letter from Liberia
In an episode of Come Fly with Me, the BBC’s 2010 satirical fly-on-the-wall documentary set in a fictional UK airport, Ian Foot, the Chief Immigration Officer, challenges a passenger from Liberia for travelling under a forged passport. “The slight giveaway,” says Foot smugly, “is there is no such country as Liberia.”
The affronted passenger, appalled by the officer’s racism, points to Liberia on a map of West Africa and the humiliated Foot lets the visitor through.
What makes the sketch credible, adding to the humour, is widespread ignorance about the country. The name sounds like a contrived amalgam of two well-known African states: Libya and Nigeria. But, as Foot admits when he sees the map, “Oh yes, just hidden under Sierra Leone”.
In July, I travelled by road from Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. The two countries have much in common. Both nations were significantly shaped by the repatriation of formerly enslaved people from the Americas in the early-19th century – hence Freetown and Liber(ty)ia.
In addition, in the aftermath of civil war in the 1990s, both nations have grappled with political instability and face substantial challenges rebuilding their societies and institutions.
But their religious demographics are very different. Liberia is predominantly Christian (85 percent) whereas Sierra Leone is majority Muslim (77 percent).
The American Colonization Society, which brought 15,000 freed slaves to West Africa, founded Liberia as a Christian state, as most of the settlers were believers; and Christian mission organisations wasted no time evangelising the indigenous population. Liberia is, in fact, Africa’s oldest republic having declared independence from the USA in 1847 but has retained strong links ever since.
Sierra Leone, on the other hand, was a British colony until independence in 1961, but Islam arrived in the region centuries before from Fulani traders in neighbouring Guinea, taking hold of Sierra Leone’s two main ethnic groups. British efforts to spread the gospel under their rule were largely ineffective, but happily the two faiths have coexisted peacefully.
My interest in the region is with the Anglican Church. As Ghana prepares to leave the CPWA (Church of the Province of West Africa) to become its own province alongside Nigeria – by some way the largest African province in the region, in fact the whole Anglican Communion – the remaining West African dioceses in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, The Gambia and Cameroon, are valiantly establishing the necessary infrastructure to become a self-governing and self-sufficient province. They hope to be recognised as such by 2030.
However, in addition to the divergent religious demographics of the two principal countries, Sierra Leone and Liberia, there are other significant differences: two of the five are French speaking, Guinea and Cameroon, while the official language of the other three is English. And while the provincial office is in Freetown, in the middle country geographically, the archbishop is based in Guinea. And the distance from The Gambia in the west to Cameroon in the east is 3,000 kilometres. Also, differing churchmanship across the five countries is pronounced. Guinea is high church, Anglo-Catholic, whereas Liberia retains much of its American Episcopal heritage.
Yet, despite this, the six bishops (for there are two dioceses in Sierra Leone) are united in their vision to shepherd their flocks and proclaim the gospel throughout the region. On my trip I had the privilege of attending their strategic planning meeting and witnessed their commitment to each other and their mission in West Africa. Their particular focus just now is to conduct an audit of their combined physical and human assets so they can best use the resources for the glory of God. Please pray for this fledgling group as they begin this exciting yet challenging journey together.
