The Perspective
Atlanta, Georgia
April 30, 2019

April 14, 1979 - Monrovia, Liberia

Forty years ago Monrovia erupted. The masses of ordinary Liberians, students, workers—people considered by the power elite as slaves—took to the streets to have their names etched in the global history of struggle and resistance. The sheer heroism, the revolutionary vigilance and the daring courage of this unfortunate mass to tear off the yoke of domination, deprivation, and dispossession didn’t pass without the utter brutality and criminal bloodletting of the alienated Liberian ruling clique against the defenseless protesters.

Like all ruling classes whose privilege, wealth and power are built on the exploitation and repression of the masses of the people, the degenerate regime responded with savage violence, brute force, and an appalling form of counter-revolutionary terror on the ordinary people whose quest was to be treated simply as human beings and wanted a dignified existence. It did not matter how many ordinary Liberians perished under its jackboot and crude bullets insofar as the regime kept its grips on power.

Like all backward regimes whose power is not derived from the consent and support of the Liberian masses, the Tolbert regime wasted and splattered the bloods of the defenceless and unarmed people who only charge for being eliminated was their call for a new politics and alternative society in which they will leapfrog from the state of prehistory and enter the era of quantum transformation where collective participation will be corralled for the construction of an inclusive society which offers decency, honesty, and dignity. This was the dream which found resonance with the people but created panic in the psyche of the ruling clique.

There are attempts by purblind revisionists of the degenerate True Whig Party (TWP) to distort the significance of this day, rehabilitee those who presided over not only the dismemberment of the society but also the slaughtering of students and the tribal masses and tuned the vicious aggressors into historical victims. Similarly, there are strides by certain media poison-pens to paint the revolutionary upsurge of the people as a conspiracy by certain elements who brainwashed them and orchestrated the protest action. These anti-people media mercenaries have not realized that for once the tribal people understood their power that they could change their status when they act as a class for itself. They don’t realize that it is the people realizing their strength and embolden by indignity who can alter the historical trajectory and push society into a new era.
Our duty is not to buy into the fabrication dripping from the pens of historical falsifiers who see the people as cannon fodders and don’t understand the contours to analyze the people’s movement upon the scene of history. The aim of this piece is to analyze why April 14, 1979, happened: the social context, the national oppression of the tribal masses and their relegation to the status of second-class citizens, the international context which pushed the people to act, and the provision of quotes from anti-colonial scholar-activists and radical pan-Africanist intellectuals who analysed the Liberian society and exposed the polarity of master and slaves between the settlers, and the tribal masses respectively. Also, attempts will be made to unearth the contradictions between the forces of production and social relations of production, how wealth was appropriated, as it is the base which determines the character of the superstructure in a society.  In short, the politics of that era was principally determined by the mode of production interacting with the social relations of production.

April 14, 1979, indicates the society was at the nodal point of ferment, thus revolution was placed on the order of the day.  All over the people wanted a revolution, they wanted transformation, and they wanted liberation. This was loud in Monrovia, as it was deafening in the countryside, as it was implacable everywhere. Here the masses of the people were defying myths, mystifications and the old taboos that sustained the asymmetrical power relations.  The divine rights of the maximum leader were challenged and discarded as a form of historical anachronism. But the conditions that gave rise to a peak in the consciousness of the tribal majority  and led them to the ultimate social outburst can be explicitly found in the fact that the society was organized in the way where the coming in of foreign capital uprooted the masses from their villages where they were engaged in subsistence and pushed them forward in the mines and plantations to serve as serfs and slaves for the creation of surplus value for the multinationals, while the local bourgeoisie became the “veranda boys” of international capital and created a system of control  where the majority stock was denied the rights to economic equality, participation in the political process of the state in terms of voting, seeking redress, and ensuring that  persons representing them were subjected to an electoral rigor where they the ordinary masses  would vote and  participate in the daily affairs of governance. While the masses of the people grunted and agonized about those historical injustices, spokespersons of the system treated them with derision, making it appear as though inequality and domination were natural occurrences and not a product of man’s exploitation by another man. Such viewpoint was the promotion of the Liberian variant of that racial prejudice which posits that certain races are inferior to the others and thus must be treated like animals. The True Whig Party ruling clique holds as its ideology the subservient inferiority of the tribal masses:  they were backward and suffer genetic deficiency which made them “hewers of woods and drawers of water” for the settler ruling class. Meanwhile, it has been argued in progressive circles that it is the forces of production which determine the social relations of production, and the latter determines the economic base of society, thus the make-up of the superstructure: the dominant ideology, politics, and social institutions.  Mass uprisings such as the April 14 protest must be understood within the context of the interpenetrate relations between the base and the superstructure. On the front of the superstructure, one must pay serious attention to the dominant ideology, politics and social actors that shaped the event that led to such outcome.  On the other hand, the base digs deep into the social relations of production, the deep-rooted imbalances that created the antagonistic contradiction beneath the surface which pushed the people into action to sweep away the clique which held them in bondage.

It must be noted that regarding the rice and rights demonstration, the ideological underpinning in part underlines the popular discontent against the backward ruling clique, the system of domination, deprivation, and alienation. However, the basic exigency for the explosion can be found in the wholesale economic exploitation of the tribal masses upon which the state was sustained—the rampant poverty, mindless exploitation of the people—enforced by the violent pillars of the neo-colonial state: the police and the army. The superstructural content of the struggle highlights it as the mass resistance of the tribal people in the streets against vices that weighed them down, while the base presents it as the boiled over of popular anger of the people against the running dogs of imperialism in the Liberian ruling class and its imperialist patron which used the labor of the tribal masses to produce wealth and give them pittance in return. In the last analysis, the nature of the uprising and the social forces which participated in it can be understood from the reality that while the people produced wealth on the plantations and in the mines, it was privately appropriated and owned by a fingerful of monopolies, while repression was sustained by the paid juniors (the national bourgeoisie) on behalf of its masters to keep the tribal masses and their vanguard under repression. Therein was the root cause of the social eruption. The clear meaning of the event can also be seen in the contradiction in the relations and forces of production and the outrageous tendency of grotesque accumulation. 

By asserting that the economic base is the motor force of social development in no way indicates it is the singular factor that engenders social uprisings and attendant development. Neither is it an attempt to exclusively reduce the repertoire of vices that push the masses into battle against the moribund True Whig Party to economism. Very clearly it must be asserted that it was the sum total of complex contradictions of which the economic question became the central and principal contradictions that made the streets to burst into flame.  It would be foolhardy to discuss the era of the True Whig Party without shedding light on the character of the armed defenders of the state, the nature of the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the role of the Masonic craft, the family, the church, and the propaganda that sustained the domination of the ruling clique. The base and the superstructure ought to be analysed together, while the superstructure emerges out of the base, but it is the superstructure which replies to the base and reinforces it.

While the falsifiers of history and defenders of the old order would have us believe the myopic formulation that, the radicalization of the once docile tribal masses, their eventual upsurge, and  stampede into history were the orchestration of certain individuals who enmeshed themselves into ‘foreign ideology’ and brainwashed the people into taking to the streets.  This bankrupt claim is farfetched and ahistorical. On the contrary, it was the contradictions emanating from the internal character of the society which pushed the people into mass resistance. Without such contradictions, the subjective actors would play no decisive role. Simply put, objective realities give rise to the subjective actors, but real revolution happens when the people engage in real life struggle to challenge their backward lot and put the quest for new society on the front burner.  The reason for their upsurge cannot be found in vulgar abstraction but rather its inevitability must be understood from the vantage point of how the society was organized, where the people lived, what was produced, and who appropriated what was produced. It must be emphasized that the event of April 14, 1979, was a product of a developing trend. Of course, subjective factors played a role, not in terms of inventing the event but serving as a catalyst, but the real reason why the event happened can be found within the internal, antagonistic contradictions in the society.

Less we forget, the iron law of social change in a class-divided society holds that it is the contradiction in production which leads to a social explosion. It goes further to point out that in a class society besotted by antagonistic contradictions, where wealth which is socially owned is diverted as the natural preserve of a ruling minority, it is only mass resistance which alters the balance of forces and changes such social dynamics and usher in a new era. It goes without saying that fundamental social change which alters the power matrix in society, the world over, in most instances, has been a battle between two contending classes of dissimilar class interests. However, where we are and how far the nation has come in light of the gains, setbacks, frustration, and disappointment is proof that society doesn’t move on a linear progression. The class struggle has one of two outcomes - ‘’either in the revolutionary reconstruction of society at large or in the common ruins of the contending classes.”’

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About the Author: Alfred P. B. Kiadii writes from Accra, Ghana, and can be reached through bokaidii@gmail.com