'Mississippi in Africa': The Promised Land
By IRA BERLIN

MISSISSIPPI IN AFRICA
By Alan Huffman.
328 pp. New York: Gotham Books. $27.

OF the many tragedies set in motion by the enslavement of African people in the United States, few are more sorrowful than the history of Liberia. Founded in 1816 as a refuge for black Americans by a peculiar alliance of slaveholders and abolitionists, Liberia was advertised by its proponents -- so-called colonizationists -- as a means of speeding slavery's demise and demonstrating the capacities of people of African descent; it would also renew the continent with an infusion of evangelical Christianity, American republicanism and commercial capitalism.

But from the start, the promise proved empty. The initial settlement was more a charnel house than a refuge, as ill-supplied immigrants succumbed to disease. Rather than ending slavery, Liberia became both a place of enslavement and a host to other forms of coerced labor that differed from slavery in name only. The immigrants and their offspring mercilessly exploited the indigenous African population. At the end of the 20th century, tensions between the Americo-Liberians and the local peoples exploded in a series of civil wars that killed, mutilated, exiled and impoverished hundreds of thousands. Only the most optimistic give the recent cease-fire much chance to redeem the colonizationists' original promise.