Liberia: A Nation Finally Writes its Own Story

The Historical Society of Liberia has launched a 24-volume Presidents Biography Series — one book for every Liberian head of state since 1848. The first volume, on Edwin Barclay, is out now, with a dozen more presidents already assigned to Liberian authors and manuscripts due through 2028.

BOOK REVIEW: The Presidents Biography Series (Historical Society of Liberia)
Volume One: Edwin Barclay, by Anthony Barclay

Rodney D. Sieh, [email protected]

Monrovia – For a country that has produced twenty-four heads of state since 1848 — more, by the Historical Society of Liberia’s own reckoning, than any other African nation can claim — it is a strange fact that so few of them have ever had a book written about their lives. That gap is now being closed, one volume at a time, and the opening entry in the new Presidents Biography Series suggests the wait may have been worth it.

The series, launched by the Historical Society of Liberia, aims for twenty-four volumes in all, one for every president from Joseph Jenkins Roberts to the present day. Five biographies and their authors have already been announced, and a dozen more writers have signed on to cover another thirteen presidents, with manuscripts due through 2028. Every author on the list is Liberian — a deliberate choice, and the right one.
Volume One takes up Edwin Barclay, president from 1930 to 1944, a leader whose historical footprint has long been, in author Anthony Barclay’s own assessment, “generally sketchy and devoid of robust analysis.” The board’s foreword makes a broader claim on the same theme: that for all of Liberia’s presidents, book-length studies remain “remarkably scarce.” Reading the opening volume, one senses the series is less interested in monument-building than in the harder, more useful work of filling in blanks — treating its subject as a man to be understood rather than a name to be honored.

That instinct runs through the project’s guiding philosophy. Liberian historiography has too often been flattened into a single fault line — settler descendants versus indigenous populations — and the Society says it wants this series to resist “simplistic binaries and enduring stereotypes.” It is an ambitious ask of any single book, let alone twenty-four written by twelve-plus different hands. But if the first volume is a fair indication, the series is aiming for complexity over convenience, which is exactly what a body of work this overdue should be doing.

Two names carry particular weight behind the project. D. Elwood Dunn, a director on the Society’s board, planted the seed for this series fifteen years ago, when his three-volume 2011 collection of Liberian presidential addresses closed with a complaint that no one had yet written the biographies to go with the speeches. The Rev. Kedrick Brown, at work on a life of Joseph James Cheeseman, brings his own thread back into the story: he is the son of Mary Antoinette Brown Sherman, the first woman to head a university in Africa, to whom Dunn dedicated his 2011 volumes — a dedication Brown discovered only recently, on a library shelf at Princeton.

Whether the full series can sustain the standard set by its opening volume remains to be seen; a project spread across a dozen authors and several years will inevitably vary in voice and rigor. But the ambition itself is the story here. As Dunn puts it, the completed series “will constitute a significant contribution to the country’s historical and cultural heritage.” On the evidence of Volume One, that is not overstatement — it is overdue.

About the Author

D. Elwood Dunn is the scholar whose long-standing argument set this series in motion. A former Liberian government official, he served between 1974 and 1980 as assistant minister of foreign affairs and later as Minister of State for Presidential Affairs and chief of staff to President William R. Tolbert, Jr. He was traveling with an advance team when the April 1980 coup ended that government, and he relocated to the United States shortly after.

Dunn holds a bachelor’s degree from Cuttington College and Divinity School and a master’s and doctorate from The American University in Washington. Over a 35-year academic career, he taught at the University of Liberia, Cuttington, Seton Hall, and Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, before spending three decades at Sewanee: The University of the South, where he now holds the title of Alfred Walter Negley Professor of Political Science Emeritus. He edited the Liberian Studies Journal from 1985 to 1995 and retired from teaching in 2012.

His published work includes the 2011 three-volume collection of Liberian State of the Nation addresses, the Historical Dictionary of Liberia, and History of the Episcopal Church of Liberia Since 1980: A Sequel, along with decades of journal articles. In 2012, Liberia named him National Orator for its 165th independence anniversary. He told his own story in the 2022 memoir A Liberian Life, published by Brill. He now lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, sits on the board of the Historical Society of Liberia, and continues to consult privately on Liberian and African affairs.