America’s New Orleans and Africa’s Liberia Share Painful Similarities
Post-Katrina tour reminds journalist-in-exile of home

NEW ORLEANS — It might be unfair to compare New Orleans and Liberia because Liberia is an independent sovereign state located on the west coast of Africa while New Orleans is just a city in southeastern Louisiana, one of 50 states making up the great United States of America.

But for three reasons Liberia is similar to New Orleans: Both were slave states, both have suffered disasters that have shaped their futures, and both have very large black populations.

The state of Louisiana was a slave state until it seceded from the Union during the American Civil War on January 26, 1861. New Orleans was captured by federal troops on April 25, 1862.

The West African Republic of Liberia’s population of some three million is made up of a vast majority of indigenous people plus a community of descendents of Afro-American settlers who came from the United States in the mid 1880s. Most from the U.S. were freed slaves from the northeast states.

They had been household slaves or craftsmen. Many could read and write. They took control of the coastal area, largely ignoring the tribes of the interior. In 1847, the Americo-Liberians, some 3,000 in number, declared the nation independent — the only African state not to have been a European colony with the possible exception of Ethiopia, if one considers Italy’s occupation as “conquest” and not “colonization.”

Louisiana had one of the largest free black populations in the U.S. Even post-Katrina, New Orleans had a lot of that black population, about 32.5 percent. And Louisiana as a state and New Orleans, in particular, experienced a natural disaster just as Liberia experienced a man-made disaster for almost 15 years.

A Ghost Town

Our Continental Airlines Flight CO 5S landed exactly at 7:35 in the evening in Hurricane-prone New Orleans.

As I collected my luggage and passed through the terminal of the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, I wondered how New Orleans would be one year after Hurricane Katrina killed more than a thousand people and displaced more than one million.

The next morning, we toured the city with David Meeks, city editor of The Times-Picayune. We started the tour at the house that he once shared with his family. It was a typical American house which looks like a semi-mansion.

“This is where the water stopped in my house, six and a half feet high,” David showed us as we entered his house being reconstructed by a carpenter.

David said the water stayed in his house for 17 days. He lived in the Lakeview community.

	WPI's 2006 fellows tour hurricane-ravaged New Orleans with journalist David Meeks. He started the tour at his own home.
Photos by Kris Mortensen

Some parts of the city still looked like a ghost town. Most of the communities were quiet. The ruble was yet to be cleared. Some homes that were submerged had yet to be rebuilt and life in general in most parts was not as it used to be before the hurricane

Though some of David’s neighbors were fixing their houses, others remained nervous about the possibility of another hurricane.

As we visited many parts of the city, I was reminded in many ways about my country, Liberia, which went through not a natural disaster, like the one that ravaged New Orleans, but an avoidable man-made disaster that killed thousands of people and displaced about a million.

Like Liberia — a country of three and a half million people that was trying to pick up the pieces in the wake of a debilitating civil war — the state of Louisiana, with a pre-disaster population of four and a half million, was trying to pick up the pieces after Hurricane. Katrina.

The homeless in New Orleans included well over 200,000 school-age children. There were about 20,000 homeless school age children in Liberia. Colleges were opening their doors to displaced students from both places but many lacked the documents needed to substantiate their claims of being high school graduates.

There were many hurdles to overcome. Homes needed to be repaired, jobs needed to be available and everyday needs had to be met.

Albert Bass Jr. and his wife, Belva, of the Lower 9th Ward community, a predominantly black community, were very much aware of these hurdles.

“We have a nine-year-old son that we need to feed but we don’t have any money. We need water, food and shelter but there is no help,” said Belva.

New Orleans was not the state capital of Louisiana but in many aspects it looked like the Liberian capital, Monrovia.

Monrovia, named after U.S. President James Monroe, was a sad testament to the absence of progress and the impact of deliberate destruction on the nation.
Potholes, limited generator-supplied electricity and a lack of drinkable water for most inhabitants was the norm along with the omnipresent hulks of half-finished or half-destroyed and mold-encrusted buildings.

Per capita income in Liberia was just $120, down from $1,269 in 1980, and the country’s gross domestic product was below $500 million.

The total gross state product in 2003 for Louisiana was $140 billion while its per capita income was $ 26,312 or 43rd in the United States.

On every street corner I passed at night in New Orleans’ French Quarter, there were blacks (as well as the whites) with bottles of drinks in their hands singing, dancing and chilling just like residents of Monrovia were nightly doing, as if they had never experienced disaster at all.

“This is one of the ways we try to put smiles on our faces,” said a 28 year-old woman whom I met at a nightclub in New Orleans. “Katrina took away our houses but not our spirit.”

The restaurants and nightclubs remained crowded till sunrise.

The same way many people blamed power-greedy Liberian politicians for waging a senseless civil war in that West African nation, many Americans believed the flooding of metro New Orleans was an avoidable disaster.

They said the levee and canal walls failed because of human errors.

Engineering experts said the canal walls were designed and built using substandard engineering standards. Even when the situation became known to the U.S Army Corps of Engineers, the agency responsible for assisting levee boards and emergency officials before, during, and after a storm, it was decided that nothing would be done about it.

Then, on August 29, 2005, the flood walls and levees catastrophically failed throughout the metro area.

Would New Orleans regain its pre-Katrina status in America as Liberia aimed to regain its pre-war status in Africa? Only time could tell.