By Sidiki Fofana | Truth in Ink
A few days ago, a respected friend and renowned Liberian journalist, an intellectual par excellence, Sherman C Seequeh , reposted his 2017 reflection in which he credited the rise of multiparty democracy almost exclusively to the late Hon. Gabriel Baccus Matthews, the founding father of the Progressive Alliance of Liberia (PAL) and standard bearer of the United People’s Party.
I write to disagree with Sherman not in any way to diminish Matthews’ towering role in our national history, but to set the record straight. The practice of multiparty democracy in Liberia goes much further back, long before Matthews was born, and certainly before his entry into politics. To tell the story as if it began and ended with him is to do a disservice both to history and to the many Liberians who fought, bled, and sometimes died to create political space.
Liberia’s political pluralism did not begin in the 1970s. In the 19th century, the Republican Party of the lighter-skinned Americo-Liberians and the True Whig Party of the darker-skinned settlers clashed fiercely for power. Their rivalry, though often bitter, created a tradition of competitive politics that persisted until the Republicans declined after the 1870s, leaving the True Whigs in control for nearly a century. Political scientist Gus Liebenow reminds us in Liberia; The Quest for Democracy that this shift to one-party dominance was not an inevitable product of Liberian society, but a deliberate consolidation of power.
Tolbert’s Opening and Ambivalence
When President William R. Tolbert Jr. succeeded William V.S. Tubman in 1971, Liberia stood at a crossroads. The country had a restless youth population, growing urban inequality, and a rising class of educated professionals demanding a seat at the table. Unlike Tubman, who smothered opposition, Tolbert cautiously opened the political space.
In a 1975 address, Tolbert declared; “We must open the doors of government to new voices, for we cannot continue to rule a changing people with old methods” (Liberian Star, March 3, 1975). He permitted greater press freedom and tolerated civic debate. Most significantly, in January 1980, his administration approved the registration of PAL as the Progressive People’s Party (PPP) , the first legal opposition party in nearly 100 years.
But Tolbert’s openness had limits. When the rice price protest erupted on April 14, 1979, the government responded with deadly force. Forty-one people were reported killed (independent accounts say more), hundreds arrested, including Matthews and other PAL leaders. The events of April 14 exposed Tolbert’s dilemma: he wanted reform but feared losing control.
More Than One Voice
Matthews’ role cannot be overstated. He boldly told a Monrovia rally in 1978: “Liberia belongs to all Liberians, not just the True Whig Party” (PAL Manifesto, 1978).
But Matthews did not stand alone, for example there were others that included but not limited to:
- Togba-Nah Tipoteh, through MOJA, provided the intellectual framework for social justice and civic empowerment. His 1977 lecture at the University of Liberia declared: “Democracy is not given; it is demanded. And only an organized people can win it.
- Amos Sawyer published his seminal work The Emergence of Autocracy in Liberia in 1978, warning: “Liberia’s tragedy is that we personalized the state. Until we depersonalize power, we cannot democratize it.”
- Oscar J. Quiah, H. Boima Fahnbulleh Jr., Chea Cheapoo, and student leaders risked careers, endured detention, and mobilized strikes that pressured the government to act.
The Forgotten Giants Before Matthews
How do we then forget the roles of Didwho Welleh Twe, the Kru statesman who dared seek the presidency in 1951 and was hounded into exile by Tubman’s government? Or Tuan Wreh Coleman, who stood almost alone in opposing Tubman’s one-party rule when doing so meant risking everything?
And what of H. Boima Fahnbulleh Sr., who endured imprisonment under Tubman for his political convictions long before Matthews’ name entered Liberia’s political vocabulary? 
If we still insist on marking the Matthews era as the “rebirth” and not the ” birth” of multiparty democracy, then we must also remember Dr. Amos Sawyer’s historic candidacy for Mayor of Monrovia during the Tolbert administration. That election, which would have been one of the first genuinely competitive municipal contests in modern Liberia, was cancelled out of fear that the opposition could win.
These are not marginal details. They are part of the very spine of Liberia’s democratic journey. To erase them is to erase the men and women who stood when standing meant persecution.
And so we insist that sole credit to Mattew is “Misleading.”
If we choose to date the “rebirth” of multiparty democracy to the late 1970s, then to crown Matthews as the sole father is historically dishonest. Matthews and his allies supplied the fire, but the government of the day made the legal and policy decision to open the door, a decision Tubman had refused to make for decades.
As historian Carl Patrick Burrowes observed in Power and Press Freedom in Liberia, 1830–1970: “Opposition becomes meaningful only when the state allows it oxygen.” Tolbert, whatever his faults, was the first president in a century to allow that oxygen to flow, even if briefly, even if under pressure.
The Honest Record is Liberia’s multiparty democracy is not the invention of one man. It is the product of a forgotten 19th-century tradition, the courage of multiple opposition leaders, and the reluctant but decisive policy choices of a sitting government that broke a 100-year monopoly on power.
Reducing this hard-won history to the name of Gabriel Baccus Matthews alone flattens a complex struggle, erases the wounds of others, and pretends that government decisions did not matter.
Truth in Ink believes that telling history the honest way means acknowledging all its actors, the state, the street, and the scholars, so that we may learn from both their courage and their contradictions.
