Summary
Global awareness of Liberia often centers on the violence associated with the 1980 coup and the civil wars that followed, while the longer material history of settlement receives less attention. This article argues that recent violence cannot be understood apart from the nineteenth-century settler colony established by the American Colonization Society in 1822.
Through BAHA research in the Barbadian-settled township of Crozierville, the article examines how settler-community architecture and the material vestiges of civil conflict remain linked on the contemporary landscape. It shows how fragmented violence in Liberia has to be understood through the country’s specific history of Back-to-Africa settlement and Black diasporic return.