Capítulo II. Marco Teórico
2.3 Aprendizaje Experiencial
2.3.1.3 Modelo de Aprendizaje y Desarrollo Cognitivo de Piaget
The interior boundaries set by treaties with Britain and France in 1885 and 1892, showing the ambiguities in their definition. As Stewart notes, ‘the map clearly shows the contradictory nature of the British and French treaties’.
Map 5. Proposed territory, 1906
A solid line demarks the interior boundaries of Liberia, although this map still only ‘represents the proposals at one stage of
negotiations between France and Liberia’. Whilst the most
imaginative of the maps, in that it is merely a proposition, it also appears the most complete, and is said to be the most geographically accurate of the maps.
If Map 1 depicts the extent of the Republic on the ground at Independence, then Map 2 shows how Liberia nonetheless remained an unbounded idea. Despite the encroachment of the British on the Republic’s north-western frontier, and the French to the south-east, Liberia was still seen to reach indefinitely into the interior. As Stewart notes, ‘no definite limits are available for the interiorward extent of Liberia on this or on many of the following maps, even though such limits are shown on the maps’ (as in Maps 4 and 5).72
Maps 3 and 4 then record the process of establishing Liberia as a bounded reality. Map 3 depicts the Republic’s north-western boundary with Sierra Leone according to the 1885 Anglo-Liberian treaty, which, as Stewart notes, ‘sets the Mannoh (Mano) River as the boundary; the left bank until the river intersects the interior boundary of Liberia, or if the river does not extend that far, a line from its farthest reaches extended in a northeasterly direction until it intersects that boundary.’ Stewart then adds: ‘The fact that there was no definite interior boundary at that time merely adds to the vagueness’.73 The result is a solid line
that begins confidently, before fading into the interior, the answer it is supposed to provide ending in a question mark. Likewise, Map 4, depicting the south-eastern boundary with France’s west African colonies, ‘tries to apply the provisions of the 1892 treaty to actuality’;74 and yet, as Stewart concludes, the result is ‘two sets of
boundary descriptions [that] do not jibe.’75
Whilst Maps 3 and 4 are an attempt to depict the bounded reality of ‘Liberia’, Map 5 is drawn as an imagined territory, proposed in 1906 during negotiations between Liberia and France. Thus the least realistic of the maps, in
72 Stewart, ‘Liberia's Boundaries: A Preliminary Study’, 'Map C'. Even after the boundaries had been
finalised, the interior of Liberia remained indefinite. In Graham Greene’s account of his 1936 walking tour through Liberia, he notes: ‘I could find only two large-scale maps for sale. One, issued by the British General Staff, quite openly confesses ignorance; there is a large white space covering the greater part of the Republic, with a few dotted lines indicating the conjectured course of rivers (incorrectly, I usually found) […]. The other map is issued by the United States War Department. There is a dashing quality about it; it shows a vigorous imagination. Where the English map is content to leave a blank space, the American in large letters fills it with the word “Cannibals”. It has no use for dotted lines and confessions of ignorance; it is so inaccurate that it would be useless, perhaps even dangerous, to follow it, though there is something Elizabethan in its imagination. “Dense Forest”; “Cannibals”: rivers which don’t exist, at any rate anywhere near where they are put; one expects to find Eldorado, two-headed men and fabulous beasts represented in little pictures in the Gola Forest.’ Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps (London: Vintage, 2002), 45-46.
73 Stewart, ‘Liberia's Boundaries: A Preliminary Study’, 'Map E'.
74 This is a reference to a treaty negotiated between Liberia and France in 1892 to settle the
question of Liberia’s south-eastern boundary.
the sense that it did not correspond to ‘Liberia’ as articulated by law, it is also the most realistic, in the sense that it comes closest to the actual lay of the land.76
Taken together this set of maps shows the high abstraction of the representational framework that was projected onto the lands and peoples of ‘Liberia’ in the attempt to consolidate the nation-state. The lines crawling across the blank page suggest an indeterminate, movable species of thing, capable of changing place without an essential change in its actual nature. At the same time, as a colonial technology, these lines were cutting deep into an actual place, reflecting and facilitating the transformation of its lands and peoples into the territory and citizens of Liberia.77 Thus as a kind of performance artwork, the map
series shows the gradual overlay of ‘Liberia’ upon the country over which it sought to extend its jurisdiction between 1846 and 1906; whilst as a work of surrealism, the maps show just how indefinite the territory remained, and how fantastic the process was of consolidating ‘Liberia’.
The fantastical nature of this process can be read in the Report of the Special Commissioner for the Demarkation of the Anglo Liberian Boundary.78 Written in
1903 as a record of the Commissioner’s expedition to map the north-western boundary set down in the 1885 treaty,79 the report reads in parts like the journal
of a man exploring the realms of a mythical country that exists in name alone, as ‘Liberia’, but which has not yet been made conscious of itself as Liberian. Throughout the report there is a striking dissonance in how the Commissioner describes the places he passes through, as a kind of future-present Republic— present in the minds of Americo-Liberians, only yet to be made present on the ground. At the same time as he describes these places as ‘our Republic’, and advises the Government to ‘lose no time in taking possession of and occupying’ them, he notes the lack of presence of the Republic there. Thus at one point, having presented the Liberian flag to some Chiefs, he notes: ‘For the first time had our flag been seen in this part of our Republic so they informed us’.80
76 Ibid, 'Map J'.
77 Compare Olivia Barr, ‘A Jurisprudential Tale of a Road, an Office, and a Triangle’, Law and
Literature, vol 27, no 2 (2015).
78Report of the Special Commissioner.
79 On the demarcation process, see also Yekutiel Gershoni, ‘The Formation of Liberia's Boundaries,
Part 2: The Demarcation Process’, Liberian Studies Journal, vol 17, no 2 (1992).
80 Ibid, 9-10. In his study of the ‘pacification of the Liberian hinterland’, Akingbade also notes how
The Americo-Liberian vision of making citizens out of the African peoples living within the envisioned territory of the Republic can also be seen in this report. At one point, on entering the town of Kailahun on the north-western frontier, the Commissioner notes that its ‘3000 or 4000 inhabitants’ were ‘kindly disposed and friendly—in a word they are nice people and will make us good citizens by and by. But the imitation must come from us.’81 This reflects the view,
shared by the government and its supporters, that the process of extending ‘Liberia’ into the interior would be uni-directional and top-down: these people would be made into our citizens.82 The sentence that follows—‘but the imitation
must come from us’—is remarkable, not only because it repeats the thought that the extension of ‘Liberia’ into the interior would be uni-directional and top-down, but because of its apparent typographical error. Presumably the Commissioner meant ‘invitation’ and not ‘imitation’, in line with the European practice of establishing authority over an African people and their land through the signature of a treaty.83 The ‘invitation’ would be to enter into a treaty with the Liberian
government, perhaps on the promise of military protection and the provision of infrastructure and schools, in return for recognising the sovereignty of Liberia and allowing the Republic to raise its flag over the town.84 But the word ‘imitation’ is
equally appropriate, pointing to the implication of such an invitation. Becoming a Liberian citizen would involve not merely a change in legal status: it would involve, by and by, becoming ‘civilised’. As the Commissioner writes early in his report, after carrying out ‘an inspection of these stalwart sons of our forest’: ‘[I was] proud to know that we had thousands of such good strong men that could be utilized as citizens, if civilized, in building up a strong commonwealth on our border and Interior.’85 Of course to ‘utilise’ means not simply to ‘use’, but to use in a way that
Americo-Liberians’, and that ‘their first awareness began when they were required to pay taxes and recruit men of their number for public works or for work on the farms of individual Americo- Liberians’. Harrison Akingbade, ‘The Pacification of the Liberian Hinterland’, Journal of Negro History, vol 79, no 3 (1994): 292-293.
81Report of the Special Commissioner, 12 (spelling ‘mistakes’ in original).
82 As it turned out, these particular people and their land would be annexed to Sierra Leone by the
British.
83 See Gershoni, ‘Liberia's Boundaries, Part 1’, 27.
84 See Report of the Special Commissioner, in particular the summary of the ‘political character’ of
the mission at 20-24. On the importance of the flag as a sign of the Republic’s dominion in the interior, see, eg, at 9-10, 13-14, 18, 20-21.
alters the object in use: it is to ‘render useful’; to ‘convert to use’.86 To make these
‘sons of the forest’ into citizens would be to make them useful to the nation-state. Not only would they make useful soldiers for the Republic, as the Commissioner anticipated, but they would also be especially useful as labour.87 However, as the
Commissioner also notes, to make these ‘hinterland peoples’ useful in these ways, first they would have to be rendered ‘civilised’, which was essentially a process of imitation, involving conversion to Christianity and a proper ‘book education’ that would not only inform their beliefs but also their dress and manners.88
If the success of metonymy is in the fusion of signifier and signified—so that a name such as ‘Liberia’ is thought to correspond with the lands and peoples it circumscribes—then key to this success is the realism of the representational framework. This does not mean the representational framework must actually correspond with the given form of its object. The opposite: as an act of articulation, giving new form to what is, the framework must be super-real. Indeed, the more surreal the framework’s articulated vision is, the more able it will be to bend its object into another form. This of course creates a dissonance between the representational framework and its object. But that is why the success of the metonym depends on the realism of the representation, which does not mean it has to be ‘actually real’, but only imagined to be real.
This is the genius of a metonym: its capacity to be simultaneously separate and inseparable from its object—inseparable in the sense that the framework and its object become all-but indistinguishable (hence the realism); separate in the sense that the two are never quite identical (hence the realism is over-laid or super-imposed, that is, surreal). Thus for the Commissioner going out to map the interior of Liberia, the task was not to describe the country ‘as is’, but to overlay the territory articulated in the treaty onto the country. As visionaries, instead of seeing an existing country, the Americo-Liberians who set out to create Liberia saw a fantasy world of primeval forests ‘heavily timbered and watered’ by ‘brooks,
86 ‘Utilize, v.’, OED Online, September 2015 (my italics).
87 I discuss this in the next section. See also Akingbade, ‘The Pacification of the Liberian Hinterland’,
279.
88 And yet, ‘the imitation must come from us’, which also points to the fact that the colonisers, rather
than the colonised, would have to be the ones to assimilate to the other. (With thanks to Jeremy Farrall for pointing this out.) Of course, this is not how the Americo-Liberian settlers saw the situation. In general, they saw themselves as the source of imitation, and not the ones who would be doing the imitating—although in the end, of course, the influence worked both ways, with both ‘colonisers’ and ‘colonised’ influencing each other.
rivulets, and creeks’ and populated by primitive ‘sons of the forests’.89 It is not that
they did not see the dissonance between their vision and what they encountered on the ground; it is just that they saw their vision as more real. After all, this was the light that would illuminate Africa’s true potential and enable its transformation.
In sum, the process of extending Liberia ‘beyond the littoral’ was meant to be a process of super-imposing the idea of Liberia over the blank space of the ‘hinterland’ to consolidate the nation-state. In the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘littoral Liberia’—the place of Americo-Liberian coastal settlements—was a place in flux, its north-western limits under pressure from the British, its south- western limits contested by the French, with both threatening to subsume the nascent Republic within their colonial empires.90 Extending Liberia ‘beyond the
littoral’ was supposed to finally settle the uncertain, contested place of ‘Liberia’ in west Africa by establishing definite boundaries and bringing the country—both lands and peoples—under its dominion. And yet, as I now turn to show, super- imposing the idea of ‘Liberia’ over the hinterland using the surrealist apparatus of the colonial legal framework did not place Liberia beyond the littoral, in the sense of settling its place in west Africa. Rather, the effect was to extend littoral Liberia into the interior. Desmond Manderson and Honni van Rijswijk describe ‘littoral spaces’ as ‘heightened and active, places of contested imaginaries’—‘an environment of flux and change par excellence’.91 Despite the attempt to settle
‘littoral Liberia’ by defining its territory and population, what had been throughout the nineteenth century a largely open and indeterminate idea, with only ‘a narrow strip squeezed in between the twin perils of land and sea’,92 would become in the
twentieth century a littoral space par excellence.
89 See notes 61 and 85 above.
90 See Gershoni, ‘Liberia's Boundaries, Part 1’; Gershoni, ‘Liberia's Boundaries, Part 2’. 91 Desmond Manderson and Honni van Rijswick, ‘Introduction to Littoral Readings:
Representations of Land and Sea in Law, Literature, and Geography’, Law and Literature, vol 27, no 2 (2015): 174. See also Desmond Manderson, Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law (Oxon:
Routledge, 2012), Chapter 10.