Liberia breaks off relations with Germany

On 8 May 1917 Liberia, one of the two independent states of Africa, alongside Ethiopia, abandoned its neutrality and broke off relations with the German Empire. In the morning the representatives of the United States, Britain and France, together with the captain of the British cruiser Bacchante, which had arrived at Monrovia two days earlier, were received by President Daniel Edward Howard and formally advised him to take this step. The same day Secretary of State Charles D.B. King sent the acting German consul, Dopffel, a note breaking off relations and withdrawing his exequatur. Some chronicles of the war give the date as 5 May, but the American diplomatic documents point unambiguously to 8 May.

For Liberia this step was very costly. Before the war Germany had been its most important trading partner, and according to some accounts it took about three quarters of Liberia’s foreign trade. German firms operated in Monrovia and in the ports along the coast, and from 1913 a German submarine cable from Emden via Tenerife ran through Monrovia, so that the city became an important hub of German telegraph communications in West Africa. Since 1912 the indebted republic had placed its customs revenue under an international receivership, in which British, French and German receivers sat alongside the American general receiver. The Liberians also remembered, however, how in 1913 German warships had lain in their roadstead for four months and made demands after incidents on the river Cess. The war and the British blacklist paralysed trade with Germany, and with it the state’s revenue.

When in February the United States broke off relations with Germany, the government in Monrovia assured Washington that it fully shared its position and that, if Germany carried out its threat, it would hand the German representative his passport, although it had no military force with which to support the Americans. On 4 April, on the eve of the American declaration of war, Monrovia asked for protection, because there were rumours that the local Germans might take up arms. On 20 April King called together the representatives of the United States, Britain and France and announced that Liberia was exchanging neutrality for “benevolent co-operation” and would withdraw the German consul’s exequatur. The diplomats asked him to delay the announcement until they had instructions. Washington had no ship to spare, so it agreed that the British and French should, jointly with the Americans, advise Liberia to break off relations as soon as sufficient protection appeared off its coast.

It appeared on 6 May in the shape of Bacchante. That same afternoon the three Allied representatives and the cruiser’s captain agreed a programme at the American legation: to notify the consul of the rupture of relations, to search the Germans’ houses and stores and take away their arms, if necessary to support the Liberian authorities with sailors from the ship, and to remove all Germans from the country, giving them at least two weeks to settle their affairs. These proposals were put to Howard on 8 May. In his note King wrote that Liberia had long kept aloof from a conflict whose causes concerned Europe alone, but that the new German programme of submarine warfare, the sinking of unarmed ships without warning, the bombardment of undefended towns and the violation of the rights of small neutral states threatened the triumph of the principle that might stands above right. The submarines also endangered the lives of Liberians who travelled and worked on Allied and neutral ships. King recalled the threat of the German consul, who on 21 April had warned in the war bulletin he published that after victory Germany would present a bill for damages even to states “of the third and last category”. On 9 May the Liberian consul general in Baltimore, Ernest Lyon, informed Secretary of State Robert Lansing of the rupture.

The expulsion of the Germans, however, had to wait. Liberia wanted guarantees of protection against German retaliation and the lifting of British trade restrictions, and Lansing considered it unjust that a country starving for lack of trade should enter the war and get nothing in return. On 16 May Washington advised Monrovia to take no further steps for the time being. Only on 4 August 1917 did the Liberian Congress unanimously declare war on Germany, an hour after the arrival of a French warship that took the arrested Germans to France. The war reached Monrovia in April 1918, when the German submarine U-154 demanded the closure of the wireless and cable station and then shelled the town.