
All right, that just about covers that. Moving on to my favorite part,
The...
The strongest trait for Liberia would have to be its story.
It was like an experiment that actually ended up working,
then kind of got glitchy but then rebooted. First of all,
The country has about 4.6 million people and is the only African state to have gained independence without major revolt.
The largest of the groups in Liberia are the Kpelle about 20%, the Bassa at 14%,
the Americo-Liberians come in third and around 11%, the Grebo at about 10%
and the rest are made up of most of the remaining 12 tribes plus a few other non-Africans.
They used the Liberian dollar but accept US dollars,
they use the A, B, C and F outlets
and they drive on the right side of the road,
and they are one of the only three countries in the world
that uses imperial units instead of metric
just like the US and Myanmar. (NOTE: Myanmar has it own units of measurement)
UNITED STATES: "YEEAH! It's Just Us Three Against The World!
We're In This Together, Guys!"
MYANMAR (BURMA): WOOOO!
Even though recently, they've considered transitioning into the metric system.
UNITED STATES: "Oh No You Don't, Get Back On Over Here!"
In Liberia, the official language is English
but only about a fifth the country speaks it properly.
It's more common to hear Liberian Kokoqua,
which is like a mashed up creole-ish type of language that incorporates words from various tribal languages.
For example:
Pempem (Motorcycle)
Biggity (Arrogance)
Chop (Food)
Noko (Soldier)
and one of my favorites: Swee muder (Juice popsicles).
It's been said that a standard American English speaker can listen really hard and maybe pick it up in about two weeks.
Oh, they always track extra sounds like "O" or "ya" on words.
"Right-o", "Not bad-o", "Ya-hello".
It's kind of like Singlish with "Lor" or"La".
Man, Liberia, you guys have a lot in common with Singapore like have you ever met Singapore?
Like here. Here, talk amongst yourselves. Say 'Hi' to each other.
As mentioned, Liberia has 16 main tribes each speak their own language and dialects
specializing in their own unique customs and trades.
For example: The Kissi tribe is famous for being rice farmers.
The Dey are known for being salt traders and carving wood masks.
The Bassa are like the people of the forest and they're good at hunting.
The Kpelle are the largest tribe and they were the tribe that historically became slaves to the other tribes
so there's kind of like that stigma that they don't like having.
The Vai are the people from the Mali kingdom that actually created their own script
making it one of the few indigenous African writing systems.
The Kru are masters of sailing and fishing, many work for the coast guard.
The Mandingo and Gio and Mano tribes are like the muslim tribes
and the Grebo are great fishermen.
Now here's an interesting part. One thing that makes Liberia stand out from the rest of Africa
was that the nation at least in modern times
was resettled by freed slaves that were initially brought from the US and Caribbean
in the mid-1800s by the American Colonial station Society.
Okay get ready because I'm about to go into Story Mode.
Basically if you were a freed slave in the us in the mid-1800s, you had two choices:
Stay as a disenfranchised individual and hope that over time society would get better for you
or you could take your chances and sail to Africa and create your own society
run by you and other freed slaves funded by the US government.
In 1822, the first ship set sail and in over four decades,
over 13,000 freed slaves were returned back to Africa
and an entirely new people group, the "Americo-Liberians" were formed.
Some of whom were mixed-race children of slave owners that had privileged upbringing and education.
It was strange though because essentially these new African American colonialists
were returning back to the continent of their ancestors which was completely foreign to them.
They didn't initially get along with the indigenous people groups and for a while, clashes and fights broke out.
Eventually, the Americo-Liberians took power as the elite.
They built their own infrastructure and government based off of the US system of legislation.
They tried to build schools and churches to help integrate the natives
and after decades, they finally gave birthright citizenship to the tribes.
So in a sense historically, there's always kind of been like this rift between the natives and the colonialists.
Tensions eventually led to the first and subsequent second civil wars in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s,
caused by natives back-lashing against the Americo-Liberian elite.
Eventually, peace deals were signed, the most free and fair elections took place.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a harvard trained economist won the presidency and became the first female president in all of Africa
and then George Weah was voted in to follow after her.
The majority of Liberians around 85.5 identify as Christians, mostly protestant
although indigenous belief systems are also practiced and sometimes synchronized
whereas about 12% are Muslim.
Oh and one more thing, from what I've been told in Liberia,
everyone likes to bluff flaunting expensive clothes and accessories.
They all have like the newest cell phones even if they live in shanty houses.
They even have a word for it: Shikii
Hey but you know we're all kind of guilty of trying to show of for making an impression to people.
Last of all, a few famous people from Liberia or of Liberian descent might include people like:
Martin Delany, Chris Gbandi, India Arie (hehe, India)
Saran Kaba Jones, Tamba Hali,
Maybe Oprah Winfrey?
Kat Graham and Louis Gossett Jr.
A lot of those people though are like Americans of Liberian descent
but ehh, I guess it still kind of counts.
Speaking of America and relations with them,
Liberia's kind of like that kid playing on the swings that you walked up to on the playground because you wanted to say hi.
But then the moment you got two feet away from him, they fall off and break their arms
screaming in pain so you're like: "Oh shoo...,
Hi, are you okay?"
First of all, within Africa,
Namibia showed huge appreciation for Liberia support for their liberation efforts
and offering Liberian passports to help students study abroad.
The Namibian defense force also stops by in stations themselves occasionally in Liberia.
Sierra Leone and Guinea were like the really close cousins that suddenly got really mad
because that one thing that happened in the 80s that they never really forgot.
And by that I mean, president Charles Taylor.
Although issues have settled, they still kind of remember it and hold it against them, a little bit.
India really started to love Liberia after they gave their full-fledged support for India's stance on the Kashmir dispute.
And in return, (former) president Sirleaf was invited to India. They struck up multiple export
and investment deals in things like engineering, equipment pharmaceuticals and steel and plastics
which increased India's investments in Liberia by four times.
When it comes to their best friends though, Liberians always kind of go back to their
1800 roots and say the USA. Sometimes they even call themselves "Little America" and the statement
"We will become America's 51st state" has even been a slogan in some presidential campaigns.
Many of their former presidents were even born in the US.
Even though tensions were built up in the 80s and 90s,
the US is still the largest provider of investment and foreign aid
and they still take cultural and diplomatic cues from their stepdad.
Overall, the two have a weird but somewhat functional relationship.
In conclusion, nowhere else in the world do you find
an African nation colonized by African Americans.
It's just only in Liberia. Interesting, eh?
Stay tuned, Libya is coming up next!