A Patriarch Yields the Reins

His full name was William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman, but to 1.5 million Liberians he was simply "Old Daddy." As President for 27 years of the Ohio-size West African rubber republic, he was the oldest, established, permanent, doting, elected patriarch on the continent. Indeed, so popular was Old Daddy with his subjects that the only thing that could oust him from office was death. The ouster came last week, when the 75-year-old President succumbed to complications following a prostate-gland operation in a London hospital.

To Westerners, Tubman was a faintly improbable figure in a top hat and cutaway, a stickler for formality who lived in a $6 million, neon-lit palace. To his people, he was a father figure, accessible and gregarious, always ready to hoof a lively quadrille, Liberia's national dance. He sought to present an air of omniscience, insisting on approving all government expenditures of more than $200 and even extending his jurisdiction down to settling his staff's marital problems.

Despite the comic-opera fac,ade, however, Tubman made some substantial contributions to Africa's oldest independent black state. His rule was characterized by both stability and a medicum of physical progress. By means of education and arm-twisting, Tubman did all he could to wipe out the differences between native tribesmen and the elitist Americo-Liberians (descendants of Liberia's freed-slave founders).

During his administration, he increased the budget from $1,000,000 to more than $65.2 million, and began a road and rail system. But these achievements came at the price of doing away with a free press, stifling all official opposition and maintaining a docile, corrupt civil service. Under his rule, Liberia's economy remained largely the preserve of the Firestone Co. As events following his death showed, the country is firmly adhering to the rule of law--at least for the moment. Under the U.S.-style constitution, the leadership was peaceably handed over to Vice President William R. Tolbert, 58, a man who has the same political views as his mentor, but who can never hope to emulate Old Daddy's style. Tolbert's mandate will run until elections are held in January. Then he may have to compete with, among other rivals, a 38-year-old Harvard graduate with the potent name of William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman Jr.

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