By George K. Werner (formed education)
In December of 1989, shortly before Charles Taylor’s rebel incursion shattered Liberia’s fragile calm, I traveled by road from Pleebo to Monrovia. Schools had closed for the Christmas holidays, and I came to the capital to see an optometrist. It was my second visit to Monrovia. The first, I do not remember at all—I was barely two years old when my mother flew from Grand Cess to visit her sister and some of my older siblings.
This time, I came by road.
The transport bus dropped us at Waterside—dusty, crowded, alive with the festive chaos that only Monrovia can produce in December. Markets overflowed. Music competed with shouting voices. Traders, porters, passengers, and hustlers shared the same space with practiced ease. I stepped off the bus, dust clinging to my clothes, a small plastic bag in my hand holding my belongings, and a rooster my mother had given me to deliver to a relative.
Before I could fully take in the scene, a voice rang out from close by:
“Country boy in town. Look at how he crossing the street.”
I crossed the street all the same—and went home.
Home, first, was New Kru Town, where I was deeply unsettled by the living conditions of many residents. Then Lynch Street, where I stayed briefly with my brother Augustine. From there, I moved to my uncle William Toby’s house—known to many as Tugbe Nyeneh—directly across from Christ the King Parish in Gaye Town, Old Road.
It was in Gaye Town that I encountered a moment that has stayed with me ever since.
I often walked from there to Chuboh—please forgive my spelling—to see my friend McDonald Nah. One day, while I was in the boys’ quarters, a young girl came running down the stairs shouting:
“Pleebo! Our pa say you must go!”
She called me Pleebo not because she knew my name, but because she did not care to learn it. Kronnisanyon was too long. Sanyon required effort. Pleebo was easier—an entire person reduced to a place.
I did not respond. I genuinely did not understand her.
Go where?
From upstairs, I overheard her reporting to my uncle: “Pleebo can’t understand English. He ain’t want come.”
Moments later, my uncle came rushing down the stairs, urgency in his steps.
“Didn’t you get my message?” he asked.
“What message?” I replied.
“I sent for you.”
“Oh,” I said, confused. “She said, ‘our pa say you must go oo.’ I didn’t understand. Go where?”
My uncle paused, then laughed—not mockingly, but knowingly. With warmth and humor, he explained the difference between the English spoken in Monrovia and the English spoken in Grand Cess, where grammar, phonics, and enunciation mattered; where meaning was shaped carefully, not flung loosely and assumed.
It was a small lesson—but a lasting one.
That moment revealed something deeper than language. It exposed an attitude Monrovia has carried for generations: the belief that it is not merely the capital of Liberia, but Liberia itself. Its speech is assumed correct by default. Its habits are treated as the national standard. Everyone else must adjust—or be labeled slow, backward, or “country.”
Monrovia long regarded itself as the home of “book people”—the place of intelligence, learning, and refinement. Everything that came from outside the capital, everything that did not sound like it, dress like it, or move like it, was quietly judged as lesser: less educated, less polished, less worthy. Knowledge was mistaken for accent. Intelligence was confused with proximity.
Education became not a discipline of thought, but a tone of voice. In that narrow hierarchy, brilliance from the counties was discounted before it could even speak, while mediocrity from the capital passed as sophistication simply by sounding the part.
That hierarchy was not accidental; it was institutionalized. Schools like College of West Africa were built as instruments of exclusion—designed to reproduce privilege, gatekeep opportunity, and certify belonging to a narrow Monrovia elite. Education was less about expanding minds than about signaling status. In that sense, it was the missionaries—often dismissed today—who quietly disrupted the monopoly.
By forcing education beyond Monrovia, into towns and villages the capital had long ignored, they democratized learning in ways the local elite had neither the imagination nor the courage to attempt. Whatever their flaws, they understood something fundamental: a nation cannot be educated from one city alone.
Monrovia is not special. It made itself central by accumulation, not by excellence. Greedy and selfish, it pulled everything onto itself—institutions, money, opportunity, attention—so that others must come begging it, or remain trapped within it, as I did for a time.
This was not an accident. It was policy, habit, and attitude combined. Roads, budgets, schools, hospitals, and power were designed to flow inward. Once that imbalance hardened, the capital began to mistake dependency for superiority. Those who arrived seeking services were mocked for coming; those who stayed were reminded they were still outsiders.
I have lived and worked beyond Liberia. In countries like Nigeria, I have watched cities empty out at certain times—not because they are weak, but because national life is not imprisoned in the capital. People return to towns and villages, to family land and community life. Power circulates. Culture breathes. The countryside is not treated as something to escape from, but as something that sustains the nation.
That is what confidence looks like.
Monrovia clings instead. It drains its hinterland and calls the result urbanization. It hoards scarcity and calls it importance. Even its pride is thin—fragile infrastructure, unreliable water and electricity, collapsing roads, overcrowded settlements—yet the disdain persists, carried casually in language and tone, as if congestion itself were sophistication and impatience a marker of modernity. The capital’s English is not superior; it is simply louder, more careless, and more accustomed to not being questioned.
I have seen better cities. I have worked in systems where capitals coordinate rather than cannibalize, where national development is not mistaken for metropolitan accumulation. Measured against those places, Monrovia’s exceptionalism collapses under its own weight.
Liberia cannot be built around a city that must impoverish the rest of the country to feel important. A capital should organize, not dominate; serve, not siphon. A city that teaches itself to look down on its people will one day discover that it has nowhere left to stand.
I learned this long ago, dusty at Waterside, called “Pleebo” by someone who did not care to learn my name. The problem was never how I crossed the street. The problem was a capital that forgot it must one day learn to cross the country.
