Donate NowJina Moore, for the Pulitzer Center (Photos by Glenna Gordon)
It was our first day reporting in earnest, and we chased. We chased that document, with verve and determination and not a little spunk.
We'd like to pretend that it's some top-secret set of papers that will reveal the greatest scandal yet to hit West Africa, but it was actually a pretty straightforward review paper, which in any other country would be in every library we went to, and probably on the Internet. And, well, when it comes to West African scandals, the competition is pretty stiff at the moment.
We were looking for an overview of legal reform, and we wound up in four different law libraries – at the law school, the Temple of Justice (think Liberia's Supreme Court), the Ministry of Justice (think Department of Justice) and the National Bar Association of Liberia. We never found the document, but we did find a lot of beautiful leather-bound books, many of them seemingly untouched.
Leather-bound books, you say? In Liberia? Where do they print books, let alone find leather for binding?
Um…not exactly. These are all American law books, shelved here thanks to donations by any number of organizations that so far seem to include the US government, the American Bar Association, the Carter Center, the UN Development Program, and surely others we haven't discovered yet.
Why American law in Liberia? It's all part of the complicated history between America and Liberia. You probably remember that Liberia was "settled" by freed American slaves. That's a nice image, an idyllic Middle Passage in reverse that "returned natives" to their "original land." Like most white stories about Africa –- and we're sorry to be so blunt, but that's what most of the colonial blather leading up to, and well beyond, the Scramble for Africa is –- it's a myth, a vessel for prevailing political, cultural and yes, even humanitarian, norms of the time. Suffice to say, there were people living in Liberia before the freed American slaves arrived, and tensions between the two groups haven't gone away. (One of the things you'll see us reporting about is the role of that tension in and after the conflict.)
What's this got to do with the law? Liberia's legal system looks a lot like ours, and American case law and legal precedent carry a lot of weigh there. Especially because the Liberian law is so hard to find. The few copies of the Liberian legal code that do exist go up through, roughly, 2000.
Why so few, and why so long ago? Exactly. Stay tuned. In the meantime, we share three photographs of our favorite of the four libraries, the National Liberian Bar Association.