Time and war have shrouded the Tubman legacy.
The older tribal Liberians, who loved Tubman for his Unification Policy, are dying out. Looters toppled the statue of Tubman on the University of Liberia grounds, beheading it for scrap metal, and eternity has ended early for the eternal flame on Tubman's grave.
The best-known Tubman in Liberia is probably Sebah Tubman, a great-niece of the president and Miss Liberia 1999-2000. She is known for her work as a goodwill ambassador across the continent ¡ and for her stunning beauty.
But President Tubman is not forgotten ¡ his downtown Monrovia monument remains intact, and he retains a measure of currency by appearing on the new Liberian $20 bill.
Tubman's $20 is worth less than 50 cents, however, as American greenbacks have long been supplanted by the devalued Liberian version as the country's official money.
The poverty rate in Liberia is estimated at 80 percent by the United Nations, and the volume of the nation's economy is less than half of what it was before the war.
U.N. figures rank Liberia 174 out of 175 in the world on the human development index, a measure combining life expectancy, education and income. The United States ranks fourth.
There is intensified fighting today, especially in the northwest, where Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are often in conflict and where armed resistance to President Taylor's rule has continued.
As most of the country lives and dies in squalor, Taylor takes care of a small inner circle and keeps a boot heel on his political opposition.
In July, a ship loaded with human cargo cruised down the African coast, hoping desperately for a friendly port. The anchor stayed dry, however, as Ghana turned them away. Then Togo and Benin, too, treated them like drifting jetsam.
After 26 days at sea the passengers were sick and exhausted. A number of them were seriously ill with malaria and diarrhea, and one man told the BBC that he had been drinking seawater for four days before they came ashore.
There were tears and hymns as they made port in Nigeria, where they were allowed to dock for humanitarian reasons. Many of those on board were children who "wandered off the boat looking lost and confused,'' according to an Associated Press correspondent.
A century ago, the 186 tired and hungry wanderers could have come ashore into Liberia's open arms, not as refugees but as new Liberians ¡ black brothers and sisters handed the keys to the kingdom, like the Tubman slaves who left Augusta in 1837 to start new lives in the West African colony.
But these were Liberians, and it was Liberia they were fleeing.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 271,234 Liberians refugees are living outside their country with U.N. assistance, 10,826 of them in the United States.
What was once a safe haven has become a shoving-off point as Liberians try to escape a sad and bloodied place.
Another Tubman's time?
A half-century ago, a little America. Today, a little hell.
Who's to blame?
Many, of course, blame Doe, the leader of the 1980 coup, and his bloody regime. Tolbert's murder and the killing orgy on the beach opened a Pandora's box that Taylor proudly holds open still, the thinking goes.
Some blame the Americo-Liberians, including Tubman and Tolbert, for not moving faster on reforms ¡ or for moving too fast.
Another common refrain is that the Americans have never been good enough friends, choosing to fight for faceless oil tycoons in Kuwait while Liberians, children of America's own soil, in a land of America's creation, fought and died with no intervention whatsoever.
"There's no doubt about it," former President Carter says. "There is no doubt that we have not treated either Tubman's regime or Tolbert's regime or Sergeant Doe's regime or Taylor's regime with a degree of assistance that would bring gratitude to the hearts and minds of individual Liberians.
"We've never done that. You know, we basically looked the other way, except that we've used them."
Liberians find various ways of expressing their relationship with America: a child and foster parent, an ant versus an elephant, or an abused wife who keeps returning to her husband's side.
The country has rarely risen above its status as an American footnote, quaint and historic. Virtually every news story about Liberia, no matter its content, has a paragraph explaining its American slave roots.
Carter is the rare American who has acted as if the link between the two countries is not a thing of the past. In addition to his visit to Liberia as president, he has nurtured close ties with the Liberians. He and his family, working with the Carter Center, personally observed the 1997 elections won by Taylor.
"We had great hopes, I did personally, for the future of Liberia after the election was over," Carter said in June from his office in Atlanta. "Over a period of time, Taylor became more and more abusive toward his potential future political rivals. He coagulated more and more power in his own hands, to the detriment of the parliament and other nongovernmental groups, and he came to abuse human rights."
All this from the man who had told Carter in 1997 that he wanted to make himself into "a Mandela."
"So we finally laid down some ultimatums and told Taylor that if he didn't correct his mistakes and initiate the reforms he had promised me that we would actually close our office," Carter says.
In November 2000, the Carter Center shut its office in Monrovia, fearing for the safety of the workers. The office had been open nearly continuously since 1992, during all but the worst fighting.
"I think that if and when we do see some reforms initiated and implemented by Taylor, with very careful monitoring to make sure his words match his deeds or vice versa, then I think now is the time for America to say, OK, this time let's really form a partnership with Liberia, maybe as a pre-eminent country in Africa on a benevolent basis," says Carter.
Above all, Carter is still "grieved" today by the history of the relationship between the two countries, especially American support for the elitist Liberian regimes of the past, including those of Tubman and Tolbert, and the exploitation of Liberian workers by American businesses.
"I don't think America is absolved of its obligation, myself. That's my personal opinion, and I've demonstrated it, I hope, by my words and actions," he says.
Shad Tubman isn't sure there is much of a debt for America to pay.
"I do think you could have been better friends," he says. He's still troubled that his mother-in-law was denied asylum by the United States after her husband, President Tolbert, was killed in the 1980 coup. By and large, however, he believes that Liberia's troubles are of its own making.
At one time America wooed ¡ and enriched ¡ Liberia as a strategic partner: a fellow soldier in the wars against Hitler and, later, communism. Shad says that if his countrymen corrupted themselves with the wealth that came with that partnership, they have no one to blame but themselves.
"I don't blame the United States at all. In fact, I prefer the American explanation (more) now than I did then because America has made it clear that Liberia is of no strategic importance to her," Shad says of the American response during the Liberian civil war.
"Understand this: there is no question of making excuses, of trying to exclude myself from what happened, or making excuses for my father and so forth," Shad says. "We are all to blame, and we all have to fix this thing."
Some say that one way to fix Liberia is for Shad to join a political alliance or run for president himself, which he always said he would leave to others.
"I also said that the only way I would consider the idea of running for president was if I felt it was the only way Liberia could be saved, and this was at a time when we were not even thinking about what is happening now," Shad says.
"And the question somebody asked me recently was, `Don't you think the time has come?'ƒ"
Shad is caught somewhere in the middle. His dream was to fulfill his father's vision for unification and support a candidate from the Hinterland for president.
Some believe, however, that if Shad had been elected president before the coup, his intellect, his reputation as a reformer, his popularity with all peoples and his charisma could have spared Liberia all the blood, the death, the killing, the hate.
In short, they say, a Tubman could have saved them.
Shad tries not to second-guess the path he took decades ago, but the thoughts have clouded his mind before.
"If only I had done this, if I had said this, if I'd said the other ¡ this might never have happened,'' he says in a rising litany, then stops dead for a moment's calm.
"But wait a minute,'' he whispers, "I'm not God.''
Going home
William V.S. Tubman sat his son Shad down at a young age and taught him to believe that he was no better than anybody else.
"Today you are the president's son; tomorrow you may not be the president's son,'' the old man had told him, one lesson among many. But the fact is, Shad remains to this day the president's son. To ladies in church, to broken Liberians, even to New York City cabbies, he is the president's son.
"The Tubman legacy is very strong and compelling,'' says Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the former presidential candidate.
"Unless we get people with the Tubman name forming alliances with other opposition leaders and take a stand against Mr. Taylor, ... you don't have the moral authority.''
Johnson-Sirleaf says that she would gladly stand in a political alliance with Shad, and finds it "very troublesome'' that he's unwilling to do so.
She does little to hide her disappointment with Shad for aspiring to a role of Christian service instead of political leadership.
"I've told him that he's not worthy of his name. I've told him that to his face,'' she says. "Yes, he will get a lot of reverence and attention, but he's not going to make a difference.''
Shad says his focus will be to live the Gospel of Jesus.
"When I see human suffering, when I see people dying, when you see people having nothing to eat ¡ these are the things that affect me, that bother me,'' he says.
"I'm going to go back, and I'm going to do the best I can to help nurture the people, their spiritual and their physical needs, as much as I possibly can, outside of the political arena.''
"I hope that at (my age) there will be no suspicion of political ambitions.''
As time stands stone-age still on the streets of Monrovia, it ticks rapidly by for 68-year-old Shad, who has delayed his return to Africa, unwilling to leave his wife and children and grandchildren behind. But Liberia and his larger earthly family beckon as well.
"Even today, I'm sitting down there, I said, `Shad, what are you doing in the United States? Why don't you get up and go back home now?'ƒ''
Home.
It's a tribute to Liberia that someone like Shad still considers it home. Shad didn't give up on Liberia after the 1980 coup, and he says that he could never dishonor his father's memory by giving up on it now.
When he crosses that ocean, Shad says he's going back for good. He's not the first Tubman to say that. His great-grandparents probably said much the same.
Shad feels no great connection to his ancestors and their American roots, but there is a line that runs through them that started in Augusta 165 years ago, when a God-fearing man and his wife set their slaves free. And it ran through those free men and women, through William and Sylvia Tubman; to their son Alexander, the minister; to his son William, the president who made himself a slave before God in prayer; to his son Shad, who holds tight to the torch of Christianity that was nearly doused in blood and hate.
"The torch has never gone out,'' says Shad. "It's been dimmed.
"Within 10 years time, you will see a movement in Liberia both in terms of physical and spiritual development ... that you cannot imagine. Abraham asked the Lord, if there were 10 righteous people, if he would spare Sodom and Gomorrah. And there are more than 10 righteous people in Liberia.
"I have no doubt whatsoever that the new Liberia will be so much better than the old Liberia. It sounds silly to the world, but I have no doubt about it.
"I'm going to feed and I'm going to educate, and I'm going to nurture, and tell them that their real life starts not in this life, but when they die.
"What I intend to do is let my light so shine before men that my good works will glorify God.''
But it is dark in Liberia tonight.
Liberians overseas
13,000: approximate number of free blacks resettled in Liberia by the American Colonization Society from 1822-1867
271,234: number of Liberian refugees living outside their country with U.N. assistance, 10,826 of them in the United States, in 2000
Sources: Library of Congress; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
The Augusta Chronicle ©2012. All Rights Reserved.
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