Liberia: Nobel Peace Prize - Crutch, Instigator, or Catalyst

12 October 2011
analysis

For more than a century up to 1989, the world knew Liberia as the “Lone Star” of hope and self-termination in the then “dark Continent of Africa”. In their quests for liberation and national independence, continental patriots and nationalists like Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Nelson Mandela of South Africa, Patrice Émery Lumumba of the Congos, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and António Agostinho Neto Angola either took cue from, looked up for inspiration and guidance, or flocked to Liberia for counsel and support.

Liberia was literally the oasis of peace and tranquility in colonized Africa. But like the Good Old Book would say, the people and leaders of Liberia feigned peace and glorified impunity, when there was only a wounded population silently nursing its political and social wounds – wounds inflicted by soaring autocracy submerged in oppression and suppression. So for more than a decade, the nation went into revolt. As it revolted and adjusted, it presented to the international community variously as “failed state”, “Taylor Inc.”, “pariah state”, and even “the epicenter of regional destabilization”. Also, as it revolted and adjusted, its dispersed population became objects of derision and xenophobia, condemned to derelict refugee camps or to slave labor in their places of refuge. The revolt and adjustment reversed with the intervention of the international community and with the holding of a first-ever democratic election in 2005.

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