Liberia

samcster94

Banned
With a POD of 1914, is there a way to make it more prosperous??? I am asking for Romania levels of wealth, not Iceland, where it is on the edge of being industrialized.
 
Marcus Garvey starts a few years earlier and is successful. More emigration to Liberia leads to it becoming a bit more industrialized with the influx of migrants.
 
With a POD of 1914, is there a way to make it more prosperous??? I am asking for Romania levels of wealth, not Iceland, where it is on the edge of being industrialized.

Preventing the Great War might be a good start. Before the war Germany offered the Liberian government what the Liberians thought was a good deal to develop it for rubber (supposedly better than what they got from Firestone in the 1920's) and approved it (don't ask for a source as I am recalling something I read in the prior century) This was getting underway when the war started.

Having said that the country had very serious internal problems with the American Liberians trying to lord it over the natives. Liberia has been described as being Gone With the Wind with an all black cast.
 
Having said that the country had very serious internal problems with the American Liberians trying to lord it over the natives. Liberia has been described as being Gone With the Wind with an all black cast.

This is Liberia's inherent problem. I'm not sure what a largescale Garveyist influx of African Americans (probably other blacks from Anglo-America too) would cause in internal Liberian politics. A small amount could be more easily incorporated with the Liberian ruling class.

I think perhaps a Jim Crow which evolves toward less worse tendencies after 1914 and more contacts between Liberia, African Americans, and other parts of the African diaspora could lead to good results. Give black businessmen a stake in Liberia, perhaps. It would obviously need some influx of blacks from the Americas into Liberia. On the Liberian side, they need to better incorporate the natives into their state. After Jim Crow ends and black congressmen get elected, maybe there could emerge an "Africa lobby" which would especially focus on Liberia. The goal is to make Africa prosperous for the sake of the global economy, and gets the United States more involved in Africa. Is this necessarily a good thing? No (US in Latin America, US in the Middle East, etc.), but to some degree the US could make things better. I suspect the Liberian economy will be better, and more investment will occur in the country.

With a stable Liberian state supported by American blacks (and others), it could be relatively prosperous compared to the rest of Africa, and would certainly avoid brutal civil wars, people like Charles Taylor, etc.
 
What if some of the Traditionally black colleges decided to reach out to the Liberian elite to be part of their alumni culture, with an eye to maintaining social and networking connections a la the Rhodes scholarship model?

Maybe even have some back and forth, so that a significant portion of black American graduates would have a "semester abroad" in Liberia, while much of the Liberia american blacks, especially the more upper crust get educated here.

Then as American blacks gain more political power a sort of second "special relationship" develops between American Blacks and Liberia, so that Liberia has a strong lobby in America.


Sort of like the support Israel gets from Jews and some Evangelical Christians.
 
What if some of the Traditionally black colleges decided to reach out to the Liberian elite to be part of their alumni culture, with an eye to maintaining social and networking connections a la the Rhodes scholarship model?

Maybe even have some back and forth, so that a significant portion of black American graduates would have a "semester abroad" in Liberia, while much of the Liberia american blacks, especially the more upper crust get educated here.

Then as American blacks gain more political power a sort of second "special relationship" develops between American Blacks and Liberia, so that Liberia has a strong lobby in America.


Sort of like the support Israel gets from Jews and some Evangelical Christians.

Something like that would work, since it would be good to have Liberia be viewed among blacks (or at least the black middle/upper classes) as much like Israel is viewed amongst many American Jews, simply because that would be for the best of Liberia. I know there have been calls for this in the past, but not heard as much as they could.
 
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