Liberia began as an American Colonization Society shoreline
The Republic of Liberia faces the Atlantic between Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire. From 1822 the American Colonization Society steered Black American emigrants there, building Africa’s first republic and oldest continuous independence—Ethiopia excepted as never colonized.
Oldowan and Acheulean tools attest ancient humans in West Africa, and by about 4,000 to 3,500 years ago microlith-using foragers had become food producers as the climate dried. Niger-Congo peoples lived on the Pepper Coast by the twelfth century; Mande speakers pushed smaller groups such as the Dei, Bassa, Kru, Gola, and Kissi toward the sea. The fall of Mali in 1375 and Songhai in 1591 sent more migrants coastward with cotton weaving, iron smelting, and rice farming.
Portuguese, Dutch, and British traders visited from 1461 to the late seventeenth century. The Portuguese named it Costa da Pimenta, and it became the Grain Coast for its melegueta pepper. Coastal peoples paddled canoes to trade from Cap-Vert to the Gold Coast.
The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 by Quakers and slaveholders and backed by figures such as Henry Clay and James Monroe, began sending free Black Americans in 1822. Disease was deadly: of 4,571 emigrants who landed between 1820 and 1843, only 1,819 survived. State societies founded their own colonies, including Mississippi-in-Africa and Maryland, and Kru and Grebo chiefdoms raided the settlements.
Settlers declared independence on 26 July 1847 with a constitution modelled on the American one, adopting the eleven-striped flag on 24 August; Britain was first to recognise the republic. Americo-Liberians dominated politics and coastal trade until Samuel Doe’s 1980 coup killed William Tolbert and installed the first Indigenous head of state. Mining, the economic engine from the 1960s, halted during the civil wars and later revived.
Source: Liberia
