Liberian Studies Journal

Home , Joseph Jenkins Roberts, Kru people, Phelps Stokes Fund, Saclepea

VOLUME IX 1980-1981 NUMBER 2

LIBERIAN STUDIES JOURNAL

Edited by: Jo Sullivan Boston University

PUBLISHED AT THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PDF compression, OCR, web optimization using a watermarked evaluation copy of CVISION PDFCompressor PDF compression, OCR, web optimization using a watermarked evaluation copy of CVISION PDFCompressor VOLUME IX 1980 -1981 NUMBER 2

LIBERIAN STUDIES JOURNAL

EDITED BY

Jo Sullivan Boston University

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Igolima T. D. Amachree Warren L. d'Azevedo Western Illinois University University of Nevada

James L. Gibbs, Jr. Thomas E. Hayden Stanford University Society of African Missions

Svend E. Holsoe J. Gus Liebenow University of Delaware Indiana University

Bai T. Moore Ministry of Information Republic of Liberia

Elizabeth Tonkin University of Birmingham

Published at the Department of Anthropology, University of Delaware

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page

SIMON GREENLEAF AND THE LIBERIAN CONSTITUTION OF 1847, 51 by Robert T. Brown

TUSKEGEE IN LIBERIA: THE POLITICS OF INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION, 1927 -1935, 61 by Louise Johnston

LIBERIAN DRAMA, 69 by Steven H. Gale

CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN LIBERIA, 75 by Gerald M. Erchak

A BRIEF NOTE ON THE URBAN ETHNIC BASIS OF KRU LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY, 83 by L. B. Breitborde

A POST -COUP COURT IN NIMBA, 93 by Peter Sevareid

BOOK REVIEWS Andreas Massing, The Economic Anthropology of the Kru (West- Africa), 109 by David Brown

Marie Jeanne Adams et.al., eds., Ethnologische Zeitschrift, 112 by Edward Lifschitz

Robert Kappel, Liberia, wirtschaftliche und politische Entwicklung 116 1971 -80, by Stefan von Gnielinski

Response to Stefan von Gnielinski, and summary of Liberia, wirt- 120 schaftliche und politische Entwicklung 1971 -80, by Robert Kappel

John Gay, The Brightening Shadow, 124 by Ruth Stone

Emphasizing the social sciences and humanities, the LIBERIAN STUDIES JOURNAL is a semiannual publication devoted to studies of Africa's oldest republic. The annual subscription rate is $20.00, $12.00 for students and $15.00 for institutions, and includes membership in the Liberian Studies Association, Inc. Manuscripts, correspondence and subscriptions should be sent to Liberian Studies, Department of Anthropology, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware 19711. The views expressed herein are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect those of the editor or the Liberian Studies Association, Inc.

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Robert T. Brown Westfield State College

Nineteenth century Liberia was more than a geographical entity, it was also an idea, a symbolic expression of the racial, religious, political and psychological views of the population of the United States. The most thorough and widely respected of the historical works documenting this foundation era was Charles Huberich's THE POLITICAL AND LEGISLATIVE HISTORY OF LIBERIA.1 Pub- lished in 1947, this massive work was closely tied to the post war political interests of Liberia and the United States. As a result, the first of the two volumes was entirely devoted to the thirty year period leading to Liberian independence. In the process of stressing American ties and American interests in the foundation period, Huberich succeeded in creating a new legend, that a white American had written the Liberian constitution. This assertion was accepted without hesitation for Huberich was the acknowledged expert and his eight hundred pages of text were a running history of constitutional development. Furthermore, for many people, the idea was comfortable. It made continued American involvement in Liberia during the second century of its freedom seem natural and it helped justify privately held feelings about the inadequacies of the Americo - Liberians. While checking the accuracy of the Huberich version does not require redoing his history, a brief summary is in order.

The general collapse of the American Colonization Society twenty years after its founding brought a restructuring of that organization under northern control.2 Included in this restructuring was a constitution for the scattered African settlements now consolidated into Liberia. This 1839 "Buchanan Constitu- tion," named for the leader of the Pennsylvania Society who had written it, had no Liberian input.3 The settlers, however, had been aware that change was in the wind and were hurrying to complete their own constitution. Their document greatly increased Americo- Liberian political power but it preserved the ultimate authority of the Society. It was written by a committee which included Colin and Hilary Teage, Nicholas Brander and Beverly Wilson. Unfortunately, their effort was too late to affect events in the United States.4

The subsequent administration of Governor Buchanan was stormy for it saw increased troubles with Great Britain and sharp splits in the Americo- Liberian community.5 The accession of the respected and diplomatic Joseph Roberts to the governorship in 1841 temporily papered over the internal tensions but international problems increased. No adequate help was forthcoming from the United States because the American Colonization Society was still on the verge of collapse. In 1843 the Pennsylvania Society suggested that the solution to everyone's problems was to cut Liberia completely free from the American connection.6 This idea was also circulating in Liberia and, in December 1844, Governor Roberts brought the matter before the Liberian legislative council. Hilary Teage chaired a committee of the council which reported to the Board of Directors of the Society on the "vexed question" without ever directly using the word independence.7

While parties on both sides of the Atlantic recognized the direction events were moving, each tried to carefully channel the course to satisfy its

51 Liberian Studies Journal, IX, 2 (1980 -81)

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own needs. The Society was primarily concerned with preserving its economic investment in Liberia as well as its freedom to continue the transportation and care for American emigrants. Although Americo- Liberians could argue that they were already independent, a point that members of the Society agreed with, they needed some formal process to bring that status to the attention of the world and they needed to participate in the process for their own dignity.8 Both sides then proceeded to move in parallel to create legal steps necessary to bring the grand cause to culmination.

Joseph Tracy, the Congregationalist minister who was the Secretary of the Massachusetts Colonization Society, turned to Simon Greenleaf, the famous Harvard Law professor, and asked him to "study" how the Society could "keep our hold on public confidence," when it could "no longer be responsible for the character of the laws of Liberia. "9 Tracy and J.B. Phinney of the Pennsylvania Society then proceeded to push for changes in the constitution of the American Colonization Society in preparation for Liberian independence. At the Board of Directors meeting of January 1846, it was moved that the Society ask some "legal gentlemen" for suggestions for the impending Liberian constitution.10 As a result of this motion, Tracy apparently contacted Greenleaf again.11

It was months before any of this was communicated to Liberia but events there had proceeded on their own. Teage had been leading political agitation with editorials in the LIBERIA HERALD and with speeches before the members of the Liberia Lyceum.12 Political debate on the independence question had gotten so strong that a counter movement arose in Bassa County where there was a greater fear of domination by Monrovian merchants than there was of a distant white society.

In June 1846 Governor Roberts received a letter from Tracy which contained Professor Greenleaf's proposals for a Liberian constitution. Roberts sent a copy of the document back to the American Colonization Society, which had not been aware of its existence, and, according to Judge Samuel Benedict, another to the Liberian legislature.13 With some concern, the Secretary of the Society assured Roberts that the Greenleaf proposal was not a product of the Society's plans and was not meant to be adopted, although it might be useful as a guide for their deliberations.14

In November 1846, a referendum on the question of calling a constitutional convention showed that the Liberian population was badly split. Although Governor Roberts claimed that the "majority, however small that majority may be, has an in- dubitable, unalienable and indefeasible(sic) right to reform,alter or abolish" the constitution, the facts were that the voter turnout had been disajpointingly low and only a small majority had voted favorably.15 Public hesitance did nothing to slow down the political process and a constitutional convention was called for July 1847.

At its annual meeting in Washington in January 1847, the Board of Direc- tors of the ACS showed increasing concern with the tone of political agitation in Liberia. Since it now appeared that they could do nothing to stop the independence movement, it was instead decided to concentrate all efforts on preserving the rights of the Society. Because Greenleaf had already been drawn into the matter, he was asked to prepare some additional constitutional articles on the continued relations between the Society and a sovereign Liberia.16 These were sent to Roberts in April. This dispatch also contained a long hectoring condemnation of the Liberian attitude. Secretary McLain demanded that Roberts prepare a full report for the citizens of Liberia which would make it clear that the Society was not cutting them adrift. The Society "considered unkind and un- called for many of the things which were said in the colony" and certainly were not "forcing" independence.17 Roberts promised to see to the clarification,

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though he never id. At the same time, he rejected the intent of the new Green- leaf proposals.

The only record of the proceedings of the convention is a confidential diary kept by Dr. James Lugenbeel, the Colonial Surgeon.19 Dr. Lugenbeel held a low opinion of those he worked with:

Notwithstanding all our beautiful theories relative to the sable race we are forced to believe that 'black man no be all same like white man' anyhow you fix it....I have seen enough to convince me that the 'Ethiopian cannot change his skin'...they are universally deficient.20

He was also not impressed with the convention, devoting most of his descriptions to incidents suggesting the incompetence of the assembled members.

On July 9, 1847, Beverly Wilson read a proposed draft of a constitution to the delegates which Lugenbeel described as "almost an exact copy" of the original Greenleaf constitution. What infuriated the good Doctor most was that Wilson passed it off as his own, claiming that the "people of Liberia did not require the assistance of white people to enable them to make a constitution for the government of themselves." Lugenbeel denounced such declarations as "sickening ".21 Whether it was Greenleaf's or not, the draft was not accepted. Instead, the delegates divided into committees and over the next three weeks met continuously to work on sections of a constitution. Hilary Teage was charged with writing the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble and the Bill of Rights. On July 24th the full body met to debate continued relations with the American Colonization Society. At that time they rejected the Greenleaf clauses and informed Governor Roberts that such matters could not appear in the constitution of a sovereign nation. On the 26th, Teage's Declaration of Independence was approved and on the 28th of July, the full constitution received a unani- mous vote of approval. Somewhat mollified by the end of the month's observation, Lugenbeel called the final result a "very respectable state paper ".22

Not all the Liberian citizens agreed with that assessment. Roberts wrote McLain that independence had been approved by a large majority except in Grand Bassa.23 Technically this was correct but Dr. Lugenbeel's vote tally is much more informative. There were approximately 2500 Americo- Liberians at that time, of whom some six hundred were males over twenty -one and thus eligible to vote. Only 269 cast ballots, 211 in favor of independence and 58 opposed. Fewer had voted on the constitutional referendum than had cast ballots in the initial legislative elections fifteen years earlier when 330 voted. Studying the voting patterns by settlement is even more informative. Monrovia voted 111 -yes and 0 -no; New Georgia, 31 -yes, 3 -no; Caldwell, 22- yes,6 -no; Millsburg, 21 -yes, 0 -no; Marshall Cove, 12 -no; Edina, 37 -no. No votes at all were collected from Bassa and Bexley or the settlements of Sinoe county. Thus Sinoe and Bassa counties with populations of about eight hundred cast a total of 0 -yes votes and 49 -no. The interior towns of Montserrado county with populations of at least nine hundred, cast only 83 votes, 74 -yes and 9 -no. Dr. Lugenbeel noted that if the opponents had voted "I suppose the majority in favor would not have exceeded fifty." More likely the referendum would not have been approved at all. Fur- thermore Lugenbeel wrote, "what is the most remarkable feature of the opposition is the conduct of Amos Herring and Ephraim Titler, two of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution...and the ringleaders of the opposition....Strange set of people, some of these Liberians. "24 Protest meetings continued in Bassa with charges of voting irregularities and all was "confusion and almost anarchy."

Now that Liberia was legally independent, the question still remained,

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Was the Liberian constitution a product of the Americo-Liberians and their experiences and needs, or, was it the gift of a paternalistic white society through the agency of a noted Harvard professor? Certainly it must be agreed that the strongly nationalistic Declaration of Independence which cries out against injustice is the product of Hilary Teage expressing the sentiments of the larger population. Article I, the Declaration of Rights, contains elements from the constitution that Teage worked on in 1839. Certainly Section 15 of Article I, on the liberty of the press, is distinctly Teage's. All five of the constitutional Articles contain material expressly suited to the Liberian situation, material which was not known to Greenleaf, who had only recently evidenced any interest in the colonization movement. Greenleaf produced whatever he wrote in a short time without the knowledge, or aid, of members of the Society, with the exception of Joseph Tracy, and there is no suggestion that Tracy had any input. Certainly Greenleaf, nor for that matter any other member of the American Colonization Society, could not have been responsible for sections 12 and 13 of Article V, which restricted the ownership of property and citizenship rights in Liberia to blacks. That in fact was exactly the opposite of what the Society was trying to do and represented a serious set- back for them. And then there were the unique sections 10 and 11 of the same article which guaranteed economic rights to women. Those clauses were revolutionary in 1847 and remain so today. In 1840 Professor Greenleaf had written a short article directly contrary to that point of view which was also contrary to Anglo -Saxon law as codified in Blackstone.25

In the final analysis, there were some constitutional proposals from Greenleaf which were given to the Liberian legislature in 1846. No copy of them survive. Two members of the consitutional convention, Teage and Wilson, had helped write the proposed constitution of 1839. Large parts of the 1847 document were written by Teage and other parts were designed by someone very familiar with particularly Liberian problems of administration. Certain clauses could not have been written by a white American male of the 1840's. That which remains could have been written by any intelligent person familiar with law and politics. Certainly the "American Negroes who became the Pilgrims and Founding Fathers of Liberia had brought with them the Bible and Blackstone and American statute books," and had the ski11.26

The only other comment on Greenleaf's contributions came from Judge Benedict, a member of the convention and a political opponent of the Roberts - Teage group. After losing the first presidential election to Roberts, Benedict wrote Greenleaf to thank the professor for the "document you so politely sent as was of much service...we endeavored to use as much of this as suited our circumstances. Several words, or parts of sections in our constitution, both myself and a few others would prefer to have been left out and others inserted but the majority in convention -you know, will govern. "27 In other words, the Liberians produced the constitution they wanted out of their own circumstances.

FOOTNOTES

1. Charles Huberich, The Political and Legislative History of Liberia (New York, 194).

2. See Huberich and Archibald Alexander, A History of Colonization on the Western Coast of Africa (Philadelphia, 1846); P.J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement 1816 -1865 (New York, 1961).

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3. Buchanan to Gurley, May 17, 1839, Records of the American Coloniza- tion Society (hereafter ACS), Series 1B, Dispatches From Liberia, Reel 172.

4. Teage to Gurley, March 1839, ACS, Series 1B, Letters From Liberia, Reel 154.

5. Robert Brown, "Struggle for Power: The Opposition to Independence, 1839 -1849," paper presented to the 12th annual Liberian Studies Association Conference, April, 1980.

6. Minutes, Board of Directors, 18 January 1843, ACS, Reel 290.

7. Teage to Board of Directors, January 15, 1845, ACS, Series 5, Annual Reports, Reel 286.

8. For an astute discussion of the legal problems of Liberia see, Joseph Tracy, "Liberian Independence," African Repository, XXI (April, 1845), 97 -103.

9. Tracy to Greenleaf, April 26, 1845, Greenleaf Papers, Treasure Room, Law Library, Harvard (hereafter, Greenleaf).

10. Minutes, Board of Directors, January 21, 1846, ACS, Reel 290.

11. There is no record of this contact.

12. See, for example, Liberia Herald, March 31, 1845.

13. Roberts to McLain, June 25, 1846, ACS, Series 1B, Reel 172; Roberts to Greenleaf, June 19, 1846, Greenleaf Papers.

14. McLain to Roberts, August 28, 1846, ACS, Series II, Reel 238.

15. Roberts Address to the Legislative Council, January 4, 1847, quoted in Huberich, Vol. 1, 810 -811; Roberts to McLain, November 9, 1846, ACS, Series 1B, Reel 172.

16. Minutes, Board of Directors, January 20, 1847, ACS, Reel 290.

17. McLain to Roberts, April 12, 1847, ACS, Series 11, Reel 238.

18. Roberts to McLain, June 28, 1847, ACS, Series 1B, Reel 172.

19. Lugenbeel to McLain, October 14, 1847, "Extracts, Private and Confi- dential," ACS, Series 1B, Reel 154, part II.

20. Lugenbeel to McLain, February 6, 1847, ACS, Seies 1B, Reel 173.

21. Lugenbeel to McLain, October 14, 1847, "Extracts, Private and Confi- dential," ACS, Series 1B, Reel 154, part II.

22. Lugenbeel to McLain, March 24, 1847, ACS, Series 1B, Reel 173.

23. Roberts to McLain, October 9, 1847, ACS, Series 1B, Reel 173.

24. Lugenbeel to McLain, October 14, 1847, "Extracts, Private and Confi- dential," ACS, Series 1B, Reel 154, part II.

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25. Simon Greenleaf, "On the Legal Rights of Women," (Boston, 1840). The only copy of this is in a collection at the Huntington Library, California.

26. Milton Konvitz, ed., Liberian Code of Laws of 1956 Adopted by the Legislature of the Republic of Liberia (Cornell, 1957), viii.

27. Benedict to Greenleaf, April 4, 1848, Greenleaf Papers.

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THE POLITICS OF INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION, 1927 -1935*

Louise Johnston Concordia University

On March 17, 1929 the Booker Washington Industrial and Agricultural Institute (BWI) situated in the Liberian hinterland near the town of Kakata, opened its doors to admit its first one hundred or so African students. The opening of BWI marked the beginning of Tuskegeeism in Liberia. BWI's educational philosophy and curriculum would follow the teachings of its namesake, Booker T. Washington, and his brainchild Tuskegee Institute of Alabama. BWI would emphasize industry, thrift, Christian morality and community uplift through the acquisition of practical skills. Though Washington had often expressed his desire to see a Tuskegee in Liberia, he made no concrete step to build an institution like BWI. The founding of BWI was the result of almost ten years of hard work by members of the Phelps- Stokes Fund, a New York philan- thropic foundation, the American Colonization Society, also of New York, and several missionary groups working in Liberia. The drive to create BWI was led by Thomas Jesse Jones, Educational Director of the Phelps- Stokes Fund and James L. Sibley, the Fund's Educational Advisor in Liberia.

The opening of BWI brought new hope to an American missionary effort that Sibley felt was disorganized, poorly funded, and badly managed. Since mission schools had focused on liberal arts teaching to the exclusion of more practical types of education like Tuskegeeism, Sibley and Jones felt that they had done little to improve the poverty and ill- health of Liberia's indigenous population. As BWI's curriculum would concentrate on "Superivison and Teacher Training, Agriculture, Homemaking and Health," its sponsors believed that the dawn of a new day for Liberian education and the Liberian people was approaching. BWI would prepare Liberians for the modern world by teaching skills like mecha- nics, the building trades, carpentry, tailoring, trading, animal husbandry, smallhold agriculture, and simple medical aid. Jones believed the African sense of community would be enhanced if the women learned the household arts, needle- work, sound child rearing habits and hygiene. He also hoped BWI would run a teacher -training course similar to the Jeanes School in America, and that these teachers would disseminate the philosophy and skills taught at BWI throughout Liberia.2

Over the next twenty years BWI admitted some eight hundred students from various areas of the country including youngsters from Bassa, Kpelle, Kru, Grebo and Gola areas. The Institute had "dormitories, a laboratory, tools and machinery."3 It ran a major furniture and cement manufacturing business and had one of the best health dispensaries in the Liberian hinterland. Though its live- stock raising program did not live up to expectations, its agricultural production was high. Each student received basic military training of the kind given at Tuskegee and was also given rudimentary literacy and mathematical instruction.

Despite these achievements, BWI managed to produce only thirty -three graduates in its first ten years of existence. Of these thirty -three only about ten were able to find employment outside the Institute. Another six were hired

Liberian Studies Journal, IX, 2 (1980 -81) 61

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by BWI, nine more went on to higher education at the College of West Africa and Liberia College.4 In 1950 an American observer in Liberia reported that since BWI gave only a "rudimentary education" graduates could not find employment and often went on to Liberia College and the government service. He went on to say that BWI was not supplying the skilled craftsmen and tradesmen Libe- rian industry needed. He suggested that BWI graduates could be better guaranteed employment if they interned at various companies. He also believed that a minimum wage for BWI graduates would help sustain student interest in industrial education.

By 1950 the socioeconomic position of the indigenous people BWI served remained virtually unchanged. The classical literary tradition continued to dominate the Liberian education system. Support for the mass industrial education scheme Jones had hoped for in 1929 failed to occur by 1950. When Jones died in 1950 he could not count the Liberian experiment in Tuskegeeism as one of his more successful ventures.

The failure of the BWI program to transform the Liberian education system and Liberia's population was the result of a series of internal problems and external threats. The internal problems, which included the absence of qualified teachers and high staff and student turnover, were the consequence of inadequate funding and a lack of coordination among the various missionary groups involved in BWI. While these problems were severe, they alone cannot explain BWI's limited achievements. As we shall see, BWI's poor showing was due primarily to Jones' close affiliation with other American interests in Liberia after 1926. The nature of this affiliation combined with the discriminatory hiring policy of the BWI Board6 and the philosophy of Tuskegeeism itself, precipitated the hostility of the Liberian government and later the anger of the indigenous people BWI served.

In 1920 Jones led the Phelps- Stokes Fund African Education Commission which surveyed the educational systems of colonial and free Africa. In Liberia he found that the "nation's educational welfare had been left almost exclusively to the foreign mission societies." The social leaders of Liberia, the Americo - Liberians, "made virtually no contribution to the nation's education." Jones reported that "the type of education in which they (the Americo -Liberians) are interested is so exclusively concerned with preparation for clerical pursuits and the government service...as to exclude any effort to prepare youth to deal with hygiene, (or the) agricultural, industrial and social needs of either the Americo- Liberians or the Native masses." He went on to say that "the future of the educational and religious endeavor in Liberia...seems now about to be determined by the success or the defeat of the proposed American loan (of 1921)." He cautioned that if the Liberian government failed to "obtain credit on favorable terms" it would be forced to go it "alone to work out its development." This would necessarily "defer indefinitely the sanitary improvement, the economic development and the educational facilities so vital to the welfare of the Liberian people. "7 Since the American loan of 1921 failed, the Fund was forced to shelve its educational plan.

In 1926, the Liberian government granted the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company of Akron, Ohio, a major rubber concession and accepted in return a con- ditional multi -million dollar loan from the Finance Corporation of America, one of Firestone's subsidiaries. James Sibley reported that in light of the new financial situation of the Liberian government and the economic development the rubber industry would bring, the Phelps- Stokes Fund ought to reconsider its decision not to develop a Tuskegee in Liberia. Sibley indicated moreover, that the Americo- Liberian government was now willing to support the Phelps- Stokes Fund's plan to build an industrial institute at Kakata.8 Sibley drew up a "master plan" for Liberian education. At the heart of his plan was "a cooperative effort

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between the missions and the (Liberian) government." He felt "that an institution devoted to agricultural and industrial training would form the perfect capstone to the evolving educational structure. "9 On Sibley's recom- mendation, Jones and the Phelps- Stokes Fund forged ahead with plans to build BWI.

In 1926 Jones and Sibley met with Harvey Firestone to ascertain the industrialist's view of Liberian development. They found him to be a "man of tenacity of purpose" who was "kindly disposed toward education. "10 In 1928 when the Board of Trustees of the Booker Washington Institute was incorporated, Harvey Firestone Jr. was asked to sit on the Board. He accepted with pleasure. Thus began a twenty -five year affiliation between BWI and the Firestone operations in Liberia. Firestone became one of BWI's major funders. He also provided "specialists to aid in the erection of buildings; machinery tools and just about anything else the Institute required. The Firestone plantations enter- tained all visitors to BWI on the school's behalf." After 1936, Firestone employed many BWI students and graduates.11

The work of Jones and Phelps- Stokes Fund drew, in addition to the interest of Firestone, the attention of the American Department of State. In 1926 the Department's Financial Advisor in Liberia, Sidney de la Rue, wrote to Assis- tant Secretary of State William Castle lamenting the condition of Liberian education. He recommended Sibley's report as "a very wise and well -drawn up plan." He went on to say,

I think it will take at least twenty -five years to install a system of education and get sufficient results therefrom to give Liberia an educated thinking middle class. It is the middle class which makes it possible to maintain democracy. I think we must visualize this educated class as our objective in building up this nation on a firm enough foundation to be lasting.

In 1927, Henry Carter, who oversaw Liberian affairs for the Department, wrote to Castle supporting de la Rue's suggestion that Liberia required "educated and trained administrators." He felt that an educated administration was especially appropriate "now when American interests have obtained a definite and predominant foothold in Liberia." Carter believed that the "decline in Liberian education" placed governmental control in the hands of a small elite. Rule by an elite was making "a stable government in Liberia almost impossible" and was, consequently, "making it difficult for the United States to deal effectively with Liberia." It was encouraging "French and British encroachment" and "threatened the entire structure of U.S. interests in Liberia." Carter suggested an "intensive intellectual exchange between the U.S. and Liberia." He recommended a "coordination and reorganization of missionary schools through...the Phelps - Stokes Fund." He urged that the whole matter "be carefully canvassed with...the Phelps- Stokes Fund, with institutions like Tuskegee and Hampton and with Mr. Firestone who would be glad to assist from humanitarian considerations and from a desire to protect his investment." Carter concluded that the question of education was "of highest importance" since the "announcement of the establishment of the Firestone interests in Liberia has brought it more or less into the public eye of this country." In September of 1929 at a Board Meeting of BWI which Carter attended, Jones expressed his appreciation to members of the State Department for their support of the Phelps- Stokes industrial education program.12

During the turbulent years from 1928 to 1935 when the Liberian government teetered on the verge of bankruptcy and defaulted on the loan agreement of 1927,13 Jones and Anson Phelps- Stokes continued to throw their weight behind Firestone and the State Department. In 1929 when Firestone and the State Department were being charged with using forced labor in Liberia, William Castle moved quickly

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in an attempt to forstall "violent attacks on the part of religious interests... by contacting Rev. Anson Phelps -Stokes...in order to 'put the whole business frankly before him'." In August of 1929, Jesse Jones "provided a semi -official rebuttal to a major public address (by Raymond Leslie Buell of Harvard Univer- sity) attacking Liberian policy. "14 Buell's book, The Native Problem in Africa, and his articles criticizing the State Department's "secret diplomacy" and the injustices of the Firestone loan,15 raised the ire of the Department and Jones. Jones' attack on Buell was coordinated with similar attacks by Castle in Washing- ton and ex- President King in Liberia.16

In January 1933 Jones made another public address defending Firestone.17 With the skill of a seasoned diplomat, he praised the Firestone Company for its "high business principles in dealing with its employees as well as the general public." He gently reprimanded British rubber interests for their part in under- mining the Firestone operations in Liberia. Jones echoed Firestone's view when he maintained that "Until the international financial depression limited the expansion of the Company the economic welfare of Liberia was stimulated and advanced in many directions." Again like a true diplomat, Jones welcomed the investigative activities of Lord Cecil's League of Nation's Committee on Forced Labor in Liberia. But in reality Jones was quite unsympathetic toward Cecil and the Committee. Cecil had made a scathing indictiment of the Firestone operations and was outraged by the rubber baron's refusal to renegotiate the loan agreement of 1927. He had, moreover, criticized Jones for his willingness to give Firestone "what would amount to a mandate over Liberia." Jones relayed his "shock" and "surprise and disappointment" to the State Department at Lord Cecil's remarks. "I am impelled to fear" wrote Jones, "that he has been sub- jected to influences which unjustly reflect on the Firestone Company and possibly even on our State Department." A short time later Jones expressed his regrets to members of the American Colonization Society at the "short- sighted actions of President Barclay and his associates...in breaking its contracts (with Fire- stone)."18

Jones' public support of Firestone, combined with the close affiliation between BWI and the Firestone plantations, led to problems with the Liberian government. From 1930 to 1934 as the government moved toward default, it with- held its grants to BWI. In 1931 Howard Oxley, Sibley's successor as the Phelps - Stokes Fund's Educational Advisor in Liberia, reported that President Barclay refused to meet with him and the education organization had lost prestige with the Liberian government. Anson Phelps- Stokes believed that the attitude of the government towards the organization had deteriorated so much that the lives of its members were in danger.19 In 1933 Jones reported that the conditions in Liberia were "effectively nullifying (the) educational and religious services of (the Fund) in Liberia." Moreover, Liberian government officials "were being rather troublesome" to the principal of BWI. Jones interpreted the government's actions "as an attempt to express their disapproval of our failure to support them in their present policy. "20 Ten years later, the Barclay government had still not forgotten Jones' 'treason'. In 1943 Barclay wrote to Phelps- Stokes explaining that since BWI's Board had failed to hire a black American principal and had, furthermore, "ignored the Liberian point of view," the government had had little interest in supporting BWI.21

BWI's student population became equally hostile toward the Institute but for different reasons. In 1935 students were conscripted by the government to build roads linking the Firestone plantations. Though BWI's principal Paul Rupel and other members of the education organization saw nothing wrong with the assignment, the students themselves felt "betrayed" by the school and Firestone. At the same time as forced labor was being used on road construction, Firestone testified to the League of Nations Committee in defense of the Liberian government and maintained that there was no forced labor in Liberia. BWI's administration

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reported that students no longer "took their lessons seriously." A good number "dropped out of the Institution and school property was being destroyed or stolen." Many of the locals who "had never been convinced that the foreigner's Institute had their best interests at heart ", regarded BWI as "a place to rob and steal all you can get. "22

By way of a summary and conclusion, I will address two questions: What was industrial education and how did the various groups involved in the industrial education program in Liberia view it?

Industrial education of the Tuskegee type was designed primarily to in- still the virtues of hard work, industry and thrift in those it educated. Under Washington's leadership, Tuskegeeism emphasized black self -help, self- reliance and racial advancement through economic achievement rather than political gain. Since Washington demanded that blacks eschew politics, he was criticized by some of his black contemporaries like W.E.B. DuBois, for acceding to the demands of racists. Nevertheless, Washington's dedication to the Tuskegee ideal combined with his personal charisma, lent an air of defiance to industrial education. Consequently, it enjoyed popular black support. After Washington's death in 1915, Tuskegeeism underwent a subtle transformation.23 With Jesse Jones at the helm, industrial education became little more than a training ground for industrial growth. Though Tuskegeeism continued to focus on community uplift, the emphasis on self -reliance and racial advancement was replaced by an appeal for blacks to aid in the exploitation of natural resources and the development of the nation. The philosophy of industry and thrift were now aimed at creating a black work force that would willingly respond to the demands of industry.24 While the new Tuskegeeism enjoyed wide acclaim among philanthropists and indus- trialists seeking to create a stable, productive black community, it lost all legitimacy among blacks. Industrial education offered training in low -level industrial vocations and small -scale agriculture that denied economic opportunities as well as political advancement to blacks.

Of the various groups interested in or involved with the development of Tuskegeeism in Liberia,none figures so prominently as the Phelps- Stokes Fund and Thomas Jesse Jones. They believed that industrial education would coordinate the disorganized American missionary effort in Liberia and that it could transform the Liberian education system from one that emphasized the classical liberal arts tradition to one which taught practical skills. They saw industrial education as a method of erasing poverty, illiteracy and ill- health among Liberia's indigenous population. They also saw that its success might convince the Libe- rian government to participate in public education. In order to implement the plan, Jones relied on the support of other American interests, like the State Department and Firestone, involved with Liberia. In return, he spoke out against those, like Buell and Lord Cecil, who criticized the American presence in Liberia. Since Jones felt the success of industrial education in Liberia depended on the maintenance of cordial relations with the country's largest developer and em- ployer, he courted Firestone and defended American rubber interests in Liberia. In so doing, Jones lost Liberian government support for industrial education. Furthermore, Jones, who seemed to be preoccupied with politicking on behalf of the State Department and Firestone, was diverted from the more mundane responsibilities of running an educational institution. Consequently, during the forced labor crisis, he also lost the support of the African population BWI served.

The State Department's notion of the role of industrial education in Liberia differed somewhat from Jones and the Phelps- Stokes Fund's view. Members of the Department felt that industrial education would help develop an educated middle class in Liberia which would, in turn, give rise to a stable, democratic

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Liberian government that would protect American investments in Liberia. The State Department's belief that industrial education could lead to the formation of a class of educated and trained administrators was entirely wrong. The aim of industrial education was to precipitate a semi -skilled Liberian labor force that would enhance the economic development of the country. Industrial education could perhaps produce a working class that would support the activities.of the middle class, but it could not itself create that middle class.

Harvey Firestone's support of the industrial education plan indicates that he, more than the other Americans, saw the real benefits of Tuskegeeism. If industrial education could create a semi -skilled labor force with sound work habits, it would do nothing but good for the rubber industry. In order to safe- guard his investment, Firestone set up his own schooling system in addition to supporting BWI. This was a wise move in light of BWI's many problems. Never- theless, Jones' support of Firestone and his conviction that it was President Barclay and not Firestone who caused the default crisis of 1933, benefited the industrialist. Firestone sustained the influential support of American religious and educational interests in Liberia by investing heavily in BWI. In the long run this support was far more valuable to Firestone than the actual work of BWI.

The reasons for Liberian government opposition to BWI are less clear than one might suppose. On the one hand, it appears that government officials regarded the industrial education plan as part of a larger American attempt to gain control of Liberia. The government lost faith in BWI when its sponsors failed to support the loan default of 1933 or at least when they refused to declare their neutrality in the matter. On the other hand, since industrial education was aimed at helping the socially, economically and politically oppressed indigenous people of Liberia, the Americo -Liberian elite undoubtedly regarded it as a threat to their dominance. Clearly also the government was offended by the policy of racial discrimination practiced by the BWI Board.

Finally, the hostile attitude of the indigenous people BWI served shows that they saw industrial education as something to be avoided. BWI became associated with forced labor and the worst exploitation of industrial development. Since the BWI program offered few job opportunities, students preferred the liberal arts studies of the various colleges in Liberia. A liberal arts education at least helped pave the way to government service posts and thus provided an opportunity to escape the difficult labor conditions which accompany the development of a plantation economy. Opposition to the Tuskegee program also occurred at a far deeper level. Tuskegeeism, like the liberal arts, replaced, or attempted to replace, African values with Western culture. But where the liberal arts fell on fertile soil in Liberia and throughout Africa, Tuskegeeism sowed the seeds of discontent.25 The American sponsors of Tuskegeeism in Liberia believed the problems the indigenous people faced had been created by a mis- directed liberal arts educational system. Since the indigenous people were preoccupied with climbing the social and political ladder, they were no longer able to cope with the responsibilities of day to day living. In short, Liberia's masses no longer had a sense of community. Tuskegeeism's emphasis on industry, thrift and Christian morality would,Jones hoped, restore this lost sense of community. Thus industrial education was much more than mere training in voca- ional and agricultural skills. It attempted to transform a society at its most fundamental levels in the areas of religion, child raising, language, dress and so on. In truth, Jones had misdiagnosed the source of the problem. The poverty and ill health of the indigenous people had little to do with a lack of community. These people had difficulty supporting themselves because government officials and the Frontier Force persistently confiscated staple crops and goods or recruited labor, in lieu of money tax. Though Jones was well aware of this situation, he put up little resistance to such activities.26 Nor did he appear to realize their effect on the BWI program. The confiscation of crops and forced

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labor requirements were major disincentives to increased agricultural production. Consequently, the indigenous people had little opportunity or desire to implement even the limited skills BWI offered. Similarly, the philosophy of community uplift which was so integral to the BWI program, presented no solutions to the political and social oppression the people of the Liberian hinterland experienced. In the final analysis, those things BWI offered, training in low -level vocational and agricultural skills and a program for community uplift based on a Western cultural model, were outweighed by what Tuskegeeism refused to offer, a program to ensure the political, social and economic development of the indigenous people.

FOOTNOTES

*This article was presented in an earlier form at the Thirteenth Annual Liberian Studies Conference, University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, April 16- 18, 1981. As the records of the Phelps Stokes Fund have been recently transferred to the New York Public Library and are closed for cataloguing, research for this paper has been limited to the American Colonization Society Records. The author would like to express her appreciation to Professor Frank Chalk, Department of History, Concordia University, for his helpful criticisms during the preparation of this paper.

1. For a discussion of the history of the Phelps Stokes Fund, Jones and BWI, see Edward Henry Berman, "Education in Africa and America: A History of the Phelps Stokes Fund, 1911- 1945," (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1969). See also Donald Spivey, Schooling for the New Slavery (West- port, Conn., 1978).

2. "Education in Liberia," a report by James L Sibley, n.d. (c. 1926), American Colonization Society, Series VI, Subject File (ACS,SF), Sibley, James L. (JS); Sibley to Henry L. West, President, American Colonization Society, March 26, 1926, Ibid.; Thomas Jesse Jones, Education in Africa: A Study of West, South and Equatorial Africa by the Phelps Stokes Fund and the Foreign Mission Societies of North America, and Europe (New York, 1922).

3. Donald Spivey, "The African Crusade for Black Industrial Schooling," Journal of Negro History, LXIII (Spring 1972), 12.

4. Minutes, November 28, 1939, ACS,SF, Advisory Committee on Education in Liberia and Booker Washington Institute, 1935 -39.

5. Claude A. Barnet, Director National News Service of the Associated Negro Press, Inc., to Walter Wynn, Principal, BWI, July 27, 1950, ACS,SF, Educa- tion in Liberia and Booker Washington Industrial and Agricultural Institute, 1939 -52.

6. Edward Henry Berman, "Tuskegee -in-Africa," Journal of Negro Education, XIV (Spring 1972), 110.

7. Jones, Education in Africa, 290, 315 -316.

8. Sibley to West, March 6, 1926, ACS,SF,JS.

9. Berman, "Tuskegee -in- Africa," 106 -107.

10. Sibley to West, March 6, 1926, ACS,SF,JS.

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11. Spivey, "The African Crusade," 12 -13.

12. Sidney de la Rue to William Castle, State Department, Washington, November 25, 1926, 882.42/58, Department of State National Archives, Decimal files. (DSNA, DF). Minutes, September 13, 1929, Ibid.

13. Frank Chalk, "The United States and the International Struggle for Rubber, 1914 -1942," (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1970); Frank Chalk, "The Anatomy of an Investment, Firestone's 1927 Loan to Liberia," Canadian Journal of African Studies, I (March 1967), 12 -32.

14. Lloyd N. Beecher, "The State Department and Liberia, 1908 -1941: A Heterogenous Record," (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Georgia, 1971), 152, 158.

15. Raymond Leslie Buell, The Native Problem in Africa, II (New York, 1928); Raymond Leslie Buell, "Mr. Firestone's Liberia," The Nation, 126 (May 1928), 521 -524.

16. Beecher, "The State Department and Liberia," 152.

17. An Address by Dr. Thomas Jesse Jones delivered to the League of Nations Convention, St. Louis, Missouri, January 13, 1933, ACS,SF, Advisory Committee on Education in Liberia and Booker Washington Industrial and Agri- cultural Institute, 1929 -1934 (ACEL 1929 -34).

18. Jones to Ellis O. Briggs, State Department, Washington, February 27, 1933, ACS,SF, State Department 1932 -1936. Jones to West, March 23, 1933, ACS,SF,ACEL 1929 -1934. For a discussion of Jones' support for Firestone, based on the Phelps Stokes Fund records see I.K. Sundiata, Black Scandal: America and the Liberian Labor Crisis, 1929 -1936 (Philadelphia, 1980), 81 -106.

19. Bishop Campbell to L.A. Roy, Secretary and Assistant Treasurer, American Colonization Society, September 19, 1930, ACS,SF,ACEL 1929 -34.

20. Jones to West, March 23, 1933, ACS,SF,ACEL 1929 -34.

21. Edwin Barclay to Anson Phelps Stokes, July 8, 1943, Phelps Stokes Fund File S -2 (1) in Berman, "Tuskegee -in- Africa," 111.

22. Spivey, "The African Crusade," 13 -14.

23. Kenneth James King, Pan Africanism and Education: A Study of Race Philanthropy and Education in the Southern United States of America and East Africa (Oxford, 1971), passim.

24. James D. Anderson, "Education for Servitude: The Social Purposes of Schooling in the Black South, 1870 -1930," (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Illinois, 1973).

25. King, Pan Africanism and Education, passim.

26. Minutes, January 19, 1931, ACS,SF,ACEL 1929 -34.

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Steven H. Gale Missouri Southern State College

The history of drama in Liberia is a mixture of interesting paradoxes, in part growing out of the history of the country itself. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the American Colonization Society of Massachusetts transported freed slaves to West Africa from the United States and the Caribbean. These former slaves carried with them a common language, English, and a vague knowledge of American and European literary traditions. Some of the men who became the leaders of the newly formed Republic of Liberia, such as Edward W. Blyden, Joseph J. Roberts, and Alexander Crummell, were well educated in the classical tradition, however, and were acquainted with Greek and Elizabethan plays (the early curriculum of the University of Liberia, founded in 1863, is remarkable in its attention to these areas, as well as Arabic subjects). As a result, Liberian drama has had a strong American /European taste from the beginning. This has been reinforced by the fact that the settlers, the Americo - Liberian community, have held political and economic power since the first landings, so their taste has been imposed on all others. What support there is for the theatre in Liberia derives substantially from these Americo- Liberians and from the American and European diplomatic corps stationed in the capital city of Monrovia.

There have been other influences on the development of a native drama in Liberia, of course. Very few of the ex- slaves who settled in Liberia had originally come from this part of Africa, and each ethnic group brought some remnants of their ethnic lore with them. In addition, those emigrants from the Caribbean had been exposed to different literary traditions than those from the United States proper.

Furthermore, there was already extant in Liberia a body of drama which belonged to the indigenous population. Interestingly, this work has been largely ignored until recently, partly perhaps because there are at least sixteen major language groups recognized in the country, and partly because of the Americo - Liberian's clear bias against anything aboriginal. It may be, however, that these African traditions will ultimately be the source of a truly Liberian national drama.

Most of the African drama is oral and very little has been recorded. In the main it consists of dancing and singing which precedes, accompanies, and follows events such as plantings, harvests, marriages, and funerals. Even activities such as iron smelting and clothes washing are accompanied by ritual and singing. The ceremonies concerned with everyday village life that were performed for me at a small up- country town near Cuttington College in 1974 tended to be fairly short and very repetitious.

Another group of dramatic ceremonies are performed in association with the bush schools, semi- secret religious societies responsible for rites of passage initiations. In Liberia the young males attend the Poro society and the young females attend the Sande society. After the training of the children is

Liberian Studies Journal IX, 2 (1980 -81) 69

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complete, there are a series of public ceremonies to celebrate their initiation into the society. These rites often take place over a period of eight days. The first event on the graduation program for the girls of the Kendeja Sande

Grove, for instance, is the introduction of a new Yavi ( ) or male masker who introduces the ceremonies. On the second or third day the "Dee Tue"

( ) ceremony is performed. This involves the pounding of rice into a

meal for the performance of a special rite. A new Zowoba ( ), another

masker, is also introduced. On the following day during the "Bongdaa" ( ) ceremony the girls are ushered into the town from the grove where they have been

taking instruction in the society's traditions. The "Kengo Jila" ( ) ceremony on the next day is an exhibition of Sande dances for the entertainment of the public. The fifth day is taken up with washing the initiates as part of the purification rites. This is followed on the sixth day by a ceremony called "Sii Bahn Kolo" ( ) -- dressing and seating the girls in the kitchen where they remain for three days. At the end of the three day waiting period,

the Mazowo ( ) or Grand Matron of the Bondokuu ( ), or Grove, also

known as the Mazo ( ), leads the "Keng Soma" ( ) ceremony, the stepping down from the kitchen, after which the girls are set free by the Mazo ( ) and take their places in the society. These ceremonies are still performed in Monrovia and not only is it a common sight to see youngsters naked from the waist up with their faces and bodies painted white as a sign that they are going through the initiation process, but sisters within the society remain quite close to one another in the secular world, relying on each other in business, politics, education, charity work, and so forth. Clearly this is one form of drama that is still an important and influential aspect of the quotidian life of modern Liberians, even though it remains unrecorded in print.

One of the few Liberian dramas to appear in print is a meni -pélee recorded by Ruth M. Stone in Sanoyea in August 1970.1 This musical- dramatic folktale (meni -pélee translates literally as "playing matter ") is performed by a master story teller, two male soloists, and a chorus of six women, and is related to the form of folktale narration among the Kpelle that is performed without music or additional participants. Stone's meni -pélee is a familiar one among the Kpelle and tells the story of an orphan boy and a woman with no relatives who are brought together. In the course of the plot various animals are magically called to be killed for food and the tale illustrates the traditional values of love, as exemplified in the mother -son relationship, and the "need to respect traditional law as symbolized in the law of nature making the boar and palm kernel natural enemies. "2

It is a promising sign that more attention is now being paid to this body of traditional drama. Mary L. Gross and Loba Moore (the wife of Bai T. Moore, Liberia's only published novelist), for example, are gaining reputations as skilled adapters of Liberian folktales and parables for dramatic presentations for elementary school children.3 Gross's Home Again, a short playlet about a young boy who goes into the woods to hunt for berries against his mother's advice

( "the woods are very dangerous. . . . you will get lost "4) and must be rescued by his father from kidnappers is typical, demonstrating that anyone who violates the traditional laws of society must face the consequences. The aim of these pieces is to be simple and charming while transmitting traditional values.

Another extremely hopeful sign is the increasing attention being paid to performances of the Liberian Ministry of Information, Cultural Affairs, and Tourism's National Cultural Troupe. Due to the enthusiasm and encouragement of Kona Khasu, who will be discussed in more detail below, the troupe is actively involved in several programs a year in which they perform short plays based on Liberian folktales. The sketches are generally a combination of a traditional drama and Khasu's creativity. These simple, unsophisticated playlets are re- freshingly entertaining. The Medicine That Detects a Lie, for instance, is about

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a man who suspects his wife of having a boyfriend. Being disturbed by his suspicion, he plans to induce her to confess the truth and at a friend's urging he buys a "lie- detector medicine." Whenever anyone tells the possessor of this medicine a lie, they receive beatings until they tell the truth. The husband is very happy with his medicine until he discovers that he, too, is liable to receive a beating whenever he lies.

Another sketch, Moon Light Dance, tells of a young girl who goes into the forest alone one moon -lit night to dance. Two passing drummers hear her and each tries to convince her that he is handsomer and stronger than the other. When she cannot make up her mind which to choose for a partner, they become annoyed and leave. As soon as the drummers leave, the girl's boyfriend appears and they begin to "play love games in the moonlight." An old woman sees them and advises that they go home: "The moonlight brings out forest demons." The two lovers tease the old lady, though, and laugh at her, not believing her "until it is too late. "5 A third dance -drama presented by the National Cultural Troupe is called The Leopard Ballet. This play relates the story of a man -eating leopard that is unnatural in its ability to escape death at the hands of even the most experienced hunters. The chief of the clan decrees that whoever succeeds in killing the leopard shall have his most beautiful daughter to marry and an intensive hunt for the leopard by the clan's four most powerful magicians begins. All four return, each claiming to have killed the big cat, and a contest is organized to determine which of them was truly responsible for the leopard's death.

The examples cited above indicate that Liberia is still in a relatively early stage of dramatic development. There is no fully developed written tradition in literature in Liberia and no truly professional actors or writers in the country. What development there has been has been based on the foreign drama brought by the educated members of the colonizing groups or introduced in literature classes at one of the nation's two colleges. The first dramas written in Liberia of any literary merit were written to be performed during the centennial celebration of Liberia's Declaration of Independence in 1947. These plays include the late Roland Dempster's short piece, The Office Genius, and Dr. Garretson W. Gibson's historical work, The Constitutional Convention, which was staged under the direction of Mrs. Doris Banks Henries, wife of the former Speaker of the House. Dempster is said to have left manuscripts of two plays, one of which he called The Search for Truth. Gibson, a former Minister of Education, is not known to have written any other plays for the stage. His The Constitutional Convention is a dramatization of the events that led to the signing of Liberia's Declaration of Independence in 1847.6

This seems to represent a pattern developed in Liberian dramatic literature in that the writers of creative literature in Liberia are not professional authors (with the recent exception of a few newsmen) and therefore must earn a living in a way other than writing. Literature, therefore, is a hobby and only one or two works are produced in a writer's lifetime. Mrs. Henries, who directed The Constitutional Convention in 1947, is typical of this pattern. She produced Tubman of Africa, a five -act pageant, for Liberia's President Tubman in 1962, and she wrote The Father of Our Country in honor of the sesquicentennial of the birth of Liberia's first President, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, which was performed by students at the University of Liberia. Her most recent work is The Landing of the Pioneers, published in 1971. The Landing of the Pioneers details the organization of the American Colonization Society's program for sending the first shipload of settlers to Liberia aboard the Elizabeth, ship- board adventures, the landing, and the first confrontations with the African population. Like most drama to this point, it is basically wooden because it is filled with patriotic cliches and the characters are too revered as historical personages to become real figures on the stage.7

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Another play performed in 1962 was Fatima Massaquoi Fanbulleh's One Hundred Years of Struggle, which chronicles the evolution of the University of Liberia from its founding as Liberia College in 1863 to its present status.8 This play, appropriately created by a prominent university faculty member, was produced in conjunction with the University of Liberia's Centenary Celebration.

The most proficient Liberian dramatist to date is Lester R. Parker, who has scripted six plays, beginning with Till You Return in 1959, and including Monkey Works (based on a Liberian proverb and considered his second best play), Fear in the Morning, and The Human Vacuum (written in 1965).9 Parker's most recent and most ambitious script is They Shall the Dust Return, a still unper- formed philosophical work written in 1970. This play shows a great deal of potential and will probably be very effective on the stage with a little re- writing to take into account certain limitations in staging. It deals with a man's relationship with his teen -aged granddaughter. Seeing her in an amorous embrace with her boyfriend, the grandfather philosophizes on the nature of life and death and then burns down the house as he holds her unconscious body in the living room in an attempt to keep her pure. Although there are a few Liberian undertones, unfortunately the drama is set in a mid -western American city in the early 1970's. While it is a very promising piece of writing, there is nothing essentially Liberian in it and it is indistinguishable from plays written in the United States.

Parker may represent the beginning of a new trend in Liberian drama, however, for while he is a professional radio and television journalist, at least his work and his hobby are related. As a professional writer, he has devoted more time to creative writing than most of his predecessors or contemporaries, perhaps because he has a better understanding of writing technique due to his training in journalism at an American university.

Another contemporary Liberian dramatist who has professional training in the theatre is Kona Khasu, mentioned above, who received a Master's degree in theatre from an American institution. Khasu, formerly Director of Cultural Affairs in the Ministry of Information, Cultural Affairs, and Tourism, is probably the most professionally and scholarly oriented of all Liberian dramatists. Although he has written only a few plays so far, Mania Asumana (1970) beine his most important, he has taught theatre arts on the college level, and he has done some drama criticism, including essays on "The Theatre in Traditional Africa" and "African Theatre -- Colonial and Post -Colonial." In the final analysis, though, his importance may rest on his efforts with the Cultural Troupe, for he provided a needed service in this capacity and his writing was not for the public per se, much of it being created improvizationally for Cultural Troupe performances. When he attempts to write serious drama, as he did in Homage to Africa, staged in 1974, his radical third world, nationalistic, anti -American beliefs are so strong that he can only produce broad rhetoric of the worst kind. It is a mark of the level of theatre in Liberia, however, that such work is highly praised.

Although Liberian drama is still definitely in the formative stage, there does seem to be increasing interest in the dramatic form of expression among young Liberians, with several other young authors beginning to try their hands at playwriting. Partly stimulating this interest and partly reflecting it is the growth of little theatre groups. The University of Liberia's student dramatic club, the University Players, first came into being in the early 1950's and was responsible for sporadic presentations growing out of interest in drama department courses. Visiting Professor of English Robert Arthur Plowman put the Players on a more regular basis in 1960 and the group was so successful that they were invited to participate in the International University Theatre Festival in Nancy, France during the summer of 1967. They performed two different produc- tions, the better of them being The Wind of Change, a drama written by the

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students themselves (the second was a fifteen minute one -act piece). Much of the current support of drama in Liberia has grown out of students who were connected with the University Players in the mid- 1960's -- Charles Minor, Lester Parker, Kona Khasu, and others. Shortly after the Nancy performance, the University Players became defunct as those most interested graduated, but in 1973 Visiting Professor Jean Bell Manning of Paul Quinn College and Steven Gale, a Fulbright Professor from the University of Florida, revived the group. In 1974 -75 the University Players were still active, under the direction of Vashti Padmore who was trained at Harvard, presenting a minimum of one program a semester alternating short African and American plays. An alumna of the Players, Miss Gledy Badio, is recognized as the country's most accomplished thespian. A second university group has performed occasionally at Cuttington College, and several high schools, particularly St. Patrick's have held performances, too.

Ultimately, if Liberia is to have a truly native drama, it will have to grow out of programs like these. At this time, however, the most consistently successful little theatre group in Liberia is the Monrovia Players. Established in 1960 by Donald Upton, the British Advisor to the General Post Office at that time, the Monrovia Players has staged well over thirty English and American plays at the rate of about two a year. The acting is at a high level, and the business community supports the group nicely. If nothing else, the Monrovia Players have kept alive the idea of live theatre in Liberia and have served as a means of exposing the general public to drama on a regular basis. American Peace Corps teachers and British Volunteers have also helped by carrying the concept of dramatic presentations with them on their up- country assignments. The major problem that plagues all little theatre groups in Liberia at the moment is the lack of suitable facilities.

Finally, the Ministry of Education created the Society of Liberian Authors several years ago. Although still basically amaturist in practice, the Society offers help to all serious Liberian writers in the form of workshops, lectures, readings, and so forth, and like the coffee houses of eighteenth century England, the atmosphere of mutual criticism provides the average Libe- rian writer with a critical perspective that he is not likely to acquire in any other way. Most of the aspiring young participants favor novels and short stories, but there are several who are attempting to learn playwriting.

The two very different lines in Liberian drama, the ritual drama of the indigenous population and the conventions adopted from traditional Western drama, are slowly beginning to evolve into what may some day become a truly Liberian drama. There has always been popular support of drama in Liberia, and there is now emerging a body of writers and actors with sufficient experience and talent to guide the blending of Liberian elements (in part with the stimulus of the nationalistic movement) and the more established traditions from the American and European theatre. Other influences are starting to appear, too: emigrants from other African nations, especially Nigeria and the Ivory Coast, are bringing new ideas and customs with them from their more dramatically sophisticated backgrounds and the itinerant Manding traders carry elements from culture to culture as they travel, often reflecting their Muslim taste.

The agrarian based African dramas have heretofore been attended almost exclusively by Liberians who live in the small villages in Liberia's interior. With the activities of the National Cultural Troupe, these dramas are now being seen in Monrovia. Furthermore, many of the rural Liberians who have moved to the capital city now occasionally attend plays presented by one of the little theatre groups. The dichotomy between the two strains that are ingredients in the growth of a national drama are evident in the audience's reactions at one of these little theatre group performances. At the University, parents who never went to grade school now come to watch their college- student children act. Most

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verbal humor based on witty word play tends to be ignored, but events with a tragic cast, such as the announcement of the illness or death of a character, are typically greeted by roars of laughter. As director, I had instructed the cast about when to pause for laughter in plays that I was familiar with, but even though the students demonstrated that they understood the humor in American and British works, the audience did not react as I had anticipated. At other times, laughter unaccountably errupted. After analyzing these incidents, I determined that they were invariably associated with sickness or death. The humor in Douglas Turner Ward's Happy Ending, for instance, was largely unappre- ciated, while the unexpected death of the witch doctor in James Ene Henshaw's Companion for a Chief brought several minutes of sustained laughter when presented on the same program at the University in December 1973. The audience is still like Partridge at the performance of Hamlet in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones -- they talk constantly, keeping up a running commentary on the action as they tell one another what is happening, and shouting warnings and advice to the characters on stage. It sounds like an old -fashioned revival meeting at times as they voice their approval of what is being said with shouts of "That's right."

The audience's reactions are refreshing because the viewers are intensely involved in what is happening. With this kind of popular enthusiasm behind it, Liberian drama may become exciting as African elements are incorporated in the Western dramatic forms that have constituted accepted Liberian drama to this point. It is to be hoped that the hybrid will draw on the best of both conventions.

FOOTNOTES

1. Ruth M. Stone, "Meni- Pelee: A Musical -Dramatic Folktale of the Kpelle," Liberian Studies Journal, IV, 1 (1971 -72), 31 -46.

2. Ibid., 32.

3. These activities were described to me by Gross, Moore, Mrs. Armstrong (University of Liberia librarian), Jangaba Johnson, Kona Khasu, and Lester Parker in discussions throughout the spring of 1974.

4. Mary L. Gross, Home Again, unpublished, undated manuscript.

5. Program for the Ministry of Information, Cultural Affairs, and Tourism presentation "Kendeja Comes to You," May 31, 1974, a performance that I attended.

6. Manuscripts for these works have been unavailable; references are based on discussions with Mrs. Henries during the spring of 1974.

7. Doris Banks Henries, The Landing of the Pioneers, privately published in Monrovia.

8. No known copy exists. The play was described to me by Mrs. Armstrong in the winter of 1973.

9. I have seen these works in manuscript form only; they have not been published.

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Gerald M. Erchak Skidmore College

"As individuals express their life,(sic), so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production."

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels The German Ideology

"With a better understanding of the African social structure, an educationalist would be able to adopt a practical theory and method to suit the situation, and to satisfy the African aspira- tion, so that education, instead of creating confusions, might help to promote progress, and at the same time to preserve all that is best in the traditions of the African people and assist them to create a new culture which, though its roots are still in the soil, is yet modified to meet the pressure of modern conditions."

Jomo Kenyatta Facing Mt. Kenya

When considering the role of education in development in a country such as Liberia, one must investigate traditional informal education as well as modern formal education and how these two forms relate to modernization and to each other. In other words, one must investigate the complex interplay between the two "developments," that of the child and that of the national economy. Ed- ucation and economy are the twin engines necessary for a national take -off into the "higher heights" of modernization.2 Both are necessary for flight; if one malfunctions, the other goes down as well, taking the people with it.

INFORMAL EDUCATION

In the early seventies; I undertook to investigate the early experience antecedents of the poor performance of Kpelle children in the spreading Western - style schools of Liberia.3 If the children were failing in school, as they clearly were in large numbers4 (Gay and Cole, 1967), what contribution could they possibly make to a developing modern economy? Conversely, from where were new economic and business ventures to draw their skilled and educated employees? My study employed a cultural, ethnographic frame of reference and utilized the systematic observation of the behavior and interaction of children and adults as the primary methodology.5 (Erchak, 1977:71 -98, 206 -216). Although the

75 Liberian Studies Journal, IX, 2 (1980-81)

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subjects were Kpelle, the findings have general relevance to all of rural Liberia.

While I studied traditional education and socialization in general, quantitative data were collected only on the first six years of life -- the early learning environment -- since I believed then, and believe now, that the pre -school years are formative in shaping the child's intellectual development and orientation toward schooling. The guiding thesis was materialist: that child- training practices and other aspects of informal early education are in large part adaptations to ecological and economic realities. I referred to this appraoch as "the economics of early education."

The findings of this research have been published elsewhere;6 it is not my intention to review them here. However, some brief examples will illustrate the adaptation of the learning environment to material factors. For example, if the Kpelle early learning environment is largely adapted to the exigencies of the Kpelle subsistence base, then this adaptation should be reflected in sex differences in child behavior and training practics. Such was indeed the case: sex differences in child training and behavior clearly reflected task assignment and anticipated adult economic role. They were further shown to stem from the needs of mothers and other adults in performing subsistence tasks. In other words, sex differences were shown to be materially, rather than psy- chologically, based. Similarly, developmental trends, as indicated by differences in behavior and training between age groups, have material bases. They were found to reflect increasing responsibility in task assignment and increased self-reliance, increasing productivity within the household, and progress toward adult economic roles. Some age differences in behavior stemmed from caretakers' needs in performing required tasks, for example, keeping a child "out of the way" or preventing a child from contaminating the drinking water.

In sum, the exigencies of Kpelle subsistence horticulture seemed to direct child training and behavior along certain lines. Kpelle child rearing and behavior was and is well adapted to the Liberian rain forest environment, as well as to the economic imperatives of Kpelle life. The adaptive process operates within the Kpelle child's early learning environment, principally through the following means: (1) mothers' and other caretakers' needs and requirements while caring for children and carrying out subsistence activities at the same time; (2) differential task assignment of older and younger children and of boys and girls; (3) subsistence, domestic, and responsibility training of children in anticipation of adult economic roles; and (4) children's cognition of perceived adult economic roles and the imitative practice of same. In Kpelle society and, I would expect, other rural Liberian societies, these four appear to be the main factors at work forming and maintaining the early learning environment and thereby shaping children's nonsocial behavior as well as adult /child and child /adult social interaction. The resultant learning environment is a survival mechanism in Kpelle cultural evolution, helping to produce the personalities and patterns of thinking needed to maintain Kpelle society. The Kpelle subsistence economy is a precarious one, characterized by seasonal hunger and periodic famine; the traditional early learning environment removes a great deal of error from this precarious system and helps maintain the deli- cate balance between the people and the tropical forest. Kpelle culture in the past could not afford the competitors, entrepreneurs, innovators, and other deviants essential to a modern economy.

FORMAL EDUCATION

Western education in Liberia is for the most part American- style,

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utilizing American and British texts designed for American and British students, and is a patchwork of four main types of school: (a) Liberian government schools staffed by Liberian, Peace Corps, and other volunteer teachers; (b) mission schools; (c) private and corporation schools, e.g., those of Firestone Plantations Company; (d) private Liberian "tutorial" schools, i.e., classes operated by an enterprising individual with some education for a small monthly fee. These schools are having a far -reaching effect on the Kpelle and other rural Liberian peoples, both parents and children; they are disrupting the traditional way of life, and training children to be kwii -- foreign, strange, Liberian, educated. When this process starts, it is irreversible, as Kpelle elders are well aware. Schooling and wage labor have irrevocably altered Kpelle society.

The Kpelle schoolchild has neither completely rejected traditional Kpelle culture nor embraced kwii culture; he is caught in the middle, a point emphasized by Cole and his fellow researchers.7 In Kien -taa,8 the village where I carried out most of my research, the elders expressed a great desire to have a school in their village, yet few had any interest in the local private school, perhaps because of the tuition. In many other areas, and everywhere until recently, the Kpelle were very much against Western schooling: it is disruptive, makes children lose respect for their elders, and makes them lose interest in rice -farming. On the other hand, the occasional son who obtains employment might put a zinc roof on his father's house. The result today is an ambivalence toward schooling.

A child who enters school is taking a step in the direction of becoming kwii. He may eventually leave school and return to a traditional life -- the pressures are often tremendous to do so -- but while in school a child is en- gaging in kwii behavior. Increasing numbers of parents now perceive the inevi- tability of modernization and reluctantly send their children, especially boys, to school. Many of them become disillusioned when they realize what a long process schooling is, and stop supporting their children in school. The result is often numbers of individuals with enough education to disdain farming but not enough to even get promoted beyond the third or fourth grade, let alone obtain the white -collar jobs they dream of. Such dropouts remain "tied to (their families) and the more slowly changing world of the partially educated Kpelle adult. "9 Rather than functioning as a sociocultural broker between the Kpelle village and the modern nation of Liberia, the school often generates tensions and conflicts in values. John Gay and Michael Cole have studied this problem:

All these difficulties have a focal point in the Western -oriented schools. The schools could ease this period of culture conflict by giving it some focus and order. But the schools...often seem to be doing just the opposite, despite the good intentions and earnest efforts of supervisors and visiting experts. Children are taught things that have no point or meaning within their culture. There is no framework within which comprehension might be possible. What might be valuable and useful in tribal life is by- passed, and meaningful points of contact with the people ignored.1°

School activities are usually baffling and meaningless for the Kpelle schoolchild. Knowledge is generally accepted by Kpelle children on the basis of the authority of the person who possesses the knowledge. Hence, school material is accepted on the basis of the teacher's authority alone. The teacher gives the answer; the student memorizes it. Liberian teachers encourage this authoritarian approach to learning: the teacher in the Kien -taa area used corporal punishment liberally, particularly when students assaulted his authority by asking too many questions.

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The material learned is for the most part irrelevant to the child's experience, and poorly- trained teachers do not improve the situation. Meaning- less facts are simply memorized and regurgitated. The Kien -taa students chanted after the teacher. The main methods for learning "are rote memory and clever guessing based on familiar cues ".11 The child imitates the teacher's words simply because he is told to do so and wants to please the teacher. In addition, the Western way of life the child is presented through school is alien and confusing. This conflict is compounded by some teachers who treat the traditional Kpelle way of life as inferior, primitive, and demeaning. Writing itself is totally new to the child. Perhaps he has only seen the clan chief's clerk write before entering school.

These conflicts and contrasts produce an ambivalence in the Kpelle child. In one study, Kpelle high -school students expressed rejection of much of Kpelle culture and a desire for a Western life-style, complete with wealth, power, and leisure; at the same time, they planned to return to their home villages to make improvements there and, in a sense, "convert" their kin to Western ways.12 In Kien -taa, a visiting student expressed his desire to bring "electricity to the whole place."

The ambivalence of the child is often aggravated by the hostility of the adults of the village toward the student's accomplishments and the lack of comprehension of what Western schooling entails. Cole interviewed elders in a community in Zokwele chiefdom, asking them how a child should change as a result of having been educated in a western school:

They stressed that the child should learn...right and wrong, the history, customs, and traditions of his people, respect for the elders of the community, and skills at making a living. The methods they suggested for learning were as traditional as the changes desired in a child. These elders felt that a child who does not listen should be beaten or else told frightening stories ...He should be advised how to correct his mistakes and be allowed to watch his elders as they perform their daily tasks. The ideal educational product is one who will respect his elders, make a living, know the traditions, and be courageous.13

These elders would likely have given the same opinions if asked how a child should change after having attended Poro school:

EDUCATION AND ADAPTATION

Given all of the above findings, it is no wonder that Kpelle and many other rural Liberian children perform poorly in Western -style schools. In fact, it would be most surprising if they were to do well in school. The school environment is alien to the Kpelle child, unrelated to the skills and characteris- tic thinking patterns he has acquired in the first few years of life. He is unprepared for this new environment and does not usually adapt to the school, even after several years: ways of thinking and behaving acquired in the first years of life are the most difficult to alter. In addition, he does not have the same motivation to learn the new skills that he had when he began to learn those skills needed for Kpelle life. The technical and social skills the child is interested in and has begun to learn have no place in the classroom. Exam- ples and subjects taught in school deal with nothing relevant to the Kpelle child's experience. The child's keen observational skills are of little use in school. Relational thinking, characterized by the use of proverbs, can only lead to chastisement and confusion in the classroom. In short, the Kpelle

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early learning environment is virtually antithetical to the Western -style school environment. To the Kpelle, the premises of the school are absurd, the activities bizarre.

The traditional learning environment is constrained by, and adapted to, ecological /economic imperatives which are still operative when the child at- tends school; the child's thinking and behaving continue to adapt to his home environment and the child grows further away from the patterns of thought and action needed to do well in school. The school must be part of the material forces that shape the early learning environment, part of the total environment, part of Kpelle culture, if Kpelle children are to perform optimally.

At present, schools in the Liberian interior exist in a sociocultural vacuum largely because they are not perceived as leading to jobs. Therefore, there is little motivation to attend, and even less to achieve in school, and rightly so at present. To alter this situation, the early learning environment must be compatible with schooling; it must be adapted to the same environment to which the school environment is adapted, that is, a modern socioeconomic structure. Where this structure is irrelevant to daily life, as in Liberia and in much of the Third World as well as in Western urban ghettoes, the school will be irrelevant, the early learning environment, as in the Kpelle case, will be adapted to a traditional way of life, and children will continue to perform poorly in school.

CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Successful modernization demands that child development and economic development be synchronized. The socioeconomic forces which ultimately cause the mutual irrelevance of the everyday experience of the rural poor and the school environment must change if schooling is to be successful. The unilateral introduction and promotion of schools will not modernize Liberia; nor will the unilateral introduction of modern economic enterprises. The relationship between education and economy is dialectic; a modern social formation results when both are attacked simultaneously.

Without drastic changes in the Liberian national economy which might substantially alter the lives of rural people as well as of the urban poor, the Kpelle early learning environment will continue to be adapted to a different reality than that of the Western -style schools, and Kpelle children will continue to perform poorly in those schools. At least two basic changes are necessary if this cycle is to be altered: employment opportunities other than subsistence horticulture, and adult literacy must be accessible. Without availa- bility of employment alternatives upon reaching adulthood, there is very little reason to attend school and the student's motivation is low. John Ogbu, a Nigerian anthropologist who has studied schools in the U.S. as well as elsewhere, accurately refers to the process and the resultant school failure as "adaptation to limited opportunity. "14 There must be ways in which education, once achieved, can be put to use. Massive adult illiteracy is a second major obstacle to achieving continuity between home and school learning environments. Without adult literacy, there is little likelihood that an early learning environment compatible with the school environment will arise. Paulo Freire's (1970; 1973) highly successful program for adult literacy in Latin America could surely be modified for use in Liberia. Freire sees literacy as a means of objectifying the socioeconomic environment through political action.15

Other changes would facilitate the transition to a developed Liberia. Traditional early learning environments are neither "deficient" nor "deprived,"

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and accordingly should be built upon in the Liberian schools. Bicultural curricula emphasizing both Kpelle and Liberian culture should be introduced along with bilingual instruction. English should be taught as a second language rather than the only language of instruction. Teaching methods must be devised to stimulate noncontextual thinking; Paulo Freire's work is again relevant in this area. Agricultural extension education should probably have precedence over certain traditional subjects, given the largely agrarian Li- berian economy.

The Kpelle learning environment will not be altered without change in the total environment. The nature and direction of that change must be determined by the "total involvement "16 of the Kpelle and other Liberian peoples. The International Year of the Child (1979), when I first presented this essay, seemed like an especially good year for the policy -makers of Liberia and elsewhere to look seriously into the links between child development and economic development. The situation in the new Liberia is even more urgent now, but at the same time, the new government offers opportunities for revolutionary change.

FOOTNOTES

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Liberian Studies Association held at Howard University, Washington, D.C. April 5 -7, 1979.

2. "Total involvement for higher heights" was a principal slogan of the overthrown William Tolbert administration.

3. Field research in Liberia was carried out in 1970 -71 and was financed in large part by a Fulbright Grant. Portions of this paper have appeared in somewhat modified form in Gerald Erchak, Full Respect: Kpelle Children in Adaptation (New Haven, 1977).

4. John Gay and Michael Cole, The New Mathematics and an Old Culture: A Study of Learning Among the Kpelle of Liberia (New York, 1967).

5. Erchak, Full Respect, 71 -98, 206 -216.

6. For example, Erchak, Full Respect.

7. Michael Cole, et.al., The Cultural Context of Learning and Thinking (New York, 1971), 48.

8. "Kien -taa" (Pepper-town) is a pseudonym.

9. Cole, Cultural Context, 48.

10. Gay and Cole, New Mathematics, 7.

11. Ibid., 34.

12. Cole, et.al., Cultural Context, 54 -57.

13. Ibid., 51 -52.

14. John Ogbu, The Next Generation (New York, 1974) and Minority Educa- tion and Caste (New York, 1978).

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15. Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom (Cambridge, MA., 1970) and The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York, 1973).

16. See Note 2.

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OF KRU LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY1

L. B. Breitborde Beloit College

This article presents data which suggest an argument underscoring the role of urban social organization in the emergence of a Kru polity and Kru language. Generally, I am concerned with how the amalgamation of socially distinct groups into the Kru "tribe" is related to the internal dialect diversity that characterizes the Kru language. But while the social and linguistic variation internal to the Kru are widely known, it is the purpose of this article to examine these issues as they pertain to the Monrovia Kru community, and also to suggest that aspects of the urban setting itself helped to shape the parameters of Kru ethnicity and language for the country as a whole.

The problem with trying to attach the Kru language to a distinct social group is two -fold. On the one hand, the attempt to place Kru within a classification of African languages is beset with difficulties based on the problem of defining the Kru language itself. On the other hand, attempts to delimit the language must take into account a proliferation of distinct local groups and the dialects which their members speak -- and here there is not a very neat correlation.

Most of the major classifications of African languages have difficulty when they try to accommodate the similarity in the languages spoken along the coast of West Africa from Monrovia southeast to the Cassandra River in Ivory Coast. Greenberg (1966), for example, uses Kru to label a language group consisting of six languages (Kra, Grebo Bassa, Bete, Bakwe, De). The Kru group is a member of the Kwa sub -family of the Niger -Congo family. The difficulty here is that, according to this listing, the majority of Kru people in Liberia today would speak none of the languages listed in the Kru group. Only Greenberg's Kra could be cited as being spoken by some of the Kru people today. Kra is a label given most often to the language spoken by people in five settlements in the central portion of the coast, called the Five Towns. The term Kra seems to be used as a way to disambiguate a classification that otherwise would claim something like this: "The Kru language is a member of the Kru language group and is spoken by the Kru people." This is obviously not a very informative claim. What is at issue is the meaning of the "Kru language" as well as the referents of the "Kru people ". Ambiguities in the use of Kru in more than one sense are a result of a situation where even in recent history and, to an extent, at the present time, the language and ethnic referents of the term are not homogeneous entities.

The ways in which the label Kru has been used to describe people have involved not only scholarly efforts by historians and linguists but also the

Liberian Studies Journal, IX, 2 (1980 -81) 83

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practical day -to -day administrative decisions of Liberian government officials. There are no indications that the investigations of the former have played any significant role in the decisions of the latter. However, published accounts of the history of the southeastern Liberian coast do suggest some aspects of the relationship among social groups that shaped the conditions in which political decisions were made.

There are various documentary sources and oral traditions which account for the arrivals and movements of dialect -associated groups of people on the Kru Coast. The picture that emerges is one of two main population movements. The first was parallel to the coast and links the people known today as Kru with 16th century polities controlling the northern coastal area. The second was perpendicular to the coast and links the Kru people with relatively recent migrations (1800s) from an interior kingdom to the southern coastal area. The peoples involved in these movements clashed with each other, competing for a relatively small number of favorable settlements along the coast. The peoples in the interior, behind these coastal groups, do not have much of a documented history, but it is known that those groups repeatedly tried to establish themselves on the coast but were repelled and they regrouped back into the interior (Schroeder and Massing 1970:19).3

These groups of people were probably localized patrilineal descent groups and still exist today in the form of localized patriclans. They are called dakf (sing. daka) and are referred to in Liberian historical documents by the term "tribe" and "subtribe ". The daka was the largest social group, although there were cases of temporary confederations and cooperation among several of them from time to time. It is on the dak3 that one must focus in examining the relations between Kru ethnicity and Kru language, since not only is each daka associated with a distinct dialect, but also because it is through their relations over time with each other, with European traders, and with the Liberian government, that a Kru ethnic identity and language took shape.

I will not review those economic and political interrelationships here since there are a number of accounts that provide this information (Davis 1975, 1976; Sullivan 1978; Brooks 1972). Suffice it to say, by way of summary, that the economic relations appear to be the source from which emerged the association of certain dakf with trading and shipping, and the probable linguistic confusion that resulted in a sense of the term Kru as an ethnic label. This, of course, has been noted by many recent researchers in this area, and the link between the development of a Kru ethnic group and the emergence of the concept of a Kru "language" has also been discussed (Breitborde 1976 -77). However, while there has been awareness that social distinctions internal to the Kru were related to Kru dialect differences, these differences have, for the most part, been discussed in terms of what constitutes "real" or "proper" Kru (i.e., usually the dialects associated with the dakÇ which comprise the Five Towns, e.g., Koelle 1854, Dalby and Hair 1964: 190 -91, de Lavergne de Tressan 1953: 133 -143, Greenberg 1966). On the other hand, if it is true that the social processes by which a Kru ethnic group was created are also the processes through which the boundaries of their "language" were defined, we would want to examine very carefully those processes for clues to explain the linguistic relationships among the Kru dialects which we know to exist. And it is in this regard that the urban data may be significant.

The importance of the urban data is two -fold. Firstly, there is some evidence that in the early history of the republic the form of social relations within the Kru migrant community of Monrovia, and between them and the settler government, may have influenced the boundaries of the concepts "Kru people" and "Kru language ". Secondly, there is a pattern to the clustering of dakf for administrative purposes among the Monrovia Kru which is reflected in independently

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collected data on the linguistic interrelationships of Kru dialects. While the primary data I present here address this second point, it is perhaps useful to briefly consider the first.

By the middle 1800s, the settler government had gained legal ownership of Kru coastal lands through treaties and purchases (see Sullivan 1978 and Davis 1975). While the Monrovia government may have had great difficulty in establishing their political administration on the coast, the settlers were very active in commercial activities throughout the area. Not all the particulars of Americo -Liberian administration along the coast during this period are known. But it is clear that in their policy and treatment of that coastal area, the government operated on the basis of a concept of a "Kru people" who populated that area; and the dakf in that area eventually responded in those terms as well (Davis 1976:11).

There may be reason to believe that the Americo- Liberian government's relations with the Kru coastal peoples which fostered the emergence of a Kru tribal identity were to some extent influenced by the interactions between the central government and the residents of Krutown in Monrovia. Monrovia had, from the outset, developed as a city of two settlements: Krutown, the original Kru village, was at the base of the hill atop of which stood the settler neighborhood. Krutown was inhabited by people who had migrated from many of the hinterland dialect -associated dak', and the system of neighborhood organization that evolved in Monrovia was based on dak) membership: dak) membership was the basis of residence sections within Krutown and dak) headmen were involved in the selection of names of neighborhood leaders submitted to the mayor of Monrovia for appointment as "Kru headman" during the 19th century. All the Monrovia Kru were organized on the basis of dak' membership into the Municipal Corporation of Krutown, authorized by an act of the national legislature in 1916. Even after the neighborhood was razed in an urban redevelopment project following World War II, a new neighborhood, New Krutown, was established. The Corporation eventually relocated there and the administrative importance of the dak, was maintained (Breitborde 1979).

An intriguing but unexplored question concerns the basis for the grouping of dakf into the 6 sections of the Corporation. Informants here claim vague similarities of custom, history and language. It is also certain that population size has played a role. At one time the Corporation expanded to 7 sections. Two of the original sections were the Bassa and the Grebo, but they have since separated from the Corporation -- only to be replaced by new sections comprised of other Kru dale.. These latter were often urban groups of much smaller size than the dal(' of other sections. Some interior dak4 were so underrepresented in Monrovia that their members could not effectively function as a group, but attached themselves to other dak( in the Corporation. By the mid -1970s their numbers had increased to the point that they had emerged as separate dakt on the Corporation. There is, then, a basic premise operating on the Corporation, i.e., that the dak, is the unit of organization, but some flexibility and demography obscure the basis for the grouping of particular dakf into particular sections (see Breitborde 1977:27 -33 and Appendix III for further discussion).

While nothing more precise than this can be said at the moment, the significance of the issues should be underscored. For, the organizational structure of the Kru Corporation may have been transferred -- at least conceptually -- to the Kru countryside. That is, how Kru was defined in the city, i.e., what dakE were included, may have become the underpinnings of the definition of the

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"Kru people" in the countryside. It was in Monrovia's Krutown, in the 1800s and well into the 1900s, just yards away from the Americo -Liberian settlement, that the government had its most sustained and immediate contacts with indigenous Africans. One concomitant of this was that communication between the government and the rural Kru was often conveyed through the Monrovia Kru. For example, when in 1916 the legislature passed the act incorporating the Monrovia Kru, and created the office of Kru Governor, the president immediately sent the governor as his emmisary to the Kru coastal area to help quell a distur- bance between Kru and Sinoe settlers.4 The channelling of government relations with rural areas through the urban immigrant community has persisted to this day, to the extent that the Kru Corporation serves an important function as an informal system of representation paralleling the formally elected rural con - gresmen.5 The creation of sections defined the particular channel within the Corporation through which certain rural dakt maintained important links with the Liberian government in Monrovia. This, of course, adds to our curiosity concerning the basis for the grouping of urban dakk into the six sections. While the evidence is too scanty to support a claim that the internal structure of the Corporation was simply imposed on the rural dakr, it does allow us to recognize, at the least, the potential for these urban developments to have solidified the bonds among those dakr, grouped within each section -- both in the city and in the countryside. Thus, the process by which the Kru tribe came to be defined may have a significant urban component.

The implications of the above for the question of Kru linguistic diversity become all the more intriguing when it is recognized that the distinctions among Kru dialects are more socially motivated than they are based on linguistic differences. Objective linguistic differences do not always explain why different dialects are conceived of as being distinct. This is a point which has been argued previously (Breitborde 1976-77). Simply put, the argument is that the distinctiveness of dak£ as social groups underlies the claims by Kru speakers that dak' -based dialects differ from each other. If this idea of a dak basis for linguistic differences is true in a general sense, then it remains to be seen if the grouping of dak' into Corporation sections is also reflected in dialect inter -relationships.

Fortunately, there exist some quantitative measures of how the more than forty rural dialects are related to each other, through the efforts of a team from the Institute of Liberian Languages in 1974 (Duitsman, Bertkau and Laesch 1975). A significant finding of that study was the statistical confirmation of the categorization of their language by Kru speakers into "coastal" and "interior" classes. For example, Duitsman et al. pointed out that some interior dialects of Kru should, on the basis of lexicostatistical criteria, be included as part of Grebo, the neighboring "language ". The statistics also showed the relationships among a number of Kru dialects to be so close as to suggest that their distinctiveness could not be based on linguistic grounds (or at least the linguistic grounds used in the lexicostatistical study). It was for these statistical similarities that I offered an explanation (Breitborde 1976 -77), i.e., that from the point of view of the Kru people, dialects associated with dake differ from one another because their native speakers themselves differ, in terms of dak, affiliation, from one another.6 The dialect survey has not been exhausted as a source for illuminating key social processes in the "development" of the Kru language. In conjunction with urban sociocultural data, the claim of a social basis for the Kru language can actually be strengthened.

Based on the statistics of cognate percentages in the Kru Dialect Survey,

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A BRIEF NOTE ON THE URBAN ETHNIC BASIS 87

Kru coastal dialects consist of four major groups, with an additional group and one dialect of "transitional" status between coastal (klaq) and interior (taju)si) types. This classification, based on lexical cognates, is presented in FIGURE ONE.

FIGURE ONE

Kru Dialect Classification (after Duitsman et. al, 1975)

Kla3 (Kru)

Taju3s5 Kla3

Western West /Central Central/ \Eastern r2? -13 Boo -12 Blio-1 Woli -17 Doo-16 Witt -27 Tatuk -19 St» -11 Tolo -2 WE) -14 Jede-21 Ny?a -30 KwEatu3 -20 Kulu -10 Duo -3 Jai?-6 Dreo -22 Dio -37 Kai -9 Ja, -5 Nyanu -15 Nya3 -18 Tal ? -39 Pluu -8 Gbuu-7 Doo -16 Seo -23 Kab3 -4 Situ -24 Jltp3 -40 Pete -26 B3tba -38 Tla ? -25 Gbeta -42 Nymala -31 Nifa -44 Witt -27 Bald -45 Sekle ? -43 J1a3 -41

This classification has some support in the perceptions of urban Kru speakers themselves. New Krutown residents claim to be able to identify a person's dak3 by his speech, and this was demonstrated to me on several occasions with reasonable success.7 As a result, I tried to develop a formal exer- cise to measure residents' perceptions of dialect differences. A triad test was conducted where names of dialects were each written on a file card, and several informants agreed to sort through every possible combination of three cards, identifying the "different" dialect in each group of three.8 The results showed that informants were not able to reproduce a classification of dialects that reflected the statistical divisions of the Kru dialect survey. As a matter of fact, this lack of "success" led me to quickly abandon this time -consuming test in my fieldwork. However, a subsequent re- examination of informant re- sponses showed that within many individual triads examined by informants, their identifications of the dialect which was different in relation to the other two were, by and large, accurate. Another way to view this is that although the informants were not able to organize forty -five dialects into a uniform overall classification based on linguistic similarities and differences, for those seg- ments of the classification of which they were aware, statements about dialect differences did reflect the relationships among dialects specified by the published lexical cognate percentages. These dialects correspond, of course, to the dakf of the Kru Corporation, shown in FIGURE TWO.9

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FIGURE TWO

Municipal Corporation of Krutown 1976

CORPORATION

Keu Gbeta Páß Five Tribes J12 Matlo

Blio -1 Ny,a -30 Jla ? -41 Witt -27 Kab2 -4 Wa? -14 Toto -2 Nifa -44 Sekle? -43 Nyigbi -28 Diu -37 Nyanu -15 Jae -5 Gbeta -42 Bala -45 Jlufaa -29 B?tra -38 Duu-16 JaDD -6 KplepY Nymala -31 Tala -39 Woli -17 Gbuu-7 WEa2 -32 Jl(p0 -40 TatuE -19 Nya ? -18 Niwl, -33 Kwfatu'-20 Tr ? ? -13 Kau-34 Jede-21 Plx. ? -8 Sobo -35 Dreo -22 Kulu -10 Wesep, -36 Seo -23 Sect -11 Sit» -24 Boo -12 T ?a? -25 Ka2 -9 Pete-26 Duo-3

There is one additional dak, on the Corporation, Kplep, which does not correspond to any dak 2 on the dialect survey. This is due to the fact that Kplep» is actually a township in the interior inhabited by people from several different nearby dak£. The Kplep people in Monrovia function as a dak o but their speech is said not to be a "distinctive" dialect. The dialect survey team stayed away from towns as a rule and therefore presented no data on the speech of Kplep 22 residents.

Using the dialect survey, the dake within each section of the Corpora- tion can be identified with the group of dialects to which they belong. FIGURE THREE shows that all sections, with the exception of Keu, consist of dakE with closely related dialects. In Keu, the difficulty is due to the combination of Western Kla? dakE with Taju3s3 dialects. Clearly it is not on linguistic affinity alone that the dakE are grouped into sections, but with the exception of Keu, no major linguistic problems exist. There have never been as many Taju3s7 people in Monrovia as there have been Kla? speakers. It is not too far- fetched to think that if their numbers increased, Taju2s' could form their own section on the Corporation. But, like other groups of small number who were in the past attached to larger dakE within the Corporation, Taju2s3. dak¢ must be attached to some existing section within the Corporation. Wherever they might be attached, their speech would distinguish them from the rest of their section as it does in Keu.

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FIGURE THREE

Dialect Variation in the Kru Corporation

CORPORATION

Keu Gbeta Páß Kra J12 at1)

1 -WEST 30-EAST 41-EAST 27-CENT 4-EAST 14-W/CENT 2 -WEST 44-EAST 43-EAST 28-Unc 37-EAST 15-W/CENT 5 -WEST 42-EAST 45-EAST 39-Unc 38-EAST 16-W/CENT 6 -W /CENT kplepx, 31-CENT 39-EAST 17-W/CENT 7 -WEST 32-Unc 40-EAST 19-Tatue 18 -CENT 33-Unc 20-Kwtatu 13-Tra? 34-Unc 21-CENT 8 -TAJ 35-Unc 22-CENT 10 -TAJ 36-Unc 23-CENT 9 -TAJ 24-CENT 3 -WEST 25-CENT 26-CENT

Key: WEST = Western Kla W /CENT = West /Central Kla? CENT = Central Kla? EAST = Eastern Kla. TAJ = Tajuas.) Unc = untested in Kru Dialect Survey

Thus, the internal organization of the urban Kru community, measured through the dak2 /section structure of their Corporation, seems closely related to dialect differences within the Kru language. We still cannot answer the question of whether the formation of the urban Corporation was the basis for the exporting of these social and linguistic parameters to the Kru rural areas, or if instead the urban situation helped to solidify a sociolinguistic situation which already obtained in the countryside. But whatever the case, it is now clear that such questions of Liberian Kru ethnic identity and language cannot be answered without special attention to the urban data.

The Monrovia Kru community is an interesting case through which to consider the linguistic components of social identity. The Kru consider themselves a "tribe ". The Liberian government considers them a "tribe ". And their status as a tribe is the basis for a system of urban ethnic and neighborhood administration which rests on national legislation. But the Kru consist of a large number of patriclans, each speaking a distinct dialect which, in some cases, cannot be understood by other Kru speakers.

This paper has followed the direction suggested by Hymes to examine how

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the emergence and organization of social groups -- here, the Kru, especially the urban Kru -- underlie "the organization of linguistic resources" (1968:44). It has reviewed the relationships between dialect-associated social groups geo- graphically in the hinterland, and administratively in the organization of the urban Kru Corporation -- in order to help explain the linguistic affinities of "related" dakE in the city. Kru ethnic identity confers a status important in political and economic action as well as personal association in Monrovia. But it also entails a status as a member of a particular dak., and therefore as a speaker of a particular dialect distinct from the speech of other Kru dake. Kru ethnicity, on the one hand, unites a group of people socioculturally; but, on the other hand, it entails internal linguistic differentiation among those whom it unites. Thus, in the city, people from many dakE are brought together socially by the same set of factors which divides them linguistically. And in Liberia as a whole, people from many dakf have been grouped together conceptually as Kru and treated as a unit in policy decisions that may affect many domains of their lives. Examining the processes that permit this, then, will eventually enable an understanding of the Kru language concomitants of Kru ethnic identity.

FOOTNOTES

1. This article is a revision of "Ethnic Bases of Linguistic Diversity in an Urban African Neighborhood ", a paper presented at the 75th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C., in November 1976. The fieldwork on which the article is based was conducted in Monrovia from December 1974 through May 1976, supported by a Dissertation Research Award from the National Science Foundation (GS- 39669), a Fulbright -Hays Fellowship (OEG -0 -74- 7535), and a fellowship and grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (1- FO1- MH58450 -01). I gratefully acknowledge the support of these agencies.

2. The classification of Kwa within Niger -Congo is itself problematic. See, for example, Greenberg 1963 and Voegelin and Voegelin 1964. Welmers (1977) reviews the evidence for classifying Kru as a separate branch of Niger- Congo, rather than as part of the Kwa branch. See also Lauer (1980) for the most recent review of the interrelationships among Kru languages.

3. Sullivan (1978:Appendix A) provides a useful summary of the traditions of migration and other relationships among dakE.

4. Jo Sullivan points out that this was often resented and seen as treason by coastal Kru (personal communication).

5. The role of the Kru urban ethnic organization in the informal system for center -periphery relations is the subject of a paper in preparation (Breit - borde 1981).

6. The cognate percentages of some pairs of dialects are quite high, over 95 %; some as high as 99 %. And yet they are still perceived by speakers as different dialects. This underscores the fact that lexical similarity is only one of a number of possible ways in which dialects may differ. Duitsman, Bert - kau and Laesch do provide some data on phonological differences (1975: 92 -96). Note that the numbers used in the figures for each dialect correspond to the numbers from the dialect survey. A social basis for dialect differences and mutual intelligibility is certainly not unique to the Kru. See Woolf (1959, 1967) for a well -known West African case.

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7. Tn every instance of this sort I witnessed, residents could successfully tell whether the speech was interior or coastal Kru. Identifi- cation of exact dakt were not as successful. This situation is made more complex by the existence of what might be termed "urban Kru" speech and by a sizeable number of Monrovia -born Kru, but this is beyond the scope of this paper.

8. The technique is borrowed from Romney and D'Andrade (1969). The number of triads possible with 45 dialects was prohibitive, so the test was modified in such a way as to test the triads which occurred within the "natural groupings" into which informants sorted the cards initially. The details of the method and actual statistical results are not presented here.

9. Figure Two differs in some ways from the organization chart of the Kru Corporation presented by Fraenkel (1964:80). These differences are not discussed here, but see Breitborde (1977: Appendix III).

REFERENCES CITED

Breitborde, L. B. "The Social Structural Basis of Linguistic Variation in an Urban African Neighborhood," Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Roches- ter, 1977.

. "Some linguistic evidence in the study of Kru ethnic and linguistic affiliation," Liberian Studies Journal VII (1976 -77), 109 -119.

. "Structural continuity in the development of an urban Kru community," Urban Anthropology 9(1979), 111 -130.

. "Urban ethnicity and center -periphery relations in Liberia." Paper to be presented at the 79th annual meeting, American Anthro- pological Association, Los Angeles, 1981.

Brooks, George C., Jr. The Kru Mariner in the Nineteenth Century: An Historical Compendium. Newark, Delaware: Liberian Studies Association, 1972.

Dalby,David, and P.E.H. Hair, "Le langiage de Guynee: a sixteenth century vocabulary from the Pepper Coast," African Language Studies 5 (1964), 174 -191.

Davis, Ronald W. "The Liberian struggle for authority on the Kru Coast," The International Journal of African Historical Studies 8 (1975), 222 -265.

. Ethnohistorical Studies on the Kru Coast. Newark, Delaware: Liberian Studies Association, 1976.

Duitsman, John, Jana Bertkau, and James Laesch, "A survey of Kru dialects," Studies in African Linguistics 6 (1975), 77 -103.

Fraenkel, Merran. Tribe and Class in Monrovia. London: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1964.

Greenberg, Joseph, "History and present status of the Kwa- problem," Actes du Second Colloque International de Linguistique Negro-Africaine, 12 -16 Avril (1962), 215 -217.

. The Languages of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966.

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Hymes, Dell, "Linguistic problems in defining the concept of 'tribe'." In, Essays on the Problem of Tribe, ed. by June Helm. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968.

Koelle, Signmund. Polyglotta Africana. London: Church Missionary Society House, 1854.

Lauer, Joseph J. "Linguistic evidence for reconstructing the history of the Kruan /Guere." Paper presented at the 23rd annual meeting, African Studies Association, Philadelphia, 1980.

Lavergne de Tressan, M. de, Inventoire Linguistique de l'Afrique Occidentale Francaise et du Togo. Dakar: IFAN, 1953.

Romney, A. Kimball and Roy G. D'Andrade, "Cognitive aspects of English kin terms." In, Cognitive Anthropology, ed. by Stephen Tyler. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969.

Schroeder, Guenther and Andreas Massing, "A general outline of historical developments within the Kru cultural province." Paper presented to the annual meeting of the Liberian Studies Association, Indiana University 1970.

Sullivan, Jo Mary, "Settlers in Sinoe County, Liberia, and their Rela- tions with the Kru, c.1835- 1920," Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston University, 1978.

Voegelin, C.F. and F.M. "The language situation in Africa." In, Languages of the World: African Fascicle One. Anthropological Linguistics 6 (1964), 1 -13.

Welmers, William E. "The Kru languages: A progress report." In, Language and Linguistic Problems in Africa, ed. by Paul F.A. Kotey and Haig der- Houssikian. Columbia, South Caroline: Hornbeam Press, 1977.

Wolff, Hans, "Intelligibility and inter-ethnic attitudes." Anthropolo- gical Linguistics 1 (1959), 34 -41.

. "Language, ethnic identity, and social change in southern Nigeria." Anthropological Linguistics 9 (1967), 18 -25.

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Peter Sevareid Temple University

Following the April, 1980 coup, the new Superintendent of Nimba County took away from the courts jurisdiction of cases involving students. These cases were turned over to the schools. Several of the disputes heard at Central High School in Sanniquellie from May to December, 1980, are reported in this article. Among these, a case in which a senior was charged with the improper weaning of another man's child is described at length. This is followed by a review of how legal theory,confronted with a successful coup, has sanctioned unexpected changes in the legal order elsewhere in Africa and how this may affect Liberia. Historical Liberian attitudes toward technical questions of court jurisdiction,along with the daily realities of political power in Nimba County, are then given to show the limitations of the Central High Court.1

THE CHANGE OF JURISDICTION

Shortly after the April 12th coup, a town meeting was called by the new military Superintendent for Nimba County at the Superintendent's compound in Sanniquellie.2 The Superintendent, Captain Robert G. Saye, a Mano3 man from below Saclepea (in the center of the county), was not known to many of the residents of Sanniquellie. People could not remember having seen him before, even at the soldiers' barracks on the edge of town.

On the morning of the meeting, a large crowd gathered in front of the President's House. This is a modern cement -stucco building connected to the Superintendent's residence. Presidents Tubman and Tolbert, as well as other high ranking officials, stayed there when touring the county. Saye spoke from the second floor balcony. A loudspeaker was secured and his voice could be heard all over Sanniquellie. As he spoke, Saye was surrounded by soldiers dressed in green fatigues (U.S. Army issue). They carried M-1 rifles, machine guns, and hand grenades. Also on the balcony were local officials of PAL (the Progressive Alliance of Liberia). They were part of the opposition group whose members had been imprisoned by Tolbert. They had just been released.

In his speech, Saye explained that the people of Liberia had been liberated by the coup. They were now, in his words, "free, free, free, free."

, (The crowd took up the chant: "we're free, we're free. ") Saye said that in the past Liberians had been "oppressed, suppressed and depressed." However, "those people" - here referring to the Americo- Liberians, the descendants of freed American slaves who had been in control of Liberia since its early nineteenth century founding - were now gone and the people of Nimba County would no longer be "oppressed, suppressed and depressed." The country was being governed "by the people" and everything was going to be done in the interests "of the people." Again, this was because they were now "free, free, free, free."

Liberian Studies Journal IX, 2 (1980 -81) 93

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Saye recounted how the coup had taken place. He described who he was and what his new role would be in the life of the county. Though he spoke only in vague terms about what the new government planned to do, he said life was going to improve. Things were going to be better for the masses of the people. National policies would cease to be solely for the benefit of a small group of highly paid government officials or a few select families. Saye did explain some of the new freedoms. One of these concerned the large student population in Sanniquellie.

As in other big towns in the county, many students went to school in Sanniquellie. They attended the government's Central High School, St. Mary's (run by an order of Dutch and Canadian Roman Catholic lay brothers), or Baptist High School. Some attended private entrepreneurial high schools such as those named for the father of Mayor Michael Dolo of Sanniquellie or Senator Jackson F. Doe of Nimba County. There were also several elementary schools.

Tensions existed between students and other residents of Sanniquellie. Since few of the students came from villages within walking distance of town, they either had to board with relatives or rent rooms in one of the quarters of Saniquellie. Some stayed in the clan houses established by the Mano and Gio4 chiefdoms. Because the families of most of the students were subsistence upland rice farmers, there was little money to support the students once school fees were paid. Students had to subsist in Sanniquellie as best they could. Some had odd jobs; many did not. During "hungry time," when the previous year's supply of rice had dwindled and before the new harvest was in, everyone was short of food and money. An annual crime wave would hit Sanniquellie and students were the prime suspects.

High school students were also older and more mature in Liberia than high school students, for instance, in the United States. Students would go to school when their families could afford to send them. They would often have to "sit down" for a year or more in the midst of their school careers when times were bad. Because they were older, students often found themselves in competition with adult town residents in such affairs as sexual encounters. This was true for both men and women students. It was quite common for a female student to support herself with the help of an unrelated older man. Inevitably, jealousies would arise between this man and her fellow male students. In Liberia, the disputes created by the endless competition for sexual favors were known as "woman palaver" cases. In Sanniquellie a disproportionate number of these cases involved students.

High school faculty members were also disliked by town residents. Their incomes were usually greater than those of local people. They were more highly educated and a few had studied abroad, mostly in the United States. Some were originally from other parts of Liberia and thus were neither Mano, Gio, or Man - dingo,5 the three dominant groups in Nimba. Others were not even from Liberia, but from countries such as Sierra Leone or Ghana. A foreign teacher, moreover, might be "on contract," which meant that he received more than twice the pay of counterpart Liberian teachers.6

Many in the audience listening to Captain Saye that morning were students. They were excited, therefore, when he stated that one of the new freedoms concerned them. From now on, any case or palaver involving a student or teacher from any of the schools in Nimba County could not be taken to court. A dispute, even one in which one of the parties was not a student, was to be settled at the school itself. And if a case was taken to court by mistake, the court must refer it to the school's principal or to the Supervisor of Schools.

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In Liberian English two terms were used in speaking of dispute settlement: "confusion" and "palaver." Confusion could be anything from a disagreement or argument to a fight. In 1979 Central High School played a football (soccer) match with a rival team from outside the county. The game ended in "confusion," that is, a fistfight. Palaver was '[a] word which [came] from the Portuguese meaning dispute or debate, and which [referred] to one of the most common forms of social interaction in Liberia. "7 In Nimba palaver was limited, as often as not, to the discussion of a dispute, to the process of talking it out. Confu- sion referred to the disagreement itself. A confusion occurred and then there was a palaver to settle it. Taken together, confusion and palaver encompassed the whole process of dispute settlement.

Liberia was unusual in Africa in 1980 in that it still maintained a dual system of courts. It was common practice during the colonial period in English speaking countries to have a separate system of courts for Africans and one for Europeans. The former applied customary law and the latter received common law and general statutes from the mother country. Though never technically a colony, Liberia was ruled (until April, 1980) by a small minority, the Americo- Liberians. They established one set of courts for "natives" and another for "civilized" persons.8 Other countries, such as Ghana and Kenya, unified their court systems with independence and abolished the customary courts.9 Liberia had not done so.

Thus in Liberia two systems operated side by side in the rural counties. There were judicial courts ranging from the Justices of the Peace, to the Magis- trates, to the Circuit Courts, and finally to the Supreme Court in Monrovia.10 There were traditional courts that ranged from the Quarter and Town Chiefs' Courts, to the Clan Chiefs' Courts, on up to the Paramount Chiefs' Courts. Then either original cases or appeals from the Paramount Chief could go up through the administrative courts - from the County Commissioner to the County Suoerintendent, to the Minister in charge of local government - ultimately to the Head of Statell himself. In theory there were limitations on the subject matter jurisdiction of particular courts.12 There were also supposed to be precise distinctions between original and appellate jurisdiction. In practice, however, the courts in Nimba County openly competed with each other for cases. Rarely was one turned down. Depending on the willingness of the parties, the same case could be brought before the Town Chief, the County Superintendent or the Circuit Court.l3

The students and teachers in Saye's audience were pleased to be one of the first groups in Liberia to immediately benefit from the coup. They had not fared well at the hands of the traditional and lower level government courts in Sanniquellie. For instance, the courts had used witness subpoenas to publicly humiliate faculty and students. On several occasions, teachers had been dragged out of their classrooms and beaten in public by court officers on the way to testify.

Decisions of the judges were also perceived as unfair. In one case, the principal of an elementary school had used a switch on a misbehaving student. She complained to her parents who took the case to the Magistrate's Court. The principal was found guilty and as part of his punishment was required to pay her parents an amount for her treatment at Sanniquellie Hospital. The fact that at a government hospital such treatment was free and that her parents had not had to pay a penny in this case made no difference.

In addition to paying large fines, students and faculty often had to spend time in jail. To be jailed was not a deterrent for the ordinary defendant who did not wish to remain in Sanniquellie. The government jail was made of mud and sticks. Frequently the jailor could be induced to look the other way when

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a prisoner poured drinking water on his cell wall and squeezed out through the muck. (Really serious offenders, such as murderers, were kept at the soldiers' barracks or at police headquarters.) But students and teachers usually wanted to stay in Sanniquellie to finish their schooling or keep their jobs. For them the jail was effective.

The school community saw the new change in jurisdiction to be a change for the better. They would now be tried by a more sympathetic judicial body and they would avoid the large fines and stiff penalties of the regular courts. As an added benefit, the new system would be free and they would not have to pay the substantial costs or court fees which accrued to the loser in Liberian courts.14

THE CASE OF THE IMPROPER WEANING

The first major complaint involving a student at Central High School in Sanniquellie to be referred by a court to the school's Disciplinary Committee occurred about a month after Saye's speech. A man charged that one of the students had had sexual relations with his girl friend. This caused her to stop breast -feeding his child and as a consequence the child had been weaned before its time. The case had originally been brought to the Paramount Chief in Sanniquellie; but because of Captain Saye's proclamation, the Chief told the plaintiff to "carry"15 his case to the Principal of Central High.

The Disciplinary Committee of Central High School had been in existence prior to Saye's speech. Sometimes the Principal alone would discipline students, but at others he would hand disputes to the Committee for settlement. Occasionally he would sit with the Committee, though in the weaning case the Principal referred the case to the Committee and did not participate.

The Chairman of the Committee at the time was an American (on contract) who taught English and French. He had been a Peace Corps volunteer, was married to a Gio woman, and had lived for six years in Nimba County. Two Liberian senior staff members also sat in this case, the school's registrar and a teacher of history. There were several other members of the faculty assigned to the Com- mittee but they rarely came. There was also one student, a senior on the Student Council, who was a non -voting member. In this case he was not present since classes were in session during the mid- morning hearing and it was a policy not to pull students from class. Also in attendance was the school's janitor. Though not an official member of the Disciplinary Committee, he would often be lounging in the Principal's office when a case was heard. In this case, as in others, he questioned the parties and helped in the consideration of the ver- dict. It was quite common in customary trials in Liberia for members of the audience to take part.

The complainant, Alfred Lemah,16 was a Mano in his late thirties who was married and the father of several children. He held a low level job in the Sanniquellie office of one of the central government ministries. Because he had a family and a job, he was what was known in Liberia as a "responsible man." He came to the hearing in the company of an older relative, Michael Paye.

The defending student was Thompson O'Flomo, a senior from Garplay. He was Gio. He was in his early twenties and something of a star athlete at the school. His last name had originally been Flomo, but following the long vaca- tion that year he had added the Irish 0'.

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When Lemah brought his complaint, the Principal immediately called the Disciplinary Committee into session. O'Flomo was pulled from his class. The Chairman began the hearing by taking his place behind one of the two desks in the Principal's office, the usual site of Committee meetings. The others sat in chairs arranged in a semi -circle before him. Only student O'Flomo stood - with his hands clasped behind his back. This stance of respect occurred in formal encounters with authority throughout Liberia, particularly where the person was the subject of an accusation. The stance was the same whether it was a young schoolboy before his teacher or a village farmer before his chief. No written documents were filed in the weaning case. One member of the committee took notes, but these were never written up and are presumed lost. The proceedings were in English since all the participants spoke fairly fluent English.

Lemah was asked by the Chairman to tell them what he had to say. He recounted that he had been "loving to" a young woman, who was apparently Mano and in her late teens, and that they had had a child. The woman lived in a room in one of the houses in Sanniquellie and Lemah had provided her with an adult - sized bed for the child.

One evening about three weeks before the hearing he had entered her room to find O'Flomo lying on the bed. Lemah said he explained to O'Flomo that he had given the woman this bed for their baby and that he didn't want to see O'Flomo lying there again, ever. O'Flomo didn't get up immediately, but when he did he apologized and left. Lemah returned to the room on another occasion two weeks later and saw O'Flomo and the young lady both lying on the bed. At that point he became upset and threatened to take the young man to court if he saw them together again. O'Flomo left. Once again Lemah returned and saw the two of them together. This third time Lemah did not say anything, but took his complaint straight to the Paramount Chief's court. The Paramount Chief, knowing of the new Superintendent's proclamation, told Lemah that as it involved a student he must take the case to the Principal of Central High.

The Committee could not immediately establish what it was that Lemah wanted them to do. The complaint,improper weaning, was a common one in Liberia. It was believed that if a mother who was breast -feeding her child had sexual relations, her milk would dry up. As a result the child would be weaned before it was ready and its health endangered. Apparently Lemah wanted some kind of compensation from O'Flomo. In response to questions, Lemah said that he was no longer loving to the woman. He was asked whether he paid the woman's room rent and he said no. He kept stressing, however, that he was the father of the woman's child. The Committee indicated that this was an important "legal" point.

He was asked how old the child was and he said three months. Where was the child at the present time? It was with the woman's parents in her village. How long had the child been there? Over a month. But had he not first seen O'Flomo in the woman's room only three weeks before the hearing? No answer.

The Committee seized on this point. They wanted to know how the student could have weaned Lemah's baby if the child had left its mother for the village prior to the beginning of her new relationship. Lemah avoided answering this; he kept insisting that O'Flomo had weaned his baby and that when that happens whoever weans a baby was responsible for paying damages. Although it was widely believed that sexual intercourse would cause untimely weaning, the wrong to the child was often not the object of a suit. Damages were really sought for inter- ference with the plaintiff's relationship with the child's mother, who was usually the plaintiff's wife. This was a customary version of what is known in Eng- lish and American law as an alienation of affections suit.17

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O'Flomo was asked to comment on the testimony of the complainant. He said that everything had happened as Lemah related but he added that he was no longer seeing the young woman. He also said that at the time he came to be loving to her he did not know that she had a baby. This was a fact which she had hidden from him.

Though he had just admitted the truth of Lemah's testimony, the Committee now gave O'Flomo the formal opportunity to tell his side of the story. This proved to be a repetition of his previous comments. He was, in turn, asked questions by the Committee and Lemah was then asked to comment upon O'Flomo's testimony. By this procedure each party was allowed to say all that he wanted to say.

The Committee then asked the complainant Lemah what he wished them to do. It was still unclear what action he desired. Lemah said that since he was no longer loving to this woman he didn't care what happened to her. His only interest was in the welfare of his baby. But because the child had been weaned it was susceptible to illness and was bound to "weaken" and "sicken." He was sure there would be hospital costs to be paid. Now it was obvious to the Com- mittee that the complainant was looking for a financial settlement even though he failed to specify any particular amount. He also said he wanted disciplinary action to be taken against the student, apparently that O'Flomo be put out of school.

Though neither of the parties had been excluded from the room at this point, the discussion turned towards finding a solution. There was an unex- pressed feeling among Committee members that the student ought not to pay damages or be expelled. This case was a dispute that should have been taken up with the woman's family. Had Lemah spoken to her father or mother? No, he had not. Since the weaning involved their own grandchild, the Chairman said, they would be as concerned for the welfare of the child as Lemah. In the discussion that followed the Committee asked Lemah's older relative, Michael Paye, what he thought. He agreed that this was a family matter. He, Lemah, and the woman should sit down with her parents and talk it out. O'Flomo did not have to attend this meeting - in fact it would be better if he was not there.

At this point student O'Flomo was sent out of the room. The prospect of carrying the case to the young woman's parents was discussed at greater length. Finally it was concluded that such a course would be the best result.

There was still the matter of what, if anything, should be done by the Committee in its role as a school disciplinary committee. Despite the new jurisdiction assigned to the Committee by Superintendent Saye, it still had to function, and was more accustomed to functioning, as the arbitrator of student discipline. To consider this role, the Committee now sent complainant Lemah and his relative Paye from the room.

In Liberia (as indeed anywhere) it often happened that men had relations with other men's wives or girl friends. The faculty members on the Committee had themselves engaged in such activities and for that matter, no doubt, were presently so engaged. It was decided that since this was such a normal thing for a young man to do, no disciplinary action would be taken unless another complaint of the same nature was brought against him. The Committee would advise him to stay away from the woman. This in camera discussion lasted about twenty minutes. The janitor was still there and participated.

The parties and Paye were called back. The Chairman said that the Committee had concluded that indeed this was a family matter and that Lemah and his relatives should sit down and discuss it with the woman's parents. If no

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solution could be worked out in that palaver, the parents themselves should bring the case back to the Committee. The Committee would meet again and decide what action, if any, to take against O'Flomo.

In the meantime the Committee told Lemah it would strongly advise O'Flomo to stay away from the woman. He should not go near her room. He should not go anywhere near her quarter. If Lemah had any further complaint against O'Flomo, he too should come back and the Committee would take immediate and drastic action.

Lemah indicated that he was satisfied. Being "satisfied" was important in personal encounters in Liberia. It was also a term used in many forms of dispute settlement.18 Since in practice there were few limits on jurisdiction, and since courts actively competed with each other to resolve disputes and thereby earn fees, courts were careful to see that complainants were satisfied. This did not mean that the plaintiff would always win, but it was important that he be made to feel that the result was fair. The Disciplinary Committee was new to its role as a court and it was not charging fees. But in this matter, as in other aspects of the case, it was following traditional patterns of judicial behavior. It was important that the complainant be satisfied.

Lemah then left with Paye.

The Committee lectured O'Flomo on the necessity of being more careful in choosing partners. In the future he should be sure to ask questions first. Though the tone of this lecture was stern, in no sense was there an implication that what he had done was wrong or immoral. Rather the Committee was upset that he had not been as discerning as he should have been.

The case adjourned. Apparently that was the end of it for complainant Lemah since by the completion of the school year he had not been heard from again. The day after the hearing the Chairman of the Committee happened to be walking through the young woman's quarter in Sanniquellie. The door was open and he saw O'Flomo sitting in her room.

OTHER CASES

Two more major cases were referred to the Disciplinary Committee between May and the end of the school year in December, 1980. In one case a male student at another school had purchased several new shirts, washed them and hung them on a line to dry in his quarter in Sanniquellie. Three of them "got missing." A few weeks later he discovered one of these shirts in another student's room. This second student said that the shirt belonged to a student at Central High. The first student took the matter to court and was referred to the school.

The Central High student claimed before the Disciplinary Committee that he was innocent. However, the witness who could attest to that was in Monrovia. The Committee decided to believe their student as he had a good record, but since he had been "in possession of stolen property," the "law required" that he pay $15 for the shirt. The defendant had one month in which to pay the complainant and the latter could return to the Committee if the money was not forthcoming. Nothing further was heard in the case. Had the case gone to a regular court, the student would probably have had to pay for all three shirts.

The other major case referred by the courts during this period involved a female student. A woman in Sanniquellie said that the student had been loving

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to her husband. When she discovered this and went to the young woman's room to confront her, the young woman had "abused "19 (insulted) her. Not only did the student abuse her, but the student's two sisters did the same. The two sisters were not Central High students and their conduct was not considered by the Committee.

The resolution of this case was an order by the Committee that the student write a formal apology. One copy was given to the woman and one to the Committee. In addition, the student was suspended from school for one week. The complainant said she was satisfied.

Despite the intention of Saye's speech that all cases involving students and teachers be transferred to the schools, this was not always so. For instance, in one case a landlord took a teacher to court for failing to pay his rent for five months. The Magistrate's Court in Sanniquellie kept the case and decided that the teacher had to pay the rent in addition to court expenses. In another case a student made a complaint against a faculty member at Central High. The case was taken to the Paramount Chief's Court and he retained jurisdiction. The complaining student was the Chief's daughter.

In a third case two teachers took a Police Major's car for a joy ride and smashed it up. Their case did not go to court at all. They were immediately locked up. Two and a half weeks later they were released following a coming to terms between the Police Major and the families of the two teachers. No charges were filed.

HOW THE LEGAL SYSTEM SURVIVES A COUP

There is considerable literature in African law on the nature of the changes in a country's legal order that take place as a result of a coup. One of the most famous discussions of the subject is the opinion of the Chief Jus- tice of Uganda in Uganda v. Commissioner of Prisons, Ex Parte Matovu.20 The Chief Justice, Sir Udo Udoma,21 was speaking for the High Court of Uganda in a case where a man was kept in prison under a detention order. The order was issued on authority which ultimately derived from a new post -coup constitution. Sir Udo had to consdier the "legitimacy," to use the concept of Max Weber,22 of the new government and the new constitution that followed Milton Obote's 1966 ousting of the Kabaka of Buganda, Sir Edward Mutesa. The latter had been Presi- dent of Uganda under the previous constitutional scheme created when Uganda received independence from Britain in 1962.

Lawyers have used different philosophical theories to rationalize the dominance of a legal order (natural law, divine law, etc.). Sir Udo chose the "might makes right" doctrine. He based the Court's approval of the detention on the reasoning of Hans Kelsen, father of the Vienna School of Analytical Positivists.23 Put simply, it holds that when a new group takes control of a country in an unconstitutional manner, the new order is legally legitimate if its control is "effective. "24 Once control is effective and a new constitution replaces the old one, the old laws assume their mantle of authority by virtue of incorporation in the legitimacy granted by the new constitution. Thus detention under the terms of a statute whose original legitimacy derived from the old Uganda constitution is still effective even though the old constitution was altered (thrown out) in a manner not contemplated by its own amendment provisions.

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Such questions as the authority of courts to hear and decide particular cases - the questions of jurisdiction - are easily answered once the Kelsen rationale is accepted. A court's power in a pre- existing jurisdictional statute to take a case continues under the new regime by virtue of the specific continuation of the old laws.

The continuation and legitimization of old laws has occurred repeatedly in Africa following coups.

To give an example, when King Sobhuza II of Swaziland scrapped the Bri- tish -made constitution and assumed personal power in 1973, his speech doing so contained the following:

"(f) KNOW NOW, therefore, that I, Sobhuza II of Swaziland, hereby declare that in collaboration with my Cabinet Ministers, and supported by the whole nation, I have assumed supreme power in the Kingdom of Swaziland.

The Constitution of the Kingdom of Swaziland which commenced on September 6, 1968, is hereby repealed.

Our laws, with the exception of the constitution hereby repealed, shall continue to operate with full force and effect, and shall be construed, with such modification, adaptions[,] qualifications and exceptions as shall be necessary to bring them into conformity with this and ensuing decrees. "25

In the April 12, 1980 coup in Liberia, Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe and a small number of soldiers seized power. The former President William R. Tolbert, Jr. was killed and his personal wealth confiscated.26 A military government in the form of a committee of enlisted men and officers was established. It was called The People's Redemption Council of the Armed Forces of Liberia. Sergeant Doe became its Chairman as well as Head of State. Leaders of the former government were arrested and several, including the former Chief Justice James A. A. Pierre, were executed for high treason after trial by a special military tribunal.27

The new legal order for Liberia was established by a decree issued twelve days after the coup. It was as follows:

"PRC DECREE NO. TWO

Decree By the People's Redemption Council Of The Armed Forces of Liberia Suspending the Constitution of Liberia and Estab- lishing A System of Orderly Government.

It is hereby decreed by the People's Redemption Council of the Armed Forces of Liberia as follows:

1. The Constitution of the Republic of Liberia, as amended through April 12, 1980, and the three branches of Govern- ment established thereunder are hereby suspended.

2. During the period of suspension of the Constitution all Legislative powers and all Executive powers shall be vested in the People's Redemption Council presided over by its Chairman.

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3. All laws now in force in the Republic of Liberia other than the Constitution shall be in force as the laws of the Re-

public of Liberia, until . they shall be repealed or amended by the People's Redemption Council.

4. The existing Executive Ministries and Agencies of the Republic and the laws relating thereto, shall be in force until they shall be repealed or amended by the People's Redemption Council of the Armed Forces of Liberia.

5. The People's Redemption Council shall set up and establish Special Tribunals by decrees for the handling of such matters of judicial nature previously handled by the judicial branch of Government.

6. The Writ of Habeas Corpus is hereby suspended and material [martial] law is hereby established until otherwise ordered by the People's Redemption Council.

This Decree shall take effect immediately upon the signature of the Head of State of the Republic of Liberia.

Issued this 24th day of April, A.D. 1980.

Sgd: M /Sgt. Samuel K. Doe CHAIRMAN OF THE PEOPLE'S REDEMPTION COUNCIL AND HEAD OF STATE OF THE REPUBLIC OF LIBERIA"

Decree No. Two was very much in line with similar decrees passed after other coups in Africa. Though the Constitution was "suspended" (para. 1), rather than repealed as in the Swaziland coup, the effect was the same.246 And there was the usual paragraph (3) legitimizing all laws other than the Consti- tution and continuing their effectiveness.

The previous Liberian government had been modeled on the American system of three equal branches - executive, legislative and judicial. The Decree consolidated the authority of the executive and the legislative branches of the former government in the People's Redemption Council (para. 2). As for the judicial branch, the Council gave itself authority (para. 5) to reconstitute the courts by establishing Special Tribunals.

The reconstituting of the courts was achieved by Decree No. Three, also issued on April 24th. It vested the judicial power of the country in The People's Supreme Tribunal which was given powers similar to those of the old Supreme Court. Instead of justices there were seven "members" of the Tribunal with one as Chairman. They were appointed by The People's Redemption Council. A1129 the other lower courts were reconstituted with new judges but with their old powers.30 The prefix "People's" was attached to their new names. In Monrovia, for example, the full title of the Sixth Circuit now became the "People's Civil Law Court of the Sixth Judicial Circuit, Montserrado County, Republic of Liberia."

The effect of these two decrees was that the old judicial structure stayed in place though the judges were new. The legal system had survived the coup. To use the rationale of Kelsen and Matovu, control of the country by the People's Redemption Council was effective; therefore the new regime in Liberia was legitimate. Old laws would continue to be obeyed because they have been

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sanctioned by the new legal order. The statutory authority of the courts to hear and decide cases, including the jurisdiction of the lower courts in the counties, thus remained unchanged.

COURT JURISDICTION UP- COUNTRY

How does all of this relate to the new "courts" established by Superin- tendent Saye for students and teachers? First, Saye's change in jurisdiction did not take place elsewhere in Liberia.31 It was limited to Nimba County and, as we have seen, did not apply in practice to all the cases involving students or teachers that occurred in 1980, even in Sanniquellie.

Second, in most African court opinions in which judges attempt to rationalize changes in the legitimate legal order, such as Matovu in Uganda, they deal with but one unusual change. That change is at the very top, a change of the constitutional order (the constitution) itself. It is assumed that once a change of power at the peak of the legal system is effective, then the entire system on down the line and out into the rural areas will operate pursuant to the written statutory plan. Courts will only hear cases that they have statutory jurisdictional power to decide and will apply only authorized rules of law and recognized remedies in deciding these cases.

The past operation of the Liberian legal system, as is indeed true of most African legal systems, has never been that theoretically neat. In Liberia exact jurisdictional boundaries between the courts have not prevented courts from deciding almost any case that came along. Nor has there always been an overridingg concern that the rules of law and the remedy applied be formally correct.32 For example, in the fall of 1979 there were few copies of the new penal law in the government courts in Nimba.33 Courts were trying and sentencing defendants under the old law although in many cases the authority for doing so had been specifically repealed.

For that matter, the entire system of administrative courts, from the court of the County Commissioner on up to that of the Head of State, was legally unconstitutional and had been so since at least the early years of the twentieth century.34 The Supreme Court of Liberia had repeatedly35 held these courts to be without authority to try cases. For instance, in 1919 the court decided the case of Karmo v. Morris.36 Two "native chiefs of the Todee and Ding sections of the Golah3' country"38 had been imprisoned in the guard room of the Interior Department by Major John Anderson, of the Liberian Frontier Force, upon the command of John Morris, Secretary of the Interior. A theft had been committed by Gola tribesmen in the settlement of White Plains (inhabited by Americo-Liberians). It was a policy of the Interior Department that chiefs were responsible to hand over to the department known thieves and stolen property or the value thereof if it was "ascertained that the culprits were members of their tribe and that the stolen property had been carried into their country. "39 The two Gola chiefs at first submitted to the rule holding them responsible for the acts of their subjects and they executed a bond to pay the penalty for the theft. But when the bond matured the chiefs refused to pay. The Secretary of the Interior learned of their refusal and he had them locked up.

A petition for a writ of habeas corpus to set the chiefs free was brought in the Circuit Court. Morris and Anderson sought to justify the imprisonment on the ground that one of the two chiefs had acted contemptuously at the Secretary's court when called before it. The power to punish for contempt was said to flow from the judicial powers conferred on the Secretary by an October 13, 1914 Act of the Legislature.40

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The chiefs argued that the judicial provisions of the Act violated Article I, Section 14 of the Constitution of Liberia.41 This provision sepa- rates the powers of the government into three departments - executive, legislative and judicial. It is patterned on the U. S. Constitution. As a result of this, the "doctrine of separation of powers" holds that it is improper to give the power of one branch of government to another branch. The legislature cannot confer judicial power on the executive.

Despite these arguments, the Circuit Court upheld the Secretary of the Interior. There were allegations that the judge in that court did so because of outside influence. Chief Justice James J. Dossen commented on this in his opinion for the Court:

"In his argument before us counsel for appellants suggested that undue and improper pressure may have been brought to bear upon the uudge of the court below by means of threats emanating from a certain source, the determination of this case, being regarded in certain quarters as of vast importance to the power and prestige of the Interior Department... We hesitate, however, to give credence to the suggestion that a judge of any of the courts of Liberia, could in this enlightened and progressive age of this Republic (when it is, we hope, recognized by states- men and politicians alike, that the security and safety in a democracy rest in an independent, fearless and competent judiciary), be so weak, so recreant to duty, as to permit himself to be deterred from the plain path of duty in the determination of matters brought within his grasp.

The Supreme Court reversed. It held that the 1914 Act "in certain respects is in conflict with this doctrine of the Constitution [separation of powers] in that it attempts to confer judicial powers upon the Secretary of the interior, who is an official belonging to the executive department of government. So much therefore of said Act which attempts to confer such powers upon said officer is repugnanat to the provisions of the Constitution and should be declared void and inoperative; and it is hereby so held. "43

Notwithstanding this strong language, which was later confirmed again by the Supreme Court,44 the system of administrative courts flourished.

CONCLUSION

What kept the administrative courts in place, of course, was political power, not legal authority. Not only were these courts useful to those in overall control of the country from Monrovia, but they were supported by local power groups. It was a way of combining traditional authority over local groups with centralized government.

Such congeries of political forces operated to perpetuate the new courts for students and teachers established by Superintendent Saye. Sanctioned by the de facto government and supported by the large population of students and teachers, these courts were effective. But there were limits to their powers and these limits were not restrictions imposed on their jurisdiction by statutory clause or case decision. They were restricted because another person or group had greater real power. The schools were politically strong enough to see that routine cases involving their students and staffs were taken out of the regular courts. On the other hand, there were specific instances, such as those involving the daughter of the Paramount Chief or the car of the Police

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Major, when the power of the schools was not enough. Court jurisdiction in Nimba County, then, was a phenomenon that changed from day to day and case to case, and this was as true of the time before the April 1980 coup as after.45

FOOTNOTES

1. The information in this paper on events subsequent to the coup is from an interview in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania on March 12, 1981 with the former Chairman of the Central High School Disciplinary Committee.

2. There is rarely an agreed upon spelling for place names in Nimba. The spellings for Sanniquellie and other geographical names are the first official versions given for each in James C. Riddell, Kjell Zetterstron, Peter G. Dorliae and Michael J. Hohl, "Clan and Chiefdom Maps for the Má (Mano) and Dâ (Gio)," Liberian Studies Journal IV, 2 (1971 -72), 159.

3. "Ma," see Svend E. Holsoe, A Standardization of Liberian Ethnic Nomenclature (Philadelphia, 1979), 3.

4. "Dan," Ibid.

5. "Manding," Ibid.

6. Often, however, a large portion of a foreign teacher's salary went for gifts to officials which were necessary to obtain and to keep one's job.

7. John Gay, Red Dust on the Green Leaves: A Kpelle Twins' Childhood (Thompson, Connecticut, 1973), 240. "[D]iscussion; argument, trouble (e.g.,

'money palaver,' or "Woman palaver'). Derived from the Spanish word ' palabra.' " Warren L. d'Azevedo, Some Terms from Liberian Speech (Liberia, 1970), 43.

8. See M. R. Konvitz and M. L. Rosenzweig, "Liberia," in A. N. Allott, ed., Judicial and Legal Systems in Africa (London, 1970), 122; and Toye C. Barnard, ed., Revised Laws and Administrative Regulations for Governing the Hinterland (Monrovia, n.d.).

9. See my article, "The Work of Rural Primary Courts in Ghana and Kenya," African Law Studies XIII (1976), 145.

10. The immediate aftermath of the coup saw the suspension of the Libe- rian Constitution and the replacement of the Supreme Court by the People's Supreme Tribunal. Certain crimes, such as high treason and bribery by a foreign resident of a uniformed official, were to be tried by the Special Military Tribunal. How- ever, with the exception of Justices of the Peace in Magisterial Areas, the rest of the system stayed in place. See Decree No. One (April 12, 1980), Decree No. Two (April 24, 1980), Decree No. Three (April 24, 1980),and Decree No. Five (May 13, 1980) in Public Affairs Bureau, Ministry of Information, Cultural Affairs and Tourism, Seven Decrees of the People's Redemption Council (n.d.).

11. Formerly the President.

12. Konvitz and Rosenzweig, "Liberia."

13. See my paper, "My Head Wife Told Me: The Law of Evidence in the Rural Courts of Liberia," presented at the 23d Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Philadelphia, October 18, 1980.

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14. Many of these fees were not sanctioned by statute but were facts of Liberian legal life nonetheless.

15. In Liberian English a plaintiff would threaten to "carry" a defendant to court. A case would be "carried," appealed, from one court to another. This use of the verb "to carry" was a general one and not limited to legal affairs. "'Carry me' (take me) "was a common expression. D'Azevedo, Some Terms From Liberian Speech, 8. "To bring," for instance, was similarly used: "'Bring me to that place' (Take me there)." Ibid., 5.

16. The names of the participants have been changed.

17. See Note, "Alienation of Affections: Flourishing Anachronism," Wake Forest Law Review XIII, 585 (1977); see also "Husband and Wife" (in vols. 41 -2) and "Seduction" (in vol. 79) of West Publishing Co., eds., Corpus Juris Secundum: A Complete Restatement of the Entire American Law as Developed by All Reported Cases (St. Paul, 1981). Under the Liberian statutory domestic relations law as revised in 1973, adultery or seduction of a wife was actionable. Government Printing Office, An Act Adopting A New Domestic Relations Law (Monrovia, 1973), Sub. Sec. 13.1. However, the act did not apply "to parties where domestic relations are subject to and governed by customary laws and traditions." Sub Sec. 1. 1. In such cases the rules on adultery or seduction were governed by the customs of each ethnic group. See Karpeh v. Manning (1936), 5 Liberian Law Reports 162, for the applicability of general and specific customary rules. A few general customary rules on adultery and seduction were contained in the Hinterland Regulations as early as 1923. See Charles H. Huberich, The Political and Legislative History of Liberia (New York 1947), II, 1235 -1236. See also Toye C. Barnard, Revised Laws and Administrative Regulations for Governing the Hinterland, 54 -56. See also Sec. 405 and Sec. 406 of the Abo- rigines Law, I Liberian Code of Laws of 1956, 68 -69. The Aborigines Law was dropped in the recodification of 1973. See I Liberian Code of Laws Revised (1973).

18. "'I am not satisfy.' (...I have not been treated properly.)" D'Azevedo, Some Terms From Liberian Speech, 50.

19. "[C]urse; verbally insult; ridicule. 'That teacher abuse me when I make mistake' (That teacher made fun of me or spoke harshly to me over something I could not help)." Ibid., 1.

20. [1966] E.A. 514 (U.), High Court of Uganda. The case is discussed by R. B. Martin in "Note," Eastern Africa Law Review 1, 61 (1968).

21. Udoma was a Nigerian brought to Uganda to Africanize the judiciary.

22. See Max Rheinstein, ed., Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society (Cambridge, 1954).

23. For a brief review of Kelsen's ideas, see Wolfgang Friedmann, Legal Theory (New York, 1967), 275 -287.

24. Friedmann speculated that effectiveness of control might be proved in several ways: "the obedience of the majority, of an enlightened minority or sheer physical force." Ibid., 285.

25. This is taken from a mimeographed sheet in my possession entitled "Speech of Sobhuza II King of Swaziland on April 12, 1973" which I understand was distributed in Mbabane at the time. See the articles on the Swazi royal coup in the New York Times, April 13, 1973, 2, and in the May -June 1973 issue of Africa Report, XVIII, 3 (1973), 12.

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25 (cont.). There is similar language in the first decree of the National Liberation Council which took power following the ouster of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966. N.L.C.D. 1. In Rhodesia a year earlier Ian Smith and his government renounced English Sovereignty with a "Unilateral Declaration of Indepen- dence" (U.D.I.). They published a new constitution to replace the former one of 1961. Arguments from Matovu to support the continuing legitimacy of the old laws and the juristiction of the existing courts were raised in the cases that followed: Madzimbamuto v. Lardner- Burke, N.O., [1968] (2) S.A. 284 (App. Div. Rhodesia), & 3 ALL E.R. 564 (Privy Council). For a comment see Leslie J. Mac- Farlane, "Pronouncing on Rebellion: The Rhodesian Courts and U.D.I. ", Public Law 325 (1968).

26. PRC Decree No. Seven (May 13, 1980).

27. PRC Decree No. One. Elements of the crime of High Treason included "rampant corruption," "maladministration of government," and "contravention of the democratic process."

28. A large committee was subsequently appointed to draft a new constitution to replace the suspended one. Thus there was no intention that the old Constitution be reinstated. Interestingly, the old constitution (as amended through May 8, 1972) contained language that might, on first reading, justify a coup. Article I's opening statement included the following: "The end... of government... is to secure... to [the people]...their natural rights, and the blessings of life; and whenever these great objects are not obtained, the people have a right to alter the government, and to take measures necessary for their safety, prosperity and happiness." I Liberian Code of Laws Revised 3 (1973). This is similar to language contained not in the American Constitution (1789) but rather in the American Declaration of Independence (1776): "That to secure these rights [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, etc.], governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government." (Para.2.) For Liberia's Declaration of Independence see Huberich, The Political and Legis- lative History of Liberia, I, 827 -834. Most judges, however, would interpret the language from Article I of the Liberian Constitution as referring to the Constitution's own amendment mechanism, not to a self- contained right of revolution. Article V, Section 17 of the Liberian Constitution required a two thirds vote of both branches of the legislature and approval of two thirds of the voting public in a special election for the Constitution to be altered or amended. I Liberian Code of Laws Revised 18. On the other hand, were this interpreted as a constitutionally sanctioned right of revolution, one that permits the government to be altered without following the specific amendment procedures, then there would be no need for a Kelsen brand of analysis after a coup. Sargeant Doe's takeover would not be unconstitutional. His government would be legitimate without any inquiry as to whether or not its control of the country was effective.

29. With the exception already mentioned in fn. 10 above.

30. Those powers were contained in Government Printing Office, An Act Adopting a New Judiciary Law (Monrovia, 1972), referred to in Sec. 1.5 of Decree No. 3.

31. To my knowledge.

32. Many technical questions would arise, for instance, were a lawyer to study the Disciplinary Committee's decision in the weaning case. Some of these

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questions would be: Why did Saye, rather than The People's Redemption Council, create this new court? What substantive rules of law are to be applied? Statutory? Customary rules? If the latter, the rules of which ethnic group? Mano? Gio? See also fn. 17 above. For a general discussion of some of these questions in other English- speaking African jurisdictions, see "Part II - Internal Conflicts and the Application of Customary Law" in A. N. Allott, New Essays In African Law (London, 1970), 107 -338.

33. Government Printing Office, An Act Adopting A New Penal Law (Monrovia, 1976). Copies were hard to find even in Monrovia itself.

34. Determining an exact date when these courts were first held to be unconstitutional is difficult both because of the limited number of accessible Liberian court opinions that have been published and because of the difficulty in understanding precisely what effects the holdings of some opinions were in- tended to have. Gray v. Beverly, 1 Liberian Law Reports 500 (1907) and Blahmo v. Ware, 2 Liberian Law Reports 63 (1912) can be read as finding the system of administrative courts unconstitutional. See generally Huberich, The Political and Legislative History of Liberia, II, 866 -872, 1206 -1244. See also Alfonso K. Dormu, The Constitution of the Republic of Liberia and the Declaration of Independence (Jericho, New York, 1970), 42 -51.

35. Besides the principal case discussed in the text below, see Jedah v. Horace, 2 Liberian Law Reports 265 (1916) and Posum v. Pardee, 4 Liberian Law Reports 299 (1935).

36. 2 Liberian Law Reports 317 (1919).

37. "Gola," Holsoe, A Standardization of Liberian Ethnic Nomenclature, 3.

38. 2 Liberian Law Reports 318.

39. Ibid.

40. 1914 Session Laws 16.

41. T. McCants- Stewart, Revised Statutes of the Republic of Liberia (1911, published 1927), 120.

42. 2 Liberian Law Reports, 320.

43. Ibid., 334.

44. See fn. 35 above.

45. The help of Svend Holsoe, Vera McPhilomy, Mary Nauman, Jo Sullivan, and Jeff Thomsen in the preparation of this paper is gratefully acknowledged.

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BOOK REVIEW 109

Andreas Massing, THE ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE KRU (WEST- AFRICA). Franz Stiner Verlag. Wiesbaden. 1980. DM. 48., xiii, 281.

Andreas Massing's Economic Anthropology of the Kru is an ambitious work, attempting both an exposition of the cultural characteristics of the 'Kru' linguistic area, and an analysis of agricultural practice in the region which aims to test the rationality of resource allocation in the Kru indigenous economy. Given that this is a region in which most studies of economy and society tend to be very limited in their scope, such a wide- ranging approach is certainly to be welcomed, in principle. The fact that the enterprise is far from totally successful does not necessarily deny the validity of the attempt, though it does draw it seriously into question.

There are two major sections to the study, corresponding to the two themes referred to above. The first is concerned with the delimitation and description of the 'Kru Culture Area' (KCA) which Massing defines as that in which 'Kru' languages are spoken, as classified by Westermann and Bryan (though the Liberian 'Bassa', which they classify as one of the Kru group, hardly figures in this work). The choice of this subject area is an interesting one, and the author displays some ingenuity in the way he draws together information from a wide variety of sources, in both English and French, and from diverse fields of academic enquiry, in the biological and social sciences. The extensive style of presentation, in which material from a broad geographical area is juxtaposed and, to some extent, analysed, implicitly raises important issues of comparison which may more than compensate for inadequacies in the data (for this is not, it should be said, the most reliable of works, in ethnographic terms).

There is a very major difficulty with this first section, however, which is never satisfactorily resolved, and which tends to vitiate the impact of the work in general. This relates directly to the choice of subject matter. The view that the 'Kru' linguistic unit (according to Westermann and Bryan's pre- liminary and very tentative classification) might also define a single culture area is clearly a contentious one, requiring some substantiation. Yet surpri- singly, not only is no attempt made to substantiate this choice, but none is apparently deemed to be required. Indeed, it is only in a footnote to a passage of purely ecological description that we learn of the grounds upon which the culture area is to be defined.

This difficulty is only compounded by the author's recourse to a method that is, for the most part, exegetical rather than analytical, and which renders the posture of enquiry and exploration inherent in the choice of subject matter a very difficult one to maintain. Whilst, for example, Massing accepts McEvoy's (surely valid) contention that the supposed ethnic units 'Grebo', 'Krahn', etc., refer to artificial categories, created by outsiders in an urban context, and reflecting influences external to the regions in question, his own attempt to reclassify these units does little more than replace one set of suspect terminology with another. Thus, the Krahn /Guere distinction becomes one between Western and Eastern 'We', purely it would seem, in deference to the present -day political boundary between Liberia and Ivory Coast (for the division has no pre- colonial ethnographic basis at all). The coastal area is separated into three ethnographic zones (Western, Central and Eastern Kru) on grounds which the author himself recognises to be arbitrary.

Similarly, when it comes to the discussion of political organization, the exposition again seems simultaneously to acknowledge, and yet ignore, the implications of the data presented. The absence of kwi societies from the area conventionally regarded as 'Kru' surely merits more than passing reference, as do the significant differences in the structure (as opposed merely to the number) of political offices between the more northerly and southerly groups (though

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these differences are partly submerged by errors in the author's ethnography). Whilst the discussion of the role of religious oracles in the pre -colonial period is a highly suggestive one - and, I believe, substantially correct (though kwi jirople was in Chelepo not Putu, as is made clear by Davis' informant, whom Massing quotes at length) - one would require some compelling argument to establish that the existence of such pan-tribal oracles denoted the underlying ideological unity of the whole region. No evidence is given to support Massing's claim that these societies formed 'a loose confederation' p. 71); neither, incidentally, were they organized into segmentary lineage systems, as Massing contends(p. 17).

In the second half of the study, the author is concerned with an analysis of Kru domestic economy. The approach in this section involves a fair amount of historical description, as well as agronomic analysis, though the two aspects are barely integrated. The basic aim is to explore the nature of the limited development of the Kru region through an analysis of decision -making processes within the constituent household units, the assumption being that the region is in ecological terms comparable with other regions of West Africa which have achieved much greater agricultural development, and hence, relatively less developed for primarily socio- political reasons. This is combined with a detailed polemical attack on the views of Marshall Sahlins concerning the domestic economy, as represented in the second and third chapters of his Stone -Age Economics (1974), employing data obtained partly from the author's fieldwork in the Ivory Coast. From this analysis, Massing concludes that, contrary to Sahlins' own views regarding the political and demographic factors which govern the size and distribution of the surplus in less complex agrarian societies, variations in production among the Ivorian Kru can be seen as primarily reflecting temporary influences relating to "family cycle events rather than socio- structural causes" (p. 204).

This is, in some ways, a sophisticated piece of analysis, which it is not entirely within my competence to judge. I leave it to others more versed in the methods of agricultural economics to decide whether Massing's mathematical treatment of the data justifies the conclusions reached, and whether this data is, in any case, of such quality as to warrant the faith placed in it. One cannot but feel, however, that in view of the very limited state of knowledge concerning the organization of agriculture in this region, a more qualitative treatment, based upon a detailed, diachronic study of resource allocation within a few farm families, might have been more illuminating than the broad, but rambling, mathematical presentation offered. Massing also discusses Sahlins' views concerning the domestic mode of production. Massing is right, I think, to be sceptical of Sahlins' Stone -Age Economics which, despite its superficial plausibility and profligate use of Marxist terminology, never departs from a simplistic and ahistorical evolutionist position. But here again, Massing's overconcern with quantification diverts him from exploring fully the implications of his data, and from revealing the relationships between production levels and constraints deriving from the contemporary economic and social environment. Specificially, one feels that the influence of factors relating to the size and composition of the household are overplayed, to the detriment of those relating to the wider political milieu.

It is not, however, all that easy for the reader to make his own sense of the voluminous data offered. To take an example: one sub -section of Chapter 7 is entitled 'An Agricultural Sample Survey', and in this the reader is referred to a sample of 14 villages; these, the author claims, are "circled in red on Map 10" (p. 160) - though the whole work is in monochrome, and no villages are circled - and presented in tabular form in "Table XXVII" (actually Table XXXIII, in which 13 villages are listed, two of them numbered '12' and at least one

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mis- spelled). Nine of these are discussed in detail in a section enigmatically entitled "Ten Sample Villages" (the map locating the farms of one village appears twice, once out of place). The reader is then referred to Appendix V, in which a survey of 96 households is said to be discussed (though in the actual appendix, a sample of only 94 is claimed). Finally, in Appendix VI, production profiles for 10 of the villages in the sample are said to be presented - though -11 villages (two mis- spelled) are, in fact, listed on the same page as this claim is made, and subsequently represented in graphical form. These sorts of errors, combined with the author's own idiosyncracies of English style, make for some very perplexing reading indeed. With the economic data, as with the ethnography, one feels that the author would have been well- advised to consider fewer cases, in greater detail, and with more attention to his readers' needs.

This is, then, a work with many major problems. It is, nevertheless, an often stimulating study, which offers a significantly different perspective from the average anthropological treatise on this region, and which suggests a number of fruitful avenues for future research. A pity, though, that it is marred by so many errors, inaccuracies and misprints (the bibliographic referencing in the main text is the worst I've ever seen), as well as by a frenetic and undisci- plined manner of presentation which bears all the hallmarks of overhasty publication.

David Brown University of Sokoto, Nigeria

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ETHNOLOGISCHE ZEITSCHRIFT. ZURICH. I, 1980. Editors Karl H. Henking, Walter Hirschberg, Hugo Huber, Andre Jeanneret, Otto Zerries. Co- editor Marie Jeanne Adams. 25 DM.

The publication of this collection of eleven essays concerning research done in the past decade in Sierra Leone and Liberia should be welcomed by scholars from all disciplines. The volume deals mainly with aspects of the widely known and somewhat misunderstood men's and women's secret associations of this region, the Poro and Sande, respectively. Marie -Jeanne Adams of the Peabody Museum of Ethnology, Harvard University, who also contributes an introduction and afterword is the co- editor (with the editorial board of the Volker - kundermuseums der Universität Zürich). The authors, who include anthropologists (d'Azevedo, Bledsoe, MacCormack, Holsoe and Zetterstrom);art historians (Perani, Fischer, Phillips and Adams); historians (Siegmann); and sociologists (Bellman and Jedrej) provide essays which range from meticulous reporting and analysis of field data to overviews presenting hypotheses regarding the ethnohistoric development of men's and women's associations and power structures in this area. Six of the eleven essays deal primarily with men's associations, four deal with women's associations and one (MacCormack's) describes an association which has not yet been extensively described in the published literature. Adams notes in her introduction that the collection of essays grew out of a conference held at the Peabody Museum of Ethnology, Harvard University, in April 1978.

The first group of essays, dealing with men's associations, begins appropriately with Warren d'Azevedo's article on Gola Poro and Sande associations. The appropriateness of first discussing Gola Poro and Sande arises from the accumulated evidence suggesting that the Gola associations in their conserva- tism most accurately reflect exemplary forms of the structure and content of the two associations. Importantly, d'Azevedo notes the continuing trend toward the facile use of the Poro society, only partially understood, by researchers in many disciplines as a virtual model for comparative social theory -- the "poro- type organization" typifies this. This trend has obscured the importance and integral relationship of the women's Sande society with the Poro society. D'Azevedo's essay provides an extensive overview of the complementary roles of Gola Sande and Poro associations, with particularly informative data on historical change in the 19th and 20th centuries. He concludes optimistically that despite the great changes which have occurred in Gola political organization, economy and religion, the core cultural values of Gola life expressed through Poro and Sande are still intact and show every evidence of remaining so.

William Siegmann and Judith Perani's essay "Men's Masquerades of Sierra Leone and Liberia" was previously published in an issue of African Arts (9, 3, 1976). Reprinted here with additional black and white photographs, it provides an excellent review of men's masking traditions from southern Sierra Leone and western Liberia, an area best known for wooden masks used by women of the Sande society. Importantly, the essay points out that the men's elaborate visual dis- play masks are used by non -Poro associated men's groups called gbonjisia. The masks are primarily non-wooden, using instead leather, raffia, cloth, yarn and wickerwork construction. Some ten different masks are described with regard to appearance, construction, performance style, and function.

In his essay "Poro of the Yamein Mano, Liberia," Kjell Zetterstrom offers a capsule review of the Poro society in Mano life. He discusses Mano tales of the origin of Poro and its relationship with the Poro associations of neighboring ethnic groups, describes ritual activities including circumcision and Poro initiation, and discusses the structure and various offices of the association. It is tempting to compare Zetterstrom's recently gathered data with that of George Harley's from the 1940's and earlier, but some of the problems inherent in Harley's published material are also present here. Although one can

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assume that he conducted his field research in the mid- 1970's, Zetterstrom does not provide any details regarding how long he spent in Mano country or how many informants he used (and what their qualifications, and hence, their reliability may have been). The references to illustrations accompanying the essay are often unclear and the objects illustrated (none,apparently in situ) are not identified with regard to collector, place and date of collection, and present location.

Beryl Bellman's essay "Masks, Societies and Secrecy among the Fala Kpelle" is important because he views mask use as only a part of a more general phenomenon of the Poro and Sande societies; i.e., the management of illusion and the constitution of secrecy. Echoing d'Azevedo, he cautions against the tendency current in scholarly literature to draw general conclusions concerning the Poro society based on practices observed in a single area. Bellman compares two neighboring communities, each with similar though very different Poro associations. He describes Poro and non -Poro association structures and ritual practices in both communities, and delineates the masked and non -masked "devils" (spirit masquerades) which are manifestations of each association's powers. He concludes with a discussion of the difficulties of describing the universal nature of Poro. The problem as he sees it, exists because significant differences in Poro structures appear even between neighboring communities of the same ethnic group.

Eberhard Fisher's "Masks in a Non -Poro Area: the Dan" is footnoted as

". . . a talk given at the Peabody Museum," and it does, indeed, read as a transcribed tape of an oral presentation. Fisher's main points are: (1) that all Dan masks represent spirits from the forest, (2) that ancestors are not worshipped through any Dan masks, (3) that the Dan do not have a Poro association, (4) that certain Dan masks are associated with circumcision, (5) that there is no prescribed course of training for a mask carver, (6) that each Dan mask belongs to a single, specific person but may be held, following his death, by his lineage, (7) that the Dan have non -masked, nighttime- appearing spirit manifestations as well as wooden face masks, (8) that peacekeeping masks have been used among the Dan for more than a century, and that (9) Fisher's own categorization of Dan masks published in Die Kunst der Dan (1978)1 and in African Arts 11, 2 (1978) must be taken only as an analytical schema. It does not reflect the dynamics of reality, where age, efficacy and the borrowing of motifs among neighboring groups have significant effects on mask forms and functions. While quite lucid and straightforward in presentation, Fisher's essay would have benefited from the inclusion of illustrative photos or diagrams.

As Monni Adams rightly states in her introduction, William Siegmann's essay "Spirit Representation and the Poro Society" constitutes one of the "great leaps forward" in our understanding of the use of masks in social control. Siegmann argues for the definition of three areas of differing spirit manifestation within the Central West Atlantic region, suggesting that the different uses of masks (and non -masked spirits) are based on historical aspects of migration, settlement and political structure. The essay is nicely positioned in the collection -- following essays on Gola, Mano, Kpelle and Dan modes of spirit manifestation -- offering a hypothetical overview which places the individual ethnographic studies into historic and geographic perspective and which suggests approaches for future ethnographic research within the region.

The latter essays of this volume are all concerned (with the exception of MacCormack's essay) with the Sande society. Svend Holsoe's essay "Notes on the Vai Sande Society in Liberia" begins this section with a detailed account of the manner in which the Sande society functions among the Vai. Holsoe describes the origin of the Sande society among the Vai (probably derived from the Gola)

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and details basic aspects of Sande functioning, including the "bush" school, offices of the society, and the creation and usage of masks. The extensive, detailed presentation of Sande initiation practices should prove useful to scholars from many disciplines (it is a nearly classic anthropological "rite of passage "), but also interesting are the new bits of data unearthed in the process. Holsoe explains that masks are not limited in use to specific individuals and that, in fact, they may on occasion be worn by men (raising, but unfortunately not answering, the questions of when and why this may occur). For art historians, Holsoe's notes regarding the omnipresent symbolism of water in Sande ritual may prove to be a significant avenue for research. This article includes a glossary of Vai terms and several previously unpublished black and white field photos of aspects of Sande ritual.

In contrast to Holsoe's essay, which focusses on Sande ritual, Ruth Phillips' essay "Iconography of Mende Sowei Masks" focusses very narrowly on the carved wood objects -- masks -- which are the visual focus of many Sande public activities. Phillips acknowledges at the outset that a complete iconographic explanation of the Sowei mask may never be possible, both because of the secrecy of such information and because of historical change. She goes on to discuss various symbolic elements of the Sowei mask including color, mouth forms, neck rings, coiffures, facial scarification and depictions of amulets, horns, teeth and other objects which may be carved as objects attached to coiffures. Importantly, Phillips absolutely rejects William Hommel's published assertions of certain kinds of sexual symbolism expressed in Sowei lobed hairstyles. She indicates that while there are some very oblique sexual references in certain iconographic elements, they are never made in as blunt and bold a manner as Hommel indicates. In conclusion, Phillips distills Mende Sowei mask iconography to four elements: high status, power, wealth and beauty. The article is accompanied by a mixture of field and object (mask) photos which are documented whenever possible in terms of carver and date of creation, but never indicate where the object is presently located or where it was when photographed.

The broadly observational articles by Holsoe and Phillips are followed by two short articles that are more abstractly analytical in character, M. C. Jedrej's "Structural Aspects of a West African Secret Society" and Caroline Bledsoe's "Stratification and Sande Politics." Jedrej finds several binary oppositions in basic aspects of Sande ritual functioning and sets up a structural situation determined by factors of people, space and supernatural spirits. His theoretical structure is based on the work of Max Gluckman and Edmund Leach,and he utilizes both his own field data and that of other researchers. As Adams notes in her introduction, perhaps the most significant aspect of this essay is Jedrej's proposed hypothesis to account for why masking is needed in Sande ceremonies. He suggests that the appearance of normally uncontrollable, invisi- ble forest spirits in the village expresses tangible control by the Sande women. This does not, however, deal with the uniqueness of Sande women's masking among all other similar extant female associations.

Bledsoe's examination of the sociocultural context of the Sande society among the Kpelle is less abstract and perhaps more readily pertinent to the data at hand. Arguing that the more important aspects of Sande lie in the way in which Sande leaders consolidate power rather than share it, Bledsoe shows how Sande intensifies power differences between males and females of lineages, and in the society at large, between women themselves. She sees the Sande society's claim to educate youth and promote solidarity as cultural ideologies meant to rationalize the appropriation of labor and wealth by individuals or small groups of elites. In sum, Bledsoe provides a useful framework for viewing both men's and women's secret society structures by looking beyond cultural explanations to actual economic and power relationships.

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Carol MacCormack's essay "Art and Symbolism in Thoma Ritual," stands in contrast to the preceding essays in this collection since it deals with neither the Sande nor the Poro association, but with an association that co- exists with both of them among the Shrebro Mende of Sierra Leone. MacCormack describes basic aspects of the association, including its initiation rituals which closely parallel that of Sande and Poro -- and its internal structure of offices and functions, including the four masks used in Thoma rituals. She discusses binary oppositions inherent in various aspects of Thoma ritual (village /forest, land /water animals, men /women, color symbolism). It is never clear, however, as to why the association, complementary to Poro and Sande, is needed and how it is determined which children will join one association or another. Following Bledsoe's essay, which dissects the rational interests of the elite groups that manage such associations, one craves the application of that kind of analysis to this situation as well. MacCormack's prose is at times difficult to comprehend (example: "Water is polysemic, meaning libations poured upon the ground,soaking down to the watery underworld of ancestors. ") and one is not always sure whose interpretations of ritual actions one is receiving (the informant's? the writer's ?). Six well- documented black and white photographs accompany the essay.

In her short concluding essay "Afterword. Spheres of Men's and Women's Creativity ", Marie Jeanne Adams theorizes that a particular men's activity, figure carving, may parallel a primary women's activity, bearing children. She suggests that men use female imagery as often as they do in figure carving because it creates the metaphor of woman as the willing fulfillment of their wishes, just as women ideally treat their children. The conditions of creativity, Adams asserts, are similar for men and for women. Both involve separation and confinement, refraining from sexual activities and food and, finally, exclusion of the opposite sex during creation. Adams' hypothesis should prove tantalizing for further research by art historians and anthropologists.

One of the significant achievements of the Peabody conference, Adams notes, was the agreement on standardizing terms for ethnic groups in this region. It is unfortunate that the otherwise very excellent map included with this volume does not indicate the mentioned ethnic group designation changes. Addi- tionally, Adams'assertion that We is pronounced as though the "w" were a "v" is incorrect; it should be pronounced as a "w ".

This collection of essays has been well -printed and well- bound, and includes the addresses of all the authors. It is unfortunate, however, that it remains relatively inaccessible to students and scholars in this country. This special issue of the journal can be purchased for 25 Swiss francs from the Volkerkundemuseum der Universitát Zurich. It shall, hopefully, set an example for ethnographic- oriented Museums and departments and centers of African Studies around the country, of the kind of publication which is much -needed for all areas of African studies.

Edward Lifschitz Washington, D. C.

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LIBERIA: Economic and Political Development 1971 -1980. Some critical remarks on Robert Kappel's recent work: Liberia, wirtschaftliche und politische Ent- wicklung 1971 -80 published by: Institut für Afrika -Kunde, Vol. 23, Hamburg, Germany, April 1980.

The work submitted by Kappel could be understood as an attempt to explain the political situation and the economic and social factors resulting in the coup d'etat led by Master- Sergeant Samuel K. Doe and a group of lower ranks of the Liberian Army. Although the author says that his study had already been concluded in January 1980, it was not published until well after the self -made President Doe had usurped office. One may be of the opinion that this book in many ways is most timely. As soon as one reads the foreword, however, one will be inclined to believe that the author has produced somewhat of an apologetic thesis to subsequently justify the action of a few insubordinate army men who have "terminated the corrupt and despotic system set up by the Americo- Liberians, which was detested by the majority of the Liberian people ".

Kappel promotes the opinion that the basic reason which led to the coup in April 1980 must be found in the prevailing Neo- Colonialism of the Americo - Liberians, who as agents of American Imperialism, representing the ruling class of the 'Big Shots', have continuously provoked and enslaved the working population.

I am not willing to enter a political discussion for or against capita- list or socialism, but as a geographer and socio- economist I cannot fail to state that Kappel presents a socioeconomic picture of Liberia which is in many ways distorted. He operates quite liberally with historic facts and gives no consideration whatsoever to many relevant geographical and ethnic problems this country has to face.

First of all it is simply ridiculous to insinuate that the American Colonization Society planned to found a great empire under American rule, an 'American Colony'. This is contradicted by the foreign policy of the United States and the famous doctrine of James Monroe, President of the United States at that time. The ACS was a private organization founded in 1816 by a group of philanthropists and clergymen,namely Bushrod (not Bushroad) Washington, nephew of George Washington, Robert Finley, a Presbyterian pastor, Elijah Cald- well, Francis Scott Key, Henry Clay and others. Its main purpose was to resettle the freed Negro slaves on the land of their fathers in Africa. The United States was at no time prepared or willing to declare Liberia an American colony. Indeed, having never been a colonial possession, the new settlement was constantly an obstacle in the eyes of the colonial powers during the partition of Africa, and it is really remarkable that the settlers were able to preserve independence, although they lost substantial parts of their territory. Only the endurance of the pioneers and the passionate desire for liberty helped to overcome this period of consolidation, a fact to which Kappel gives no credit.

Kappel's bibliographical studies depend largely on secondary sources, which he freely cites without much criticism. In addition his quotes are rather selective, used mainly to expose and point out that the settlers from America did nothing but oppress the tribal people, steal their land, and thereafter en- slave them as farm hands and cheap labor. It is quite true that the newcomers were convinced of their superiority to the indigenous people they encountered, but their conflict with the different tribes was mainly caused by their inter- ference and objections to the slave trade, which at that time was still practiced, especially by the Gola, Vai and Kru leaders. Kappel gives not much thought to the many tribal wars, which have been carried out just for the purpose to capture slaves in the hinterland.

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After the proclamation of independence in 1847, the economy of the young republic started to thrive. Trade relations with England, Holland and Hamburg became especially intensive, and by 1955 more than 30 ships, built in small shipyards near Monrovia, sailed under the Liberian flag.

Because of events of world -wide significance, Liberia was driven into isolation and underwent a grave economic crisis which lasted from the 1870's for more than 50 years. Prices of most export commodities dropped on the world market and the development of the steamship resulted in the complete disappear- ance of the Liberian sailing fleet. Furthermore, the outbreak of World War I cut off the trade with Germany. Liberia, greatly to her own disadvantage, was forced to take several loans, the one of 1912 on condition that an American be appointed commissioner of Liberian customs assuring prompt repayment. In 1935 the function of the commissioner became more truly that of a financial advisor.

Meanwhile, the Firestone rubber plantation started production on a large scale and the increasing revenues from rubber exports stimulated development of all branches in public life, ranging from infrastructural investments, building of roads, ports, schools and hospitals to the employment of some 20,000 people with over 60,000 dependants. Firestone encouraged Liberian farmers to start private plantations, so that by 1977 about 9100 independent rubber farms existed. According to Kappel they were all being "exploited by Firestone, misusing its position as the sole buyer to pay low prices for the latex ".

Since the inauguration of President Tubman Liberia's economy has pro- gressed considerably. The Open Door Policy and the introduction of the U.S. dollar as legal tender caused an exceptional investment boom particularly in the field of mineral exploration. A few years after the first iron ore mine was opened up at Bomi Hills, Liberia became the biggest producer of iron ore in Africa, and her balance of trade for the first time showed positive results Kappel, however, sees Liberia bleeding for the benefit of the United States and of the European nations, her mineral and agricultural resources exploited by foreign concessions to their own profit, and the wealth with which nature had endowed the land seemingly drained away to flow overseas. He gives not much credit to the facts that capital investment and technical know -how from Europe and the United States have made possible great advances to the general standard of living. For Kappel, Tubman as the representative of the leading class favoured cooperation with foreign investors only to his own benefit.

Keppel also discredits Tubman's Unification Policy, which according to him was an attempt to provide the labor force for investors from overseas. This purely selective way of putting things misses the important fact that Tubman really took impressive measures to improve the conditions in the rural areas. Even Tuan Wreh admitted that it was "to Tubman's lasting credit that he had initiated the extension of the country jurisdiction to the farthest limits of Liberian territory" (p. 43).

Tubman, who considered education an essential element in the life and progress of the nation, gave priority to school construction and teacher training. Aid from "imperialistic America" provided also impressive means to foster education and Peace Corps teachers as well as missionary societies did a marvellous job in the distant village schools.

When William R. Tolbert finally became president in 1971, he reaffirmed the policies of Tubman basically (according to Wreh "he had to remain in Tubman's shadow to play it safe"), although he was eager to distinguish himself as the new leader. First of all, he reshuffled his cabinet and appointed some young and talented men. Trying to bring greater efficiency into government operations

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and weed out corruption, he rigorously dismissed some high officials.

Tolbert aimed for a "Human Capitalism" and a "wholesome functioning society" on the basis of his policy of "total involvement ". His endeavour to ease the social tension of the evergrowing urban population did not, however, bring satisfactory solutions.

Taking much interest in foreign affairs, Tolbert hastened to establish diplomatic relations with communist Russia and the Eastern Bloc, which Tubman had strongly opposed at his time. Liberia also became an Associated Member of the European Common Market. Certainly this membership is neither a "disguised form of neo- colonialism ", nor "did Liberia turn her back on America by entering the EEC" -- as Kappel remarks. The country simply tried to diversify her trade relations and take advantage of a wider market in Europe and opportunities for financial aid which most African nations already enjoy.

As the elected chairman of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), of which Liberia was a founding member, Tolbert invited the sixteenth Summit Conference to take place in Monrovia in 1979. Whilst he was -- by all means -- heavily criticized for having spent millions of dollars on this conference for pure representation at a time when many of his people were out of work and in need, this is a very common but faulty attitude taken by developing countries, who on their way to compete in world affairs usually overemphasize foreign politics in comparison to internal affairs.

It is also true that the Mano River Union (MRU) between Liberia and Sierra Leone has not as yet furnished the results anticipated. In due course, however, it may be valued as a step toward the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). In fact, early in 1980, Guinea declared her intention to join the MRU as a third party.

Tolbert had to cope with quite a few economic problems caused by the world -wide recession, the drastic increase of the oil price, and the devaluation of the US- dollar, which still is the legal tender in Liberia. The argument that the use of the US- dollar is essential to the maintenance of a healthy investment climate is of course questionable, but the creation of an independent monetary system might also be a very risky venture, as experiences have clearly shown in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Tanzania.

Although Liberia, in comparison to quite a few other African nations, finds herself in a quite acceptable position, it is still a developing country and neither Tubman and Tolbert nor Samuel K. Doe could change this basic fact. The same can be said about the long way of nation -building. Most African countries face the difficulties of having to unite a large number of tribes of different languages and cultural backgrounds and often strong animosities. In Liberia this situation was aggravated by the necessity to integrate into the society people of different ethnic groups and the already better educated former slaves from America, who brought with them christianity, a certain degreee of civilisation, and agricultural innovations hitherto unknown to the indigenous population. No doubt, this brought on a certain form of society where the Ameri- co- Liberians represented superiority, but it is very bold to conclude that this society was unaware of this situation and did nothing whatsoever to integrate the tribal people. That it had tried to master this problem is proved by Tub - man's Unification Policy.

It seems to me that Kappel was influenced too strongly by using left - wing publications without the necessary objectivity, thereby loosing contact with the reality which is much more complex than the ideological cliché shown by him.

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It is always very dangerous to transfer certain political ideas which were born in Europe to African conditions, and by changing historic facts, make them fit. They don't and they never will. There is no doubt that mis- demeanor and corrupt behavior existed in the Liberian Government, but they did not represent the real dangers to the economy. The real problems of underdevelopment should be found in insufficient economic planning, inadequate infrastructure, and hence increasing structural disparities between urban and rural areas, lack of technical and administrative know-how, and last, but not least, the still deficient general education. Moreover, the ever - growing urbaniza- tion has determined the structural and functional imbalance of the urban population in Monrovia, increasing the social tension of the many unskilled and unemployed slum- dwellers to such an extent that they were ready to listen to and be the easy prey of any agitator promising liberty and better living conditions by annihilating the former rulers. This dream of entering the Garden of Eden usually ends like it was witnessed in Uganda and Iran.

Stefan von Gnielinski University of Munich

LITERATURE USED

d'Azevedo, W.L. "A Tribal Reaction of Nationalism," Liberian Studies Journal, I (1969), 1-21.

Coale, W.D. West German Transnationals in Tropical Africa. The Case of Liberia and the BMC. Munich, 1978.

v. Gnielinski, S. Liberia in Maps. London, New York, 1972.

. "President Tolbert's Visit to West Germany," Afrika Forum, I/79, 77 -79.

. "UNIDO Investment Promotion Meeting, West Africa," Afrika Forum, II /80, 171 -180.

Kuhn, W.E. "Growth Without a Central Bank, Peculiarities of the Libe- rian Case," Nebraska Journal of Economics, 9/70, 37 -52.

Liebenow, J.G. Liberia - The Evolution of Privilege. London, 1969.

Maynard, G. "The Economic Irrelevance of Monetary Independence: The Case of Liberia," Journal of Development Studies, (1970), 111 -132.

Schulze, W. A New Geography of Liberia. London, 1973.

Tolbert, A.B. Liberia at the Crossroads. London, 1979.

Townsend, R.E. President Tubman Speaks. London, 1959.

. The Official Papers of W.V.S. Tubman. London, 1968.

Wreh, T. The Love of Liberty. The Rule of Pres. W.V.S. Tubman in Liberia 1944 -1971. London, 1976.

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Notes on S.v.Gnielinski's review

The main emphasis of my investigation Liberia - Wirtschaftliche and politische Entwicklung 1971 -1980, as a glance at the English summary or at the chapter headings will show, is not upon the history of the country but rather upon current circumstances, the problems of underdevelopment and poverty and upon the international economic and political relationships in which Liberia is involved (pp. 37 -136). It must therefore be stated at the outset that S. v. Gnielinski's critique only very superficially touches on the content of my book.

In addition Gnielinski has in part misrepresented my conclusions. He speaks, for instance, of the farmers being all "exploited by Firestone, misusing its position as the sole buyer to pay low prices for the latex ". This quotation does not exist in my text. What I in fact write is "that the Liberian farmers are totally subordinate to foreign planters' capital with regard to price- setting, fixing of quantity and quality on the market, processing of the raw -material and the purchase of new plants...The concern uses its power in order to depress the price of rubber (Firestone is the 'price- setter') below world market prices and in order, at the same time, to keep the farmers in a dependent position as regards the purchase of new plants" (p. 51 f.). Nor do I maintain that Liberia's membership in the European Community (which does not exist;) is "a disguised form of neo- colonialism ". This quotation, again, is nowhere to be found in my book. I actually wrote: "Liberia's political turn towards Europe and the countries of the third world was accompanied by a streng- thening of economic cooperation. Liberia became a member of a number of multi- lateral associations in West Africa, a member -state of the ACP (African, Carib- bean and Pacific States) and of the non -aligned movement, which most clearly underlines the cooperation with the third world." (p. 117).

My investigation was published in June 1980. After a period of research in Liberia in 1979 the manuscript of the book was handed over to the Institut fur Afrika -Kunde in Hamburg in January 1980 (three months, that is, before the military coup d'état of April 12, 1980) and a foreword was added exactly ten days after the coup. This foreword describes the developments of the year 1980 up to the coup and the first measures taken by the People's Redemption Council. Gnielinski misquotes particularly this foreword. He writes: "Has produced somewhat of an apologetic thesis to subsequently justify the terrorist action of a few insubordinate army men who have terminated the corrupt and despotic system set up by the Americo- Liberians, which was detested by the majority of the Liberian people". This in fact completely distorts the meaning of my text. In the foreword I quote S.K. Doe and explain why Doe considered the coup to be necessary. I write: "President Doe declared in his first public address that the Tolbert government had not been capable of fulfilling the wishes of the Liberian people. There had been unparalleled corruption..." (p. XIII).

In actual fact Gnielinski merely makes use of the review article as an excuse for putting forward his own theses on the history of Liberia (which I only briefly deal with, pp. 1 -36). Unfortunately his own account is extremely one -sided and in part simply wrong. The activities of Firestone and of other foreign capital, for instance, have not been an unmingled blessing for the majority of the population, contrary to his account. Are we to forget that workers for Firestone in the twenties and thirties were forcibly recruited and had to work for little pay and with no rights? The "impressive measures" which Gnielinski writes about turn out to be nothing but a veil concealing the real situation. He fails, for example, to mention not only the infringement of all democratic rights for the majority of the population during the Tubman and Tol- bert era, but also the suppression of strikes, the confiscation of farmland by the Americo- Liberian ruling class, the obstruction of the political opposition,

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corruption, and nepotism.

Robert Kappel

Summary of Robert Kappel's Liberia. Wirtschaftliche und politische Entwick- lung 1971 -1980. Hamburg, 1980.

Since 1876, Liberian society has essentially been determined by the one -party rule of the True Whig Party (TWP) which developed in Liberia on the basis of an economy dependent on foreign powers. Between the middle of the 19th century and 1926, Liberia's economy was dominated by the capital of foreign traders who bought cheap raw materials (palm oil, coffee, and dyewood) from Liberia and shipped Liberian workers to Panama, and particularly to Fernando Po, for forced labour. The Liberian state secured its revenues by imposing taxes on both imports and the export of labour. With the exception of a few plantations, national capital investments did not exist. The more British and American financial interests seized control of government administration by a strategy of indebting the state which gave them control over the state's fi- nances and the Liberian Army (Frontier Force) and the more they tried to convert Liberia into a colony, the more the jurisdiction of the Liberian state was extended to the African peoples residing in what is now Liberian territory. It took the Liberian state a full century to establish its rule firmly, because some of the ethnic groups and peoples fiercely resisted the conquerors, trying to prevent the seizure of land, the imposition of taxes, and the recruitment of forced labour and it was not until 1932 that the last rebellion of the Kru was eventually suppressed.

Following a period of continuous and full control of the country by the USA, and in particular by the Firestone Company, between 1926 and the end of World War II, the era of the Open -Door Policy began in 1944 when Mr. Tubman acceded to the presidency which lasted from 1944 till 1971. This Open-Door Policy was essentially characterized by the fact that Liberia was opened to foreign investors who had merely to pay low fees and duties to the state. The state granted concessions, guaranteeing favourable terms through the In- vestment Incentive Code (IIC). Until October 1979, however, this type of concessionary economy excluded foreigners from the possibility of acquiring land in Liberia. It was this concessionary economy which supplied the state with most of its revenues and, during the Tubman era, more than 50% of the state's revenues came from profit- sharing and partnership taxes paid by foreign concessionaries. As a result of the Open-Door Policy foreign capital flowed into the country for investment in the rubber plantations and, from 1951 onward, also in iron ore mining. The principal investors were Americans and Europeans interested in the low -cost exploitation of iron ore in Liberia.

Already during the Tubman era the afflux of European capital enabled Liberia to free herself from her one -sided dependence on the USA. This process of withdrawing from US influence has been intensified throughout President Tol- bert's reign which began in 1971. In addition, Liberia has since that time endeavoured to accelerate the country's development by entering into trade and tariff agreements and treaties also with Asian and African countries and by implementing joint development projects and plans to improve infrastructure, processing industries, agriculture, and the exploitation of raw materials. This process is still in its early stages, the dilemnma of Liberia's economic and social policies being best revealed by the Mano River Union(MRU) between Liberia and Sierra Leone. Due to the one -sided orientation of the economy toward the export of raw materials and the relative insignificance of the processing

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industries, there does not seem to be any basis for the development of the exchange of commodities between Liberia and other African and Asian countries. Though the MRU was founded as early as 1973, trade between the two countries has not yet reached 0.2% of the total of exports and imports. The productive basis of the two countries is so weak that even after the abolition of tariff barriers (in 1977), the exchange of goods has hardly increased. Being aware of this problem, the MRU has set itself the goal of improving, in particular, the infrastructural conditions for economic cooperation and providing the funds for joint ventures. Early in 1980 Guinea declared her intention to join the MRU as a third party.

In the political field, the Open -Door Policy means that Liberia is turning more and more towards the countries of Europe and the Third World, including in particular the Afro -Asian ones, in the hope of playing a major role in international decision -making. Liberia had already exercised influence as a representative of moderate forces when the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was founded in 1963. Later on - and especially after 1971 - her attitude in the issue of decolonization became more and more radical, probably due to pressure by other African countries. This new political trend was clearly revealed in President Tolbert's severe criticism of South Africa's apartheid policy. For 1979/80 President Tolbert was elected chairman of the OAU.

Since the mid -seventies the limitations of Liberia's economic and social policies have become more and more evident: While additional investment incentives permit the free flow of foreign capital into the country, the state is completely unable to influence those aspects of world economy, and those import and export prices which are essential to its own economic development. Even the quantities of iron ore, rubber and other commodities, which Liberia can export, depend on the demand of the world market. Ever since the European and American steel industries have got into a crisis, the export of iron ore has diminished. This led to considerable losses in the state's revenues, and even rising taxes on timber exports have been unable to make up for those losses. It is true that the establishment of the National Bank in 1974 provided an instrument for the control of the issue of dollar coins but it is all but impossible to ascertain the amount of money and investments existing in the country, because US Dollars flow into the country, or are transferred to foreign countries, through private banks. The essential problem is, however, that Li- beria is unable to influence the exchange rate of the Dollar.

The deterioration of the country's economic situation is accompanied by the incapability of the Liberian government to solve the country's social problems by means of economic and social policies serving the interest of the nation. While the concessionary system has enabled the elite - most of them the offspring of the Americo -Liberian settlers - to accumulate riches through profit- sharing, joint ventures, and managerial positions, the majority of the Liberian population have to shoulder the consequences, providing the basis for the wealth of a minority by low wages, the loss of land and taxes. The relationship between foreign investors, the elite in power, and the Liberian people may be best explained by reference to the rubber sector: As in all other fields foreign oligopolies dominate production, marketing, and fixing of prices. Liberian rubber plantations sell their products to such firms as Firestone, Goodrich etc., who dictate the prices. Workers employed in the rubber sector total about 40,000 and most of them do not earn more than the minimum wage of 2 Dollars a day when working on foreign -owned plantations. Those working on the Liberian - owned plantations do not even get the minimum wages, thus enabling the plantation owners to maintain their position vis -a -vis Firestone etc. and secure favourable profits for themselves.

The social situation of the Liberian people is marked by indescribable poverty. The per capita money income of the majority of the population amounts

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to about 70 dollars a year. The public health system is in a desolate state. 85% of the population are illiterate. As the inadequate producer prices for rice do not guarantee peasants a sufficient income, the cultivation of rice has gone down so much that more and more rice has to be imported which in turn results in an increasing burden on the state's budget. The problems of the peasant families whose reproduction basis keeps deteriorating, as the young people leave home to work on rubber plantations, in iron ore mines and in Monrovia, the country's capital, became more and more critical. Due to the seizure of land by the government and foreign concessionaries, a considerable shortage of land makes itself felt in some parts of the country. At the same time, however, a small stratum of rich people, a "rural bourgeoisie ", is developing and has access to loans and labour, possessing a sufficient acreage for growing cash crops and tree crops.

Just like the situation of the peasants, that of most other sections of the population keeps deteriorating: Wages decrease while there is a rapid rise in unemployment, especially in Monrovia. This social misery has been the cause of the strike movement and political unrest which has been spreading in the country, particularly since Mr. Tolbert's accession to the presidency, and which has resulted in the formation of such political organizations as the Pro- gressive People's Party of Liberia (PPP) and the Movement for Justice in Africa (MOJA). April 14, 1979, saw the gravest political riots in Liberia's history. As a result parts of the Monrovian population defeated the plan to raise rice prices. The riots, the subsequent struggles about the elections of a new mayor for Monrovia, when the TWP tried to enforce the application of an obso- lete electoral law, which had come into effect in 1847 and favoured land-owners, the strong pressure, which forced the government to permit the registration of the PPP as an opposition party, as well as the strikes in mines and plantations, are an indication of the growing political consciousness of the Liberian population. The newly formed opposition groups demand democratic rights, including the right to join trade unions, and some of them call for the reduc- tion of the country's economic dependence on foreign countries. At the same time they fight against the one -party rule existing since 1876, corruption, nepotism, and the "gobbling business" of the offspring of the Americo-Liberian settlers who still rule the country. The TWP, President Tolbert and the ruling class of the Americo -Liberians react to the ever -growing pressure of political forces and trade unions by repressive military and police actions, by adopting more stringent laws and by limiting democratic rights.

The study was concluded in January, 1980. After further unrests in March and April, 1980, lower ranks of the Liberian army led by Master -Sergeant Samuel K. Doe carried out a coup d'état on April 12th, 1980, which terminated the Tolbert regime. The new Government under President Doe contains some military representatives as well as leading members of the opposition against the former regime and three former members of the Tolbert Government.

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John Gay (with the editorial advice of John Kellemu), THE BRIGHTENING SHADOW. Chicago: Intercultural Press, 1980. 280 Pp. Forward.

Fictional accounts provide an incisive and vivid portrayal of life in African communities. African and Western novelists, anthropologists, and journalists have all contributed selections. In this novel, John Gay employs such a vehicle to "represent Kpelle life in a single narrative."

Gay continues to depict the characters first introduced in his earlier book, Red Dust on Green Leaves. The twin boys choose dichotomous life styles: Sumo remains in the home village and becomes an expert religious practitioner and blacksmith, while Koli seeks a Western education and life style.

As an ethnographic account, this book provides description of many aspects of Kpelle and Liberian life ranging from ritual practices to family relations, agricultural practices, city life, and conflicts when Western and traditional practices clash. The author incorporates numerous scenes familiar to those who have lived in Liberia. The details of those scenes sometimes appear more Western than Kpelle, perhaps in large part, because of the English diction that creates concepts sometimes alien to Kpelle patterns of cognition. This translation problem is, of course, ubiquitous in the ethnographic enterprise. A phrase such as, "His heart sank" simply does not give us an image that translates from the Kpelle where an equivalent expression would be "Nii e soli goi" (His heart hurt his stomach). If the Kpelle were to present a description of movement such as the "sank" implies, they would, according to their speak of something rising rather than something sinking. While this single example seems minute, these microscopic elements build over the course of an account the larger image of what is Kpelle life. The extreme difficulty in presenting any approximation of Kpelle life at all through such a medium is underscored by Clifford Geertz's critique of the ethnographic enterprise:

What...most prevents those of us who grew up winking other winks... from grasping what people are up to is not ignorance as to how cognition works...as a lack of familiarity with the imaginative universe within which their acts are sign (1973:13).

Gay does give us a rough glimpse of Kpelle diction when he incorporates proverbs and folktales in the course of verbal interchanges.

From a fictional narrative perspective, Gay constructs a number of epi- sodes, some with particular poignancy. The rebuilding of the rice "kitchen" by family members after their father Flumo accidentally burns it down and the hiding of Saki after he contributes to another man's death are particularly effective. While the writing sometimes seems ponderous and the scenes more real than fictional for the reader who recognizes characters and locales, the overall structure creates a credible fictional work.

The Brightening Shadow as the sequel to Red Dust on Green Leaves provides us with an account that in broad strokes creates a picture of life among the Kpelle in the recent past.

Ruth M. Stone Indiana University