Monrovia

The city began on 7 January 1822, when agents of the American Colonization Society landed freed and freeborn African-Americans on Providence Island in the Mesurado River, after an earlier attempt on Sherbro Island had failed. The settlement on Cape Mesurado was named Christopolis and then Monrovia, after James Monroe, the American president whose government had backed the scheme. The Dei and Bassa people already living on the cape and the surrounding rivers contested the land, and the settlement's first years were marked by fighting, fever and heavy mortality.

When Liberia declared independence in 1847 Monrovia became its capital, and the Americo-Liberian elite built the city in the image they had brought with them: a grid of streets on the peninsula, clapboard houses with verandas, Baptist, Methodist and Episcopal churches, a Masonic order that doubled as the country's political establishment, and the Centennial Pavilion of 1947 for presidential inaugurations and the Capitol of 1958 for the legislature. The Freeport, built by American forces during the Second World War, opened in 1948 and turned the city into the country's commercial centre.

The 1980 coup that overthrew President William Tolbert ended Americo-Liberian rule and began two decades of upheaval. Monrovia was besieged in 1990 and fought over again in 2003 when the second civil war ended with a peace agreement, and much of its infrastructure, including the Ducor Hotel and the water and power systems, was wrecked. Since 2003 the city has grown far faster than it has been rebuilt, absorbing people displaced by war and by the search for work, and in 2014 it was the focus of Liberia's Ebola epidemic, when the West Point district was quarantined.

Monrovia is where the settler inheritance is most visible in Liberia: the churches and their choirs, the Masonic lodges, the American place names and constitutional forms, and family lines traced to Virginia, Maryland or Mississippi. It is also, and more so every decade, an Indigenous Liberian city — Bassa, Kpelle, Kru, Vai and Grebo communities have their own districts, associations and churches, and the old line between "Congo" and country people has blurred without disappearing from politics.

The everyday language is Liberian English, often called Kolokwa, full of its own grammar and idiom, and the handshake ending in a snapped finger is the city's signature greeting. Sunday is quiet in the morning and loud afterwards, and church music, hipco — Liberian hip hop sung in Kolokwa — and West African pop carry from shops and taxis. Football is followed intensely, George Weah's career being the point of national pride, and matches at the Samuel Kanyon Doe Sports Complex fill the eastern suburbs with traffic.

Monrovians are direct and hospitable, and conversation is sociable rather than brisk. The war is within living memory for almost everyone; it is discussed openly among friends but is not a subject a stranger should raise lightly. Photography of people, markets and anything official needs asking first.

Greater Monrovia holds about 1.76 million people at the 2022 census, close to a third of Liberia's population, and the built-up area runs from Bushrod Island in the north through the peninsula and Sinkor to Paynesville in the east. Housing ranges from walled compounds on Tubman Boulevard to the dense single-storey lanes of West Point and New Kru Town, and the city has grown outwards far faster than roads, drainage or power lines have followed.

The economy rests on trade, the port, government, and the aid and diplomatic sector, with a large informal side: market traders, pen-pen riders, phone-credit sellers and generator mechanics. Electricity supply has improved since the Mount Coffee hydroelectric plant on the Saint Paul River returned to service, but cuts are routine and many businesses run generators. Piped water is limited, so wells, tanks and water sellers fill the gap.

Days start early, with traffic building before seven and markets opening at dawn; the heat and the afternoon rain slow the middle of the day, and evenings are spent outside shops, in church halls and at bars along the boulevard. Youth unemployment, the cost of imported rice and fuel, drainage and flooding in the rains, and the state of the roads are the recurring complaints of city life.

Rice is the measure of a meal in Monrovia — a Liberian who has eaten anything else may still say they have not eaten. It arrives under a soup or stew: palm butter, made from boiled and pounded oil-palm fruit, cooked with fish, chicken or beef; cassava leaf, pounded fine and simmered long with palm oil and smoked fish; potato greens, the sweet-potato leaf equivalent. Jollof rice appears at parties, and dry rice means rice served plain.

Dumboy, cassava boiled and pounded into a smooth dough, and fufu, made from dried cassava, are eaten with pepper soup or palm butter, torn off and swallowed rather than chewed. Torborgee is the fiercest of the soups, sour and heavily peppered with fermented seasonings. Pepper is not optional in Liberian cooking, and country pepper appears on the table as well as in the pot.

Street food is fried or grilled: plantain, cassava and potato chips, roasted corn, doughnuts, meat pies, and fish or chicken grilled over charcoal with pepper sauce. Palm wine tapped outside the city and cane juice, a raw sugarcane spirit, are the traditional drinks; ginger beer and Club Beer, brewed in the city, are the common ones. The settler baking tradition survives in cornbread, rice bread flavoured with banana, and the cakes sold at church gatherings.