ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the role of personal narrative in settler-colonial situations and, in the process, problematizes the prevailing settler-colonial explanatory rubric. It shows that as former slaves and marginalized free persons of color, exiled from the land of their birth, the migrants to Liberia had a different experience from most white settlers in other locales. The settlers sailed for Liberia in 1820, and the settlements that they created would have an ambivalent relationship with the metropole throughout their existence as colonies. Far more so than most other settler-colonial situations, the endeavor in Liberia was defined by contradictions, by conflicting goals and practices. The American Colonization Society (ACS) was founded by some of the nation's most prominent political leaders, yet the US government never officially endorsed the colony. If one takes ACS rhetoric at face value, the only difference between African and American blacks was in stages of cultural development.
