George Henry Andrews

George Henry Andrews (1926 – September 3, 1997), former Liberian sports journalist and later minister of Tourism and Cultural Affairs of Liberia. He presided over a pivotal election in the 1990s.

Andrews was born in Cape Palmas, Liberia in 1926., His father, Lawrence Andrews, had impregnated a native girl and felt too ashamed to admit being the father of the child. Lawrence condemned the girl as a liar and left the area. He would not see his son again for nearly 40 years. Andrews grew up in abject poverty, but as a descendant of Americo-Liberian, being fair skinned through the blood of his father, he managed to use the perceived social status to get a scholarship to high school.

Andrews excelled in school. Perhaps because he felt the need to nullify his father's complete rejection, he pushed himself and was valedictorian of every academic class he ever entered. His mother died in 1941 and he later said he was ashamed because part of him had always been embarrassed by the fact that his mother was an uneducated member of the ethnic and social underclass. In 1945 Andrews entered journalism school and graduated to become Liberia's most popular sports announcer. His play-by-play was so popular that there are still Liberians today who talk admiringly about his quips and speaking style.

By 1949, Andrews was tired of sports casting. He felt that Liberia did not present enough opportunities for an ambitious young man, so he applied to attend university in the USA and was accepted to the University of Cincinnati, Ohio where he studied journalism. In the United States he excelled at school but was a bit of a playboy. By the end of his studies in 1954, he had gotten a son by a young African-American fellow student. Despite vowing to never do what his father had done, George denied being the father of the child and left the U.S. so that the mother could not force him to support the child.

Back in Liberia, Andrews started an advertising business with the money he had saved while working in America. The business soon died from lack of prospects in the small backward African country, but through it he met R.D. Urey, the father of the woman who would later become his wife. Urey was a man of small stature but great power. He was mayor of what was at the time Liberia's second city, Careysburg. He also owned huge tracts of rubber trees leased out to the Firestone Rubber Company. The young George impressed the older Urey with his desire for learning and his drive. Soon, Andrews, with Urey, was attending meetings of Liberia's one and only political party, the True Whigs.

Andrews was an excellent speaker, having been trained as a radio announcer, and impressed the big boys of the party. He was hired in 1958 as news anchor for the then fledgling government TV station. His style and the exposure of TV brought young Andrews fame. He married Esther Urey, the 4th of R.D. Ureys seven daughters in 1960. Some say the bride was already pregnant at the wedding, but Andrews always insisted that the child was born two months premature. Now married and respectable in Liberia's conservative society, George moved up the ranks at the Ministry of Information. On the election of William R. Tolbert in 1973, Andrews was appointed to the cabinet of the president as Minister of Information, Cultural Affairs, and Tourism. He now had eight children, not all of them by his wife. His infidelity brought a souring of relations between him and his wife's powerful family. But his wife loved him and protected him after Urey had decided the brash playboy should be brought down a notch.

Andrews was now a powerful man in his own right. He built a three-story mansion in a fashionable part of Monrovia, the capital city, and moved in with his wife and all eight of his children. This was the beginning of the talk that George might be presidential material. Andrews himself made no bones that he was capable of holding any position in the government.