Retracing the footsteps of a nation

In a new documentary Liberian filmmaker Nancee Oku Bright chronicles the history of her country since its “colonisation” by freeborn black Americans in the early part of the nineteenth century. Titled “Liberia: America’s Stepchild,” the film analyses US/Liberian ties against the backdrop of the sometimes difficult relationship between the incoming black settlers and the indigenous communities who had occupied the territory for centuries. “Today people generally think of Liberia as a disaster, but it was not always so,” said Oku Bright, who also works for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “It was the only black republic in the sea of colonial Africa and it made the colonisers very uncomfortable and the Africans very proud.” The film begins in the early 1820s when the Washington, DC-based American colonization society tried to send free blacks to Africa. The society’s purpose was to reduce the possibility that free blacks might encourage slaves to revolt against their oppressors and to spread Christianity and “civilization” to the African continent. The documentary retells the early story of Liberia, including its early struggles with disease; the eradication of slavery on its own shores; warring indigenous communities; its evolution as Africa’s first independent republic; and the nurturing of its international diplomatic relations, particularly with the United States. “As someone who got parachuted into the middle of the story in the mid 1980s, this filled in a lot of holes,” former BBC West African correspondent Elizabeth Blunt told IRIN. One hundred and fifty years later, the film explains, Liberians were divided into two distinct groups: the often privileged American descendants – known as “Americo Liberians”- and the indigenous population. It was a division that would sow the seeds of the turmoil that has ravaged Liberia since Samuel Doe, a master-sergeant in the Liberian army, grabbed power in a bloody military coup in 1980, which ultimately led to a seven-year civil war, leaving 150,000 Liberians dead and more than half the population displaced. “Many of the events that occur in Liberia happen partly because people simply don’t know their own history and, in that vacuum, history can be terribly manipulated,” Oku Bright said. Part of what the documentary portrays is that Liberia’s usefulness to the United States ended, in the eyes of U.S. policymakers, with the end of the Cold War, leaving Liberians, who used to call their country “Little America”, with a great sense of disappointment. “I hope that this film can show us how tragedies unfold when there is no political will to do the right thing, either from leaders or from those who they believe to be their allies,” Oku Bright said. Copies of the video can be ordered through the PBS web site or by calling 877-727-7467.