The Republic of Liberia is almost the smallest of West African states, its population of a million and a half in 1973 being exceeded by every state in the region save only The Gambia. Its insignificant size, coupled with its peculiar heritage as the region's only non-colonial state, sometimes give it the appearance of being insulated from its neighbours in an uneventful stability of its own. Certainly, the more dramatic events of recent West African history have passed it by. Yet the Republic of Liberia has been subject to many of the same pressures as its fellows, both externally and domestically, and the way in which it has managed them has more than a merely idiosyncratic interest.

The most salient features of the Liberian experience over the last twenty or thirty years have been political stability and economic growth. The first of these is sometimes exaggerated by a mistaken impression of instability in the ex-colonial states: of the eight states of the West African littoral from Mauretania to the Ivory Coast, only one – Sierra Leone – has had a government overthrown by violence since independence. Even so, the Liberian record is impressive. The same party, the True Whig Party, has held office continuously since 1877, its tenure unbroken by any coup or extra-constitutional succession, a record equalled by no other political party anywhere in the world. Its capacity to manage succession to high office was most recently exemplified by Vice-President Tolbert's orderly takeover on President Tubman's death in 1971.