Liberia
Capital: Monrovia · West Africa
Africa's first republic, where indigenous Mande, Kru and Mel cultures — with their Poro and Sande societies — interweave with Americo-Liberian settler history.
Ethnic communities
- KpelleLargest group; Poro/Sande initiation societies
- VaiInventors of the indigenous Vai syllabary (1830s)
- KruLegendary mariners of the Atlantic coast
- Grebo, Bassa, Gio, ManoForest societies with strong mask traditions
More communities of Liberia
- Bassa · Coastal farmers with own Vah script tradition
- Grebo · Southeastern coast warriors of mask federations
- Gio (Dan) · Mask carvers of the Nimba border forests
- Mano (Mah) · Northern forest kin of Dan ritual arts
- Loma · Poro heartland along the Guinea line
- Kissi · Rice farmers of the tri-border stone figures
- Gola · Ancient forest people — Sande society's deep roots
- Gbandi & Belle · Northwestern forest farming communities
- Krahn (Wè) · Southeastern forest mask societies
- Mandingo (Manya) · Muslim traders threading every market town
- Dei & Mende · Coastal and border communities of old chiefdoms
- Americo-Liberians · Settler-descended founders of the republic's institutions
Languages
Major languages: Kpelle, Bassa, Vai, Kru languages, English
Language families: Niger-Congo (Mande, Kru, Mel)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Kingdom of the Vai
- • Condo Confederation
Heritage sites
- • Providence Island
- • Sapo National Park
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Liberia
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Music & the arts1916–1988
Bai T. Moore
Literature and folklore
Poet, novelist and collector of Liberian oral tradition whose novella Murder in the Cassava Patch is the country's best known book.
- Politics & liberationb. 1938
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Postwar governance
Africa's first elected woman head of state, who took office after Liberia's civil wars and shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for work on women's participation in peacebuilding.
- Sportb. 1966
George Weah
Football
The only African player to win the Ballon d'Or, in 1995, funding and equipping Liberia's national team himself during the civil war. Later president of Liberia.
- Science, business & activismb. 1972
Leymah Gbowee
Peace activism
Organised the women's sit-ins and sex strike that helped force an end to Liberia's second civil war. Nobel Peace Prize, 2011.
Deep-dive community profiles
Americo-Liberians
Freed African Americans and Caribbean settlers who founded Liberia in 1822, built a republic on the American model, and ruled the indigenous majority as a five per cent minority for 133 years until a sergeant shot the president in his bed.
Open deep profile →Bassa
The coastal people of central Liberia — farmers and fishers of the Buchanan hinterland who devised their own alphabet in the diaspora, whose Poro and Sande societies govern initiation, and who were among the first to meet the American settlers in 1822.
Open deep profile →Dan (Yacouba)
The forest people of the Ivorian west — carvers of the serene, polished masks that Modigliani's generation studied, keepers of the leopard society, the stilt-dancers who tower over festivals, and a culture where every mask is a spirit with a name and a temper.
Open deep profile →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.
Open deep profile →Kissi
The rice farmers of the three-border forest — a people split across Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia whose ancestral stone figures are dug from their own fields, and whose region was where the 2014 Ebola epidemic began.
Open deep profile →Kpelle (Guerzé)
Liberia's largest people — rice farmers of the forest interior whose Poro and Sande societies school every generation, whose 'moot' house-palavers became a model of restorative justice, and whose talking drums carry the forest's news.
Open deep profile →Kru
The seafarers of the Atlantic coast — canoe crews so skilled in surf that European ships hired them for two centuries, who refused to be enslaved and were feared for it, and whose men worked the whole coast from Freetown to the Congo.
Open deep profile →Mende
The rice-farming people of Sierra Leone's forested south whose Sande and Poro societies school every generation, whose Sowei mask is the only known African mask danced by women, and whose chiefs and orators shaped the modern state.
Open deep profile →Toma (Loma)
The forest people of the Guinea-Liberia border — makers of the great horned landai mask of the Poro society, inventors of an indigenous syllabary in the 1930s, and farmers of one of the last patches of Upper Guinean rainforest.
Open deep profile →Vai
The people who invented a script — coastal traders of the Liberia-Sierra Leone border whose syllabary, devised around 1833 from a dream, is one of the very few writing systems created independently in modern times and still in use.
Open deep profile →