Liberia

Liberia was founded in 1822 by the American Colonization Society as a settlement for freed and freeborn African-Americans, and declared independence in 1847 — the oldest republic in Africa. The settlers, known as Americo-Liberians, built a state with a flag, constitution, and politics modelled on the United States, and ruled the Indigenous majority — around 95 percent of the population — as a disenfranchised underclass through a single party for more than a century. Firestone established the world's largest rubber plantation here in 1926.

In 1980 a coup led by Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, from an Indigenous group, ended Americo-Liberian dominance and began a slide into disaster. Two civil wars, from 1989 to 1997 and 1999 to 2003 — Charles Taylor's insurgency, the use of child soldiers, mass atrocities, and spillover into Sierra Leone — killed around a quarter of a million people and destroyed the economy and infrastructure.

Peace came in 2003 with a regional and then a UN peacekeeping force. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, elected in 2005, became Africa's first elected woman head of state and a Nobel Peace laureate. The footballer George Weah was president from 2018 to 2023, when Joseph Boakai won. Liberia was also the hardest-hit of the three countries in the 2014–16 West African Ebola epidemic, which killed almost 5,000 people here.

Liberia is culturally distinctive in West Africa for its American inheritance — the language, the place names, Baptist and other American church traditions, and the "Congo" elite's Antebellum-style architecture in Monrovia — layered over Indigenous cultures. About sixteen Indigenous ethnic groups, in three broad language families, retain strong traditions, including the Poro and Sande secret societies that run initiation and much of village governance.

Most Liberians are Christian, with a Muslim minority among the Mandingo and Vai, and syncretic practice widespread. The Vai are notable for having invented their own syllabic script in the nineteenth century, one of the few Indigenous writing systems developed in Africa.

Football is a national passion — George Weah's rise to the world's best player and then the presidency is a point of enormous pride — and music, storytelling, and mask traditions are strong. Hospitality is warm, and Liberians are generally quick to welcome the rare foreign visitor.

Around a quarter of the population lives in Greater Monrovia, a sprawling, low-lying coastal city of markets, half-finished concrete, and the ruined Ducor Hotel on its hill. The rest of the country is farming villages and small towns, many cut off by bad roads in the rains, and the mining and plantation enclaves.

Liberia is one of the poorest countries in the world, still recovering from war and Ebola, with the economy resting on iron ore, rubber, gold, timber, and palm oil, on remittances, and — a quirk — on the world's second-largest ship registry, which flies the Liberian flag of convenience. Unemployment and under-employment are very high, and electricity and clean water remain scarce.

Daily life runs on the shared taxi, the market, the church, and the extended family, with the single long rainy season shaping the farming and travelling year.

Liberian cooking is West African, built on rice — eaten at nearly every meal — with a rich, often fiery soup or stew poured over it. Cassava leaf (pounded and simmered with palm oil, meat or fish, and seasoning), potato greens, and palm-butter soup are the classics, along with jollof rice, "dry rice" with gravy, and "check rice" with greens.

"Dumboy" and "fufu" (pounded cassava) are eaten with pepper soup; "torborgee" is a pungent fermented-bean stew; and grilled fish and chicken with pepper sauce are the street staples. The American influence shows in cornbread, biscuits, and doughnuts.

Palm wine and cane juice (a raw sugarcane spirit) are the traditional drinks, along with ginger beer, and Club Beer is the local lager. Kola nuts are exchanged as a gesture of welcome and respect.

Liberia's tourism is minimal, and its appeal is coast and forest rather than built sights. Monrovia has Providence Island, where the first settlers landed, a small national museum, the bustling Waterside market, and the view from the skeletal Ducor Hotel, plus city beaches that are best appreciated from a distance because of pollution and currents.

Robertsport, on Lake Piso in the northwest, is the country's most relaxed spot — a small town with long empty beaches and some of the best-known surf breaks in West Africa, plus fishing pirogues and a scattering of simple lodges. Marshall, south of Monrovia, has river islands and mangroves.

Sapo National Park, in the southeast, protects the largest area of primary rainforest in the country, part of the Upper Guinean forest belt, with forest elephants, pygmy hippos, and chimpanzees. It is hard to reach and lightly developed, visited only by determined travellers with an organised expedition. Kpatawee Falls in Bong County and the Firestone plantation are other occasional stops.