Liberia

Liberia faces the Atlantic along a low, rain-soaked shore of lagoons, mangrove creeks and sandbars, broken by rivers such as the St Paul and the Cestos. Inland, rolling hills climb to the Nimba range, whose rocks are thick with iron ore. Much of West Africa’s surviving Upper Guinean rainforest grows here, and Sapo National Park shelters chimpanzees, forest elephants and the shy pygmy hippopotamus. Heavy rain falls from about May to October.

Kpelle, Bassa, Kru, Vai and many other peoples lived here long before the American Colonization Society landed freed Black Americans at Cape Mesurado in 1822. In the 1830s a Vai man, Momolu Duwalu Bukele, devised a script for his language. The settlements declared a republic in July 1847, and for over a century power stayed with the settlers’ Americo-Liberian descendants, while the interior was largely shut out. A coup in 1980 ended that order, and civil wars from 1989 to 2003 shattered the country.

Rice matters so much that a meal without it hardly counts; it comes with palm butter, cassava leaf or fiery pepper soup. Kru seamen crewed cargo ships along the West African coast for generations, and the Poro and Sande societies prepare boys and girls for adult life. Rubber from Firestone’s plantation at Harbel, iron ore railed from the Nimba hills to Buchanan, gold and timber earn most export income, and shipowners abroad pay fees to sail under the Liberian flag.