Review in Front Page Africa of Fred van der Kraaij's book 'Liberia in the 19th Century'

Rodney Sieh wrote a review of the ASCL published book 'Liberia in the 19th Century: From American Colony to African Republic' by Fred van der Kraaij.

 

Sieh writes that there's a persistent myth that Liberia was never colonised, and that in his new book Fred van der Kraaij spends nearly 240 pages building the case against it: 'Liberia was colonized, he writes plainly in his introduction, just not by a European flag. It was colonized by the United States, working through a private society whose board was thick with slaveholders, using free Black Americans and freed slaves as the settlers on the ground.'