The Perspective
Atlanta, Georgia
May 21, 2019

April 14, 1979 - Monrovia, Liberia

Contradictions
The tragedy of the rule of the Americo-Liberians is that it was expected as people who have suffered persecution, lynching, slavery and all forms of violence that human ingenuity could devise would thrust them to establish a nation and integrate their brethren they met back home in establishing a society of oneness and common purpose. Sadly, when they returned home, they initiated a rule of conquest, voracious expansion and vicious control like overlords in their private fiefdoms, while the people were the modern equivalents of serfs living in conditions of servitude, indignity, and backwardness. Like in Apartheid South Africa, five percent of the population continuously dominated, exploited, and repressed 95 percent of the population.

William R. Tolbert was a contradictory figure. He behaved as a frontline general in the Nonaligned Movement but ardently supported the CIA-backed UNITA against the legitimate MPLA in Angola. He violated the 1969 Lusaka Manifesto of the OAU, which among other things stated that before the apartheid regime reached out to other African countries for diplomatic collaboration, it must first seek dialogue with the ANC which was fighting against minority rule in South Africa. He would go from not only violating that sacred manifesto that all independent African countries acceded to, to inviting John Vorster, one of the main architects of apartheid on the Liberian soil, simply because Tolbert fancied himself winning the Nobel Peace Prize if he were to initiative a phony dialogue between Vorster and the ANC. Ahmed Sekou Toure and others took aback by the dangerous game Tolbert was playing. Tolbert presided over a system of backwardness and exclusion on the home front. A system of privilege, wealth and power for the minority, but exclusion for the majority.  

Equally important, it would be instructive for us to point out that the superstructural institutions that maintained and justified the hold of the True Whig Party in power were in three forms: the Masonic Craft, elitist social formations, and close-knit family relations predicated upon membership by birth or marriage into the clique. Like every indolent ruling clique, this was the way the True Whig Party governed the republic, monopolized privilege in the political, social and economic realms and at the same time promoted an artificial improvisation or the co-optation of certain sons and daughters of the tribal people to present the farce that their leadership encompassed the tribal majority. It must be noted that such a move was not based on an honest effort at inclusion but was intended to churn out such delusion and provide a simulacrum of the legitimacy of the regime by the dominated masses. It goes without saying this narrow individualism and co-optation of tribal chiefs in the state bureaucracy created a short-lived respite, but it was not enough to save the wretched regime from falling. The contradictions of the emphasis on the individuals to the exclusion and utter neglect of the group sapped the process of creating a nation and such antagonistic contradictions led to the uprising of April 14, 1979, which was, not by design but as a matter of historical analysis—a dress rehearsal—for the coup of April 12, 1980.

Meanwhile, April 14, 1979, was not merely about rice but rights and injustice. It was an explosion of the accumulated and antagonistic contradictions. If anything, in a more terse way, one can say it was a rupture of the masses of the people in a way to tell those upstarts and elites that they couldn’t govern in the same old way—in the way of the minority. An expression of defiance and a chance for the regime to recalibrate. No, the rot had pervaded every pore of the ancien regime, it could not help itself because historical impotence had created senile sclerosis that could only be addressed by the regime abdicating power. This was the condition of the state when April 12, 1980, occurred. To put it more analytically, April 14, 1979, and April 12, 1980, were historical necessities that expressed themselves through accidents.  The reasons the two events happened can be found through an objective analysis of the Liberian society, the retrograde social structure, and its backward instruments of socialization. It is the internal tendencies in the phenomenon acting upon it which alters its content. The rice and rights uprising and the epochal April coup marked two critical nodal stages of change in the history of the country.

Economic inequality pervaded the republic and the tribal majority was on the receiving end of such morass. It was poverty, stagnation, and paralysis for them, while wealth, power and privilege rested on the laps of the Americo-Liberians. The regime was this corrosive African national bourgeoisie which had no economic power, alienated from the people while exuded hubris. However, it formed close-knit ties with imperialism in order to maintain its domination over the people. The economic character of the country saw the domination of American monopolies at the highest stratum, Middle Eastern business people and few Americo-Liberians were at the middle layer. Some members of the tribal majority commenced businesses, but they ran into bankruptcy because of lack of political connections. In this matrix, the state served as the guarantor of bourgeois property. Its armed defenders—the police and the Frontier Force—were the key pillars of maintaining its rule.

Here we invite the anti-colonialist fighter and one of the greatest of his era and the writer of “Pan-Africanism or Communism” in George Padmore to describe the Liberian national bourgeoisie and its link to imperialism: “The conditions of the black toilers, workers, and peasants in these countries are equally as intolerable as those we have already described in the colonies of imperialism. This is especially so in Liberia, where the toiling masses are exploited not only by foreign capitalist but the native bourgeoisie, known as Americo-Liberians, have reduced the indigenous population to the status of chattel slaves in their own interests as well as of American imperialists (Firestone Company).”

W. E. B Dubious has something to say about the conditions of servitude, backwardness, and violence among the masses of the tribal people during the era of the misrule of the Americo-Liberians: “The League of Nations appointed a committee, headed by Dr. Cuthbert Christy, an Englishman. A colored American, Dr. Charles S. Johnson, appointed by President Hoover, and the grand old man, the Honourable Arthur Barclay, one of the finest products of Liberia, were the other two members. On the whole, it was thorough and frank. The Commission made a careful investigation and proved that domestic slavery existed among the more primitive Liberian tribes; that there was pawning of children; and especially that laborers were recruited among the tribes and sent out of the country to the French colony of Gabon and to the Spanish colony of Fernando Po. The military force had been used, and President King, Vice-President Yancy, and some other officials were involved in the accusations of profit-sharing from the proceeds of this slave trade.”

It was against such terrible conditions that the mass, revolutionary ferment of the 1970s and the later coup of April 12, 1980, against the decrepit, discredited, and the ancien regime of the True Whig Party gained popular support among the masses of the people. The alienated people expressed joy at the toppling of the regime and its removal from the stage of history. For the vestiges of the old order, the masses of the people celebrated an event which destabilized the country and set it on the path of implosion. If that is not an absurd platitude from quislings of an order which wreaked havoc, national exclusion and institutionalized violence on a defenseless people, then this writer doesn’t know what is, as the people were not only celebrating the fall of the regime but also the system that reinforced and supported it. Of course, such joy was short-lived because the process of transformation was hijacked as insatiable greed, tribal strife and other vices that are fetters on progress aborted the experiment. In earnest, the fall of the degenerate regime ended the process of the dismemberment of the republic, the abolishment of a caste system-like republic, and marked the period of the expression of the people in national life.

What is to be done?
Forty years ago, the dominated masses of the people burst upon the scene of history to assert their rights to be heard, with unshakable courage and firm resistance to stand up to the discredited ruling elite, as the conscious vanguard called them to take to the streets in affirming their sovereign rights; 40 years after the people are faced with the same historical albatross, however, at a qualitative higher level;  confronted with the same repression, squalor and wanton poverty, the people’s fight back will be with the same resistance, resoluteness, and tenacity against the aggression of the CDC clique.

Unemployment, poverty, and squalor are the implacable features of the society, while children in upcountry don rags and discarded clothes sent to them from the urban centers. Broad layers of the people are becoming victims of starvation. The pangs of inequality, inflation, and economic deprivation encroach on the Liberian masses with fierce vengeance. So that these contradictions are pushing up grumbling and growing resentment among the people against the regime and its ill-fated policies that are geared at benefiting a clique as opposed to the people in their collectivity.

President Weah has become a rentier property owner from the butchery of public funds and national resources. National coffers have been emptied, the national reserve has been plundered from US$ 154 million to the US $19 million. The revenue of the country has turned into a slush fund to achieve the president’s pet project and his wet dream of political vengeance against progressive social forces who stand on the side of the people, demanding a new patriotism and commitment to a common cause for social equality and economic equity for the ruled people.

In this situation of hunger, squalor, and deprivation for the masses, the economic vultures at the helm of the republic are increasing their wholesale exploitation of the masses and their resources at the same time looking for new terrains and means to exploit all in the hope of competing for the sordid task of illegal accumulation. The fetishes of display, the knack for pomp and pageantry, the restless impatience for gentrification, a situation of assets stripping, the growing quest to tear apart their inferiority internalized in their collective psyche by donning gaudy costumes such as the Gucci apparel, Salvatore Ferragamo shoes and stashing their many foreign bank accounts with the people’s money are the main features of the bankrupt regime which was birthed with a negative birthmark of the rigging type.

There is a decline in national leadership so it is with the fall in national output. Exceedingly worrying is also the attempt at the reversal of the gains attained by all those involved in the April 14, 1979 demonstration. Virulent assaults have been initiated against basic freedoms and organization with an elementary semblance of decency in the public service. High rise in crime and the increased lawlessness in the society, with gang groups sprouting up in the communities, as the regime uses paramilitary groups to hound conscious actors.

Against these very terrible conditions, there is a growing ferment in the country. Some would say the specter of April 14, 1979, is haunting the republic. The masses are becoming restless—their vanguard is also taking criticism of national decadence to new levels. However, while they proffer popular demands, it is a bit nebulous and lack focus in terms of the objectives. It is instructive to put out the caveat that in order for the struggle to meet the ultimate objective a revolutionary organization with a revolutionary vanguard with revolutionary tactic and strategies and with revolutionary programs ought to lead the process with the people.
We say the people in history never change. They support a regime because they feel through it they can attain progressive development for themselves and for their children. They would withdraw their support and express indignation when they notice the regime has eaten its words and failed to live up to the commitment of building an inclusive society. Certain sections of the people who have always constituted the approximately 30 percent vote stock of the CDC are abandoning ship. This says much about the people’s support to a regime is not immutable. Due to the growing inequality, their support is fast vanishing with a ferocious vengeance never before seen in our history, far from what the conscious vanguard had predicted. Weeks ago, a fingerful of them who converged on the headquarters of the party is drawing appropriate conclusions. From euphoria and vivacity before the CDC assume state power to grimaces and crestfallen faces after fourteen months of the coalition at the helm of leadership. This 360-degree turn is as a result of the misrule and many scandals that have inundated the regime, as the antagonistic contradictions keep multiplying and amplifying their illusions in Weah are withering away.

A phase of the massive displaying of revolutionary energies. Different formations, interests groups, and the students are in the forefront of political organizing, while certain lawmakers have become radical and militants and have thrown themselves into revolutionary activities against social inequality. The Council of Patriots has emerged under this revolutionary current of  mass ferment, preparing a nationwide protest for June 7, while the student, led in the vanguard by its most authentic voice of defiance in the Student Unification Party, has launched an unprecedented ‘’Weah step down campaign.” Revolutionaries and conscious actors must study the movement of history and ensure this whirlwind of change which will sweep away the CDC clique does not end up with the emergence of another clique of counter-revolutionary rogues holding the republic hostage. Today more than ever before, now more than any other time, social revolution must be placed on the cards. Thomas Sankara knew a society gripped in decades of decadence and backwardness can only achieve social emancipation when a social revolution occurs: he knew so better:  “You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future”

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

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