Liberia ^ 



English and Spanish pirates paid flying visits to the 

 northern rivers of Liberia during the early part of the eighteenth 

 century, but were not very successful in their search for slaves, 

 and so left the Grain Coast pretty much to the Dutch and 

 French traders in pepper and ivory. It was not until the early 

 nineteenth century that the slave trade revived in the northern 

 half of Liberia.^ 



During the seventeenth century French, Portuguese, and 

 English writers dilate unctuously on the opportunity which the 

 slave trade gives to the savage blacks of embracing the Chris- 

 tian religion. It is amusing indeed, in reading the old travellers' 

 tales of these earlier centuries, to note the scorn with which they 

 described the nakedness, the ugliness of the Negroes, their 

 '* beastly " habits, their wicked idolatry, their brutish lives, 

 laziness, etc., etc. Yet perhaps on the next page to these 

 objurgations there might be unconsciously contradictory accounts, 

 showing that the civilisation among all these Negro tribes on 

 the West Coast of Africa in, let us say, the fifteenth and 

 sixteenth centuries was not so very far inferior to that of their 

 white visitors. Indeed, the whole impression one derives after 

 reading many books on West Africa, written in Portuguese, 

 Italian, French, Dutch, Elizabethan and Miltonlan English, is 

 that the native culture and social well-being of the Negroes of 

 West Africa from Cape Verde to the Niger Delta three and 

 four hundred years ago were superior in degree to the condition 

 of the same peoples in the nineteenth century. The sanitary 

 arrangements in their towns were quite up to the level of 

 sixteenth-century Europe. Their cookery was as appetising 



' The Coast peoples of Liberia were never much valued in the slave market. 

 The Muhammadan Vais were too proud, the Des and Basas were not of strong 

 constitution, and the Kru tribes, though quite willing to enslave their neighbours or 

 to look on at other tribes being raided, were so averse to slavery in their own 

 persons that they would commit suicide if they could not escape. 



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