Hortense Sie: 1956-64 - The Trailblazer
Liberians often make much of the history of women leaders within the Liberian interior. This is true but shouldn't be exaggerated. There undoubtedly was a history of important female leaders within the Liberian interior, there are many testified about during the pre republic era and Suah Koko was dominant politically during the era after the forming of Republic but solo female leaders such as these, while they existed, were still rare among the many many rulers of pre unification Libera. What was much more common was dual power structures, something that was common throughout the West African Coast, from Igboland to Dahomey and Ashanti. Even Suah Koko ruled alongside her grandson in her last years. What this normally meant was power shared between a male ruler and a female title holder, who was normally related to him in some ways, whether the wives who made up the government of Dahomey or the queen mother who held importance in Ashanti. Female lineage heads and titles existed and wielded real political power throughout Liberia and West African generally but normally within the same polities as male lineage heads and titles and of lesser importance. In particular, while female armed bodyguards were common further East, within Liberia male rulers tended to have a monopoly over the military and as military warfare increased during the 19th century, these male leaders became more dominant. This was not total, female war leaders did exist in the area, Nenge and Nyarroh of Sierra Leone are famous examples, but women were much more commonly land chiefs who were replaced by war chiefs during time of turmoil.
This 'separate structure' status of female leaders is perhaps best illustrated by the secret societies. The Poro and Sande, which men and women were initiated into as teenagers. Female Leaders of the Sande secret societies had huge power but only over the other women. The Poro societies for men were run by men. And while the clan based societies did see some loyalty from young men to their female elders, on an individual level, women were undoubtedly cast in an inferior position to men, with wives being submissive to their husbands and genital mutilation was common throughout the country, and almost universal in areas outside the influence of the Liberian Episcopal Church, until the 1970s.
The Liberian Presidency was seen, by the majority of the natives, as a male thing, helped by the fact that the Monrovian secret society, the free masons, was male only and where a lot of the politicking happened. This was clearly a Poro thing not a Sande thing. Even when the vote was extended to women in 1930, this mattered mostly to the women of Monrovia with the women of the interior largely not voting, either because their male counterparts would not allow them or because they viewed it as men's business, one of the reasons why the feared PU eternal domination thanks to women voters never happened. The Liberian elite was different, the Blyden schools had been teaching women since the 1870s and the daughters of chiefs were increasingly politically active, Fatima Massaquoi, most famously, would become the first 'King' of Galinas. The influence of the Garveyists also helped as while they were undoubtedly misogynistic in theory, they viewed that the job of women was to be mothers, in practice they recognised talent and had numerous women high up among their organisation. Women such as Amy Ashwood, Amy Jacques, Henrietta Davis and Mittie Gordon did much in Liberia to encourage other women into engaging with male politics. By 1956 there was a strong women's element within all three Political parties.
Thorgues Sie, Hortenses' father, had been a guerilla who had fought with Didwho Welleh Twe during the occupation. His wife and three year old daughter fled to Sierra Leone to avoid retaliation and were only reunited after Faulkner's victory and general pardon. Those years of hardship and the poverty that followed them played a big role in Hortense's, or Tee as she was known by her friends, development. She was determined to end such injustice and as soon as she was old enough joined the True Whig party of her father and his friends. She also remained in contact with the people in Sierra Leone who had taken in her mother and other refugees and was very much a Pan-Africanist at heart, believing that there was no reason for the people of Sierra Leone to be separated from their kin in Liberia by artificial borders. Elected to the Senate in 1949, at the age of only 26, Hortense would replace the dead Botoe in 1956, yet another young True Whig leader picked as a figurehead by the party elders whose machinations were largely bound up in preventing each other from gaining power. But she was also a way to hopefully bring out the female vote.
The 1957 Election was bitterly fought, because there was an awareness that the stakes were incredibly high. In 1956, a general election was held in the Gold Coast that saw Kwame Nkrumah's True Whigs, one of many new Anglophonic pan African parties which took the name of their ideological mentors, win the majority of the seats and pave the way for imminent independence. It was generally felt that is a West African union was going to be formed, it would be now.
Harper ran on the economy, on the booming export trade, on the foreign investment and on the resurgence of the Liberian dollar as the US government was accepting the Liberia currency for their rice sales and reusing that to pay labourers to build infrastructure within the country, thus restoring some confidence in the long discarded currency. Harper had even managed to get a new universal law past the Kings' Council which saw rights to print new currency reserved to the Monrovian bank to prevent a second inflationary crisis as each district printed more dollars. As more rice was coming in, the existing rice plantations could be replaced by private rubber plantations instead thus increasing the orders the government could meet. His government had hired the great African American advertising specialist, Moss H. Kendrix, to get Americans to invest in Liberia and it was paying off, this foreign investment provided the start up cash for local chiefs who would build a plantation and be able to sell that to the Liberian government who would then be able to up their commitments abroad. With the Voice of America propaganda station set up in Liberia reporting on this prosperous economic partnership every day, Harper's message sunk in.
But this economic prosperity was very unevenly spread, thanks in part to the district system, and was not something that had yet trickled down to wages. It had also come with the consequences of the rice riots and the evictions of rice farmers. Though Harper was privately sympathetic and wanted as many rice farmers maintained for the rubber plantations as possible, the bloodshed was blamed on him. Sie and the True Whigs ran on a 'buy African' counter campaign, with her making a point of eating locally grown rice on her visits to local towns looking for votes and driving there in her Liberian made motor car. The Blyden range of cars, produced in the True Whigs Vai stronghold were something of a gimmick. While it was true that Liberia had rubber, iron and oil to spare, they didn't have the experience or tools for a conveyer belt factory system and only a handful of cars were produced. Moreover the roads mostly weren't good enough, Sie's car kept breaking down while moving around the interior, and she had to have people in carts and on bicycles bringing her oil thanks to no system of filling stations. But it was an impressive gimmick and one that gathered her crowds wherever she drove. Liberians had seen cars before of course, the US army used them all the time, but not a Liberian built car.
This was the True Whig's sale pitch, the Americans would buy natural resources from Liberia sure but they wouldn't buy their industry, however the new country of Ghana would. Liberian cars and Liberian rice would find a captive market in their new union. African products, made by Africans and sold to Africans. It paid off and in 1957, Hortense Sie became the first democratically elected female leader in the world, three years ahead of Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon. Kwame Nkrumah was one of the first people to congratulate her, in a joint speech the two made to Accra in 1957, he said that the independence of Ghana was meaningless unless it was linked to the total liberation of the African continent. Sie and Nkrumah promised that the countries would move towards an economic and currency union, as precursors to an African common market, they also announced that the next Pan-African congress would be held in Accra, the first to be held inside Africa and yet outside Liberia and that they'd formed an alliance of mutual security.
No dates however were given for when this currency union would happen, though tariff free trade was established straight away, and political union wasn't mentioned at all in that speech because the two countries were structured very differently. Liberia was decentralised, with economic decisions made by the districts and had hoped for other countries to join in the same way, but Nkrumah wished to centralise Ghana and crush the power of regional groups and had no desire to give up central power. He viewed the Liberian system as one that encouraged tribalism and disunity with loyalty towards the district supplanting loyalty towards the state and preventing economic growth. Nkrumah could for instance increase taxes on the southern cocoa farmers when cocoa prices were high in order to fund projects in the North of the country but Sie could not.
Nkrumah and Sie had a great deal in common in terms of ideology and governance, both saw increases of government welfare in terms of education and healthcare during their reigns and both saw expansion of the nationalised industries to fund this but Sie's country had emerged naturally through an organic union of treaties, whereas Nkrumah had inherited a country stitched together by British conquest. Nkrumah was by nature far more authoritarian, he banned private media and, due to his distrust of the British educated juridical system, authorised detention without trial meaning that 'The Liberia Star' argued loudly that the True Whigs had bound them to an African Dictator in the model of the old Kings of Ashanti or Dahomey. He was also far more inclined to support the Communist bloc than the Liberians, tied largely to the USA, were and part of the reason for his authoritarianism was the knowledge that the CIA were plotting against him. Distrust thus went both ways, it was strongly rumoured that Nkrumah had privately hoped that Turé's socialists would win the 1957 election as the True Whigs were too closely allied to the USA for his liking.
But Ghana was also, in 1957, the only other independent country in West Africa. Nigeria would emerge in 1960, but their True Whigs party, led by Jaja Wachuku, would be affiliated with and subservient to the NCNC which emphasised Nigerian nationalism over pan-Africanism, Bankole Bright's True Whigs in Sierra Leone had done well in the 1957 legislative elections but had come second to the much more pro-British People's Party and independence would be delayed to 1961 anyway, Cham Jouf, of the Gambian True Whigs, would be much less successful and Gambia would not become independent until 1964. Elsewhere in West Africa, France had attempted to keep its Empire as part of the French Union and so French West Africa would not be independent until 1960, while Portugal was determined to keep Portuguese Guinea with a war of independence breaking out as a result in 1961. The two were stuck together and in 1959, as a symbolic offer of friendship, Ghana offered full citizenship to any Liberian living in the country, (Liberia of course already offered full citizenship to any black or coloured person who moved there) and the two countries made a joint deceleration of their desire to help all African territories to no longer be subject to foreign domination.
The true Whigs remained publicly committed to a single unitary African state but in private they'd shifted towards a two layer system. Full union was still hoped for with French Guinea and Sierra Leone, who shared a number of languages and similarly powerful regions but it was felt that for countries with different political systems who didn't share a land border, a more loose economic and political alliance would suffice.
1960 would be a year of huge change for Africa. French West Africa finally became independent, but the Pan-Africanist Modibo Keïta of Mali's attempt to form those countries into a federation largely collapsed with only Senegal and French Guinea agreeing and Senegal withdrawing almost immediately. Ghana and Liberia would reach out to this Mali Federation and agreements of mutual security, financial assistance and mutual citizenship were signed in 1960. But Senegal was the richest part of the Federation, Guinea and Mali were poor regions who Liberia and Ghana mostly had to support, in terms of loans and aid. Keïta was also far closer to Nkrumah than he was to Sie, sharing a desire for a centralised state economy and socialism. Sie in return attempted to reach out to Saifoulaye Diallo of Guinea-Conakry, but Liberia's standing offer of full union led to increasing distrust towards them on the basis that Liberia wished to annex Guinea's Eastern districts and thus deprive the federation of its tax money. Nonetheless trade between Liberia and its Northern neighbours increased hugely after independence, with the True Whig's prediction on being able to sell into a captive market proving true.
The other French colonies, Dahomey, Togo, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, Mauritania and Niger were much more sceptical of pan-Africanism and unwilling to join any federation. Yaméogo of Upper Volta was much wooed in the hope of creating a land border between Ghana and Mali but he was as he said not willing to swap dominance from Paris with that of Monrovia. The three nation 'League of Independent African states' was distrusted by a lot of the new states as being a threat to their sovereignty, with fears that secessionists such as the Sanwi would attempt to leave their existing states and join Liberia and thus gain both virtual independence and the protection of the USA. In reaction they formed a Council of Accord between them, which promised cooperation rather than unity, but nonetheless was a blow to Liberia's ambitions by forming it's own pact. Togo, under Sylvanus Olympio joined neither, but it primarily wished to regain the part of it that had been joined to Ghana during the partition of German Togoland. Nkrumah refused but offered instead a complete union between Togo and Ghana leading Olympio to denounce him as a black imperialist and the two countries were on the verge of outright war for much of 1960.
1960 would also see the independence of the Belgian Congo. Patrice Lumumbu reached out immediately to Ghana and Liberia for alliances and joined the League of Independent African states. Lumumbu however was quick to face a crisis in his own country, as various secessionist states, backed by Belgian mining companies and mercenaries began to tear the country apart. He called in the United Nations peacekeepers to resolve the situation with independent African states such as Ethiopia, Ghana, Morocco, Tunisia, Nigeria and Liberia (its army a combined one of security forces from its districts) contributing a lot of the troops. However Lumumbu had also begun to worry the United States and the CIA, worried that he would hand over the country to the Soviets. In early 1961, he was arrested, tortured and killed at the order of the Belgians and Americans and his successor would renounce any agreements with the league. This led to increasingly disenchantment with the UN and the USA among pan-African radicals. But the presence of Liberian troops in a country collapsing into anarchy, would also have a damaging effect on the sense of African unity among the Liberian people, who wondered how much they had in common with the savage Congolese and to what extent unity was possible.
Disenchantment with the UN, led to the League considering a pan-african army, independent of the UN. To achieve this they turned to the North Africans of Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Algeria in exile. In 1961, an agreement was formed between the North Africans and the League to form an African army and the countries publicly denounced continuing European rule in Africa. Shortly after this, independence activists in Portuguese Guinea, with league support, began a campaign of active sabotage. With hope of Pan-African Unity finally being realised, and new President John F. Kennedy promising to send aid and peace corps workers to the Liberia and the League to win it over from the Soviets, the True Whigs won the 1961 election. Sie's second term would however see a lot of that hope fall apart.
Algeria gained independence in 1962 and in 1963 it was invaded by Morocco, leading to war between the North African allies of the League and their withdrawal from the plans about a joint Army. Egypt would find itself mostly fighting in Yemen and Palestine instead. Mali, Liberia and Ghana did go ahead with a joint army but in practice this largely involved Ghanaian Army Officers taking control of their less professional counterparts. And attempts to extend the league beyond those three countries were unsuccessful, with Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tunisia and the remaining 12 ex French colonies refusing to participate at all, leading Diallo to denounce what he called western puppet states who were governed by independent rulers but still maintained the old colonial economic and foreign policy. Felix Houphouët-Boigny, Diallo, argued was little more than a modern day Allen Yancy.
Diallo was arguing against the tide of history. The Lagos block of Nnamdi Azikiwe and his western focused nationalist allies dominated West Africa. Pan Africanism did not die, in East Africa a federation emerged between the old British colonies of Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar, but it was never the force its proponents had hoped for. In 1963, Haile Selassie invited all the African Countries to Addis Ababa to form an intergovernmental organisation where cooperation between the independent countries of Africa could happen but one of the cornerstones of that organisation was national sovereignty and while the league nations joined, they privately viewed it as useless.
1963 had also seen Sylvanus Olympio of Togo overthrown and killed by a military coup, with Nkrumah's Ghana seen as responsible given the existing hostility and his quickness to recognise the new regime. By this time the disagreement between Sie and the other members of the League had become public, with the promised currency union long since abandoned. And increasingly there were worries that the Liberian Socialists under Turé would be similarly supported in a coup. In 1964, a number of socialist activists were arrested by local Kings on various grounds and in response Turé called for a general strike. Sie attempted to negotiate directly with Turé, but the federal constitution meant she had little power to dictate how districts responded or what laws they enforced. Much like the Rice Riots, the situation quickly span out of control and into armed warfare. Sie's government did not know how much they could trust their army, unified as it was with that of Ghana and Mali and asked for the Americans based within their country to restore order, bolstered by those Liberians recently returned from the Congo. The Socialist militias were crushed, and while they were never banned as a political party, it began a period of repression of the left and was seen as the government bowing to neo-colonialism. This was a betrayal that the League couldn't survive. Liberia was kicked out of their own organisation by Ghana and Mali.
Sie resigned with a year left of her term to go. She had bought Liberia into closer alliance with other African leaders than ever before, but had ultimately failed to deliver on it.
