Why Geography Doomed America's Only African Colony

[00:00:00]When you picture the colonization of Africa, you're probably imagining massive European empires like Britain or France. But there's one piece of land that Europe never touched because it was actually colonized by the United States.

[00:00:12]And today, this country stands as a spectacular, mostly forgotten American failure. The real culprit, though, wasn't just bad politics, but the brutal landscape itself. So, why did geography doom America's first and only African colony? I'm Jeff and this is the mostly untold and unreal story of Liberia.

[00:00:36]Liberia sits right on the southwestern corner of the African Bulge, bordered by Sierra Leone to the northwest, Guinea to the north, and Kotvoir to the east. And facing the Atlantic Ocean to the south and southwest is about 360 mi of uninterrupted coastline. In fact, if you were to look at a satellite map of Liberia today, you would immediately notice a glaring discrepancy in where people actually live in the country. The vast majority of Liberia's 5 plus million people, its major infrastructure, its economy, and its largest cities, including the capital, Monroia, as well as Buchanan and Harper, are all squeezed onto a narrow, low-lying coastal plane. This coastal strip is characterized by sandy beaches, salty lagoons, and dense mangrove swamps. It's flat. It's relatively accessible from the ocean and for the incoming American settlers in the 19th century, it was the only piece of the country they could physically manage to hold on to. In fact, in many [music] ways, this coastline wasn't all that different from coastlines in the southeastern United States. But living on this coast comes with a massive catch, one that the southeastern US doesn't really have to worry about. You see, Liberia is defined by a tropical monsoon climate, and it is staggeringly wet. Monrovia is quite literally one of the wetest capital cities on the planet.

[00:01:50]It receives an average of 180 to 200 in of rain every single year. To put that into perspective, London gets about 23 in a year. Seattle, famous for its rain, gets about 40 in. Even the tropical wet paradise of Hilo, Hawaii, or the cold, damp Alaskan archipelago, only get between 120 and 150 in of rain per year.

[00:02:11]So suffice it to say, Monrovia is on a whole other level compared to the United States wetest [music] regions, and the vast majority of it falls in a punishing wet season between May and October. And while this amount of water feeds the incredibly lush rainforest, it also happens to destroy anything humans try to build. Roads turn into unnavigable rivers of mud, foundations wash away, and the heat and humidity breed a perpetual cycle of rot and rust. But as difficult as the coastline is, it's really nothing compared to what lies just inland. Because if you try to walk inland, you are immediately confronted by an impenetrable green wall. Just past the coastal swamps, the elevation begins to rise into rolling hills and then eventually into low mountains and plateaus like the Nimbo range. Covering nearly all of this interior is the upper Gana forest. This is not your average forest. It's an incredibly dense, ancient, and hostile rainforest canopy.

[00:03:08]Even today, Liberia holds the largest remaining portion of this specific rainforest in all of West Africa. For a modern biologist, the interior of Liberia is a paradise, [music] home to rare endemic species like pygmy hippopotamuses. But for anyone trying to build a country, lay down a road network, or march an army through it, the upper Ganan forest is an absolute nightmare. It's hot, suffocatingly humid, and historically teeming with diseases like malaria and yellow fever, which acted as a natural biological shield against outsiders. And you might be thinking, if the jungle is so thick, why not just use those rivers to travel inland, like Americans did all over North America? It's a logical thought.

[00:03:48]After all, Liberia is sliced by several major rivers, including the Mono, the Loa, the St. Paul, and the Kavala. But these rivers hold a deceptive flaw for anyone hoping to use them as a highway.

[00:03:59]Because of the changing elevation and the underlying bedrock, Liberia's rivers are choked with rapids, shallow sandbarss, and waterfalls just a few miles inland from the coast. [music] They are largely unnavigable for large boats. And so instead of acting as roads into the interior, they just reinforce the interior's isolation and fortress-like physicality. And if you want to travel east to west across Liberia, you have to cross dozens of these torrential rivers, which is nearly impossible without massive steel bridges. So before a single colonist ever stepped off a boat, the die was already cast against them. Liberia's geography is almost a perfect trap. A muddy, rain battered coastline backed by an unnavigable, disease-heavy jungle that refuses to be tamed and sliced by rivers that block you from moving sideways. But it's not like this part of the world has always been devoid of humans before the American colonists [music] arrived. In fact, Liberia has always been home to an indigenous population. So, who were these people and how did they react to becoming a United States colony? Hey, I've been building an amazing geography community over at the bite.co. And for a limited time, you can get a free month of ad and sponsor free videos from all of my channels, exclusive articles, and a free digital world map of the Coppen climate system over on the bite.co. Just click the link in the description below or scan this QR code, and I'll see you there.

[00:05:29]Long before anyone in Washington DC ever pointed a finger at a map of West Africa, this stretch of coastline was already home to a complex web of human societies. For thousands of years, indigenous groups like the Crew, the Golola, the Capella, and the Basa had actually thrived in that unforgiving upper Ganaian rainforest. These people practiced something called shifting agriculture, moving their farms to allow the dense jungle to regenerate, and they used the region's rivers for local trade. When European explorers, first the Portuguese in the 1400s, finally anchored off this coast, they didn't find an empty wilderness. They found a bustling trade hub. They named it the Pepper Coast after the highly prized Malagueta pepper that grew there.

[00:06:08]Unfortunately for these locals, peppers weren't the only thing the Europeans came for. By the 17th and 18th centuries, the coastal geography made this region a tragic and highly active zone for the transatlantic slave trade.

[00:06:21]Countless indigenous people were captured, forced onto ships, and sent across the ocean in chains, never to see their homeland again. But in a bizarre twist of historic irony, the exact same ocean currents that pulled European slavers away from this coast were about to bring something completely unprecedented back to it. Ships full of free black Americans sent by a society that didn't want them. To understand how Liberia came to be, we have to jump across the Atlantic to the United States in the year 1816. At this point in time, the US was growing and so was its population of free black Americans.

[00:06:55]After all, by the year 1800, eight states, all located in the Northeast, had abolished slavery entirely. This demographic reality sparked a panic among a very strange, unholy alliance of white Americans. On one side, you had white abolitionists who believed paternalistically that black Americans would never achieve true equality in a deeply racist America and needed their own country to thrive. On the other side, you had wealthy southern slaveholders who were terrified that a growing free black population would inspire slave rebellions, or god forbid, a country that completely abolishes slavery forever. Despite their radically different motives, these two groups came together to form the American Colonization Society. Their goal was simple. Raise money, acquire land in Africa, and ship free black Americans across the ocean. It was framed as a grand humanitarian mission, but in reality, it was a massive federally subsidized eviction. In 1822, the American Colonization Society successfully acquired a small strip of land at Cape Meerado, mostly by pointing guns at the heads of local indigenous chiefs. Soon after, the first wave of African-American settlers arrived. They named their new coastal settlement Monrovia after the sitting US President James Monroe. But if you think these settlers arrived and immediately formed a harmonious bond with the local indigenous tribes, you're in for a shock. The new arrivals, who became known as America Liberians, didn't view themselves as Africans returning to their ancestral homeland. Culturally, linguistically, and religiously, they were Americans, no different from someone living in Boston or New York City. And they brought these American ideals with them. They built southernstyle plantation homes with wraparound porches. They wore heavy wool top hat and Victorian dresses in the sweltering 90° tropical humidity. They spoke English, practiced Christianity, and viewed the local indigenous tribes as uncivilized. They had survived the horrors of American slavery, only to arrive in West Africa and immediately set up a rigid two-tiered society. For the first couple of decades, the American Colonization Society managed this precarious colony. But running a country across an ocean is incredibly expensive, especially when your colony is wedged between a muddy coastline and a disease-ridden jungle. The settlers were dying of malaria at catastrophic rates. Up to 60% of the early colonists perished within a few years of arriving.

[00:09:18]By the 1840s, the American colonization society was practically bankrupt and growing desperate. At the same time, the British and the French, who were busy conquering neighboring Sierra Leone and Kotvoir, started encroaching on Liberian territory. They looked at Liberia and essentially said, "You're not a real country. You're not even a formal US colony, so we're just going to take this land." Backed into a corner, the American Liberians did the only thing they could to protect themselves. In 1847, they officially declared independence, drafted a constitution modeled almost exactly on the US Constitution, and created a flag that looked nearly identical to the stars and stripes. But declaring independence is the easy part. Paying for it is a completely different story. Unlike the British or the French who poured massive amounts of imperial capital into their African colonies to build deep water ports, railways, and telegraph lines to extract resources, the United States basically washed its hands of Liberia.

[00:10:15]The US government refused to formally recognize Liberian independence for another 15 years. Primarily because southern politicians didn't want a black ambassador walking around Washington DC.

[00:10:26]Remember, this was leading up to and then during the American Civil War, which was directly about slavery. Slave states absolutely did not want a free black country to exist. So, Liberia was entirely on its own. They had no imperial backer, no infrastructure, and no money. An elite class of America Liberians making up roughly 5% of the population was now trying to rule over a 95% indigenous majority that they completely alienated. All while confined to a coastal trap they couldn't afford to break out of. Decade after decade, the country languished. They took out predatory loans from European banks just to keep the government afloat, spiraling deeper and deeper into debt. By the 1920s, the situation was catastrophic.

[00:11:12]So, [music] sandwiched between large imperial neighbors eyeballing their land, they turned to the most unlikely of saviors and American tire manufacturer from Ohio.

[00:11:26]Liberia today remains one of the poorest nations on the planet. An incredibly tragic reality for a place that was supposedly birthed with the backing of the United States. But to understand why this grand American experiment deteriorated into America's biggest colonial failure and eventually sold itself to a tire company, we have to go back to that first colonial settlement on the coast. This is where we see what amounts to two entirely different Liberas. When those freed black Americans, the Americans, arrived in the 1800s, they didn't actually settle the country of Liberia.

[00:11:59]They just clung to the coast. Mostly because just a few miles inland was an incredibly dense, disease-heavy, and impenetrable jungle. Because this rainforest was so physically hostile, the American Liberians never successfully integrated the interior of their own country. Instead, they built an Americanstyle enclave on the coast in Monrovia and left the indigenous tribes in the interior completely disconnected.

[00:12:22]This wasn't just a cultural divide, it was a physical one. You had a coastal English-speaking Christian ruling class and a massive forested interior filled with indigenous populations that had absolutely no say in how the country was run. The American Liberians had created a country that was geographically severed into from day one. But a divided geography is one thing. To bridge that divide, you need money, tools, and roads. Something Liberia never had and still really hasn't managed to build.

[00:12:51]Because Liberia wasn't a formal recognized colony of Britain or France, it experienced the absolute worst of both worlds. The violent extractive nature of European colonialism was horrific. But it did come with one twisted benefit. Imperial infrastructure capital. When the British took over Nigeria, they spent millions building extensive railways to extract wealth.

[00:13:12]When the French took over Sagal, they built massive deep water ports to do the exact same thing. The colonizers laid down the physical concrete and steel required to connect the geography of their colonies from the interior all the way to the coast. Kotvoir, right next door to Liberia, is crisscrossed with dozens of numerically named highways where Liberia has almost none. The American Liberians didn't get any of this kind of support. They were completely on their own. The US government largely refused to fund them because Washington's original goal was entirely different from Britain's or France's. The United States didn't want to extract resources from Liberia. They just wanted to remove people from America. Once those ships dropped the settlers off, the job was considered done. This meant the American Liberians had absolutely no money to conquer the rainforest, build highways, or lay down railroad tracks. In essence, the American Liberians were flying a flag over a piece of land they couldn't even walk across. So, how does a country survive when its geography is divided?

[00:14:13]its government is broke and the world's superpowers have completely turned their backs on it. You sell your sovereignty to the highest bidder. And in Liberia's case, that bidder was a corporation. By the 1920s, Liberia was functionally bankrupt. They were defaulting on massive predatory European loans. And the British and French were once again threatening to simply invade and annex the territory to collect their debt. To save their sovereignty, the Liberian government did something unprecedented.

[00:14:41]They essentially outsourced their whole country to a private American company.

[00:14:45]Enter Firestone, the booming tire and rubber company based out of Akran, Ohio.

[00:14:50]In the 1920s, the global automobile industry was exploding, and Firestone desperately needed a massive independent supply of rubber that wasn't controlled by the British or Dutch empires. And Liberia's tropical climate was absolutely perfect for growing rubber trees. In 1926, Firestone and the Liberian government signed a historic agreement. Firestone was granted a 99-year lease for 1 million acres of Liberian land. The price, a shockingly low, 6 cents an acre. In exchange, Firestone agreed to pay off Liberia's international debts, keeping the European empires at bay. But this deal came at a massive existential cost for Liberia. You see, Liberia didn't suddenly become a successful independent country after Firestone bought it out.

[00:15:35]Instead, it became a really large corporate company town. Firestone moved in and built the largest rubber plantation on Earth. Because the Liberian government was completely broke, it was Firestone that ended up building the roads. Firestone built the ports. Firestone built the power grid, ran the radio networks, and functionally dictated the national economy. All with the backing of the US State Department.

[00:15:57]The physical geography of an entire African nation was effectively subjugated and heavily modified by a tire manufacturer in Ohio. For decades, Liberia's primary export, and the only reason it stayed afloat on the global market was the latex being extracted by a foreign corporation. But here's the craziest part in all of this. Firestone still operates this plantation and still exports massive amounts of rubber from Liberia to the rest of the world. In 2005, Firestone renewed their lease with Liberia for an additional 37 years to 2042, and as far as I can tell, still employs around 5,000 Liberians to this day. And while Liberia has endured many additional tragedies throughout its modern history, such as its two lengthy civil wars in the 1990s and into the 2000s, its failure to become a modern, stable country, is undeniably tied to the United States, first as a colony and then as its corporate debtor. In the end, Liberia's failure wasn't really a political misstep. It was a geographic and economic inevitability. It was a country conceived of as an eviction strategy built on an unforgiving terrain, deprived of any meaningful infrastructure, and ultimately bought out by a corporation just to survive.

[00:17:08]And it's a story that's continuing to unfold to this day. Once again, for a limited time, you can get a free month of ad and sponsor free videos, exclusive articles, and a free world map of the copen climate system over on my geography community site, the bite.co.

[00:17:25]Just click the link in the description below. I hope you enjoyed learning all about Liberia. If you did, be sure to check out this video all about the Pharaoh Islands and why 55,000 people live there. Thanks for watching. See you next time.