StapleLiberia
Liberian Rice Bread
A dense sweet loaf of rice flour and mashed ripe plantain, baked rather than boiled. Liberians count a meal without rice as no meal at all, and this is rice in its Sunday form.
Serves 8 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Grebo
The people of Liberia's south-eastern corner — early converts and early rebels, who produced the country's first indigenous Episcopal bishop and also its most serious nineteenth-century risings against settler rule.
Grebo people
Couple Grebo-1906.jpg · Wikimedia Commons
Identity
Population: Several hundred thousand in Maryland and Grand Kru counties and adjacent Côte d'Ivoire
Location: Cape Palmas, Harper and the south-eastern coast and hinterland
Language: Grebo (a cluster of closely related varieties)
Language family: Niger-Congo → Kru
Traditional governance: Town and clan councils with age grades and the bodio ritual office; the Grebo Reunited Kingdom formed in the nineteenth century to resist settler expansion; Liberian county administration today.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Seaside Grebo
Coastal communities around Cape Palmas and Harper.
Interior Grebo
Farming communities of the forested hinterland.
Ivorian Grebo
Related communities across the border, sometimes called Krumen locally.
Gallery
1 images
Culture
Clothing: Country cloth and imported fabric; mask costume of fibre and cloth; nineteenth-century Grebo converts adopted settler dress, which itself became a marker in the conflicts.
Food: Rice with palm butter and cassava leaf, fish, bushmeat, palm wine.
Ceremonies: Masked appearances of the abstract Grebo war masks; funerals with days of drumming; age-grade transitions; the installation of the bodio, a ritual office whose holder is confined by taboo.
Marriage customs: Bridewealth in cloth, livestock and cash; clan exogamy; polygyny historically common.
Initiation rites: Age-grade progression with instruction and public recognition; society membership in some communities.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire, at national rather than community level — 16 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
Liberia
8 dishes
StapleLiberia
Dumboy
also Pounded cassava, Dumbouy
Cassava boiled and pounded into a smooth heavy ball, swallowed rather than chewed, with a soup poured around it. Liberia's staple swallow.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
National dishLiberia
Liberian Jollof Rice
Rice fried with meat, vegetables and tomato in the Liberian manner, closer to a fried rice than the Ghanaian or Nigerian one-pot. The differences are argued over at every diaspora gathering.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Street foodLiberia
Kala
also Liberian doughnuts
Small yeasted doughnuts spiced with nutmeg and fried dark, sold in stacks from enamel basins on street corners in Monrovia from early morning.
Serves Makes 24 · 2 hours 30 minutes
Festival & feastLiberia
Palava Sauce
Potato greens or bitterleaf cooked down with palm oil, meat and smoked fish into a thick dark sauce over rice. Named for the palaver, the long discussion, that goes with a meal like this.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Regional specialityLiberia
Check Rice with Dumboy
Rice cooked with greens and palm oil, served with dumboy, cassava pounded to a smooth ball. Country food from the interior, and eaten with soup rather than cutlery.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Regional specialityLiberia
Torborgee
also Bitter greens with fermented fish
Bitterball, greens and fermented fish cooked in palm oil with a great deal of chilli, a Liberian dish for people who like their food to fight back.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Drink & sweetLiberia
Liberian Ginger Beer
Ginger steeped with lime and clove and drunk very cold, sold in bottles and frozen bags. Made strong enough that a first sip catches the throat.
Serves 8 · 20 minutes, plus overnight steeping
Côte d'Ivoire
8 dishes
StapleCôte d'Ivoire
Foutou
also Foufou
Yam, plantain or cassava pounded in a wooden mortar to a smooth elastic dough, eaten with soup. Two people work the pestle and the turning between blows in a rhythm.
Serves 4 · 45 minutes
National dishCôte d'Ivoire
Kedjenou
Chicken and vegetables sealed in a canari pot and cooked in their own steam with almost no added liquid, shaken rather than stirred. The most characteristically Ivorian dish there is.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Street foodCôte d'Ivoire
Attiéké with Grilled Fish
Fermented grated cassava steamed into light sour couscous, served with a whole grilled fish and raw onion. The lunch of Abidjan, eaten off a plastic table under an awning.
Serves 4 · 40 minutes
Street foodCôte d'Ivoire
Garba
also Attiéké thon, Garba kedjenou
Fried tuna on a heap of attiéké with raw onion, tomato and chilli, sold from wooden kiosks by Nigerien vendors across Abidjan. The cheapest full meal in the city.
Serves 4 · 35 minutes
Street foodCôte d'Ivoire
Alloco
also Fried plantain, Aloko
Ripe plantain fried in palm oil and served with a raw onion and chilli relish, sold in the evening on every Abidjan street by the women called allocodrome vendors.
Serves 4 · 25 minutes
Festival & feastCôte d'Ivoire
Sauce Graine
Palm nut pulp cooked down with meat, smoked fish and crab into a deep orange sauce, served with rice or foutou. Made for family Sundays and celebrations across the south.
Serves 8 · 2 hours
Regional specialityCôte d'Ivoire
Sauce Claire
A thin, clear, fiercely peppery broth of fish and aubergine, from the lagoon country. Named for what it is not: no palm oil, no groundnut, no thickening at all.
Serves 6 · 45 minutes
Drink & sweetCôte d'Ivoire
Bissap
also Jus d'oseille
Hibiscus steeped with mint and pineapple and served ice cold in sealed plastic sachets from every cooler box in Abidjan. The default soft drink of West Africa.
Serves 8 · 30 minutes, plus chilling
Stories & Oral Literature
The Grebo WarsHistorical account
Grebo communities formed a Reunited Kingdom in 1875 to resist the Liberian state's expansion inland from Harper, and fought a series of wars against it into the 1910s. The Liberian government eventually prevailed with help including American naval support. The conflicts fixed the settler-indigenous divide in the south-east for a century.
The Mask That Changed European ArtArt history
Grebo masks, with their flat plank faces, cylindrical projecting eyes and radical abstraction, were in Paris collections by the early twentieth century. Picasso owned one and later said it taught him that a form could stand for a feature without resembling it. The history of Cubism runs partly through the south-eastern Liberian coast.
Proverbs
“The town that argues in daylight sleeps at night.”
Open dispute settlement prevents worse.
“A mask sees what the face cannot.”
Ritual perspective.
“The sea brought the strangers; the bush kept the town.”
Coast and interior in the settler period.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: A high creator with earth and water powers beneath; the bodio's ritual confinement expresses the relationship between the town's welfare and a single consecrated person.
Beliefs: Ancestor veneration; masked spirits; the bodio office with its taboos; Episcopal and other Christianity established since the 1830s and now general.
Ancestors: Lineage dead honoured; the graves of leaders of the Grebo wars are political as well as family memory.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
The creator
Distant high god
Mask spirits
Powers embodied in the war and funerary masks
Ancestors
Consulted in town affairs and honoured at funerals
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Coastal and forest towns with palaver huts; Harper's nineteenth-century settler architecture of brick and verandas nearby.
Building techniques: Wattle and daub with thatch; the palaver hut; settler-era brick and timber building at Harper, now largely ruined.
Village layout: Town around the meeting ground and chief's compound; farms in the bush beyond; canoe beach for coastal communities.
Artifacts
Grebo plank mask
Performance
Radically abstract mask with cylindrical eyes, influential on European modernism.
Country cloth
Textile
Strip-woven cloth of the region.
Harper's settler architecture
Heritage site
Nineteenth-century Americo-Liberian buildings at Cape Palmas.
Bodio regalia
Ritual
Objects of the ritual office whose holder lives under strict taboo.
Historical Timeline
Pre-1800
Grebo communities established around Cape Palmas.
1834
Maryland in Africa founded at Cape Palmas by American colonists.
1875–1910s
The Grebo Reunited Kingdom fights a series of wars against the Liberian state.
1900s–1910s
Grebo masks reach Paris and influence Cubist experiment.
1989–2003
Civil wars devastate the south-east; Harper's historic buildings are largely destroyed.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Britannica: GreboEncyclopaedia Britannica
- Grebo masks and modernism — art historical scholarshipMuseum of Modern Art
Premium & scholarly sources