Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that Liberia itself, and the settlers who made up the Americo-Liberian class consciously embraced the legacy of the colonial identity and national imagination written across the heart of the American experiment whence it all came.

Paper long abstract:

In 1822, a group of freeborn African Americans constructed a colonial city in West Africa. Called Monrovia after the American president who helped fund the venture, the city became its own metropole—the center of a world deliberately mirroring the one that had rejected it and its people, a palimpsest of the white “American experiment.” The city, as it grew into the capital of a new nation declared free and independent in 1847, begat a cultural—and indeed racial—standard rooted in a distinctly American historical memory, one reinforced by a national rhetoric of faithful pilgrimage, Christian enlightenment, and missionary fervor. Echoing the same justifications and archival images drawn by the European “peopling,” conquest, and enslavement of the New World, this rhetoric lay at the heart of what became an “Americo-Liberian” identity as well as the vision of national piety and destiny it enacted in the creation of the young Liberian republic. This paper tracks the development of this colonial palimpsest in Liberia generally and Monrovia specifically. It argues that Liberia itself, and the settlers-then-citizens who made up the Americo-Liberian class in the Liberian metropole, consciously embraced—and even celebrated—the legacy of providential colonial identity and national imagination first born in European conquests of the New World and written across the heart of the American experiment whence it all came.