AHC: Wank Liberia

SinghKing

Banned
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with a convincing ATL where the Republic of Liberia (OTL's Republic of Liberia, with a POD after 1847) rises to become both the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the whole of Africa. Up for it?
 
Maybe the fact that it was made up of American slaves would encourage the US to support it to as a base of influence in Africa?
 
I can see two interconnected possibilities:
1) a larger population base of Americo-Liberians. This means probably more investment into the whole colonization scheme, although the OP requirements make it difficult because it would be more effectively done before 1847. This would also probably cause a larger part of the coast to be part of the country.
2) a serious commitment to build a free and inclusive society. I don't think it'd be easy or straightforward, but I think that the Americo-Liberians had a chance at creating a situation where the native African population is included into the civic body, as opposed to being marginalized and oppressed. I still expect the elite being mostly composed of immigrants and their discendents, especially in the first decades.

That should offer Liberia a basis for further development.
 
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America annexed it, and lots of White Americans move there. This brings development and industry.

It expands, bringing Manifest Destiny to Africa.
 

SinghKing

Banned
America annexed it, and lots of White Americans move there. This brings development and industry.

It expands, bringing Manifest Destiny to Africa.

Then it wouldn't be the Republic of Liberia, would it? And it'd be even more crippled by violent resistance from the indigenous Africans, who'd be even more excluded from citizenship than they were IOTL (in which they were denied citizenship until 1904). Something which may also be important is that foreign commerce with any indigenous Africans, or indeed trading with anyone other than US of Americans, was banned under Liberian law from 1865 all the way until 1931- and the repealing of this law was met with outrage by the USA (which threatened to annex Liberia outright and recolonise it in a military expedition unless the repealing of the law was overturned), and those Americans with substantial investments/near-total monopolies in Liberia (such as Harvey Samuel Firestone, founder of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, who attempted to launch a military coup within the year in order to get the decision overturned and effectively turn Liberia into his own personal rubber republic). Methinks that greater control by the USA, even if there had been a vast influx of White Americans, probably wouldn't have worked out any better for than it did for Angola or Zimbabwe. And if the USA were to annex it outright, a worst case scenario comparable to the fate of the Congo Free State wouldn't be overly pessimistic...
 
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America annexed it, and lots of White Americans move there.

Only to die of malaria and other tropical diseases in droves. There's a reason why very few white people settled the neighbouring areas despite centuries of trading forts and almost a century of colonialism.
 
I can see two interconnected possibilities:
2) a serious commitment to build a free and inclusive society. I don't think it'd be easy or straightforward, but I think that the Americo-Liberians had a chance at creating a situation where the native African population is included into the civic body, as opposed to being marginalized and oppressed. I still expect the elite being mostly composed of immigrants and their discendents, especially in the first decades.

t.

Ja. What he said.
If they can get the whole population of the country up to rural Alabama standards (say, about grade six education, near universal literacy, etc), they'd be the most advanced nation in sub saharan africa. Merge with Sierra Leone, the other ex-slave nation, and play Britain and the US off to open trade. The US might go to war against Liberia to enforce a trade momopoly, theyre not going to go to war with Britain over access to a couple of small African states.

Liberia then provides missionaries and school teachers for much of anglophone Africa, while their traders do trading into the interior and along the coast. Increased trade provides more money. All those teachers need education, so the first Black college in Africa opens in Monrovia.

Etc.
 
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