Liberia

From the Kru, Grebo, and Vai of the Grain Coast to a settler republic of freed African Americans, the long rule of the Americo-Liberian elite, two devastating civil wars, and Africa's first elected woman president.

The land that is Liberia today was long home to a mosaic of indigenous peoples — Mande speakers such as the Vai and Kpelle, Kwa speakers such as the Kru, Grebo, and Bassa, and the Mel-speaking Gola and Kisi — whose societies traded along the West African coast that Europeans called the Grain or Pepper Coast. From 1822 the American Colonization Society, an American body that sought to resettle free-born and freed African Americans in Africa, planted settlers at Cape Mesurado, founding the town that became Monrovia. On 26 July 1847 these settlers proclaimed the Republic of Liberia, the first modern republic in Africa, governed under a constitution modelled on that of the United States. For more than a century the Americo-Liberian settler minority, organised in the True Whig Party, dominated political and economic life and largely excluded the indigenous majority. In 1980 a coup by Master Sergeant Samuel Doe ended Americo-Liberian rule, and from 1989 the country was torn apart by two civil wars, associated above all with the warlord and later president Charles Taylor. After peace in 2003, Liberians elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in 2005 — Africa's first elected woman head of state — and the nation later weathered the catastrophic 2014 Ebola epidemic.