Feasibility Study and Master Plan for Robertsfield, 1965

The recent posts have reminded me of something I found in the basement of the Library of Congress several years ago, and never got around to posting here before, but now seems relevant: A 1965 Feasibility Study for Robertsfield, commissioned by USAID and prepared by a Los Angeles firm of engineers and architects.

Frankly, in many parts it is so dry and technical as to be unreadable, but I was in love from the cover, with its Microgramma typeface looking like a prop from 2001: A Space Odyssey, complete with a gorgeous, dashing R.F.I.A. logo (famously derived from Pan Am's globe emblem, as the US carrier had the contract to manage the airport apparently from its earliest days as a commercial facility).

The best parts are really all the graphics. There are a decent historic photo of the yet-to-be finished KLM Terminal (today the VIP Terminal but still sporting the sky-blue roof trim of KLM). Unfortunately, no good shots of the main Pan Am terminal, which I've only ever seen in photos and in person as a multi-storied hollow concrete shell. I am not even sure what the "interim terminal building" was, as it looks to be a finely-crafted steel-spanned, winged-roof structure. No such shed exists today, but maybe Pan Am hadn't even built the bigger building yet, and that was what the "interim" was anticipating.

Another good illustration, and what reminded me that I should post the document, is a map which catalogued intercontinental flights to, from and within Africa. The monochrome map is too low-tech for 21st century eyes; its too easy for the lines to cross over and get lost, but its fun to look at, it shows SAS's flight to Rio de Janeiro as well as KLM and Sabena's flights.

But the best part of the document has got to be the watercolor-washed perspective drawing of a future RIA as proposed by the engineers and architects. Too cartoonish to be technical, the poster board acts as an emotional hook to invest in a new airport for Liberia. The scene is recognizable, most notably by the meandering Farmington river narrowing away to the horizon, and the general arrangement and direction of the runway, landslide structures, airside facilities, and waterway are all the same.

But in place of the familiar array of small, bland terminals of today, here RIA looks if not like a miniature Laguardia than at least bigger than what might suit the needs of Madison, Wisconsin or Montgomery, Alabama. Clearly shown is a multistory, multi gate main terminal with early-iteration passenger bridges to the airliners, which here seem to consist solely of a prototype profile of the yet-to-exist B747-100. It is too-wide wings and the too-bulbous visage of these fanciful jumbo jets that most gives the painting its Warner Brothers-backdrop quality.

That this impressive volume has been gathering dust in the sub-sub of the LOC for decades was a treat to discover; what's more curious is how it was always seemingly dead on arrival. At the time of its production, the study rightly anticipated a Liberia that was soaring upwards, at least a decade and a half from its economic peak.

More relevantly, Pan American Airways, which again was not only the primary commercial user of RIA but also the manager of the airport on behalf of the government, would continue adding capacity at Robertsfield and across Africa throughout the 1960s and well into the 1970s, up until the oil crisis and related pan-African stagnation first curtailed the viability of jets from New York to Cotonou, Douala or Kinshasa. Yet tiny Monrovia would remain among Pan Am's African destinations to the very end, including many years in which real B747s would in fact land at the airport multiple times per week. It is therefore not immediately apparent why, at the crest of global optimism in 1965, the grander visions of this proposal were never implemented.

High Atop the Ducor

Speaking of the Ducor, I had long ago posted some renderings from the ill-fated, aborted attempt at resurrecting the Grand Dame of Monrovia Hotels, back when the Libyan Investment Authority was expected to take over the property and redevelop the complex. That the Ducor is still vacant is surely one of the more tangential footnotes of the Libyan Revolution.

I was recently at a government office in Monrovia which still, either through neglect or persevering optimism, still had some printed-out elevations and renderings of the revamped Ducor taped to the wall. Slightly faded, they nonetheless revealed the name of the Italian architecture firm responsible for the proposal.

I hadn't seen these images of the reborn rooftop restaurant before; they weren't included in the press pack that accompanied the media blitz of the original announcement, I suppose. Not only do I particularly like the drama of the exterior fly-over, but also the Ducor's rooftop terrace is, in a certain sense, already a destination for evening revelry: there are near-weekly sunset gatherings on the two-level rooftop of the Ducor; they've occurred more times than I can remember during my time in Monrovia.

Not sure when the old hotel will finally be refurbished, or what its fate will be. There was a very prominent rumor over the last few months that “Hilton was taking the Ducor” but I'm not convinced as there's not even the slightest official hint of that, I am not even certain that a major hotel brand like Hilton would even really be in the business of taking over a decrepit property, especially in a peripheral frontier market, more common nowadays would be for a hotel chain to agree to manage a hotel as one of the later steps in a project. I should note that there is already a Hilton in Liberia: The Hilton Garden Inn, at the airport in Liberia, Costa Rica.

Building of the Month: NASSCORP Multi-Purpose Complex

 ©Matthew Jones

Although the NASSCORP Building has been featured on the M2M Architectural Tour for many years, as it has been under construction since April 2009 (and thus almost as long as I have been going to Monrovia), it made the front pages this month as the technicolor behemoth was officially opened by President Sirleaf just two weeks ago, over five years after groundbreaking. Although construction does take a much slower pace in the developing world, it is still astonishing just how slow the progress can be.

 ©Matthew Jones

Not to repeat too heavily on what I've already written on the Architectural Tour about the landmark building, I just want to emphasize that this tremendous and unusual building has a warm spot in my heart for several reasons. Firstly, the architect, Sylvanus O'Connor, is someone I consider to be a personal friend, having worked with him professionally during my first stint in Liberia in 2008-2009, when the NASSCORP building had only just taken shape on the drawing boards of O'Connor's firm, AEP Consultants, which is located on Front Street in Monrovia.

An early computer rendering. 

Most of the major elements remained intact throughout construction.

Sylvanus is a talented and increasingly prolific designer. NASSCORP embodies much of what is prominent in O'Connor's singular style: the ebullience of its arrangements, and the flamboyance of its post-modern costuming. Like O'Connor's earlier landmark, the LBDI headquarters at 9th Street and Tubman Boulevard, the NASSCORP employs semi-classical elements but articulates a thoroughly contemporary form and finish.

Reposted from the excellent Liberian journalist blog Sengbeh.Wordpress.com from

his article about the dedication.

These gestures are only more pronounced in the NASSCORP, which is a larger building, much more prominently situated on one of Liberia's most important road crossings, ELWA Junction. It could only be unmissable if it was another standard commercial building seen thrown up in this city: hulking, heavy, and hardly windowed.  Instead, it literally glistens in a bold employment of multi-colored Alubond panels, which sparkle in a rainbow of fluorescence not unlike the oil-slicked puddles arrayed on the road out front. The effect is luminous, and a still-rare but increasingly-common option to present a shimmering, glass-covered façade more like a curtain-wall of an office tower than another darkened edifice of crude cement.

From the Nasscorp website

The candyland effect of all this color greatly softens the substantial dimensions of the structure, which is further assisted by three major formal gestures: a pair of bulbous round turrets, bridged by a soaring lobby space, which together form the tower section of the complex, and a concave curtain which connects to a thin, missile-like clock tower, all planted on a colonnaded base meeting the street, providing a transformationally urban front to what is, after all, one the country's primary traffic crossings.

Nasscorp Building in early construction, March 2010 ©Matthew Jones

This setting is a chief reason to celebrate the complex. Monrovia, stretched out over a ten-mile-long peninsula, suffers desperately from traffic congestion, as thousands of workers drive from the expansive eastern suburbs into the Central business district daily, at the western end of the Mesurado landmass. The ELWA section of Paynesville, already the gateway to Tubman Boulevard, would be a natural second commercial center for the metropolitan area. This building is the most significant step toward formally establishing that as a planning goal to date.

©Matthew Jones

Remarkable as the architecture is, its significance is not limited to the design. That a government agency raised the $11 million in project funds from its own reserves, and used almost exclusively Liberian firms, for a commercial project that aims to safeguard public pension funds, is itself remarkable.  Quoting from the remarks of NASSCORP director van Ballmoos during the dedication ceremony:

This edifice is symbolic not only because of the potential to generate revenue; not because of its attractiveness and picturesque appearance from any section of Paynesville; not only because it transforms the landscape of the city; not because of its magnificence or its towering façade over other businesses in the area, but because it signals another achievement in the reconstruction and development of the nation.

Regardless of the appeal of its appearance, few buildings have the visual, commercial, spatial, social, political, and patriotic impact of the NASSCORP building, and for those reasons, it deserves note, respect, and even acclaim.

A Pessimist's Response to Bill Gates

I am not a scholar nor an expert on aid, and actually find that debate tired and dull. Despite living and working in Liberia, I have not paid much attention to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Health, women's issues, diseases, and the other topics foremost in the Gates Foundation's efforts are probably the furthest outside of my orbit of familiarity and knowledge. My impression is that this type of work is both effective, and has seen enormous and commendable results in eradicating global epidemics and improving conditions for the world's poorest.

So, I was only half-aware that the couple issued a widely-distrubuted annual letter, so this year was the first time I read it.

What I read surprised me, and predominantly not for very positive reasons. The letter sets out to debunk several “Myths” about aid and development work that Bill and Melinda frequently encounter, which they find variously frustrating, baffling, and/or false.  As the letter begins, “By almost any measure, the world better than it has ever been,” and they feel anyone who thinks otherwise is misinformed and pessimistic.

I think I might be one of the people Gates is talking about, although I would qualify the label Those Who Think The World Is Getting Worse, more eagerly accepting an invitation into the club of Those That Are Worried That The World Might Run Out of Time Before Solving Civilization-Threatening Problems.

So, although I am no Chris Blattman, much less a Bill Easterly, I am writing this brief response to Mr. Gates Annual letter, not only as someone who may be a bit pessimistic about the world, but also as a reader surprised by the way the letter's arguments were framed, or more precisely, how the “myths” it calls out were characterized, and what evidence was used to refute them.

I don’t actually believe any of the myths that the letter seeks to debunk, but I do think the way the letter’s arguments are framed suggests a false choice between Believing the World Is Getting Worse and Supporting the Eradication of Extreme Poverty and Disease. It’s actually possible to both worry that many of the world’s problems may prove insurmountable, and being in favor of eradicating extreme poverty and disease as quickly as possible. In fact, it’s logical that one of the problem’s that pessimists are impatient about it’s the progress in alleviating extreme poverty.

According to the World Bank’s statistics from 2011, and excluding mainland China, the world’s poverty rate has only decrease by 10% from 1981 to 2005, with well more than a billion people in the world living on less than $1.25 per day, and the absolute number of people in abject poverty holding stubbornly steady for decades, as the world’s population has burgeoned. This is not just a problem in the least-developed world, by the way the total population of poor people in our own United States is at an all-time high. So there’s not very much to feel overly proud about.

Not too far into the letter, I was floored by the incorporation of juxtaposed pictures of Mexico City, Shanghai and Nairobi as proof of humanity’s progress. “These photos illustrate a powerful story: The global picture of poverty has been completely redrawn in my lifetime,” the letter states.

This statement may be true, but not in the way Gates intends it, I think: the concentration of wealth into a constellation of cosmopolitan enclaves does demonstrate a radical change in the picture of global poverty, but I doubt it reflects the high summit of human achievement. A panoramic view of Nairobi, Mexico City or Shanghai in 2014 would surely encompass more poor people between the picture plane and the vanishing point of the photo than an identical aerial shot from 1980. Also, a lot of those high-rises in Nairobi were built twenty- or thirty years ago. In short, I am baffled that this before-and-after stuff made the final edits of this letter.

Also included here is a little anecdote of Bill and Melinda’s visit to Mexico City in 1987 versus more recently, and how much nicer it was and how “everyone was middle class.” This is Tom Friedman column territory. 

The next section of the letter breezes through some statistics about income per person in some of the world's poor countries and how these have skyrocketed. I am astonished both that Gates puts forth per capita GDP as a stand-alone measure of progress and that the letter so casually equates per capita GDP to per person income, much less ignores the major contemporary issue of inequality. I say, tell that to the people of Gabon.

Oh wait, Gates actually uses Gabon as a supporting example for his case. Next to Equatorial Guinea, there is hardly a worse case of a nation that is wealthy per capita but scandalously under-developed in terms of human progress. Also, Gabon also only has 1.4 million people, or roughly the population of Hawaii.

Gates also repeatedly sites Botswana, which has about 2 million people, Mauritius, a small island with less than 1.3 million, and Singapore with its 5.4 million, and Costa Rica, with about 4.5 million. It might seem impressive to alphabetically list aid-free countries, but not so much when the population of half the list adds up to metro Los Angeles. Those ruled by hereditary kleptocrats are also not impressive when trying to convince us that we are living in an era of humanity’s unquestionable zenith.

Gates does mention corruption, but again conflates terminology in a way that is unhelpful. I know there are technical definitions of official corruption that basically mean, graft, but in the global corruption debate, the world also encompasses a wide range of theft and tax evasion. This is what pessimists are concerned about: the vast shadow world of hidden billions illicitly flowing out of every countries into elite centers and offshore havens. The example Gates provides, of a bureaucrat's phony expense report, falsely narrows people’s impatience with the fight against global corruption with henny-penny knitpicking over rounding errors on a spreadsheet of a single implementation project. I’ll skip the corruption tirade for now, and also spare conjecturing on reasons why Gates might avoid talking more broadly about corruption, but I wholly do not agree with Chris Blattman and others that those illicit acts that are associated with the term corruption have only minor and discrete effects on the development of mankind.

The last part of the letter is perhaps it’s most harmful and poorly reasoned.  I certainly hope that there aren’t armies of skeptics rooting for millions of the world’s poor to die to stave off overpopulation. But even if there are, it is hardly fair to lump people worried about overpopulation into the same grouping, or to dismiss them as “Malthusian.”

In the 21^st century, it is simply irresponsible not to contemplate the absolute limit to the number of humans that this planet’s life-sustaining systems can support. While Malthus and his disciples may have gotten the number or timing wrong in the past, that doesn’t mean the general concept should be abandoned—or that we are already past the point of too many humans consuming too much of the planet’s finite resources.

Chief among the fears of the world getting worse are the questions of climate change, habitat loss, and overexploitation of the world’s natural provisions. People like me are worried about the plastic in the oceans, the loss of forests and glaciers.  Gates simply breezes through any concerns of this variety: he sees a future simply made of happier, more prosperous people, without addressing our century’s great conundrum: that only current model that we have to pull people out of poverty results in more pressure on the Earth’s natural habitats and systems.  That is an important and necessary concern.

People like me worry about humanity’s negative impact, and how we as a civilization evolve our economic and social systems past perpetuating destruction. Labelling people like me as a group who might prefer babies to starve to death is not just unhelpful but irresponsible. While I applaud the work of the Gates Foundation, and I am glad for their strong advocacy, this letter ignored more issues than it addressed, and invented more myths than it disproved.

Employment and Survival

The on-going pehn-pehn ban is causing a confused situation in Monrovia. As referenced in a blog post on The Economist Baobab column filed today, just what the young motorbike drivers are supposed to do without their former source of income seems to be just one of the several major issues not being recognized in this situation, especially when many in this group may have been actors in the former conflict.

This seems like to a good time to quote from an article on remarks made by the European Commissioner for Development, Andris Piebalgs, speaking at an international youth job creation summit in London earlier this fall:

Sub-Saharan Africa’s relatively low youth unemployment rate of 3 per cent, compared with the 50 per cent in some European countries, disguised the scale of the issue… 

“Most of the jobs are in the grey or informal economy. They work to survive, or to work on their parents’ farm,” 

At the same time, their expectations were rising and many of them saw economic growth rates averaging 4.5 per cent as inadequate compared with the 10 per cent achieved by some other emerging economies.

“If these countries get a positive growth agenda, I believe they will come over the hill,” 

 “In a worst-case scenario, there would be instability, conflict between groups and a lot of refugees in all directions.”

Air Mano River Union?

A bit of a strange, and typically vague press report came out of the recent meeting between the Transport Ministers of the Mano River Union (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote D'Ivoire) that stated, in part:

The Ministers of Transport of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea have resolved to establish a common airlines to connect the three countries and ease the difficulty being experienced by inhabitants of the sub-region  because of the absence of connecting flights.    

It should be noted that presently none of these three countries has any domestic airline, unlike Ivory Coast, with its recently re-launched state carrier, Air Cote D'Ivoire. Perhaps that's why the MRU's newest and largest member state (which also does not straddle the Mano River) is not listed among the countries seeking to 'establish a common airline.'

The impracticalities of this scheme are evident: aviation anywhere is a costly endeavor; even in low-competition  Africa, continental giant Kenya Airways struggles to yield a profit. In the region, privately-backed, would-be Sierra Leonean state carrier Fly 6ix went bust with little fanfare, while news of an Arik-backed or government-back successor have gone silent.

The region remains a tiny market for commercial flights, with fewer seats departing Liberia in a week than are filled at most major airports in a quarter of a single hour. Furthermore, there is still very little need to connect the Mano River Union capitals with one another, much less for domestic flights. Since Brussels Airlines changed its schedule earlier in 2013, there has been no scheduled service between Abidjan, an urban center of 5 million, and Monrovia, just 2 hours away (Brussels airlines stops in Freetown as of last month). Likewise, Conakry and Monrovia were initially linked by Air France's service which it began in 2011, but that has now switched to a stop in Freetown. British Airways also flies to Freetown, although it doesn't have rights to drop passengers from Liberia in Sierra Leone. Despite all these widebody fights, there are still more frequencies to further-away Accra than next door Freetown.

ASKY Airlines, launched in 2009 by Ethiopian Airlines, and based out of Lomé, dominates scheduled flights across West Africa, albeit with tiny turboprops making a handful of flights a week, few of which hopscotch the Anglophone/Francophone checkerboard of West African countries. In April, a flight from Monrovia to Abidjan took 6 hours, as the only routing was on ASKY from Monrovia to Accra to Lomé, to a change of planes to reverse directions to Abidjan. This is the result of the current state of both the economics and regulations of the region, and ASKY has been successful in part because it boasts no particular national affiliation. Although national flag carriers will always be a point of pride for governments, they are expensive and impractical, especially for under-budgeted, underdeveloped countries.

Excellent Podcast: Peter Day's World of Business in Zambia

One of the best podcasts that I've heard in a long time was broadcast in two parts last month. The slightly unlikely platform for this insight into African development was Peter Day's World of Business on the BBC.

It seems precisely because Peter Day, an intelligent, experienced broadcast journalist who appears to possess no particular Africa experience and no apparent "aid/development" mindset, comes with his questions and observations without any preconceptions, that he was able to conduct such straightforward, revealing interviews.

What follows over two 20+ minute reports about the inadequate supply of power, drinking water, and transport both within Zambia and crossing its borders, as well as quick, perceptive dives into the country's rocky but stabilizing economic, political, and infrastructural scenes, and how these all interact. The interviews include the US Ambassador and the Zambian Vice President Guy Scott but many are by and large discussions with regular Zambians, from a truck driver, who can drive from South Africa in two days but has to sometimes wait five days sitting around because of transport bottlenecks, to poor people in peri-urban communities of Lusaka searching for clean drinking water.

There is also an insightful analysis of Zambia's copper mining industry, illustrating the challenges of transfer pricing, tax evasion, over-reliance on a single extractive sector with a fluctuating commodity price.

Well-worth listening to both parts of this podcast, first broadcast on 31 August and then 7 September, and available for listening online or download.

Kendeja Hotel on CNN

Another segment from CNN's recent Inside Africa report from Liberia, interviewing the new-ish GM of the RLJ Kendeja Resort & Villas, located beachside in Paynesville on the RIA Highway. The property looked good despite the cloudy weather, with the interview taking place by the pool under one of the nice thatched huts which is one of the best places in the city to eat a burger on a weekend afternoon.

While having been on the job for, as he reports, only 9 months, the GM doesn't seem like the best to have a perspective on how Liberia is changing, as he reports a shift since being on the ground in the type of visitor, from NGOs and faith-based travelers to investors and miners, in truth both groups make up the vast majority of the Kendeja's non-local clientele and have been since the resort opened in 2009.

The part where they show the on-site electricity and water treatment is also interesting.

Planet Money Podcast on Nigeria's GDP

Speaking of Podcasts, which I am a bit addicted to, in addition to the Africa Today Podcast from the BBC, which comes out 5 days a week, I also subscribe to NPR's Planet Money podcast, which features short, digestive summaries of complex economic stories in the news.

Earlier this year, Planet Money has two episodes about Nigeria and Ghana's GDP calculations. One called, When a Poor Country Gets a Whole Lot Richer, which described the re-adjustment of Nigeria's GDP calculations, moving the baseline year up and accounting for whole sectors such as mobile telephony, resulting in a radically larger GDP figure. Earlier in the year, an episode covered both Ghana's 2010 GDP readjustment as well as emerging tech sectors contributing to Nigeria's GDP reckoning.

I definitely recommend listening to the whole episode via the link above, which is quite illustrative on how GDPs are calculated and informative generally on Nigeria's economic growth, but I also was amazed to hear the episode because I had written an email to Planet Money and recommended this topic for a show. Unfortunately, no love for me in the credits, but still.

Grand Bassam: Ready for Tourists?

While preparing the posts about Françafrique earlier this month, it seemed serendipitous to hear my good friend and excellent journalist Tamasin Ford, the BBC West Africa correspondent based in Abidjan, on the BBC Africa Today podcast, filing a report about Grand Bassam, Cote D'Ivoire's original capital city.

Situated on the Atlantic Ocean, tiny Grand Bassam is about an hour southeast of Abidjan, and was the first capital of the French colony has been more recently something of the Newport, Rhode Island of Ivory Coast. As Tamasin reports, it has received UNESCO World Heritage status, but hasn't yet seen an influx of tourists. Listen to Tamasin's report on her Soundcloud page.

I happened to visit Grand Bassam in April this year, while visiting Tamasin and her boyfriend in Abidjan. Upon arriving from the city, we first went to a decent beachfront hotel for lunch. The beach was busy and the hotel was lively, although I didn't see that many foreigners; the majority of people seemed to be West African.

The three of us strolled to find the Vieux Carré after lunch. It was a bit hard to find, as there were no street signs or maps, and few wayfinding aides for the interested visitor. We experienced one of those strange sensations when visiting a foreign city, that particular disorientation when you have no idea if you've found the center of town or if you're on the outskirts, looking for something else.

Like several other colonial historic districts that I've visited in West Africa, Grand Bassam in its current, dilapidated condition, offers the visitors a rare chance to get up close to the architecture in its on-reconstructed state. Its amazing to be able to walk in these old buildings without restriction, such as the old railway station, below:

However, the bigger aspect is also the more negative: I was disappointed not so much at the sorry condition of the historic buildings, but it was obvious that several had already disappeared, and even the better examples that still stood, there was no way of learning more about them, such as the case with the magnificent example at the top of this post. The old center was interrupted by new construction, as would be expected in an inhabited district; some was more "contextual than others." In the bones of some of the older structures, the possibility for a refurbished, tourist-oriented destination seemed possible: fixing up a few for restaurants, cafés and small guest houses. Certainly sufficient crowds were coming to the area, as the beaches just ten minutes away were full of weekenders.

I am not familiar with what expertise or assistance UNESCO provides its designates, or whether a master plan or other aide is coming Grand Bassam's way. But there is a lot of work to be done to capture the potential of this historic city as a place for visitors, and much like the historic architecture of Liberia, as time passes, less and less of the older buildings are left standing.

All photos ©2013 Mathew M. Jones

The Wealth of Liberia

To-day, businessmen and investors from all parts of the world have discovered the commercial and industrial potential that is the Wealth of Liberia"

Big thanks to Twitter bud Chris Carnel for immediately alerting me to this YouTube posting from Pepperbird Studios: a restoration of a c.1974 newsreel on Liberia, released to Yor-El Francis of Pepperbird from the Tolbert family's private collection. 

Every once in a while a vintage film or photo surfaces which embodies this blog better than a thousand word post. This grainy, colorful, 22-minute archival gem seems tailor-made for this blog, starting off with a Swissair DC-8 landing at Robertsfield, and from there launching right into a sightseeing tour of the landmark buildings of central Monrovia, most of them barely 10 years old at the time. It almost recalls this blog's Architectural Tour of third of a century later. 

Monrovia reflected in a graceful cultural heritage, but a city, as modern as To-day... Buildings steeped in the traditions of Liberia's rich history...Building reflecting the country's promise of a rich future. As with the imposing Executive Mansion, home of the country's president, William R. Tolbert...Buildings that reflect the civic dignity of the city, its commerce and industry... For the well-being of its people, the JF Kennedy Memorial Hospital..The renown Ducor Intercontinental Hotel also looks out to one of the islands first sighted by those early settlers, 150 years ago.

Its a glowing overview of the Camelot that was Late Classic Liberia wonder-story, the High-Tolbertian boom of Rally Time, raw commodity exporting, rapid industrialization, all narrated in an infallibly clipped mid-Atlantic accent, blaring trumpets heralding the excitement of an economy on the move in between the frenetic reporting. Act One is made up of several minutes of luscious street scenes of bustling mid-1970s Monrovia, looking spotless and state-of-the-art: leafy Broad Street lined with fine-looking buildings, all recognizable today.

There's current no information about who the customers for the film-making were, but presumably this was a governmental commission, although the Tolbert family's now-somewhat infamous Mesurado Group of Companies features more than prominently throughout the feature, almost to the point where the film becomes indistinguishable as a promotion of the conglomerate or of the country itself. In those days, as in other times, investing in the Liberian economy meant investing in, or at least closely alongside, prominent and elite families. 

That contentious issue aside, the film spends a good deal of time noting many of the government programs aimed at assisting the general population, in skills training, employment and the advancement of agriculture through higher education twinned with research and development. Tobacco, processed crepe and latex rubber, cocoa, coffee and timber seem to pour out of the Liberian hinterlands and through the humming, orderly ports of Buchanan, Greenville, Harper, and of course the Freeport. It's undeniably impressive. 

There are also some delightful scenes of Swissair's glass-fronted ticket office in the Palm Hotel, at the corner of Broad and Randall Streets, as well as the busy Air Liberia office, whose location was presumably on Broad Street as well, but this is a new one for me. Later in the film, the Wings of the Pepperbird are shown linking the bustling port of Buchanan and to the industrial hive of Mount Nimba to Spriggs Payne.

The entire film is quite astonishing. In its economic overview, a sequence of scenes breeze through factories and finishing lines for cigarettes and soap, paint and packaged seafood, window frames and wood products, none of which exist 39 year later. Only Cemenco is recognizeable, although the legacy of Parker Paint and others live on in place names. Likewise lost to war and history are the refining capacity of the Liberia Petroleum Refining Company. 

 Outside of the industrial zones, the Agricultural educational farms decentralized in Virginia, Lofa, and Grand Bassa, as well as the Liberia Feed Mill Company, provide a quasi-statal architecture of agricultural advancement, with a goal of not only building export volumes, but becoming self-sufficient in rice production. The Liberia Produce Marketing Corporation, like so many of these ventures, has since ceased to exist. Even these structures and facilities have disappeared. 

In contrast, the gleaming towers of commerce, culture and industry are all recognizable, standing today either as shabby shadows of their former selves, albeit serving the exact same purpose as they did originally (the Masonic Temple, Chase Manhattan Plaza, Centennial Pavilion, the Executive Pavilion, the Executive Mansion, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Finance, Monrovia City Hall, JFK Hospital) or standing as shameful shells of once-boastful monuments, like the E.J. Roye Building and the Ducor Hotel. 

Indeed, the early shot of businessmen arriving at Robertsfield almost exactly matches the picture on RIA's Wikipedia page: the airport's facility is the same building today as it was in those days. 

The entire feature is an amazing gem for Liberiophiles and history buffs. It's entirely preciously-rare footage of Liberia's golden era, from the sunny scenes of the new Gardnersville and Amical Cabral housing estate to the incredible breadth of Liberia's industrial facilities. Of course, the film is painfully bittersweet, as it speaks of the Wealth of the Future and Progress, barely five years before President Tolbert was assassinated in the Executive Mansion, the opening violence in a horror which erased every inch of Liberia's progress, much of which, astoundingly, has yet to return.