On April 10, 1957, I left Ghana and my many friends for my new post in Monrovia, Liberia. I thought of driving there along the coast in my old Hillman Minx car, which I’d bought second hand in Accra, passing through the Ivory Coast, but there were no roads then into Liberia.
So, I booked passage on a Farrell Line freighter. The four-day voyage, stopping in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, was an experience. Among the small group of passengers was a British zoologist bringing home specimens of living fish, plants and weird animals, a latter-day Charles Darwin. I was fascinated.
Disembarking in Monrovia, Liberia I was greeted by Bill Powell, my new boss and some embassy staff. I wrote home shortly about meeting “everyone of consequence” within a few days, even President William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman.
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Monrovia was a small, closely knit community dominated by an elite few, mainly descendants of the original African American pioneers, freed slaves who were encouraged to return and settle on this remote West African coast starting in 1812.
Liberia’s government structure was modeled on that of the United States: President and Vice President (the executive); Senate and House of Representative (the legislature); and a Supreme Court (the judicial). Unlike the present situation in the U.S. the system was working smoothly, mainly because the President, controlling the army and police, was the unchallenged boss. The legislature and judiciary were merely rubber stamps.
Not long after I arrived, Powell and I were invited to a birthday party dinner in honor of the Vice President, William Tolbert. Dinners at the President’s executive mansion required guests to wear formal coat and tails (which I bought locally). At every place setting was a new bottle of Johnny Walker black label scotch, the President’s favorite. For me it was quite an adventure. Now it seems almost surreal.
This fragile political/social situation, which excluded all the indigenous people living in the interior, was bound to fail eventually. In 1980, an army coup led by private Samuel Doe overturned the government. Many of the elite I knew, including William Tolbert, by then President of the country, were viciously murdered. For decades thereafter Liberia was torn apart by savage insurrections and chaos, though now, finally, has become more stable.
However, in 1957 the lid was still in place and though one sensed an upheaval would occur someday it was all fun and party-time among the ruling class. On the surface the economy thrived, with Firestone plantation exporting rubber, miners exporting iron ore, and the “Liberian Flag” flying over much of the world’s merchant fleet.
My first residence was the attic of a small hotel near the beach owned by a Belgian couple. The meals were good and the small bar very busy. I witnessed several nasty fist-fights there usually between passing seamen and once between the hotel owner and the captain of a visiting freighter. I noted that British sailors seemed the most pugnacious. My attic room, more a storeroom, was creepy. I had read somewhere that rats might nibble and eat your toes while you slept, so I wore socks in bed at night.
Bill Powell, like Gene Sawyer, was an African American and we always got along well. He’d been a newspaper executive and unlike Gene, a very hard worker.
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The U.S. embassy was located on Mamba Point in the outskirts of Monrovia. Around it was a large community of homes occupied by expatriates, mainly Americans working at the Embassy. It was a “compound” quite separated from the city. I never liked that situation wherever it existed, preferring to live in “local neighborhoods.” My office was right downtown on Broad Street in the American library and information center.
As in Accra I was responsible for a wide range of information programs–the American library, press relations, film showings and productions, and cultural exchanges with the U.S. I had a very good staff, several from Ghana and Nigeria. Soon I began making treks into the interior with the film unit.
The only paved road was a 30-mile stretch between Monrovia and Roberts Field airport. It passed through miles of the tidy Firestone rubber plantation, thousands of trees with their small buckets attached to collect the latex. Workers were housed in small compounds along the way. Otherwise the few roads were little more than dirt tracks. No roads connected towns along the coast, so they were isolated. One went north to the border of French Guinea with a branch into Sierra Leone. Already this was the diamond smuggling route from the mines in Sierra Leone to the European buyers in Monrovia.
The U.S. had no representation in Sierra Leone and I was asked to explore the possibility of opening a consular and USIS office in Freetown, the capital. I visited often and got to know the route well. Freetown fascinated me. It was founded 30 or so more years before Monrovia by run-away slaves from Canada and the Caribbean. Later in the early 19th century, British ships intercepting the slave trade traffic would anchor and release captives in Freetown (thus the name), adding to the mix of people. A version of creole was the spoken language.
I delivered books and educational films to Fourah Bay College, the oldest Western-style university in West Africa and called on the British Governor, Sir Maurice Dorman, who questioned the need for a US presence. UK companies had a monopoly on mining interests, especially in the diamond fields. I’m sure he wasn’t happy I befriended some members of the Sierra Leone People Party, SLPP, who were leading the independence movement.
Perhaps my best memory from Sierra Leone involved selecting and arranging a “cultural exchange”, whereby Paramount Chief Ella Koblo Gulama visited the U.S. for four months with her companion and “bodyguard”, a very husky Madam Hatib. Ella was the first female elected member of Parliament in sub Saharan Africa, a prominent SLPP politician, cabinet minister and ardent feminist. She was smart and charming, always wore traditional dress, quite striking and beautiful.
I happened to be home on leave when she arrived in the U.S. where she was welcomed by Vice President Nixon, members of Congress, and academic circles. I arranged for her and Madam Hatib to visit our family summer compound in Hadlyme, CT, on the Connecticut River for three days. This was not the first or last time my mother entertained African friends of mine, and later hers. Of course, all my uncles, aunts and cousins were enchanted. I still have a picture of Ella and madam Hatib in traditional dress standing on a dock next to the Hadlyme ferry watching in amazement some of us water-skiing on the river.
Returning to Liberia I found that the embassy had rented a nice house for me overlooking the sea, which I shared with a young vice consul, Allen Davis. He and I remain close friends 55 years later and reminisce often by phone about our time in Liberia. Allen had a distinguished career in the State Department serving as ambassador to Uganda, Senegal and Burkina Faso, the latter two former French colonies in West Africa. In those years he acquired one of the finest private collections of West African sculpture, much of which he has donated to Harvard Peabody Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Kent State and the National Museum of African Art.
Allen and I had a Liberian cook named Johnny Conway, and we entertained our Liberian friends a lot. He once proposed to make us an “appa pie”. We pointed out we had no apples. He said “no mattah”, he could use any ingredients because for Johnny all pies were apple pies. We enjoyed a good laid-back social life. Sadly, many of our friends, prominent community leaders, were exiled or otherwise disposed of in subsequent years.
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For quite a while I had a very pretty, sweet girlfriend, Laura Little, who lived with her African-American missionary parents. I’m sure her father disapproved of her dating a “white boy” because he’d give me a disapproving stare when I picked her up for an event or dinner. My rival suitor was a married Liberian government minister, which was awkward. Sometimes we would hang out at nearby lonely beach to avoid gossip, though interracial mingling was relatively common in Liberia.
I continued to visit as much of the interior as roads would allow, visiting various USAID agricultural projects. Sometimes we would fly in small planes and film the work in progress. USAID recruited American Agricultural Extension Agents to develop small pilot projects, providing new crop ideas, equipment, soil enhancement and conservation, even a small fish farm. Many of these agents were dedicated and well intentioned, dealing with conditions far different from those at home. In retrospect, these “give away” programs would never be sustained, and collapsed during decades of civil strife.
My office in the American library downtown was a busy place and the library a popular center for young Liberians. We set up exhibits and displays of “Americana” in windows facing Broad Street, the busiest thoroughfare in town.
One day on a film trip home from the bush we came across two large puff adder snakes on the road. Kosoko, my film photographer from Nigeria, persuaded me to bring them home alive. Liberians are deathly afraid of snakes, even worms, but not so much Nigerians. We put them in the window display box of the library facing Broad Street for safekeeping. Several days later Ambassador Jones drove down Broad Street with the visiting Assistant Secretary of State and they noticed a large crowd in front of the library windows. The next day the Ambassador congratulated me on how impressed they were to see the fine job I was doing to attract people to the library. I kept my mouth shut and accepted the compliment.
Liberia, like all of Africa (and the world), has a love affair with soccer football. I played varsity soccer at the University of North Carolina and was named on the all-ACC team my junior year. Soon I organized a local team to play in the city league. Our sponsor was a rich diamond smuggler (Sierra Leone to Liberia), nick-named Mr. Connection. Our team was aptly named, Connections.
We were city champions the year I coached. My uncle, Bill Watson, who was an executive with the Seamless Rubber Company in the U.S., arranged to donate a dozen soccer balls to Liberian soccer. I also received donated green jerseys for the team from New York. It’s interesting to note that as I write this my girlfriend’s son, Cris Brennan, a Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua, is putting to use donated computers, electronics, and playing basketball with a competitive local team. How the world has changed, yet remains the same!
I learned (and suffered) a lot about local superstitions coaching the team. They would meet and sacrifice a poor chicken the night before a game. They would enter the stadium by scaling the wall just moments before the game was to start. Once they complained at half-time that the opposing team was magically turning the ball into water thus making it difficult to kick.
I was appointed to the Liberian National Sports and Athletics Commission, named co-head coach, with an ex-professional Haitian player, of the national team. I’m afraid we lost to French Guinea and the Ivory Coast that year. When I left Liberia an article in the Monrovian newspaper read “Mr. Montgomery’s interest in sports and his contribution to it will forever remain in the minds of all sportsmen in this country. His easy-going manner, affability and cheerful personality will be missed for there are very few like him.”
Finally, on this topic, at the risk of drumming it too much, my sporting days in Liberia were mentioned in a book, Africa, Angry Young Giant, by Smith Hempstone, journalist and former ambassador to Kenya who wrote after visiting Nigeria, “The first American I met in Enugu (my next African post) was red-headed Ernest Montgomery. We had heard about him in Monrovia where he had the reputation for being one of the few white people the Liberians really liked. He had arrived in Liberia to find an atmosphere of racial mistrust (hardly true) but soon had an enthusiastic baseball league (not true, soccer) going in which animosities of whites and blacks alike were redirected at the eternal scapegoat, the referee…”—parenthesis added. Hempstone’s information was a tad overdrawn and inaccurate.
One of the ongoing rewards for working in Liberia and West Africa was meeting and ferrying about interesting visitors. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands came on a state visit and President Tubman arranged for him to visit a paramount chief in the “bush” outside Monrovia. I followed along with Kosoko who was filming the procession. Porters carried the Prince in a low-slung hammock and his butt kept bumping the trail. Later I told the Netherlands ambassador we had the scene on film and he asked me to send footage along to the Prince who apparently remembered the incident as a rather bad but amusing moment of his visit.
I particularly liked another visitor, Mal Whitfield, the first black athlete to win the James E. Sullivan award as outstanding amateur athlete in America. Mal was sent by the State Department to run clinics on track and field, being an Olympic gold medalist twice in the 800-meter race. He trained running on sand beaches barefoot which was fitting for Liberia. One night in a Monrovia bar he defended me from anti-white racial slurs by some Liberian tough guys, slamming one of them over a bar stool. I took him and a group of local athletes to Sierra Leone for clinics there. Over the next 40 years Mal trained and inspired hundreds of African athletes many of whom went on to win medals for their countries in international games and Olympics. He is said to have arranged over 5000 sports scholarships for Africans to the U.S., and was commended for his work by Presidents Reagan and Bush at the White House.
Yet another African-American I squired around was Camilla Williams, the first Black singer to star with a major U.S. opera company. She was quite lovely and good company. In later years, she was active in the civil rights movement, and sang at the 1963 march on Washington D.C. where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech. I somehow remember she lived on West 104th St. in NYC (checked an old address book), and that same year I took her out for dinner in the City.
A rather different type of visitor was a friend of my mother. He was related to the wealthy Hotchkiss family from Tennessee. She warned me he was very stuffy and conservative, a confirmed bachelor, and apprehensive about visiting Africa. I fixed him a date with a gorgeous black Liberian (from the prominent Cooper family), and though perhaps startled, he seemed to enjoy what was a unique experience in 1958.
About this time Bob Fleming, an acquaintance from Ghana, and head of Mobil/Texaco operations for West Africa, asked me to fly to Nigeria and interview for a job with the oil company. It was a free trip and I wanted to see Lagos, so I went. The offer and pay were good but I was very happy in my current situation and declined. While in Lagos, the Consul General enquired whether I’d be interested in opening a new post in Enugu, Nigeria or Kumasi, Ghana as my next assignment. I said I’d be interested, wanting very much to continue working in West Africa.
Nearing the end of my tour in Liberia, I left for my next assignment with many good friends there, much the same as in Ghana. Bill Powell gave the Department a very positive performance report on my work, failing to mention the snake exhibit. I was to return to Liberia in future years in another job capacity.
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Letters showed how excited I was to see all the family while on home leave. Sue was in college in New London and I was hoping she’d be able to spend the summer in Europe. I offered to help with the expense. Christina wrote and asked me to bring home an elephant. Linda was still in elementary school. Her letters to me were always cheerful and happy, reflecting her personality.
Returning home from West Africa I always preferred flying to France, visiting friends there and in Switzerland, and sailing across the Atlantic to NYC. I made the trip five times on different French, Italian and U.S. ocean liners. In those days, you travelled 1st, 2nd or 3rd. class. I always went 3rd class, saving money and meeting a younger crowd. One could always sneak into first class if tempted to do so. There was often a romantic adventure or two on these voyages, which are now hazy in my memory bank.
It was summertime and most of the extended family were in Hadlyme, my grandmother’s place on the Connecticut River. It was here where I greeted Chief Ella Koblo Gulama and Madam Hatib. Back in Washington there was more discussion about my next post. Africa was beginning to attract lots more attention at the Department because of approaching independence and its economic and political consequence. One person suggested I might be a candidate for a period of study at the National War College. I was far keener on returning to Africa and the prospect of opening the new post in Enugu, Nigeria.