Air Service to Liberia, forty years ago

A smartphone photo from an African year book from about 1973, which I discovered when suddenly finding myself in the Library of the Nigerian Embassy earlier this year (which maybe could make the subject of a separate post). Monrovia was served by six African airlines, six European airlines (SAS from Scandinavia, and flew from Zürich to Monrovia on the way to Brazil. UTA is French), MEA (Middle East Airlines) from Lebanon, as well as its own domestic airline, and of course Pan American. Today it is served by nine, one of which, Delta, is leaving.

A better comparison than number of carriers would be to tally the number of weekly seats on planes departing the country; many of these 1970s flights were not on jets, and even the single isle DC-8s and B707s from New York and Europe are comparable in size to the 150-seat B737s that Kenya uses to Accra today, rather than the two-aisle wide body A330s and B767s that British Airways, Delta, Air France and Brussels use on their routes to RIA, which typically have capacity of up over 250 passengers. So the total passengers numbers may have grown, even if the number of airlines and destinations is smaller (and continues to shrink).

Note in the short section under tourism the paltry number of tourists in previous years: only 250 in 1971, rising four-fold the next year, although the fact that the address is provided as “Government Wharf, Freetown” means they mixed up this entry with Sierra Leone, so who knows.

Lastly, I didn’t know Hughes Air West was involved in Air Liberia. At times it really seems as though all of corporate America was lending a hand to Liberia in those days. I'd love to dig into the Hughes company archives and see how that partnership transpired.

It Seems Official: Delta Departing Liberia

Arriving in Atlanta from Monrovia on one plane, December 2011.

This weekend the Monrovian flying public was wracked by news reports indicating that Delta Air Lines, would be ending its services to Liberia. Delta has served Robertsfield since September 2010 with multi-week wide body flights to the U.S. via Accra, first from Atlanta, then more recently from New York-JFK.

While one of the more credible publishing houses cites credible sources in its reporting, there was initially no official word from Atlanta. Normally, news of withdrawal from markets is reported after an official press release from the airline itself, and even though FrontPage Africa has now reprinted a statement to the paper directly from Delta headquarters, the airline has made no official general public announcement.

Presuming it is 100% verified, Delta's departure at the end of August would leave Liberia with weekly service by just two intercontinental carriers, whereas in May there were multi-week options to three cities in Europe and one in the U.S. on four different global airlines. Now there will be just a pair of choices: British Airways to London-Heathrow and Brussels Airlines, which is Liberia's longest serving long-haul carrier with its Sabena-heritage going back decades. Neither of the remaining airlines, of course, offers a critical trans-Atlantic link to the United States.

Air France, which had flown twice-weekly from Paris CDG to Monrovia for over three years, stopped its service at the end of June, citing weak passenger numbers of poor revenue volume. It is likely that Air France headquarters looked not only at mostly-empty Airbuses but also its regional developments: in terms of its airline alliance and owned-carriers, it is still possible to fly to Monrovia via its network: Skyteam member Kenya Airways still flies to Monrovia via Accra, where Air France's Dutch subsidiary, KLM, takes a planeful of people to Amsterdam every single night. Likewise, Air France has been steadily upgrading its service to neighboring Abidjan, and as of this autumn will rotate in an A380 super jumbo thrice-weekly on its route from Paris, in the face of the rapid regrowth of Cote D'Ivoire, where it recently invested in the new national carrier, Air Cote D'Ivoire, which itself now flies non-stop to Monrovia several times per week. From Air France's perspective it probably makes more sense to have passengers connect in Abidjan rather than sit through a same-plane stop in Sierra Leone.

The good old days, c.2010

As for Delta, its ambitious, circa-2009 expansion plans across the African continent, from Luanda to Malabo to Nairobi, have been greatly curtailed. Visitor numbers from the U.S. to Africa peaked in 2010 have actually declined significantly in the past three years (I was shocked to learn: see below), and instead of spreading farther Delta has withdrawn from markets in the face of low passenger numbers, or security concerns: Monrovia joins an forlorn crowd of Cape Town, Cairo, and Abuja, have all fallen off Delta's map since 2009.

In looking at the last five cities those reductions left on Delta's African route network, it is amazing that tiny Monrovia has lasted as long as it has when compared to much larger, more important cities: Accra, Dakar, Lagos, and Johannesburg.

In fact, this is not the first time that I've remarked that it is astonishing that Delta actually started flying to Monrovia at all, much less flying past much bigger markets like Casablanca to do so, and it surely can be understood that passenger numbers do not justify what is surely a high-cost operation, in terms of security and crew management alone for such a small, distant destination. Ultimately, the Monrovia flying public is just too small for a three-times per week wide body to JFK.

Slower economic growth, most notably the still-lengthening trough between the frenzied exploration phase of extractive projects and the revenue-generating production phase of most of them, and of course Ebola have all surely contributed to a deterioration in passenger numbers. Most ironically, an improving socio-political situation has surely meant a decline in NGO activity (do such statistics exist?) which means fewer World Bank suits in the front and fewer save-the-world backpackers in the back of the planes.

Delta's arrival to Liberia in September 2010 was one of the high-water marks of Liberia's post war redevelopment; the first time since Pan Am departed in 1986 that an American commercial passenger plane scheduled service to Liberia. This blog has been progressively running a series of "Flying to Liberia: Its Getting Easier" posts over the years. Now that situation is rapidly retrograding.

Ten Years since A Continent for the Taking

Lacking refugee camps or any other appropriate shelter, Monrovia's huge internally displaced population took up residence in the gutted and bombed-out shells of what had been a once-proud city's most prestigious addresses. Somehow, the entire fron façade of the massive, boxy structure of the Libyan-built Foreign Ministry, for example, had been neatly sheared off in the artillery duels between the Nigerians and Taylor's fighters during one of the rebel leader's attempts to capture Monrovia. And squatters now used the ministry's offices as overcrowded apartments, seeming to pay no mind to the fact that their whole lives were on display to the passersby on one of Monrovia's busiest avenues.  

 

This same gritty resourcefulness was at work at the Intercontinental Hotel, once a majestic skyscraper that stood on the city's highest ground like an exclamation point, announcing the cosmopolitan pretensions of the old Americo-Liberian elite... Like nearly every other monument to the Americo-Liberians, the Intercontinental Hotel had been shattered and left to rot in the moldy damp of Liberia's persistent tropical rains.

Howard French's description of mid-1990s Monrovia, from his landmark chronicle of his journalistic journeys across Africa: A Continent for the Taking was published ten years ago this spring. The book contained several photographs of Monrovia from that time, including the rare shot of the Foreign Ministry, a skeletal shell on a treeless forecourt, astonishingly contrasting with the building of today. Although the historical events accounted in the book are now fading further into the past, the book is still highly recommended reading for that very same reason.

Not only does this past June mark ten years since this release of the book, but French, who since his years as an African correspondent has now spent much of his time in, and become equally expert on, China, has a new work out about Africa, China's Second Continent, which was reviewed favorably by no less of an authority than Stephen Ellis. On the summer reading list.

Visual Artist Makes Monrovia Animations

French “Visual Artist” François Beaurain has been mining the landscape of this city for at least the past year for photographic projects. Most recently, his animated GIFs on Monrovia, a series he calls Monrovia Animated, have been tossing around the internet for the past few weeks, and finally bubbled to the surface on Fast Company Design, in the slightly-awkwardly titled “Slums of Liberia Spring to Life in these Animated GIFs.” Quoting from FastCo's post:

In his GIFs, Beaurain juxtaposes the static dilapidation of the impoverished capitol [sic] with the colorful and repetitive energy of its citizens, turning them into "a piece of the conveyor belt that animates the city."

Many of Beaurain's GIFs were captured at the ramshackle Ducor Palace Hotel. Once one of the few five-star hotels in Africa [sic], it was closed before the Liberian Civil War, and has been rotting ever since. Beaurain has used the hotel's environs, ravaged by time though they may be, to set into relief the vibrancy and vitality of his subjects.

I actually think some of those that do not take place in the Ducor, and do take place in "the Slums of Liberia" are the most interesting, particularly #068 Monrovia Waterfall (above) and #45 Beauty Salon, with its simple, brilliant gesture of the mis-synced mirror image. I love the simple moment captured in #057, Swept Out (below); so much truth in those few seconds of action, as opposed to the more choreographic attempts. 

As for the use of the Ducor itself, the project is most successful when brightly-dressed, versatile young bodies are moving expertly across the dilapidated spaces (#026), especially the several that emphasize the boundaries of the architectural gestures, such as those that employ the hotel's massive, circular porte-cochere (#34, 36, & 38). 

In terms of how the art relates to Liberia itself, yet another visual co-option of the abandoned Ducor Hotel to intrigue an artistic audience is growing tired from overuse. But at least this newest attempt is expertly executed, and worth checking out. 

A Far West, A Mushroom City

I think I bought these flashcards on eBay a couple years ago. Printed in Italy in 1978-79, they must be part of a larger set of fast-fact cards on places around the world. They would suggest something educational, although in reading the short summary on the back suggests that either these were for an adult audience in the pre-digital age or that pupils from thirty years ago were under a much higher expectation for reading comprehension than would be the case today—with terminology like “autochthonous peoples” and “insalubrious districts” casually included the explanatory text. 

The card presents a dynamically industrializing state, with the orderly and ultramodern Freeport on the front, and much of the back discussing trade and economics. The tabulation of figures is also remarkable: Liberia exported 250 million dollars worth of goods in that year, 90% of which was iron and rubber, or around 800 million dollars in 2013 inflation adjustment. 

As mentioned in a post from a few months back, 2010's figure was 823 million dollars, although a third of this was the offshore ship registry. The whole country had only 1.2 million people; Monrovia only 180,000. There are probably more than 1.2 million people in greater Monrovia today. My favorite sentence, unquestionably, is “…Monrovia, which until then had looked like a Western film city with twisted wooden posts, developed and acquired one of the finest ports of West Africa, which became a free port.” Great sentence, although I cannot imagine that the unfamiliar reader would be able to understand the connection between a wild west film set and pre-modern Monrovia. Although this was enough for the front of the card to declare Liberia “An African ‘Far West.’”

The card for Abidjan is perhaps even more fascinating. First, the image itself is so banal as to be mesmerizing; it seems to be calling attention to how remarkable such an ordinary scene of an office building parking lot was in sub-Saharan Africa before 1980. The back caption states that the block is “the Ivory Coast data-processing centre at Abidjan.”

The remainder of the back text is mostly devoted to an unusual description of Abidjan's socio-economic  “hierarchy” —the Europeans concentrated in the more attractive districts of Plateau, Cocody and Marcory, the industrial zone in Petit-Bassam. Then there are the majority-African districts: Adhamé, Koumassi— “high-rise towers of rented flats,” an intriguing image; and then “the ‘areas of spontaneous settlement,’ or shanty-towns.” 

Then: “as fast as these insalubrious districts are renovated to clear them of the slums, new ones spring up alongside to house the influx of immigrants from Upper Volta, Mali, Nigeria, etc.” The echo of an earlier, imperially-sactioned racism informs a modern sociological assessment. The final two paragraphs summarize the economic sectors in almanac form. “Abidjan really is a mushroom city,” it declares. 

These cards not only recall the pre-decline era of post-independence, when Africa hummed with progress and industrialization; for me they also remind me of early childhood memories, flipping open the family Atlas or taking down a volume from the Encyclopedia set, to look up a distant, exotic city or country, described in a handful of paragraphs. The brief, essential words conjured the cityscapes in my mind: “a tourist complex on the lagoon,” —what would a ten year old American kid see? Rare was the encyclopedia image of an African city in those days, and even if the entry had an illustration, it was but one small photograph in the decades before Google image search. It was left to interpretation, and the imagination.

The other Monrovias

Driving across the US for the holidays, I happened to pass a small town in central Indiana: Monrovia. More than 5,000 miles across the planet from the capital of Liberia, my journey to my brother's house happens to bring me to the exit of this little spot outside of Indianapolis.

It's not the only, nor the largest, Monrovia in the United States, of course. That would be Monrovia, California, a city of about 35,000 in Los Angeles county. It was named for an early California rancher/railroad real estate speculator named Monroe, and it especially prominent because it is home to several well-known companies such as Naked Juice drinks company and the corporate headquarters of the  beloved health food grocery store chain Trader Joe’s. There's also a Monrovia in Maryland, close to one of the main concentrations of Liberians in the diaspora around suburban Washington, but its not officially incorporated.

I just image little school kids in these towns' public schools, learning about the namesake capital city in a sweltering equatorial country in far-off Africa.

New German Ambassador presents Letters of Credence

In early September, the headline read, "President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has received the Letters of Credence of the new Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Federal Republic of Germany to Liberia, His Excellency Ralph Timmermann."

It is surprisingly common to read articles in the local press with this grandiose sentence as the title or lede, "President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has received the Letters of Credence of the new Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of..." As there are actually quite a number of countries which have formal diplomatic relations with Liberia. However, as mentioned in a previous post from earlier this week, the majority of these diplomats are stationed in Abidjan (for most Francophone countries) or Accra (for many Anglophone countries) or even as far away as Abuja (for many non-African countries). 

Not so for Germany, however. I am not sure if Germany ever officially or permanently closed their embassy at any point during the war, which would make it the only country besides the US, and the only European country, with such a dedicated diplomatic presence in Liberia. 

This is not a recent development, either. It is an astonishing fact to contemplate that Liberia technically is older than Germany as a modern country. There is no better illustration of this fascinating anachronism than to realize that the diplomatic ties between the Republic of Liberia and a German-speaking government was not arranged with Berlin or even Bonn, but the official recognition of Liberia's independence by the Free and Hanseatic Cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, which today are only constituent states of the Bundesrepublik, but in the mid-19th century more directly resembled the medieval  free states of the Hanseatic league. 

Amazingly, this official diplomatic recognition, dating to 1855, predates Liberia's formal recognition by the United States by seven years, when in President Lincoln's administration, the tiny republic was recognized by America. Apparently the thought of a black diplomat in Washington was one of the main sticking points, and the recognition of both Haiti and Liberia was formalized on the same day, in the absence of objecting southern politicians. 

The German ports' entreaty was not entirely one of enlightened liberialism, however. The trading states were jostling for control of the burgeoning sea trade along the West African coast against other European powers. Not too give too much history in a single post, but this commercial trade, especially from German and Dutch merchants, was vital to the early survival of the fledgling Liberian republic. 

In the early-to-mid 20th century, the largest non-African populations in Liberia were northern European merchants, and Monrovia was a regular stop on the Bremen-Afrika merchant line, which also extended as far south as the Belgian Congo. Germany's commercial might in Liberia would continue through the golden era of Liberia's Open Door boom, as the German-operated Bong Mines iron ore operation was a cornerstone of Liberia's export-driven economy from its first development in 1958. 

The importance of Liberia to Germany is perhaps best reflected in the Federal Republic's sprawling, gorgeous embassy campus in Congo Town, which includes a series of handsome modernist blocks and residential villas among landscaped grounds stretching down to the ocean. I've been a few times for parties and other occasions but never asked to take photographs inside to add to the architectural tour. 

Building of the Month: Old Spanish Embassy, Monrovia

Keeping with the Embassy theme from yesterday's post, for the Building of the Month I thought I'd nominate an embassy that is one of many in the city that ceased to exist in during the war (really all except for the US Embassy closed), and one that sadly has not re-opened its diplomatic mission, even ten years after the end of the conflict. 

Spanish Embassy, without so much as a wooden fence. Flag flying at right. Date unknown.

The Kingdom of Spain, like all major European nations, had a consular legation in Monrovia. The Spanish Embassy was not part of the Embassy Row of Mamba Point, which had the American, British, Dutch, and French Embassies for decades. Yet the Spaniards had a seafront setting that was as equally dramatic as any clifftop compound in the city. 

The Spanish Embassy is at the center of the photograph, below and left of the Executive Mansion. c.1970

Tucked behind the Executive Mansion grounds, and possibly even predating its construction, the Spanish Embassy was at the end of a cul-de-sac off Redemption Road which to this day doesn't specifically have a name. A number of grand oceanfront residential mansions were built here from at least the 1950s onwards. 

Viewed from the beach in this washed-out photo, c.1965. 

The Executive Mansion, possibly under construction, is in the background.

As the last house on this lane, the house that acted as the Spanish mission is particularly recognizable for its curving, cantilevered gallery, almost looking like a turreted tower jutting out toward the sea. 

View of the Executive Mansion from Redemption Road, 2012, showing the vacant 

Spanish Embassy as the last building on the right. 

Even before the war, some of these private homes were given over to government agencies, and today this area houses the Liberia chapter of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (LEITI), and the Liberia copyright office, and at time some other governmental offices. 

Post-war map of Monrovia, c.1999, showing the old locations of the 

Kingdom of Spain Embassy, as well as the Swedish and PR China Embassies. 

More recently, this quiet corner of the central city has been buzzing with the recent opening of the grand Angler's Bar and Restaurant, which vies for the title of Monrovia's finest eating establishment. Sadly, the erstwhile Iberian embassy has yet to be refurbished, although it is still standing prominently above the beach. As mentioned a few years ago, Monrovia hosts an honorary Spanish consulate on Broad Street at the KLM/Air France/Kenya Airways ticket office.

When Swissair flew to Monrovia

The prominence of Swissair in the opening scenes of the remarkable Wealth of Liberia, which I posted about last, reminded me that some photos of Swissair and its ticket office have been posted to the Liberia 77 website.

As seen in the film, the Swissair ticket office was located in the heart of the city, at the corner of Broad and Randall Streets, in what then, remarkably as now, was called the Palm Hotel. These two photos are dated by the anonymous uploader as 1983 and 1984, which show the later Swissair paint job and a strikingly modern, glazed-wall storefront:

An interesting aside is a black and white press photo, posted earlier on Liberia 77, showing the large-pane glazing of the ticket office smashed during the April 1979 rice riots, below.

As the later color photos show, despite the vandalism Swissair stuck with Liberia, fixing their glass windows, and landing at RIA several times a week. Swissair flew a Zürich-Geneva-Monrovia weekly from April 4th 1965 to 1986, occasionally linking Abidjan or Dakar as well (see first day covers below). Swissair started with DC-8 jets, as the film shows, then employed DC-10 trijets beginning in 1977, until during the last years it used a widebody A310, as seen in this historic first-day service envelopes:

The year 1986 is the same fateful date during which Pan Am finally pulled out of Monrovia and ended its management of Robertsfield. Swissair itself met its demise suddenly in 2001, when its assets were seized by creditors. An interesting detail of this bankruptcy was that Swissair had taken over the Belgian carrier Sabena, which had never stopped flying to Liberia, and was quickly transformed into SN Brussels Airlines, now just Brussels Airlines, which still has more intercontinental seats out of RIA than any other single carrier, with 4 flights per week, and maintaining a large ticket office in the former Chase Manhattan Plaza, now formally known as the Episcopal Church Plaza at Randall and Ashmun, just a two-minute walk from the old Swissair office.

Although under administration, Swissair was similarly resurrected as Swiss International Air Lines, that new carrier does not serve West Africa at all.

Pan Am's Monrovia Schedule, April 1980

I've probably done enough posting about Pan Am, but I had to include this last schedule, showing the airline's operations at Robertsfield at close to its "late-terminal" phase of its presence in Liberia. The main changes from 1973 are firstly that the flights have shifted to an all B747 schedule, the jumbo clippers had more than twice the number of seats of a B707. However, this increase in equipment capacity had come at a reduction in service: there are no longer any flights to Kinshasa, Johannesburg, Libreville, Cotonou or Douala. Only Abidjan, Accra, Lagos, and Nairobi remain beyond RIA, with Dakar being a link between JFK and Liberia on two of three weekly flights. 

The Intercontinental Hotels tie-in remains, with blue "I" symbols next to Nairobi and Abidjan, and the Ducor name at the top. 

However, what might be most remarkable about this particular schedule is that it went into effect in late April, 1980. I have heard from people who were here during that fateful month that RIA did shut down, for at least several days (many foreigners didn't even leave their houses for a week or more, and some left immediately), as the situation in the entire country was very tense and the borders were closed for some time. Its possible that this schedule never fully went into effect-- I wonder if Pan Am pilots bypassed Liberia for some time, continuing on to Accra from Dakar. 

While global economic forces were already pulling away at Pan Am's presence in Africa, surely the historic, horrible events of April 1980 made route planners on Park Avenue think twice about their African hub. Pan Am still administered RIA on behalf of the Ministry of Transport, however, and wouldn't abandon Liberia entirely until it completely canceled its last African route from New York to Nairobi via Monrovia in 1986, five years before the airline's bankruptcy. 

Emirates Coming to Robertsfield?

Since at least 2009, there has been feverish excitement that everyone's favorite megacarrier, Emirates Airline, would start flying to Liberia. Given the airline's rapid expansion, across the African continent as much as anywhere else, and the general lack of air service into the country, any hint of movement on the subject has been met with swoons of excitement, at least by the Liberian press, which don't necessarily mind passing on a hyped up announcement of not-so-much, such as when Liberia and the UAE sign an MoU discussing the concept of air service between the two countries.

Two years ago, eyes swam with daydreams of shopping malls and sand dunes in the wake of the sufficiently vague Liberian Observer headline: Emirates Airline Flies to Liberia Soon, which was actually a story about some Emirates execs coming to check out Robertsfield, just as a management team of an airline which is receiving one new A380 super jumbo jet a month surely does to every international airport in the world. This latest article was the first update on Emirates's interest in RIA since that breathless report from 2010. An interesting note on the attendance, or lack thereof on the Liberian side:

“The UAE delegation designated Emirates Airline, Etihad Airways, Air Arabia, RAK Airways and FlyDubai as UAE national airlines under the Agreement. The Liberian delegation will designate its airlines in due course.”

April is the Cruelest Month

The above photo is from mid-April 1979. The corner of Broad and Randall Streets, the "1st and Main" of Monrovia, which is still today the site of the Palm Hotel and is down the street from the KLM desk, but no longer boasts a swish Swissair ticket office or Panasonic showroom. The city of that morning looks modern, cosmopolitan, and affluent, but on closer inspection, a disorder is evident.

It is one of the first days after the Rice Riots, perhaps even the very next morning. The Swissair agent's glass windows are smashed away, and the debris of chaos is visible on the otherwise immaculate pavement. At least forty Liberians are dead, the first casualties in a violence which would crescendo into a great massacre of hundreds of thousands.

While travel agents would sweep up the lobbies of their plush storefronts and enjoy a few more years representing European airlines, and the Lebanese Hi-Fi salons would still find customers for the latest American, European, and Japanese electronics, the golden days of Monrovia's prosperity were coming to an end. Later that year, in June, President Tolbert would open the Hotel Africa and Unity Conference Center, and for a brief while it would seem that Monrovia was still the capital of Africa, and Liberia was still a leader among its nations.

But by the next April, Tolbert would be dead in his bedroom, burial place unknown. His cabinet, including his family members, would be tied up and shot on the beach, or never be seen again.

That would be a full decade and half before the hell of April 6th, 1996, which drowned Monrovia in an acid bath of looting, destruction, mayhem and murder, and announced the arrival of the new leader, Charles Taylor.

It would be another seven years before the chaos of April 2003, when World War III rained down on destitute, desolate Monrovia in the form of un-aimed rockets, blind grenade landings, and the deadly whistle of AK bullets whipping through the streets.

April has come to Monrovia again, full of dates which are remembered by mourning if they are thought of at all. The clouds are changing. The waves, so crisp and evenly paced in previous months, crash haphazardly on shore. The bright sand repels the tidal forces, sometimes sending them back to crash against the next onslaught, a spectacular sight that forebodes of dangerous currents for swimmers. The seasons are changing; the skies begin to dim with cloud cover, soon to darken with rain.

Photo via Liberia77

What does New Zealand have to do with Liberia?

Generally not a lot, however over the past six months, stories about New Zealand have been showing up in news alerts about Liberia, and vice versa.

The reason is the Rena, a freighter vessel which struck the Astrolabe reef off the eastern coast of New Zealand's north island on October 5th, and has been lodged their since, slowly breaking up. Details of the toxic threat of oil and other chemicals leaking into the reef, and the US$100million clean-up that followed can be found in articles from around the world.

The Greek-owned, Swiss-chartered, Filipino-crewed cargo liner is, like a large number of ships on the high-seas, Liberian-registered. Liberia has long been one of the world's leading "flags-of-convenience" which has often been a source of bad press in general as an opaque source of foreign currency for Liberia's government and an unhealthy arrangement in which the world's oceangoing operators seek the lightest regulations to register their fleets (article from 2003 when Taylor departed). I mentioned the Liberian Ship Registry back in February when talking about their shiny new building in Sinkor.

Its only worse when there is a headline-grabbing accident with a Liberian-registered vessel, such as happened when Carnival Cruise Line's megaliner the Ecstasy caught fire after leaving Miami in 1998. The footage, caught on camera by Miami news stations, broadcast images of a blackening stern with the word MONROVIA emblazoned in huge letters (see below). The only connection to Liberia at all is legal and tax paperwork, yet its yet another way that evening news watchers associate negative news events with Liberia.

In the case of the Rena, it seems there may be some actual involvement of Liberian government authorities in allowing the ship to continue on its fateful voyage across the Tasman Sea. From an Associated Press Story from the end of February:

A December investigation by the AP found that Australian authorities impounded the ship 10 weeks before the crash after finding 17 safety and maintenance violations, but that Liberian maritime authorities intervened, essentially saying the ship was safe to sail and the problems could be fixed later. It's not clear whether any of the previously identified problems played a role in the grounding.

So far, the crew and the owners have been charged, but there is no further word if Liberia could be in further trouble or exposed to cost recovery by antipodean authorities. The repetitional damage that Liberia's foreign image continues to suffer at the convenience of its international maritime registry has been inflicted once again.

Vintage Ducor Palace Hotel Luggage Label

I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of this old Ducor Palace luggage label, but I have no way to confirm it, either. I bought on eBay a while back, and it just seems fitting to share it this week, celebrating the announcement that the Ducor's refurbishment might be commencing soon.

The illustration itself is interesting, not the least because it shows two buildings, when the Ducor only ever had one (not sure if that was ever the plan-- where would they have fit a second tower?). Maybe its just an artistic device here. The big palm tree is reminiscent of the Ducor Intercontinental's seal, itself modified from the Republic of Liberia's seal. My understanding of the history is that the property was built in 1962 as the Intercontinental by Pan Am, which started the chain, and when IC pulled out around 1980 or so, the hotel became the Ducor Palace. This seems to be confirmed by the homage site to the Ducor's original architect, Neal Prince. To see an original Ducor Intercontinental brochure, here's the link again.

Although not fully faithful to the actual, single-tower structure or the circular porte-cochere, there is a great little detail on this sticker in that the J.J. Roberts monument is included at left. Nice.

TED Prize-Winner JR in Monrovia

Anonymous French graffiti artist/photographer JR, winner of the TED Prize for 2011, passed through Liberia and Sierra Leone in February of 2008. He posted several of his guerilla billboard photo portraits around Monrovia, some of which are shown in this video, such as the pool of the Ducor Hotel. Other spots included the half-sunk Old Bridge. The entire video is worth watching in its entirety is appreciate some of the kinetic optical effects that he is able to achieve on the larger scales of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and in the Kibera section of Nairobi. The artist's website has a number of images from his installations in West Africa.