Liberia: Description, History, Problems

by Frederick Starr

Second, certainly, in importance, among the raw products exported from Liberia is piassava; it is the fiber of a palm—raphia vinifera. Large use is made of this extremely resistant fiber for brooms and brushes for street sweeping and the like; its use, too, was suggested by a Liberian in 1889; it was first exported in 1890 and for a time brought the astonishingly high price of from $300 to $350 per ton; as the fiber was easy to prepare and the trees were plentiful, a rapid development took place; Liberia was for a long time the only source of supply; carelessness ensued in the preparation of the fiber, the demand lessened and the price dropped; it went down to £10 per ton; at present the price is somewhat better and is stationary at £20. Sir Harry Johnston, from whom these details are borrowed, says that it is difficult to judge the quality of raphia, that it shrinks in weight, and that trade in it is somewhat speculative and uncertain; still, piassava fiber occupies an important position in the Liberian trade to-day.

Africa appears to be the continent which presents the greatest number of rubber-yielding plants; in Liberia the precious exudation is obtained from some sixteen different kinds of trees and vines, varying as to the quality and character of rubber yielded. The rubber of Liberia is not considered of the highest class, but it is of good grade; the natives of the interior are skilled in its collection; there is no doubt that great quantities of wild rubber are still to be obtained within the limits of the Republic and experiments in rubber-planting have already been made with promise.

Sir Harry Johnston gives a long list of other natural products which have been exported from Liberia at one time or another in varying quantities. There was a time when camwood found a ready market and formed perhaps the most important element in Liberian trade—of course with the invention of other dye-stuffs, the use of camwood, annatto, etc., has practically ceased; the name “Grain Coast” or “Pepper Coast” was long given to this country on account of the malagueta pepper which was exported in great quantities—this, too, has ceased to be a product of practical importance; kola nuts are to some degree exported from Liberia, and with the ever-increasing use of the kola in America and European countries, trade along this line should develop; ivory has always been among the export products of Liberia, though it has never had great significance; vegetable ivory nuts are produced here and to some extent form an article of trade—the demand for them in button-making is large and increasing, and exportation of them may reasonably be developed; hides and oil-yielding seeds complete the list of actual native export products. Sir Harry Johnston calls attention to the fact that the country is rich in ebony, mahogany, and other fine woods, in copal and other gums, in ground nuts, fruits, and minerals; these, however, have never been actual materials for export; all are valuable, however, and trade in them might be developed.

All of these raw products of natural production are valuable, but that they shall form an element in trade depends upon the natives. These things all come from the forests of the interior; if they are to be traded to the outside world, they must be collected and transported by the people within whose territory they are found; this dependence is an uncertain thing. The natives have few needs; in their little towns they take life easily; they have no sentimental interest in the development of trade as such nor in the upbuilding of the country; they care comparatively little for the returns of trade; they will work when necessary, but only as they please; when they need some money for buying wives, they will prepare some piassava fiber or dig a pit, ferment some nuts, and squeeze some oil. When they have enough for the immediate and pressing necessity, work stops, and with it the supply of oil or fiber or whatever they may have seen fit to produce. More than this, the native is little concerned about the quality of his production. So long as he can sell it and raise the resources that he needs, he does not care whether the oil is clean, whether the piassava fiber is of good quality, or whether the rubber contains dirt and stones. Impurity, however, of products is a very serious matter to the outside world; a district which neglects quality loses trade. Liberian oil, fiber, rubber, all are at a disadvantage at present through the carelessness of the producers.

It must, then, be the policy of the Liberian Government to encourage, by every legitimate means within its power, the increase of the production of the natural resources. Nor is the simple question of production the whole difficulty. Transportation is quite as important. The product, no matter how good or how precious, has no value as long as it remains in the bush. There are different methods of dealing with this matter of getting the natural products down to the coast settlements. The simplest and most natural is to let the native bring it out—but the natives are as little inclined to travel and carry as they are to produce; they will fetch down their product when they feel inclined—but the demand from without is constant. Liberians may go into the bush to bring out the products; there are always little traders who divide their time between the settlements and the interior; they travel in, sit down for several days at native towns, trade with the natives for whatever stuff they have on hand, then have it carried out; such traders are usually independent men of small means who are trading on their own account. It is not uncommon for the large trading-houses to hire agents,—Liberians or natives,—and send them into the interior to buy up and bring down products. Another method—which, in the long run, will prove no doubt the most satisfactory,—is to establish here and there in the interior permanent trading stations, supplied with a fair stock of goods, to be traded with the natives against their raw products—trading stations of this kind are already established by the Monrovia Rubber Company and by various of the great trading-houses.

In some way or other the Government should adopt a method of encouraging the natives of the interior to gather, to properly prepare, and to bring in raw produce; a definite scheme of practical education and encouragement must be devised.

While raw products offered by nature have been and are the chief element in Liberian trade, another element is immediate, and will ultimately be the chief dependence of the nation. Agriculture, though far from being in a satisfactory condition, has always contributed material for export. The country can not forever count upon a supply of raw products. Gradually the value of the forests will become secondary to that of produce of the fields. There is no reason why the Liberian coffee should not be fully re-established in the foreign market. The tree seems to be a native of the country; Ashmun reported that it was found everywhere near the seacoast and to an unknown distance back from there. Under natural conditions, the tree grew often to a height of thirty feet and a girth of fifteen inches. Coffee berries from wild trees were brought in by hundreds of bushels to the early settlers by the natives. Plantations were soon established, and many of them met with great success; in fact, coffee was once the principal export of the Republic; it was mainly shipped from Monrovia and Cape Mount; the more important plantations were located along the St. Paul’s River. Liberian coffee was much appreciated in the European market; at its period of greatest vogue it used to bring twenty-five cents a pound; the price has now fallen so low as eight or nine cents a pound. This decline is due, in part, of course, to the enormous development of the Brazilian coffee trade; it is, however, largely due to the carelessness of the Liberian planters, who had only primitive machinery for its preparation and who neglected proper care, with the result that the coffee berries reached the market broken and impaired. It is a delicious coffee, of full flavor, and improves with age. Sir Harry Johnston claims that about 1,500,000 pounds are annually produced, and reports that the output is increasing slightly. At the Muhlenberg Mission School, coffee is cultivated; care is taken in its preparation, and the price is rising; if the Liberians will give serious attention to the matter, there is no question that the old importance of the culture may be restored. It will require improved methods of cultivation, the use of better machinery, greater care in the preparation of the berry, and constant attention to proper packing and handling.

Discouraged at the fall in price of coffee, some Liberian planters introduced the culture of cacao, from which our chocolate and cocoa are derived; this culture has long been successful in some of the Spanish possessions of West Africa; in Liberia the plant grows well, and the cacao seems to be of superior quality; it is said that a good price for it may be received in Liverpool. This culture must be considered as only in its infancy, but there appears to be no reason why it should not become of great importance.

The rubber so far sent out from Liberia has been wild rubber; it would seem that a wise policy in national development would be to encourage the establishment of plantations of rubber trees or vines. One such plantation has already been established by an English company, who hoped to gather the first harvest of latex in 1912; one would suppose that the best tree for planting would be the funtumia which is native to the country and a good yielder; it is chiefly this plant which is being set out by the Belgians in the Congo colony; the English company in Liberia, however, claims that their experiments with funtumia were not encouraging, and the species actually planted is the hevea—the one which yields the famous Para rubber. While coffee, cacao, and rubber will no doubt be the earliest important plantations to be developed in the country, other products should not be neglected. Ginger has already been well tested in the Republic—there have been times when it was quite an important article of export; sugar-cane grows well, and from the earliest days plantations of it have yielded something for local consumption—if capital were available, there seems no reason why profitable plantations of cane might not be made; cassava has always been to some degree an article of export in the past,—it is of course the main food product of the natives—it is the source of tapioca and other food materials abundantly in use among ourselves. Liberia at present imports rice from abroad, yet rice of excellent quality is easily cultivated in the Republic and forms a staple food in native towns—effort to increase its local production would be good economy from every point of view; fruits of many kinds—both native and imported—grow to perfection in Liberia; experiments have been made, without particular results, in cotton raising—there are species of wild cotton in the country and experiments with both wild and foreign grades would determine to what degree culture of this useful fiber might be profitably carried on. This list of cultivated vegetable products might be enormously extended; we are only interested here in indicating those plants which would be important as trade products if their cultivation were seriously undertaken. In the matter of fruits, we may add a word; here is the suggestion of a beginning of manufacturing interests in the country; some of these fruits are capable of profitable canning or preservation, others might be dried, while still others yield materials which could be utilized outside; it would seem as if the natural beginning of manufacturing interests in the Republic would be in the establishment of factories to deal with these fruits and various derived vegetable materials.

It is to be anticipated that there will be a development in mining in Liberia; it is not an unmixed blessing to a country to possess mineral wealth; it may be disadvantageous to a little country, of relative political insignificance and actually weak, to possess great wealth of this sort. But there are certainly deposits of gold and diamonds in the Republic; these will in time be known, and their development will be undertaken. When that time comes, ores and other mineral products will form an element in national trade.