Racism is evident in Liberian studies in the continued classification of the Gola and Kru-speaking people as “hunters and gathers.” That label implies placement at the lower rung of an evolutionary chain with a corresponding lack of “civilization.” But, many transnational corporations today are dependent on “hunting and gathering” timber and seafood from around the world. Why, then, are they considered more civilized that the Gola who trafficked in kola from the forest and the Kru who harvested fish from the ocean?
Despite evidence of local agriculture, pottery and iron smelting, the presence of hunting is used by racist scholars to suggest that some people living in the area of Liberia before 1820 were stuck at a “primitive” stage.
However, it is clear that hunting persisted in many parts of West Africa because wild game was plentiful and the presence of the tsetse fly inhibited the keeping of livestock. What is more, the devastating impact of slave-trading actively fueled underdevelopment.
The use of words like “fetish,” “witch,” “country devil” and countless others keep African culture trapped in a language web that portrays it as “strange,” “weird,” even “evil.” Instead of challenging this negative discourse, some Western-educated Africans argue for the continued use of those demeaning words because they are widely used by uneducated Africans.
In truth, uneducated Africans copied those pejorative words from their educated brethren of an earlier era who copied them from Western missionaries and “scholars.” Instead of “blaming the victims,” we, educated Africans, must accept responsibility for fixing the problem, since we helped to legitimize this language of racial inferiority.