Gbarnga

Gbarnga began as a Kpelle settlement in the central forest belt, in country whose towns traded kola, iron, cloth and salt with the Mande world to the north long before Liberia's coastal republic reached inland. The government in Monrovia extended its authority over the interior only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when district commissioners, hut tax and the Liberian Frontier Force brought the area under the state, and Gbarnga became the administrative seat for Bong County.

Two institutions shaped the modern town. Cuttington College, founded by the Episcopal Church in 1889 on the coast, moved to Suakoko, a short way west, in 1948, bringing a university, a library and a teaching hospital to the interior, and the highway from Monrovia, paved in stages through the twentieth century, made Gbarnga the natural market for a wide farming region. By the 1970s it was the main market town of the central interior.

The civil wars changed it. After the National Patriotic Front of Liberia entered the country through Nimba in December 1989, Charles Taylor established his headquarters at Gbarnga and ran the territory he controlled from here during the early 1990s, a period in which the town was both a seat of power and cut off from Monrovia. It was fought over and looted, and the university and hospital were damaged and closed for years. Both reopened, the university in 1998, and after the 2003 peace agreement the town resumed its place as the market and administrative centre of the interior.

Gbarnga is the centre of Kpelle Liberia, the country's largest language group, and Kpelle is heard as much as Liberian English in the market and the taxi park. Masked performances at funerals and celebrations, drumming, storytelling and the authority of town chiefs and elders are living parts of county life rather than displays for visitors, and the Poro and Sande societies still govern initiation into adulthood in many villages, with groves and bush schools that outsiders do not enter.

The town also carries an institutional culture from Cuttington: students, teachers, nurses and agricultural researchers from across Liberia give Gbarnga a mixed population and a debating, churchgoing public life. Episcopal, Lutheran, Baptist and Pentecostal congregations are numerous, and the Mandingo trading community supports mosques in the centre. Friday and Sunday shape the week for different parts of the town.

Football on dust pitches, radio, hipco and gospel music from shops, and the constant movement of traders set the tone. The wartime years are a subject people discuss with care, and reconciliation work over land, belonging and the displacement of families has continued for two decades. Courtesy is formal: greetings before business, elders first, and patience with a pace of conversation that does not hurry.

Gbarnga had 34,046 residents at the 2008 census, the fourth most populous urban area in Liberia and one of the larger towns of the interior, and the surrounding district adds many more in farming villages. The economy is trade and agriculture: upland rice, cassava, plantain and vegetables from family farms, cocoa, coffee, rubber and oil palm as cash crops, and the buying, bulking and trucking of all of it through the town's market to Monrovia and across the border.

Salaried work comes from the county administration, the university, the hospital, schools and aid organisations, which together give the town a professional class unusual for its size. Electricity depends on generators and solar systems rather than a reliable grid, water comes from pumps and wells, and mobile phones carry money as well as messages.

The day begins early, with the market active soon after dawn and shared taxis leaving for Monrovia and Ganta before the heat. Afternoons slow, and the highway stays busy into the evening. The recurring concerns of town life are the state of the feeder roads that bring crops in, the price of imported rice and fuel, youth unemployment, and the pull of Monrovia on young people who finish school.

The interior eats country rice — upland rice grown on the farms of Bong, Lofa and Nimba — and the measure of a meal here is a plate of it under a soup. Palm butter, made from oil-palm fruit boiled and pounded to a thick orange stew, is the richest; cassava leaf, pounded fine and cooked long with palm oil and dried fish, is the most common; and potato greens and the soup made with bitterballs, small bitter garden eggs, complete the everyday range.

Dumboy and fufu, both pounded cassava, are eaten with pepper soup, and pepper is used generously in all of it. Dried and smoked fish brought up from the coast, along with chicken, goat and, in villages, bushmeat, provide most of the protein. Forest produce fills the market stalls: palm oil, kola nuts, wild mushrooms, snails, honey and bundles of greens.

Roadside food is the mark of a highway town — roasted corn and groundnuts, fried plantain and cassava chips, doughnuts, meat pies and grilled chicken sold to travellers waiting on taxis. Palm wine tapped in the villages and cane juice, the raw sugarcane spirit, are the drinks of gatherings, with bottled beer and soft drinks in the town. Bong County grows coffee and cocoa, though both are sold on rather than drunk locally.