Land of the free and land of the brave — the Liberian nation is a little America in West Africa. Monrovia is its Washington and one of the few places spared from chaos when the British and French empires collapsed. Despite all the faults of the TWP administration, from its authoritarian practices to rampant corruption, the great project has undeniably grown far from the shanty town in which it began.

Born from the minds of prominent white Americans, Monrovia was a proposal that the American Colonization Society made in response to the perceived cultural issue of freed African slaves at the time. Most of those individuals viewed racial integration as inconceivable and adopted the consensus that freedmen must return to the African continent. This idea came to fruition in 1824 after ample preparation and patronage from President James Monroe, the city's namesake. Liberia sprung from 91 original colonizers, 88 of them black Americans.

In practice, however, this attempt at repatriation only migrated the issue of ethnic tension away from America. The Kru-speaking natives saw those men of the same skin as alien intruders — they saw men who spoke the language of foreigners and were as imperialistic as any others. Predictably, the American colonists, or the Americo-Liberians as known today, also ostracized the original inhabitants mutually. When the Constitution of 1847 created the legislative framework, Monrovia became the nation's capital, and so did those who sailed to the town become the masters.

Although noticeably well-off for a West African state owing to American aid, Monrovia remains backward in its societal structure. For every extravagant palace and mansion in the metropolis, there are dozens of slums out of sight. Material wealth is a commodity for all men, but only some stay plentiful.