Play staged Off Broadway paints a picture of Africa’s unique history

NAIROBI: In the early part of the nineteenth century when the first freed slaves from the USA and the Caribbean islands landed on the West African coast under the auspices of the American Colonisation Society, little did they know that more than a century and a half later their newly found freedom would turn into chains for a new generation of Africans. Their new territory was called “Liberia:” the land of freedom, founded on the motto “the love of freedom brought us here.” That freedom was never enjoyed by all Liberians. Only 18 per cent of the population, the “returned negroes” as it were, knew what it meant. When “the other natives” finally sought their freedom several years later, a dysfunctional political system could not respond creatively. The outcome was disastrous.

Liberia, like Ethiopia, in the late nineteenth century when the Europeans carved out pieces of Africa to themselves and called them “colonies”, was never colonised. But Liberia also shared a distinction with Haiti as the oldest black “free state” in the world, both having been independent for close to 200 years by the time the rest of African colonies were “gaining their independence” in the 1960s.