Robertsport

The Liberian government signed a treaty with the Vai in 1849 that gave it the territory of Cape Mount, and Robertsport was founded in 1856 as a settlement for newly arrived African-American immigrants, beside the Vai towns that already traded along the lagoon and the coast. It took the name Robertsport from Joseph Jenkins Roberts, Liberia's first president, and became the administrative centre of Grand Cape Mount County. The Vai, whose territory this is, had developed their own syllabic script in the 1830s, devised by Momolu Duwalu Bukele and one of the two most successful indigenous scripts in West Africa, and the area was already connected to Atlantic and inland trade.

For more than a century Robertsport was a small port and mission town. Episcopal and Baptist missions built churches and schools on the ridge, and under President William Tubman, in office from 1944 to 1971, the town received public buildings, and the Tubman Center of African Culture, built in 1964 for the president's sixty-ninth birthday, of the kind that came to favoured coastal towns in that era.

The civil wars of 1989 to 2003 emptied it. Fighting and displacement pushed much of the population towards Monrovia or across the nearby border into Sierra Leone, and the town was widely looted, though its buildings largely stood; the cultural centre was destroyed and only its ruins remain. People returned after 2003, when visiting American surfers taught local fishermen to ride the point breaks below the town, giving Robertsport a modest second life as the country's best-known beach destination while fishing remained its livelihood.

Robertsport sits where two Liberias meet. The ridge carries the settler inheritance — clapboard-influenced houses, Episcopal and Baptist churches, English family names and the formality of a county capital — while the villages around Lake Piso and along the coast are Vai, with a Muslim majority, Quranic schools and mosques, and the Gola living inland. Mandingo traders add a third strand. Christian and Muslim families live intermixed and share the same holidays and funerals.

The Vai syllabary, devised near here in the 1830s, is a point of pride and is still taught and used in some contexts, and Vai is widely spoken alongside Liberian English. Fishing shapes the social calendar as much as religion: the launching and landing of canoes, the drying racks, and the women who buy, smoke and sell the catch form a working rhythm that visitors are part of only as onlookers.

Surfing has added a small culture of its own. Liberian surfers from the town learned on boards left by aid workers and now run boards, lessons and the beach camps, and the sport has become one of the few sources of work for young people that does not involve a canoe or a farm. Visitors are expected to greet people, ask before photographing and treat the beach as a workplace as well as a break.

Robertsport is a town of a few thousand people, with more living in the villages around the lagoon and along the coast. Fishing is the livelihood: canoes go out from the beach, the catch is sorted, smoked over wood in low sheds and carried to market, and much of it travels on to Monrovia. Farming fills the rest — cassava, rice, plantain and vegetables on the slopes behind the town — with palm oil, charcoal and petty trade adding cash.

Services are thin. St Timothy Government Hospital, the county's only hospital, stands in the town with some forty beds and one operating room, and serious cases go on to Monrovia; electricity comes from solar panels and generators rather than a grid, and water is drawn from wells and pumps. Schools operate in and beside the old mission buildings, and the county administration provides the few salaried jobs. Young people leave for Monrovia when they can, which is a constant subject of conversation.

The day starts before dawn on the beach and slows in the heat of the afternoon. In the rainy season the town turns inward, roads to the villages soften, and the sea is too rough for small canoes for days at a time; in the dry season the beach, the market and the surf camps are busier, and the town sees most of its visitors.

Fish is the foundation of eating here. Barracuda, snapper, grouper and the small fish Liberians call bonny come in by canoe, and a large share is smoked on wood racks behind the beach, which preserves it for the market and gives it the strong, dry flavour that goes into soups across the country. Lake Piso adds shrimp, crab and oysters, cooked in peppery broths or grilled over charcoal.

Rice underlies every meal. Palm butter — the pulp of oil-palm fruit boiled, pounded and simmered with fish or meat — cassava leaf and potato greens are the usual stews poured over it, and dumboy, cassava pounded to a smooth dough, is eaten with pepper soup. Fresh chilli is used heavily, and dried and smoked fish is a seasoning as much as a protein.

Cassava, plantain and sweet potato from the farms behind the town are boiled, fried or roasted at the roadside, and coconut and palm wine come from the trees along the shore. Cane juice, a raw sugarcane spirit, is the village drink, and bottled beer and soft drinks arrive by road from Monrovia. The lodges along the beach cook the same catch with a lighter hand for visitors.