Liberia is on the west coast of Africa. Its neighbors are Sierra Leone to the northwest, Guinea-Conakry to the north and Côte d’Ivoire to the east, with the ocen to the south and west. Its history is rather unusual: it was set up as a kind of reverse colony for freed slaves from the United States, and has been functionally independent since 1847, recognized by the USA and other countries since 1862. Indigenous Liberians got a raw deal from this settlement, and the elected government was overthrown in a coup in 1980. Two civil wars followed, from 1989 to 1997 and from 1999 to 2003. The 2005 elections brought Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first woman president, to power for the first of two six-year terms. She was succeeded in the 2017 election by well-known football player George Weah, who then lost his bid for re-election in 2023 by a margin of less than 1.3% to Joseph Boakai, who had been Sirleaf’s vice-president.
Liberia remains a country with a low Human Development Index, though still ahead of its neighbors Guinea and Sierra Leone. The main industry is subsistence agriculture. Its major exports are gold, iron ore, cacao and rubber, and it also has the second biggest maritime registry in the world after Panama. The lingua franca is English, and the overwhelming religious tradition is Protestant. The largest indigenous ethnic group are the Kpelle, but they are only 20% of the population.
Liberia has not touched my own life and career much. When I was a PhD student in Belfast, the head of the social anthropology department was Elizabeth Tonkin, who was an expert on Liberian society and culture. Later on I worked alongside the late great Stephen Ellis, whose view on Liberia were controversial but heartfelt. I did have the opportunity to ask both about Liberia, and listened in awestruck silence to what they told me. I also encountered Ellen Johnson Sirleaf at a couple of International Crisis Group board meetings just before she was elected president, but was too overawed to talk to her.
See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Liberia.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| She Would Be King | Wayétu Moore | 7,495 | 644 | 2,826 |
| The House at Sugar Beach | Helene Cooper | 8,118 | 814 | 617 |
| Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War | Leymah Gbowee | 4,361 | 312 | 629 |
| The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir | Wayétu Moore | 3,175 | 229 | 846 |
| The Darling | Russell Banks | 2,656 | 861 | 203 |
| Allah Is Not Obliged | Ahmadou Kourouma | 2,576 | 449 | 340 |
| Journey Without Maps | Graham Greene | 1,889 | 837 | 135 |
| This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa’s First Woman President | Ellen Johnson Sirleaf | 1,997 | 293 | 163 |
The top writer this week is a Liberian woman, Wayétu Moore, whose novel She Would Be King is a magical realist tale set early in Liberia’s history. Her The Dragons, the Giant, the Women is an autobiography, and I think the majority of it is set in Liberia before her family fled the civil wars.
The House at Sugar Beach is also an autobiography, about how Helene Cooper’s family was disrupted by the 1980 coup. She is now the Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times. This was the winner this week on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, but Wayétu Moore seems to have scored big time with StoryGraph users.
Mighty be Our Powers is the story of how Leymah Gbowee built a women’s peace movement to end the civil war, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for it alongside Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
The Darling is about an American woman who gets sucked into Liberian politics in the 1970s and 1980s.
Allah Is Not Obliged is about a Guinean boy who is recruited as a child soldier in the Liberian civil war.
Journey Without Maps tells the story of Graham Greene’s walk across Liberia in 1936 with his cousin (who wrote her own book about it).
This Child Will Be Great is another autobiography, this time by the president herself.
Including the StoryGraph numbers did not change the top eight, though it did rocket She Would Be King to the top of the list.
I had no tough disqualification decisions this week. I hesitated a bit about both The Dragons, the Giant, the Women and Allah Is Not Obliged, but in the end I think more than half of both is set in the country.
Very few of the books on my shelves have much to say about Liberia. I think there is half a chapter in Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures), by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlethwait, and Andrew Thomson.
Next up are the Central African Republic and Palestine, followed by Oman and Norway.
Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel | Laos | Turkmenistan | Kyrgyzstan | Hong Kong | Singapore | Lebanon
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Chile | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba | Nicaragua | Paraguay | El Salvador
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo | Sierra Leone | Libya | Liberia
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary | Austria | Switzerland | Belarus | Bulgaria | Serbia | Denmark
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea