Really dark.

As dark as the darkness in Genesis, where the light is called Day, with a capital D, and the darkness is called Night, with a capital N.

Dark.

It has been that way since the electricity was knocked out at the beginning of a bloody civil war in 1990. But, in a sense, it has been that way since a greater darkness emerged a decade before that, when unity between native tribes and slave descendants unraveled to a violent end.

The persistent darkness has created a substantial population of Liberian expatriates, members of a fraternity that has been growing over the past 10 years, draining Liberia of scholars, public servants and community leaders.

One such expatriate, a man of light, has been living in New York for 12 years. He and his wife are evangelists with a small congregation in Harlem.

On a chilly November afternoon in 1999, he emerged from Grand Central Station, running late for a meeting uptown. Seeing the long line of people at the taxi stand, he walked a few blocks from the station and hailed one of New York's 12,000 cabs.

Something told the man to talk to the driver. He asked where he was from.

Ghana, the cabbie told him.

I've been to Ghana - I'm Liberian, the passenger said.

The driver said he went to Liberia once. He visited a cousin there many years ago.

He remembered that his cousin was busy that day. He was attending a wedding, so the driver borrowed a suit coat from a neighbor and tagged along.

It was a big wedding at a small country church. The president's son was marrying the vice president's daughter.

Do you remember that, the cabbie asked his passenger.

It was my wedding, the man replied.

The cabbie pulled over and turned full around to get a good look.

This man was the groom.

This man is the president's son.

This man is Shad Tubman.

'He Is Mine'

"There was dancing in the streets of Bensonville," the Liberian Age newspaper said of that wedding day, Aug. 18, 1961. "Children laughed and sang; visitors from far and near brought gifts."

A man with a mission, Shad Tubman reads from his Bible during a Wednesday-night service in the Harlem section of New York City. Tubman wants to be a light in the darkness that has fallen over his homeland. JONATHAN ERNST/STAFF

They had come to see "popular and affable Shad" wed his sweetheart, "beautiful Wokie."

Some called it the wedding of the century. Announcements emblazoned with the Liberian coat of arms had gone out in May, marking the affair with all the pomp of a state celebration.

Liberia was riding high on a wave of prosperity like it had never seen before - with the fathers of the bride and groom at the helm.

Shad's great-grandparents, slaves of Augusta planter Richard Tubman, had been freed in their owner's will and aided in their return to Africa by his widow, Emily, in 1837.

The Tubman people had worked hard and prospered, developing their own farms and businesses in the small frontier town of Harper on Cape Palmas - a rocky promontory on the West African bulge.

The inhospitable coast where their slave ancestors landed in the previous century had finally become the land of milk and honey they had sought when they left America, and the happy couple were some of its finest fruits.

Shad, the son of President William V.S. Tubman, studied at Harvard before completing his degree at Rutgers. The good-looking young man was a dynamo on the soccer field, playing for a pro team named for his father's butler in a stadium named for the first lady.

Shad scored all three goals the first time his team, Barrolle, beat the national powerhouse, Invincible Eleven.

The eligible bachelor was snared by Wokie Tolbert, the daughter of Vice President William Tolbert, a Baptist minister and successful farmer. Tolbert was the first black man to head the Baptist World Congress and became president upon Tubman's death in 1971.

"He Is Mine," a headline screamed at the news of their engagement, but Wokie was quite a catch herself - a beautiful and stylish fashion student in London.

Shad and Wokie were part of a growing number of young Liberians from all walks of life who attended great institutions of learning in the world and brought knowledge and expertise back to the tiny West African country.

Sending Liberian students abroad was no mean feat for a country that for most of its existence had little contact with the Western world.

"For almost a century, foreign capital was unknown here because foreign capitalists will not risk coming to our shores," President Tubman said at an independence celebration in 1956.

"They fear disease; they feared attacks from those whom they called savages and cannibals; they doubted the stability of our government and the integrity of our citizens and the wealth of our lands. To them, Liberia was off limits.

A pair of taxis cross paths on Mechlin Street in one of Monroviašs busy market districts, where commerce and community still flourish amid Liberiašs struggles against poverty and violence. JONATHAN ERNST/STAFF

"We were compelled to make the best of what we had and what we could afford. It took courage, determination, faith and confidence in the future."

During the Tubman administration, the long, uphill struggle from slaves to statesmen seemed to be complete, or nearly so.

Tubman was elected president in 1943 and opened Liberia to Western development and a prosperity it had never dreamed possible.

For generations, Liberia had been a nation divided into two groups: the coastal-dwelling American slave descendants - called Americo-Liberians; and the native tribes of the Hinterland - the feral areas beyond the coast. Under Tubman, the native tribesmen gained access to schools and polling places for the first time. The Unification Policy, which embraced the native people of the Hinterland, was Tubman's greatest legacy.

Shad wanted to see it fulfilled as well. He was elected president of the Liberian labor unions in 1960 and worked to improve pay and conditions.

When he started, the minimum wage was just 4 cents an hour. Some people made fun of him, or worse, questioned his sincerity in working for the common man.

"I worked hard," Shad says. "That's the greatest part of my life.

"Within about three years' time, I was able to get it raised - it sounds ridiculous now - to 18 cents."

In the span of a single generation, Shad, who grew up in a house with no indoor plumbing, saw his countrymen leave their slave fetters and tribal simplicity behind once and for all.

But were they moving too fast? Even he wondered.

He told his father once, "You realize all the scholarships and sending people abroad from all parts of the country..., that when our people return back, that you're going to have a tremendous problem in this country. You may even have a revolution within 25 years or so.

"And the old man looked at me and he stretched his eyes, and he said, 'Boy, if it takes 25 years, I'll be disappointed.'"

"I just hope that we're able to deal with these forces and channel them properly so that the country doesn't explode," the president told his son. "And the revolution you're talking about will not be a physical revolution, but a change in our minds and the way we do things."