“The Weight of Expectations: A Chance Encounter in the Hall”
I had the pleasure of meeting Zaccheus, one of the senior security officers at our hall of residence. Zaccheus was brought to the United States in 1980 from Liberia, during what he described as the end of “a time when Liberia was sweet.” His father, then a scholarship student, had sensed that this “sweetness” masked deep structural inequality in Liberian society, where about “two percent of the population controlled the wealth” of the nation. As prominent Liberian scholar Amos Sawyer would later document, the 1970s in Liberia were characterized by stark inequality and extensive corruption among the elite, creating a devastating divide between the ruling class and ordinary citizens. For Zaccheus’s father, who was studying in the United States on scholarship, the signs of impending crisis were unmistakable. Liberia — founded in 1822 as a colony by the American Colonization Society (ACS) to resettle free African Americans and freed slaves — seemed poised for upheaval. His intuition proved...