Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God: A History of the True Whigs
- Thread starter Youngmarshall
- Start date
Thanks, pleased to hear it.
I think in terms of visualisation just think of this Liberia as Liberia + Guinea. That's not quite the border, the border with the Ivory Coast is at San Pedro rather than harper but close enough. With Sierra Leone left as a Gambia type figure surrounded by a single country.
So OYL on the left and TTL on the right. Though that's a rough sketch, I imagine the border with Cote D'Ivoire looks less awful in reality.
This TTL's Guinea has been somewhat unexplored for having had a crazy few decades and then ceasing to exist but I hope to go into more what is happening there, soon.
Conte
Lansana Conté: 1983-85 - The Soldier
After losing two elections and showdowns over land rights and the partition of Guinea, the True Whigs under Ruth Massaquoi could not afford to lose the showdown over labour rights. The Kings' Council had become their last powerbase, after they'd lost the senate, the presidency and been pegged back in local government. Because the Kings normally served for life they had survived the Socialist tide and there wasn't a Socialist infrastructure in place to challenge that because the overall Socialist goal was to remove the Kings entirely. Ironically they probably would have been able to control the council, had the True Whigs got their way about splitting up Guinea but because Telli wanted to maintain centralised control from Conakry, he was King of nearly half of Liberia but only had one vote on the council. As a result Telli was the only socialist of the 31 Kings, along with 12 belonging to the rapidly declining Patriotic Union and 18 True Whigs.
When the Opposition refused to give way to Tipoteh over the Labour bill, Tipoteh organised 30 petitions of recall and Ruth organised one in Guinea in the same manner. All 31 Kings would have to campaign for re-election in late 1979. The Socialists would put up a candidate in every seat, the True Whigs would however only put up candidates in 22 seats, in an attempt to avoid splitting the anti-socialist vote. 8 Patriotic Union Kings (2 took the opportunity to retire and 2 joined the True Whigs) faced no True Whig opposition and in fact were given access to True Whig resources. And in Guinea, they supported the campaign of an Independent, Lansana Conté.
Conté was a Susu from outside Conarky, he had studied in French schools in Senegal and the Ivory Coast and joined the French Army in 1955, like many West Africans did. He missed the first Indo-China War, which was where most of his contemporaries first saw combat, but served for three years in Algeria before returning to Guinea-Conakry upon independence. As a soldier he had loyally supported Diallo's regime and serving alongside Malian, Ghanaian, Liberian, Guinea-Bissauan and Sierra Leonean troops as part of joint armies had seen him become a committed Pan-African. He was however secretly opposed to Guinea's socialist regime, which he felt had maintained an iron grip over the district even after the transition away from one party rule and the loss of independence. In 1979 he would retire from his position in the Mano River Army, to run for King.
Conté was, as the man who had driven back the Portuguese Army during the 1969 Invasion and who had successfully resolved a border dispute with Guinea-Bissau, a hero to the Guineans and Ruth saw his campaign as the best chance for toppling Telli. He did not manage it in the end, but he came close, he probably would have won had the then just emerging separatist Guinea Nationalist Party not also ran a candidate. The Socialists had been proven beatable within their most loyal district. In the aftermath of the 79 elections, Conté, to much fanfare, joined the True Whigs and helped organise their campaign within the Guinea District.
The 1979 elections had generally gone well for the True Whigs. While the Socialists gained 11 Kings, Amos Sawyer most famously becoming King of Monrovia, their votes largely piled up in the major cities and so the opposition maintained a slim majority in the Council. Moreover, having won, the Kings could not face another election for another four years which meant Tipoteh had to shelve the idea of country wide labour laws, entirely. They were introduced in the socialist held districts, and in government owned businesses, but private businesses could merely move over the border to avoid them. Trade Unions, whose protection had been both a True Whig and Socialist priority for decades, could, and did, fight for and win guarantees of employers in True Whig districts meeting the Socialist labour standards but the sweep of immigrants into the country meant labour was very much a buyer's market. In particular, the numerous foreign owned Car factories that had followed Ford, tended to operate in True Whig districts, meaning the country was unbalanced economically, with some regions booming while others stagnated. For the True Whigs this was a decisive win for the traditional system of negotiations between chiefs, bosses and unions and the 1980 Ghendimah palm-wine music festival, itself something of a dying genre at that point as jazz and rock swept the nation, became something of a victory lap for the old Liberian elite.
Tipoteh and the Socialists felt a centralised economy wherein the central government could dictate centrally was the only way to ensure progress and the Kings system prevented that. Tipoteh by all accounts wanted to abolish the Kings Council in 1980 but such a radical step would have not only enraged the opposition but alienated those within his own party. In particular, this would mean Telli, Sawyer and the other socialist Kings would lose their own powers. This would probably be accepted within the original 30 districts but Guinea had joined on the promise of devolution and was not willing to give that up. It lacked the shared history that loosely bound the rest of Liberia together, and had significant differences in culture with French and Arabic rather than Val and English acting as lingua francas. Telli is rumoured to have openly said that Tipoteh abolishing the Kings was a step he couldn't support.
This failure to confront what he viewed as Liberia's biggest problem was why Tipoteh didn't stand for the 1981 Presidency. Instead Ruth Massaquoi would face down the old Monrovian professor and activist Angie Brooks, fresh from a stint serving with the, soon to become Secretary General, Alhaji Ahmad Tejan Kabbah at the United Nations. The election made headlines worldwide for being entirely between women candidates (this technically wasn't true as the Patriotic Union put up a man, Gabriel Kpolleh, but this would be the last election where the PU could be considered a major force) but, from a Liberian point of view, it was mostly notable for being an election where the True Whigs won the 30 districts but lost because of the votes from Guinea. While it was yet another defeat, it did mean that the Socialists lost control of the Senate, meaning Brooks would struggle far more than Tipoteh to get legislation through and anything like abolishing the Kings was firmly off the table.
The party turned to Conté. If he was the man who could bring them Guinea then the True Whigs finally had a path back to power. Guinea was still something of a land apart from the rest of Liberia, there the socialists had ruled for far longer and had done far more to reshape the country. Guinea had seen the old chieftains and chiefs abolished entirely in a way even Sierra Leone had not meaning its elites tended to be bureaucrats rather than aristocrats. It had also seen a much more vigorous campaign against paganism and witch doctors, something which scared the small but significant pagan minority in the 30 districts, already under threat after the widespread horror of the reveal of ritual murders in Danane. Guinea under Talli and Diallo was not short of accomplishments, its education system was better even than the Bylden schools, it had done much to improve the role of women and Conakry and many of the other cities were thriving but there was also deep poverty in the countryside which largely had been left behind, routine corruption and inefficiency in the nationalised industries and a low level of discontent from those who had worked elsewhere in the Mano River Union and then come home that Conté had tapped into in 1979 and still existed.
Conté almost ran more against Talli than Brooks during his time as opposition leader. He was critical of the operation of the bauxite mines, long since sold at below cost to the Soviet Union in return for investment money, saying that it was a bad deal that prevented working conditions in the mines being improved. He was critical of the lack of investment in agriculture, and of the health service's inability to control malaria and the new immunodeficiency viruses beginning to be detected in the country. And he was deeply critical of the Guinean socialist party which he felt was bloated, corrupt and had far too much power over the average citizen. Guinea and the Mano River countries as a whole had, Conté argued, been left behind by their socialist leaders. He wanted to change that. In terms of foreign policy, he wanted to pivot towards support for America; the CIA almost certainly funded his campaign. He also wanted to follow the IMF's neoliberal economic advice in terms of privatising industries and reducing government spending to promote growth and he wanted the West African Economic Zone to become much more of an active peacekeeping force with closer unity pursued. And he wanted to expand the Mano River Union to include Guinea-Bissau.
Guinea-Bissau's Cape Verdean elite had been overthrown by a nationalist military coup which distrusted the more light skinned Islanders and its new leaders, Military officer João Bernardo "Nino" Vieira and his female Prime Minister, Carmen Pereira, were old allies and friends of Conté's from the war against Portugal. Strangely enough, given his opposition to Liberian socialism, Conté also personally got on with Thomas Sankara, the new leader of what was Upper Volta, now renamed Burkina Faso.
The Liberian policy of citizenship had meant that many immigrants from Upper Volta, Mali and Guinea-Bissau had entered the country and gained the franchise. Being outside of the True Whig network of co-operative effort and traditional family support, they mostly worked in factories and voted Socialist but Conté directly appealed to them by promising to turn Bissau and Ouagadougou into cities like Conakry and Monrovia once union was accomplished. His efforts paid off and in 1985, after twelve years, the True Whigs returned to the presidency.
Conté did not enjoy his victory for long. In December 1985, war between Mali and Burkina Faso finally broke out after years of tensions, with Malian forces having the better of the earlier fighting and quickly occupying most of the Agacher Strip. Moussa Traoré, the Malian Dictator, whose coup had led to Guinea's independence from the Mali Federation, had long been a bogeyman of the Mano River Union, painted as ready to sweep down at any moment to regain the lost territory and here he was, proving them right, by attacking another member of the WAEZ. Conté mobilised the Mano River forces for war, somewhat to the displeasure of Jusu-Sheriff and Sierra Leone. Five days after Malian troops entered Burkina Faso, Liberian Troops crossed into Mali. Western observers feared a major war breaking out.
They were wrong, desperate attempts by the WAEZ to organise a ceasefire paid off after only a week of fighting, with the border dispute referred to the International Court of Justice. Just over 300 people died in the fighting, the most notable of whom was President Conté who was assassinated by a Mano River Union soldier of Malian background while inspecting his troops.
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Appreciate it.
It's a very niche story. The history it's based on is obscure (I can't imagine too many readers are that very familiar with many of the characters), its tone is very dry without much in the way of plot or characters and I actively avoid broad changes to history in a way that flies against the general butterfly maximum ethos of this site to the extent that it borders on nothing really mattering because the effects are so small.
I'm honestly kind of surprised I have any readers at all, let alone as many and as enthusiastic as I do. It's nice, I'm pleased.
Obscure history is both a blessing and a curse. It can be a curse, of course, because no one knows what you're talking about, but on the other hand it can be a blessing because no one knows what you're talking about. That is, you don't have to get into a big argument over whether 6" or 6.5" left-handed screws would be used on the widget that goes into the whatchamacallit, etc.--you are probably the most significant expert on the board. And a lot of people like seeing things that are novel or unusual, not Civil War TL #1378 or whatever (not to knock Civil War timelines, but there's a ton of them).
As for the "dry" part...have you seen the two timelines I've done? Compared to those, this one is practically an overflowing spring!
Konneh
Kafumba F. Konneh: 1985-93: The Sheikh
Few Liberian Vice Presidents made the step up to become President. Technically the last one prior to Konneh to do so was Albert Porte, but he had only been appointed as Vice President the day before Sie resigned so that he could take over. The last person elected Vice President to take over because the President could not complete their term was Clarence Grey in 1936. Being picked as Vice President in theory meant you were one heart attack or bullet away from the Presidency but in practice it was an entirely powerless position for most VPs that ambitious politicians mostly avoided.
Conté's VP, Konneh, was a 40 year old civil servant and Islamic leader from Ganta in central Liberia. He had been picked largely to shore up Conté's religious credentials and balance the ticket between Guinea and the 30 districts. He was a respected administrator and influential as a religious scholar, earning the honorific Sheikh despite his young age, but wasn't seen as having the ambition or drive for the top job, having previously served only in district politics. Fate however would have other ideas.
Konneh was sworn in as President with Liberia still at war and the country shocked by the death of their leader. Konneh would be much less of a transformative leader than Conté had intended to be, with his main aim being instead one of reconciliation and unification. Not only in doing much to hasten the end of the war but in trying to ease anger against immigrants in the wake of the assassination, condemning the violence that had erupted against migrant communities across the country and asking security forces to restore order.
He was in many ways the most Nationalist of the True Whigs Presidents, he recognised the flaws in the district system in terms of being unable to dictate a central vision, but felt the real problem was not structural but spiritual. A Monrovian, a Guinean and a Galinasian, thought of themselves primarily as being of that identity rather than Liberian and so viewed the other districts as competitors rather than allies. Konneh attempted to build patriotism in the hope of furthering cooperation between the districts, making much of funding Liberian sports teams and bands to tour the country and investing in National festivals. He also instinctively viewed religion as a potentially unifying force, creating a spiritual council wherein representatives of the country's churches, mosques and temples could meet and organise together. He had an undoubted blind spot towards Islam, flat out denying that there was any Islamic motive to the attacks on pagans in Zonneu until the police proved otherwise, for instance, but he firmly felt that the Pagan and Christian minorities needed to be represented, that they had to feel this was a country they belonged to.
He travelled around the country more than any other President before him, regularly leaving Monrovia to meet up with the Kings of various districts and he was more active that most in using the President's infrastructure fund in districts that were struggling with poverty or crime. Konneh generally had good relationships with most of the Kings, even the socialists ones, with the exceptions of Telli and Sawyer. Sawyer, the King of Monrovia, in particular clashed with Konneh on social politics. The decision in Monrovia to ban polygamy, while long demanded and not out of keeping with some Islamic thought, was seen as a deliberate attack on the Sheikh who had two wives himself.
Economically Konneh didn't embrace neoliberalism as much as Conté had promised. Konneh believed in the evils of inequality and poverty and so made only limited cuts on government welfare spending, running a deficit throughout his term, though he also encouraged growth in private and religious charity. He did sell off some of the nationalised industries and welcomed foreign investment and borrowing but maintained the high tariffs on goods being sold outside of the West African Economic Zone, encouraged progressive taxation in the district and refused to devalue the Liberian dollar.
His main legacy was a huge increase in the land exploited with oil and cocoa plantations opened, new houses and roads built and a large number of new rice paddies created. This was an inevitable result of a booming population and can't be attributed too much to the Government but drew increasing criticism due to the environmental destruction that accompanied this. Huge areas of biodiverse forest were destroyed by logging companies to clear land and pollution increased as the existing sanitation system with overwhelmed with garbage often piling up outside new build towns. A native environmental movement led by men like Alexander Peal and young teenager Silas Siakor sprung up in response, though they were not the political force during Konneh's terms that they would later become. The more politically effective attacks came from the Socialists who argued that the new land was increasingly being bought from the village councils by rich businessman and that more needed to be done to prevent this which led to Konneh's government passing a law that at least 50% of all land in each district must be owned for the common good and preserved for food production or nationalised industries. Something that largely blunted the Socialist attack line and led him to win the 1989 election comfortably.
Konneh also diverted funding from the army, which was reduced in size, towards the police and the internal security agents, with him repeatedly stating the need for justice. He took a hard-line stance on drug gangs, a stark change from previously socialist policy and something that was criticised for resulting in increased violence and prison overpopulation but also received praise for doing much to reclaim the streets from the gangs. He also took a tough line on corruption with increased wages to public servants coming line in line with hard penalties for taking bribes and spot investigations into isolated areas, though its argued more of this was a continuation of pre-existing socialist policies than is often thought. In particular the doggedness of Liberian custom agents, something associated with Konneh, was also noted on under Tipoteh and Brooks.
In Foreign policy Konneh realigned himself towards the USA, but with the cold war ending and austerity settling in in Washington, this resulted in less funding than had been hoped for. He also pushed the standard True Whig line of ever closing unity among the WAEZ with talks on a customs and currency union dominating his second term. Here Konneh was to run into problems that Liberia wanted a higher external tariff than the other members. Liberia had also become somewhat notorious for high customs valuation and slowing down goods leaving, which it claimed was to prevent trade misinvoicing where false prices were put on invoices to avoid paying taxes, but its opponents claimed was based on over-valuation of Liberian goods. This, it was argued, reduced trade and there was increasing pressure on Liberia from both the WAEZ and WTO to accept more invoice totals at face value. Konneh refused to give way, arguing that Liberia were saving millions of dollars though its customs investigations and the talks collapsed, though Konneh did win the further respect of the President of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, who increasingly became aligned with the Mano River Union and against the Ivory Coast and Mali, which Sankara felt had supported the failed coup against him in 1987, within the WAEZ.
Konneh also followed up on Conté's promise to pursue union with Guinea-Bissau and in 1990 Guinea-Bissau joined the Mano River Union, which served as reassurance to Sierra Leone who now once again was a part of the triumverate and could not see their joint army taken to war based purely on a single vote as had happened in 1985. When the Transformation Party gained control of the Sierra Leonean parliament in 1988, a single Mano River state began to once began to be seen as possible and talks to that effect were held throughout Konneh's second term, alongside the WAEZ talks, though no conclusion was to be reached by the time of the 1993 election. Konneh felt his job was incomplete but had grown frustrated and tired and, at the advice of his family, did not chose to stand for a third term.
Konneh never really succeeded in creating a single Liberian people, regionalism still dominated, but he still did much to create modern Liberia, for good and for ill.
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Hmmm, all that talk of land clearance makes me think of the elephant in the room...or, rather, the virus. Kinda suspecting there's going to be an Ebola outbreak sooner rather than later given the intensive contact people would be making with forest borders in this period, though hopefully the relatively greater stability and wealth of the region will help contain it sooner than OTL. Given the sophistication of the current vaccines, I guess there's not much chance of anything like them being developed during the pandemic unless it happens later than OTL, though.
Ebola is going to have to be something I deal with but haven't yet decided how. The truth is, I'd assumed the timeline would have wrapped up before the 1980s and it hasn't, so I'm entering areas I've read less on. Will have to do a deep dive into ebola and work out what is likely to happen in terms of its emergence.
Probably. I want to do a bunch of epilogues once I've finished the main timeline. A map, lists of all the Presidents and party leaders, a vignette from the POV of a normal person in 2021 Monrovia, a newspaper article, a scholarly look at pan-Africanism in the modern day.
But, you know, need to finish the actual main bit first.
Quiah
Oscar Jaryee Quiah: 1993-1997: The Founder
Few Liberian elections are as momentous as that of 1993. On a continental level it was somewhat overshadowed by what happened in South Africa the following year but it was still the election that gave birth to a new Country and changed the history of West Africa.
With Konneh refusing the stand for a third term, the True Whigs turned to his Secretary of State Oscar Quiah, the man who had been representing Liberia in negotiations throughout West Africa for the last six years. The new Socialist leader was Joseph Woah-Tee and Woah-Tee and Quiah had furious public arguments over centralisation vs regionalisation, the role of the religious council, the use of foreign capital, the position of nationalised industries and the violent approach the government had taken against drug gangs. But to many they were both preaching very similar lines, both parties were pan africans, who hoped for a larger union and so were pro immigration from the rest of West Africa, both were pro trade union, both were in favour of a broad welfare state that included housing and utilities, both were broadly secular but socially traditional when it came to women's rights and homosexuality, both were largely indifferent to the ecological damage caused by new land reclamation and both supported an aggressive line in terms of external tariffs and powers of customs agents.
The result is seven third parties ran for President, more than in any election before, offering an alternative to the ruling progressive consensus. The Environmentalists were represented by Alexander Louis Peal of the 'Country Party', who argued about the dangers of the increasing deforestation of the area both in terms of environmental damage and in terms of exposing humans to dangerous animals, something that would prove sadly prophetic. The Feminists flocked to Pearl Brown Bull, who worked as both a Christian pastor and University lecturer, and whose 'Progressive Christian Party' would attack the patriarchal norms of the country with the gender separated secret societies and polygamous Islamic leaders particularly her targets. Her arguments that Christianity and the Western way of the Monrovian founders were the only hopes for women however meant she gained little traction outside the big cities. Thomas Gankama-Quiwonkpwa, a young Gio Army officer, ran for the once dominant 'Patriotic Union', now reduced to only a minor party, on an anti unification and immigration platform similar to that of the People's Party of Sierra Leone. The 'Guinea Nationalist Party', opposed to the integration of Guinea-Conakry within Liberia, ran their leader, Alpha Condé, on the Presidential ticket, though he didn't campaign in the 30 old districts and so his party were mostly aiming for seats in the senate and the District House. The aging 77 year old Islamic Scholar, Thierno Abdourahmane Bah, ran for 'The Islamic Party' which wanted to cement sharia law as the basis of a national law code. Former Senator Charles Taylor, who had formed the 'Liberian Capitalist Party' after he had been expelled from the True Whigs for taking bribes, stood for the neoliberal economic policies that Conté had promised and Konneh and Quiah had shied away from, promising lower taxes, easier foreign trade, privatisation and less government spending. And finally the 'Landless People's Party', a Maoist peasants party which felt the Socialist party were too moderate, stood Ismael Gushein.
Of the nine Candidates only Quiah and Woah-Tee had a serious chance of winning, but this split in the opposition vote would prove vital to Quiah's victory and in the senate 18 out of the 80 elected came from the minor parties with the GNP taking 9 out of the 20 assigned to the district of Guinea. This meant that Quiah had only a plurality in the senate and had to rely on deals with either the minor parties or the socialists to pass anything.
The first major event of Quiah's eventual presidency was the 1994 African Cup of Nations, which Liberia had offered to host after Zaire had had to withdraw. Konneh had made much of sport as a unifying force within the country and this was seen as a chance for the new Liberian team, led by their charismatic Monrovian born Striker George Weah and his legendary partnership with Titi Camera from the district of Guinea, to cement that unity by a dominant performance.
Dominant is perhaps overstating it, they finished 2nd in their group and only got past a scratch Zambia team in the quarter finals thanks to a fortunate penalty that almost certainly wouldn't have been awarded to an away team but they were excellent in the derby semi final vs Mali and while outclassed by Nigeria in the final, did not disgrace themselves. It was Liberia's best performance at an international football tournament. More importantly to the government the tournament was a success in terms of generating crowds and good feelings, with Monrovian and Conakrian crowds alike enthusiastic in their support of their united team. And, pleasingly to the True Whigs, fans from Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso also tended to support Liberia against the bigger teams.
Quaiah was a big supporter of close alliance with his neighbours in the West African Economic Zone. He, as Secretary of State, had pushed for the WAEZ to move into peacekeeping with troops sent to Mali to help the transition into democratic rule there and help enforce the ceasefire that ended the Tuareg revolt, on the basis that otherwise the French would be invited in. Mano River troops of course played no role in that due to memories of the 1985 war but they would later be deployed into the Ivory Coast after ethnic violence broke out there. Quiah had also participated in the failed talks at establishing a customs and currency zone and was eager to renew them now that the WTO had ruled in 1994 that customs agents should only challenge invoice totals if they had compelling reason to view them as false but the innate problem of the fact that most of the WAEZ used a currency pegged to the European franc prevented much progress being made.
Quiah's government were also, of course, eager for the long talked about Union with Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau to finally go ahead, giving that Quiah had been one of the main men at the talks. In this they surprisingly had support from Senegambia, which blamed Guinea-Bissau for supporting a Christian insurgency in their southern provinces and hoped union into a Muslim majority state would cut out that support but some, unofficial, opposition from Burkina Faso which was worried about losing the votes of two allies within the WAEZ. The Transformation Party of Sierra Leone had made it clear they were not willing to simply join Liberia as Guinea-Conakry had done but would be in favour of a new unitary state that had a new name, flag, capital and political structure.
In 1995 that new nation would be officially announced, with referendums to be held in each state as for its ratification. While many names were considered, it was eventually decided on the West African Federation, as a nod to the, long since collapsed, East African Federation and as hope for the future. Its, much mocked, Flag was an Asafo style picture of five hands meeting over a river to represent union. A new Capital would be built for it on the River Niger and its structure would be a federal one with a five member executive council, made up of the leaders of each constituent country, with a rotating Presidency. Each country would have devolved self-rule but would have a joint foreign policy, customs zone, citizenship, security forces and shared tax income for country wide infrastructure and public health initiatives. Among other things this would mean that for the first time in Liberia's history, citizenship would be open to whites and asians.
The referendums were much reported on, Sierra Leone narrowly voted for Union as did Guinea-Bissau, despite a vicious campaign which saw Liberia denounced as imperialists as bad as Portugal by the no side. Liberia itself was faced with not only a vote for union but also on partition. It was the largest of the Mano River countries and it felt it deserved more say in the executive council than one vote out of three. Quiah's solution was for Liberia to enter as three countries. One consisting of most of Guinea-Conakry, one consisting of Monrovia and it's immediate hinterland and a third consisting the Highlands around the source of Niger which had been split into Liberia and Guinea-Conakry.
This would be the most far-reaching structural change to the country since the Massaquoi constitution of 1947 and he tried to get as many factions on board as possible. The GNP were being given even further devolution for Guinea but at the cost of losing the north of their 'country', the Islamic faction in return was given an entirely Muslim country which contained some of the richest mines and the Christian faction were getting a mostly Christian country in Monrovia-Liberia. More importantly, having essentially proposed the dissolution of Liberia, Quiah announced to the socialists that he was willing to consider more constitutional reform. He was, in fact, willing to sacrifice the Kings. In order to get socialist backing for the Federation, there would not only be referendums on whether the three new regions should join the Federation or remain as part of Liberia but a second referendum on the same ballot, asking 'if those regions were to be join the federation whether they'd do so as centralised states with a centralised economy or with the current devolved districts'.
There was outrage among the True Whigs at this announcement but Quiah knew that in order for the federation to succeed it needed cross-partisanship support. In the end only the Patriotic Union would come out for the no vote and all three regions voted in favour of partition and federation. All three also voted against the Kings system, supporting socialist arguments that it was an unpopular feudal relic and each new region would hastily enact a new constitution and hold another round of elections. There was a flair up of violence in response but the security forces maintained control.
In early 1997, Liberia, the oldest republic in Africa, would cease to exist as an independent country. Quiah would move from being a President of a sovereign country to one of five people on the Executive Council representing Liberia-Monrovia, alongside Carmen Periera of Guinea-Bissau, Alpha Condé of Guinea-Conakry, George Doré of Liberia-Kankan and John Karefa-Smart of Sierra Leone. Having served a four year term, he announced that Liberia-Monrovia would still hold it's Presidential election as usual in late 1997.
Quiah lost to the Socialist candidate and stood down as leader, but he had achieved more for the cause of Pan-Africanism than any previous True Whig. The West African Federation had been founded. It would have a baptism of fire. Shortly after the election, unnoticed by the national newspapers, a 4 year old girl came down ill in her family's village after having been playing in a cave filled with bats.
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Oh god, oh no...
Well, at least they have shared public health infrastructure? That's...good? They'll sure need it...!
Also, Charles Taylor being a second-rate Senator who's mostly known for taking bribes and being neoliberal is...a good change! Still a scumbag, but, you know. Big step down to just being corrupt.
They might not, tbf. Of the 40 odd ebola outbreaks, only two have caused more than a 1,000 deaths. The 2013 epidemic was not a worst case scenario, I am typing this during a worse one, but it wasn't a best case either.
This one could be anywhere from far worse to OTL to far better. The WAF have some advantages over OTL Guinea but share some of the same disadvantages and have some additional ones.
If there's a thesis to the modern era of this timeline it's that crises create big over the top heroes and villains and well run states don't. Taylor is never going to be a great guy but it was the situation that allowed him to become the villain he did. Likewise the likes of Ruth Perry, Togba-Nah Tipoteh and Mana Kpaka were heroes in OTL, but here instead of standing up for democracy against dictatorships, here they argue about labour rights and migrants rights and because the stakes are lower, they don't have the same heroic energy to them. They're just politicians.
They're all just guys.
(Appreciate that you made this comment, though. That entire section listing all the no hopers running for President was largely an excuse to bury OTL's most influential politician within that list.)
mapuche lautarino
Banned
Gaddafi was a supporter of pan-Africanism ?
we can see more adhesions to this federation in the future
we can see more adhesions to this federation in the future
Please continue, your TL has a very original idea and its also very well written, a rare combination!
Boley
George Eutychianus Saigbe Boley: 1997-2001 - The Easterner
The late 1990s was always going to be a difficult time for Liberia. The formation of the West African Federation was a major undertaking for all three member states due to the business of integrating into a single country, in terms of ambassadors, flags, citizenship and sports teams. For Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau, the federal structure cushioned that as it meant that most of the government decisions would remain local and so changes could be delayed, Guinea-Bissau wouldn't use English, the WAF's official language, in government buildings until many years after the union had been formed for instance, and even a single currency wasn't introduced until 2000.
For Liberia, however, that integration was complicated even further by the new structure of the new country. Calling it a partition is incomplete, on a political level yes, there were now three senates and three Presidents, but on a much larger level what it was, was unification within Liberia. Liberia went from 31 legal systems to 3 and Liberia-Monrovia went from 20 to 1. Liberia had never previously ever had a universal age of consent, a universal speed limit, a universal tax code, universal drug laws or universal labour standards, there was a reason it produced so many lawyers. While the problem was worse in theory than in practice, as many districts already copied the Monrovia law code wholesale for the sake of ease, that integration was meant to be the fight that defined the 1997-2001 term.
Amos Sawyer, the new President of Liberia-Monrovia and former King of Monrovia, had campaigned on simply extending the Monrovian law code to the rest of the country, seeing as this was the most used law code and did so on his first day of office. The Kings had been kept around as governors as part of Quiah's attempt at Transition but while they maintained some decision making powers, they were stuck with Monrovian law and economic policy and had no powers to prevent this. This meant that, among other things, full bans on female genital mutilation and polygamous marriages were now enforced in the heavily Islamic and pagan areas of the interior (though in practice existing polygamous marriages were still recognised, the ban was entirely on new ones). This was popular within Monrovia itself, where Pearl Brown Bull's Progressive Christian Party had performed well over the last decade, but incredibly unpopular in the True Whig cities such as Ghendimah or Man.
As a result the True Whigs, not unreasonably, turned to a Krahn speaker from the Eastern provinces for their next leader to channel the voice of that interior anger. Boley was nominally Christian himself, seen as important in the newly slightly Christian majority Liberia-Monrovia, but was from the more pagan East Country and had close associates with pagan leaders such as Joshua Vlahyi and the Doe/Dweh family. He spoke bitterly against a Monrovian elite projecting their values onto a country that wasn't represented by them, something that replicated the city and country strife the world over but with the ethnic twist that both Sawyer and Brown Bull were the descendants of settlers, who made up less than 10% of Liberia-Monrovia's people but were disproportionately over-represented in politics, media and business. While Boley and the True Whigs had distanced themselves from George Dweh's condemnation of the Monrovians as black imperialists during the 1997 election because most of the country considered Liberia's formation a unification rather than a conquest and were proud of their role in forming the first African republic, the True Whigs certainly leant into nativist rhetoric under Boley. Sawyer's 1997-2001 term was supposed to be one remembered for a fight between the Monrovian Socialists' centralising agenda and a True Whig regionalist party standing up for African traditions. It wasn't.
Diseases routinely jump from animals into humans as humans push deeper into their environments and consume them for food. The WAF had already suffered from widespread HIV-2 cases and isolated filoviruses had jumped from Chimpanzees to Humans in the regions in the 1970s. None of that had come close to collapsing the healthcare system though. The 1998 epidemic did.
The first case is generally held to be a young girl in Liberia-Kankan, her own illness, and eventual death, in November of 1997 went largely unnoticed until her family also came down with the illness and the local hospital was informed. From there however the new virus spread quickly as it was misdiagnosed as Malaria by the original hospital, with under funding of public health and chaos from the political reorganisation later blamed, and cases were soon found in neighbouring areas. George Doré's government announced in a statement on January 18th 1998 that there was a growing outbreak of an unknown but highly contagious disease, something confirmed by the WHO as an Ebola virus on the 21st, and an emergency meeting of the executive council of the WAF happened later that day.
The WAF executive council was faced with the most serious crisis since Portugal's invasion of Guinea-Conakry, in only their second year as a nation. Sawyer and Karefa-Smart promised to send as many health care professionals as possible to Liberia-Kankan to set up field hospitals, as moving patients to hospitals elsewhere was quickly ruled out, but ideas of a full quarantine zone were quickly dismissed due to the economic effects, something that was later criticised. There was also worry about causing a panic, which meant information about the virus from government sources was often delayed and released only after rumours had already spread, with Guinea-Conakry's health minister routinely accused of downplaying the virus. In particular, Liberia-Kankan had a lot of mine workers who originally came either from elsewhere in the WAF or from neighbouring countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso, this meant the normal trickle of movement around the West African Economic Zone, could easily bring with it the virus and if that trickle turned into a flood of people fleeing the virus, it could become catastrophic. It later turned out that the executive council had contacted the WAEZ on the 19th and advised for Mali, Senegambia and the Ivory Coast to shut their borders, before their own citizens were aware yet of the extent of the problem. While there were small outbreaks outside the WAF, this quick action prevented the epidemic spreading too far out of the country, but did result in large migrant camps within Liberia-Kankan of workers unable to leave which saw their own outbreaks and saw an economic collapse in part of the region thanks to this loss of labour. The Council also began a major program of buying and making Personal Protection Equipment on the 19th, though this wouldn't really take effect until April.
The larger mines and plantations coped reasonably well with the virus, setting up outpatient clinics to isolate ill workers which allowed work to continue, farming villages and economies based on local factories coped less well thanks in part to a culture of working while ill and of communal health care in areas far from the nearest hospital. Ebola had a high death rate, particularly thanks to the effects of the existing AIDs pandemic, but it was relatively easy to contain as symptoms were highly visible and asymptomatic patients were rarely contagious. Where there was considerable panic about a mutation that would allow it to become airborne, especially outside Africa where it was tinged with a racial fear, mostly it was transmitted to the carers of the sick people, with health care professionals disproportionately likely to get it, something that would arguably set back the WAF's public health program post epidemic.
In February, the first cases outside Liberia-Kankan were identified. Active quarantine efforts in Freetown and Conakry and vigorous tracking of contacts, prevented it taking hold in the big cities and airports were closed for passenger travel in February but movement of people and in particular dead bodies being taken for funerals saw the virus spread quickly through the WAF's countryside, with neglected rural areas with poor healthcare and education, and often antagonistic attitudes to the central government such as eastern Liberia-Monrovia being the worst hit, due to patients refusing to accept government orders to isolate. In March, the Council ordered the shut down of many schools and all transport, that wasn't deemed entirely necessary, was banned between infected and non-infected areas, due to dire reports coming from hospitals within Liberia-Kankan.
The True Whigs took a supportive line of the Government once they recognised the level of the crisis. As it became increasingly clear that Islamic and pagan religious communities were where most cases were happening, Konneh's religious council did sterling work in government outreach to combat misinformation and encouraging change in funeral rites and Boley himself visited a lot of isolated Krahn villages to urge them to follow government advice. The Krahn distrust of Monrovia and general neglect had meant that most villages relied on local, unqualified healers and pagan priests, whose advise was often against medical principles; Vlahyi himself would later admit to advising people to drink blood extracted from sick people to gain immunity during the early days of the epidemic. Boley's contacts within that pagan community often led to him being associated with this scepticism of western medicine but the fact that he was trusted by them, helped hugely in government outreach, something even Sawyer acknowledged.
The efforts largely worked, while in total nearly 4,000 people died, by mid August the quarantine effects had stopped the spread. The newly discovered wrinkle that male sperm remained contagious for up to 18 months after recovery meant isolated new cases continued deep into 2000 but the schools and borders reopened in late 1998 and for most people the country returned to normal. The WAF had survived its first real test. While there was deep economic and social damage that would take years to entirely recover from, generally people felt the government had done a decent job. While stories of corruption and mismanagement are not hard to find, newspapers were full of tales of food going rotten because quarantine zones prevented it being moved to hungry cities or of local politicians using government money to buy biohazard suits that weren't suitable at ridiculous rates from friends, the government were generally seen as having dealt with the problem efficiently. Certainly all five ruling parties were rewarded at the polls.
By 2001, the political scene had begun to return to the fight between the Monrovian Socialists' centralising agenda and a True Whig regionalist party standing up for African traditions that it had been gearing up for three years earlier, with the Socialist promise to de-criminalise homosexuality proving particularly controversial and the areas worst hit by Ebola demanding more help in rebuilding. But Boley's anti-Monrovian rhetoric felt hollow to his targets when he was the man who'd stood up during the Ebola crisis and told everyone to trust the government. He tied himself in knots trying to reconcile the two positions and convinced no one. It was no surprise to anyone when the Socialists were elected once again and Boley stood down as leader of the True Whigs.
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Well, if I was in Boley’s place I would say, “It was a crisis and the government was making the right decisions. If they hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have supported them.” But I guess that wouldn’t be rewarded…
Speaking more broadly, that went about how I expected. Not nearly as bad as OTL thanks to all countries being richer and more stable over the past twenty years, but still pretty bad (it would easily have been the biggest Ebola outbreak in history). I wonder if it shouldn’t have interacted badly with the HIV epidemic, which come to think of it should be pretty bad at this point even with better public health overall (I mean, it was pretty bad almost everywhere, and even doing better than OTL I’m not sure that the WAF nations could afford the massive amounts of ARVs that proved necessary to control it IOTL). I wonder if it will move up formation of the Global Fund and PEPFAR (or similar programs), since it highlights the need to support African public health programs.
Also, you used “genuinely” instead of “generally” when discussing the index case of the epidemic.
Speaking more broadly, that went about how I expected. Not nearly as bad as OTL thanks to all countries being richer and more stable over the past twenty years, but still pretty bad (it would easily have been the biggest Ebola outbreak in history). I wonder if it shouldn’t have interacted badly with the HIV epidemic, which come to think of it should be pretty bad at this point even with better public health overall (I mean, it was pretty bad almost everywhere, and even doing better than OTL I’m not sure that the WAF nations could afford the massive amounts of ARVs that proved necessary to control it IOTL). I wonder if it will move up formation of the Global Fund and PEPFAR (or similar programs), since it highlights the need to support African public health programs.
Also, you used “genuinely” instead of “generally” when discussing the index case of the epidemic.
No, probably not. Being the opposition in a crisis is always a thankless task.
Boley also, at least in otl, doesn't strike me as someone who could pull that off.
Like when accused, accurately, of using child soldiers during the civil war, he didn't just go 'everyone was, it was dire times' like a lot of the ex warlords did he instead he tried a ridiculous lie about it being a second organisation with the same name that did that.
That kind of inability to own up to what he was doing, was what I was imagining his response was.
He's probably the character I've whitewashed the most, mind. But that goes back to my thesis on heroes and villains.
That's fair criticism. My understanding is it was never as bad in west africa as southern africa but I probably should have at least mentioned the effect of a disease attacking the immune system being widespread during an epidemic
My instinct is that its unikely to trigger huge alarm since they weren't overwhelmed so you'll probably see the timetable for medical aid to africa much as otl, but will think about it.
My brother in law was in Sierra Leone with doctors without borders in 2002ish and a lot of the medical infrastructure had been destroyed by the war rather than not existing. There'd be less missions of that kind needed here.
Appreciate the proof reading, will correct when I get home.
Always enjoy your comments.