Monrovia & the Coast

Before the settlers came, the coast was home to the Vai and Gola around Cape Mount, the Dei and Bassa around Cape Mesurado and the Saint John River, and the Kru and Grebo further south-east. European traders called it the Grain Coast, after the malagueta pepper, or "grains of paradise", bought here. In 1822 the American Colonization Society landed freed and freeborn African-Americans on Providence Island and Cape Mesurado, founding the settlement that became Monrovia, named after the US president James Monroe.

Other American colonisation societies founded their own settlements along the coast: Bassa Cove near present-day Buchanan, Greenville in Sinoe, and, in 1834, "Maryland in Africa" at Cape Palmas. Maryland declared itself an independent republic in 1854 and was annexed by Liberia in 1857. The settler towns faced repeated conflict with coastal peoples over land and trade, and in 1856 Maryland asked Liberia for military aid in a war with the Grebo and Kru.

Monrovia grew under the Americo-Liberian elite, and William Tubman, president from 1944 to 1971 and a native of Harper, poured money into his home town. The 1980 coup ended with the public execution of government officials on a Monrovia beach. During the civil wars Monrovia was besieged in 1990 and again in 2003, when the war ended with a peace agreement. The city was also affected by the 2014–16 Ebola epidemic, during which the West Point district was quarantined in 2014.

The coast carries the most visible legacy of the settler state: Monrovia's churches, Masonic lodges and old clapboard houses, and families who trace their descent to Virginia, Maryland or Mississippi. For much of Liberia's history the coastal elite and the indigenous majority lived largely separate lives; today intermarriage and migration have blurred the line, though land, status and politics still carry echoes of it.

The Vai of Grand Cape Mount are known for the Vai syllabary, one of the few indigenous African scripts, devised in the 1830s. The Kru of the south-east built a reputation as seafarers, working for generations as sailors and dockworkers on European ships along the West African coast, and Kru and Grebo communities live in towns across the region. Bassa is widely spoken in Grand Bassa and Monrovia.

Religion is mainly Christian, with Islam stronger among the Vai. Liberian English, often called Kolokwa, is the everyday language of the coast, full of distinctive expressions.

Greater Monrovia is home to more than two million people, a third of Liberia's population, spread along the coast from Mamba Point and downtown's Broad Street to the suburbs of Sinkor, Paynesville and beyond. The city runs on trading, government jobs, aid agencies and the port. Traffic, power cuts, flooding and crowded informal districts such as West Point and New Kru Town are part of daily life.

The rest of the coast is thinly populated. Kakata, the Margibi county seat, and Harbel, around the Firestone rubber plantation, are the main towns near the capital; Buchanan is the port for the iron ore brought by rail from Nimba; Robertsport, Greenville, Barclayville and Harper are small county capitals. Rubber, oil palm, logging, fishing and small-scale gold mining provide most work, and land concessions to plantation companies have been a source of disputes with local communities.

Coastal Liberia eats rice at almost every meal, served under greens such as potato greens or cassava leaf, or under palm butter, a rich stew based on oil-palm fruit, with fish or meat. Dumboy — boiled cassava pounded into a smooth, stretchy dough — and fufu, made from dried cassava, are eaten with pepper soup or palm butter, and rice is also cooked into jollof rice.

Fishing towns supply fresh and smoked fish, crab and shrimp, and seafood features heavily in Kru and Grebo cooking. Liberia also has a baking tradition of cornbread, rice bread, banana bread and cakes, and plantain, yam and sweet potatoes are widely eaten. Palm wine, locally distilled cane juice and Club Beer, brewed in Monrovia, are the common drinks.

In Monrovia, Providence Island marks the settlers' landing place. The Ducor Hotel, a shell of the once-grand hotel on the city's highest hill, gives a view over the Atlantic, the Saint Paul River and West Point, and Waterside market, the Liberian National Museum, the Masonic Temple and the city's beaches show different sides of the city.

North-west of the capital, Robertsport sits between Lake Piso and the sea, with internationally recognised left-hand point breaks, empty beaches and simple lodges. South-east, Marshall lies where the Farmington River meets the sea, and Buchanan has a long beach and a busy port.

In Sinoe County, inland from Greenville, Sapo National Park protects primary rainforest reaching towards the coastal plain, with forest elephants, chimpanzees and pygmy hippos. At the far end of the coast, Harper shows faded grandeur: the ruined Tubman-era mansions, the Masonic lodge and colonial buildings near the Cape Palmas lighthouse, with beaches stretching away along the coast.