The Old Pro

There was scarcely a campaign poster to be seen or an election speech to be heard, and the one opponent to Liberia's President William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman, 63, had his own typically Liberian reason for bothering to run at all. "Not being particularly opposed to the continuation in office, of President Tubman," a church organist had said in his formal platform, "this venture of mine is divinely inspired. It is purely sportsmanlike, and is in response to the ardent desire of Dr. Tubman for fair and friendly competition."

So sportsmanlike was the President in turn, that just before last week's election he announced over the radio that he would vote for his organist opponent himself. He could well afford the gesture; of all Africa's political figures, none except the Emperor of Ethiopia has shown greater staying power than "Shad" Tubman.

Tubman's father is a Georgia-born Methodist minister who became Speaker of Liberia's House of Representatives. Tubman himself is a cigar-chomping ban vivant who likes to have the towers of Monrovia's Saturday Afternoon Club specially illuminated whenever he drops in at night. He runs his Ohio-sized country with the benign shrewdness of an oldtime U.S. city boss and a good many of the trappings of an African autocrat. If Liberia is still one of the most backward countries in Africa, its pace of advance is now among the fastest.

Know Thy Place. When Tubman took over in 1943, just a little less than a century and a quarter had passed since 88 former U.S. Negro slaves, backed by President James Monroe, the Congress of the U.S., and an idealistic organization called the American Colonization Society, landed on the Pepper Coast of Africa to set up a new nation. Except for Haiti, Liberia was the only Negro republic in the world, but that was about its only distinction. The descendants of the first U.S. settlers formed a haughty aristocracy of "Americo-Liberians" who lived along a 40-mile stretch of the coast and kept the natives of the interior firmly in their place. As recently as 1931, there was a flourishing and brutal slave trade, run partly by the Vice President himself.

A decade later the country still had only one mile of paved highway. The capital of Monrovia was a shanty town with no hotel, no telephone system, no restaurant, and not a single taxi. Electricity burned feebly two hours at night, the city had no running-water system at all, and the whole country was dependent on the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. and its vast (100,000 acres) rubber concession. Elsewhere in Africa, schools, roads and hospitals were being built, but Liberia, as one Liberian diplomat wryly explained, "had not had the benefits of colonialism."

The Old Scriptural Saying. To break the stranglehold of his fellow Americo-Liberians, Tubman began what he called a "national unification policy." In 1944, for the first time, tribal Liberians got the vote and even won a few seats in the legislature, where they proved to be reliable members of Tubman's True Whig Party. Later, Tubman extended the suffrage to women, took tribal Liberians into his Cabinet. In the back country, often carried in a hammock, the traditional mode of travel for Liberian VIPs, he palavered endlessly with jungle chiefs. Eventually he set up a network of bush clinics, experimental farms, and artificial ponds stocked with fish to supplement the meager native diet of rice and cassava roots.

Tubman has eagerly thrown his country open to foreign investment, which he much prefers to gifts or loans ("That old Scriptural saying that a borrower is servant unto the lender holds true in every instance"). With a generous tax policy and no currency restrictions--the U.S. dollar is the medium of exchange--Liberia has attracted more than $120 million in foreign capital. The Italians are building roads, the West Germans are helping to develop a new port along the southern coast, and the Israelis are putting up a new hospital, hotel, treasury building and executive mansion. Goodrich is planting 3,000 acres of rubber trees, and Liberia's own rubber crop now equals that of Firestone.

Bomi & Bong. Americans are exporting 2,000,000 tons of iron ore a year from mines in the Bomi Hills, and the West Germans have a $90 million iron-ore project under way in the Bong Mountains. But even larger than these--larger, in fact, than any other private venture in Africa on which work is already under way--is a $200 million Swedish-American project to mine the Nimba range. To get test-drilling equipment in, men had to head-carry 90 tons of materials up eight miles of mountain trails through dense forests of mahogany and ironwood. When this high-grade iron-ore range gets into full production, Liberia's income will have doubled to $40 million a year--just 40 times the size it was when Tubman came to power.

Illiteracy in Liberia remains at 95%, only one-quarter of the school-age population is actually attending school, and there is still such a national weakness for corruption that the President himself signs all government vouchers for more than $100. But more progress has been made in the last 15 years than in the entire 122 that went before. At one Monrovia polling place last week, an election official wore a red. white and blue paper eyeshade with the motto: "Don't gamble, play it safe, vote Tubman." The country's answer at week's end: more than 355,000 votes and a fourth term for Tubman, only 41 votes for his self-sacrificing opponent.

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