Named for a U.S. president on purchased Cape Mesurado
Monrovia, Liberia’s capital and largest city, was founded in 1822 on Cape Mesurado. The 2022 census confirms its primacy as economic and harbor hub. It honors U.S. President James Monroe, backer of the American Colonization Society’s free Black settlement project.
The Dey, Kru, Bassa, Gola and Vai fished, farmed and traded around the cape, and the French slave trader Chevalier des Marchais did business there in 1723 and mapped it. The colonists had first landed in 1821 on Sherbro Island, in today's Sierra Leone, hoping to repeat what Black Loyalists had built at Freetown. The December 1821 purchase covered a small coastal strip for roughly $300 in trade goods, and historians still debate how it was obtained. The settlement was called Christopolis until 1824.
Monroe had signed the 1819 Anti-Slave Trading Act, which funded the colonisation effort, and Monrovia and Washington are the only world capitals named after American presidents. A convention in the city in 1845 drafted the constitution adopted at independence two years later. Around 1900, 2,500 of the 4,000 residents were Americo-Liberians living in Monrovia proper, in buildings resembling the American South, while Krus, Bassas and Grebos lived in Krutown. By 1937 the town had 10,000 people and 30 police officers.
President William Tolbert hosted the Organisation of African Unity near the city in 1979 and halved university fees, but Samuel Doe's 1980 coup overthrew and executed him and many ministers. Two civil wars, from 1989 to 2003, wrecked the city and drew children into the fighting. In 2002 Leymah Gbowee gathered women to pray and sing at a fish market, a movement that helped end the war and elect Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa's first female president.
Liberia's Ebola epidemic of 2014 was declared over in September 2015. The metro area now holds about a third of Liberians. With about 4,600 mm of rain a year, Monrovia is the world's wettest capital, and its harbour was greatly enlarged by American forces in the Second World War.
Source: Monrovia
