True Whig Party
The True Whig Party , also known as the Liberian Whig Party , is a right-wing conservative political party founded in 1869, making it the oldest and most traditional party in Liberia .
From 1878 until the coup by Samuel K. Doe in 1980, it was the only legal party in Liberia - thus Liberia was the first official one-party state in the world. The party's ideology was originally influenced by the American Whig Party .
The party was founded in the township of Clay-Ashland in 1869 .
She ruled a society in which only the settlers who had come from North America and their descendants were citizens with the right to vote, and she often collaborated with the Masonic Order. The party supported a system of forced labor . In 1930 the Fernando Po scandal shook the power of the Ameriko-Liberians. With the toleration and assistance of the Liberian government, traffickers sold young people from the Liberian hinterland as slave labor to the owners of cocoa plantations on Fernando Póo (now Bioko in Equatorial Guinea ), which led to a five-year boycott of Liberia by the USA and Great Britain . Nevertheless, the western world saw the party as a stabilizing force and invested in the country that was ruled by William Tubman from 1944 to 1971 .
The party lost influence after William Tolbert , Tubman's successor, was killed by opponents of oppression and corruption in April 1980 . After that, the former opposition suppressed the True Whig Party. A large majority of its members and supporters then left the party, which continues to exist as a small party.
The current chairman is the civil rights activist Jeffrey Harmon, who lives in exile in Philadelphia (USA). He is (also) a graduate of the University of Liberia and, as a political scientist, has participated in numerous symposia on the reconstruction of Liberia.
The party participated in the Liberian elections in 2005 as part of the coalition for the transformation of Liberia .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kevin Shillington, Encyclopedia of African History , 2005
- ↑ Donald A. Ranard, "Liberians: An Introduction to their History and Culture" ( Memento of the original from June 25, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Center for Applied Linguistics, April 2005
- ↑ US Department of State (Ed.): Self Study Guide for Liberia . Washington DC 2003, The Early Twentieth Century, p. 12–13 ( full text [PDF; 1.4 MB ]).
- ^ Symposium Speakers Bios. In: Afrivcan Refuges online portal. Retrieved December 20, 2010 .
