The History of Liberia in 10 Minutes or less.
Hello Displorers Welcome back to another exciting video presented to you by Displore and thanks for watching, In today’s video we shall be looking at the history of Liberia in 10 minutes. The Republic of Liberia is a democracy located on the west African coast. Bordered by the Atlantic Ocean along its entire diagonal southwest coastline of 579km, Liberia borders Sierra Leone to the northwest, Guinea to the north, and Côte d'Ivoire to the east. Liberia measures 111,370km2 in area, of which nearly 10 percent is water. Much of Liberia is covered with tropical rainforest, and the country's terrain ranges from coastal plains to plateau to low mountains with a tropical climate.Liberia is often described as one of two African countries to have remained independent during the European Scramble for Africa, but this is misleading, as the country was founded by African-Americans in the 1820s. These Americo-Liberians governed the country until 1989, when they were overthrown in a coup. Liberia was governed by a military dictatorship until the 1990s, and then suffered two lengthy civil wars. In 2003, the women of Liberia helped bring an end to the Second Civil War, and in 2005, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected President of Liberia.
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Historians believe that many of the indigenous peoples of Liberia migrated there from the north and east between the 12th and 16th centuries AD. Portuguese explorers established contacts with people of the land later known as "Liberia" as early as 1462. They named the area Costa da Pimenta or Pepper Coast, or Grain Coast, because of the abundance of melegueta pepper, which became desired in European cooking. In 1602 the Dutch established a trading post at Grand Cape Mount but destroyed it a year later. In 1663, the British installed trading posts on the Pepper Coast. No further known settlements by non-African colonists occurred until the arrival in 1821 of free blacks from the Americas . Liberia was founded by free people of colour from the United States. The emigration of free people of colour, and later former slaves, was funded and organized by the American Colonization Society. The mortality rate of these settlers was the highest in accurately recorded human history. Of the 4,571 emigrants who arrived in Liberia between 1820 and 1843, only 1,819 survived.
While several distinct ethnic groups have inhabited what is today Liberia for at least a thousand years, no large kingdoms arose there on the lines of those found further east along the coast, like Dahomey, Asante, or the Benin Empire.Histories of the region, therefore, generally begin with the arrival of the Portuguese traders in the mid-1400s, and the rise of the trans-Atlantic trade. Coastal groups traded several goods with Europeans, but the area became known as the Grain Coast, because of its rich supply malagueta pepper grains.
Navigating the coastline was not that easy, though, particularly for the large ocean-going Portuguese vessels, and the European traders relied on Kru sailors, who became the primary middlemen in the trade. Due to their sailing and navigation skills, the Kru began working on European ships, including slave trading ships. Their importance was such that Europeans began referring to the coast as Kru Country, despite the fact that the Kru was one of the smaller ethnic groups, amounting to only 7 percent of Liberia's population today.
The oft-stated claim, though, that after the Scramble for Africa, Liberia was one of two independent African states is misleading because the indigenous African societies had little economic or political power in the new republic. All power was concentrated in the hand of the African-American settlers and their descendants, who became known as Americo-Liberians. In 1931, an international commission revealed that several prominent Americo-Liberians had slaves.The Americo-Liberians constituted less than 2 percent of Liberia's population, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they made up nearly 100 percent of qualified voters. For over one hundred years, from its formation in the 1860s until 1980, the Americo-Liberian True Whig Party dominated Liberian politics, in what was essentially a one-party state.The Americo-Liberian dominance was broken April 12, 1980, when Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe and less than 20 soldiers overthrew the President, William Tolbert. The coup was welcomed by the Liberian people, who greeted it as liberation from Americo-Liberian domination.
Samuel Doe's government soon proved itself no better for the Liberian people than its predecessors. Doe promoted many members of his own ethnic group, the Krahn, but otherwise Americo-Liberians retained control over much of the country's wealth.Doe's was a military dictatorship. He permitted election
