"Coming Up" in Liberia's Global Village: 200 Years of Diaspora-Making in Liberia's Education Systems

• In Event: African Diasporic Theory and Practice for Educational Equity in the 21st Century

Abstract

2022 marks 200 years since the first Black Americans settled in Liberia through the American Colonization Society, a project catalyzed by New Jersey’s Robert Finley that would result in what is arguably the earliest historical site of Black American liberation. However, controversy has characterized the historical accounts of the interactions between these early settlers, known as Americo-Liberians and indigenous populations, reifying a false yet problematic settler/indigenuos binary where Americo-Liberians and in more recent years, those who have lived or been educated abroad are perceived as being of higher status (Pailey, 2016; Burrowes, 2001). Similar hierarchies are seen across the diaspora, and recent feminist theorizing has advanced an attention to the multiple and varied formations, contestations, and navigations of the African diaspora (Campt & Thomas, 2008). Little scholarship has attended to the ways in which the education of African-descended peoples across the globe operates through a rubric of anti-Blackness which flattens differences in diasporic histories and cultures thus reproducing colonialism and white supremacy (Offutt-Chaney, 2019).

Using the Liberian education systems as a case to understand the impact of multiple migrations on the development of systems that both, reproduce inequities and offer possibilities for equitable inclusion, I draw on the local Kpelle language theorization of citizenship education as “coming up” which I came across through my 2019 fieldwork as a way of understanding how local and global interactions shape youth civic and citizenship development. Drawing on agricultural processes of germination, this local theorization accounts for the broader ecological impacts of migration, both real and aspirational, on the development of youth civic capabilities including their interactions with other local and global citizens. Much as the early growth of a plant signals the success of its fruit, young people’s navigation of indigenous and international forms of education demonstrates their ability to hybridize learning out of necessity to position themselves optimally in their local contexts and potentially in international contexts. This allows them to maximize options arising out of hegemonic formations forged by 200 years of diaspora-making at home in Liberia.

Author

• Jasmine L. Blanks Jones, Johns Hopkins University