George Henry Andrews - The Turning Point

The Turning Point

In 1976, at the prompting of his wife, Andrews contacted his father who was now an American citizen living in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. That episode made him desire to find his roots, so he made sort of a pilgrimage to his birthplace in Liberia, Cape Palmas. The experience left him changed forever.

He saw people who had not progressed in all the time he had been gone. They lived in constant and backbreaking poverty. He would later tell his wife that all his sins came back to him then, especially how he had treated the American mother of his first child. As minister of Tourism and Cultural Affairs he was able to help his hometown, and was soon diverting government projects and aid their way. He apologized to the mother of his first child, and sent for his son in the U.S. to came and live with him in Liberia. Andrews was now preoccupied with the poverty of his hometown. He wrote in a letter to his father,

It's like I have only just awakened and am seeing all this poverty and suffering for the first time. I cannot believe people live like this, or that others allow them to.

He felt uncomfortable with his part and place in the cabinet of a political system he now thought of as evil. But with 8 children and a wife, he was torn between following his new ideals and the reality of having to support his family. In January 1980, Andrews gave an interview to Johnathan Raffle, a young man he had recruited into the ministry's broadcasting wing. The young man, knowing of Andrews' new thinking on the situation in the country, asked him point blank what he felt about the fact that the economy of the country was controlled by Lebanese traders who had settled in Liberia after fleeing war in Lebanon. It was common knowledge in the country that the Lebanese community paid off the President to keep their favored position.

Andrews felt that he could not dodge the question. He expounded a startlingly frank diatribe against the evils of a government that oppressed its own people and kept foreign parasites protected so that they could continue to "suck the blood of the people." The interview caused a sensation in the country. For the Lebanese community and the ruling class, he was a Judas, a turncoat seeking personal fame and power. To the indigenous masses, he was an instant hero, the rare man in Africa who is willing to speak the truth in public.

The president, under pressure from the Lebanese, demanded a retraction and apology from his Information Minister. Andrews refused, and in a second interview, said that "it would be as evil to apologize for truth, as it would be to lie." President Tolbert was incensed, and fired him the next day. He was blacklisted in the tiny nation and had to leave the country to find employment. In June 1980 his entire family moved to neighboring Côte d'Ivoire where he took a job as head of the secretariat for the African Development Bank. Writing to his son at this time, Andrews said what hurt him most was that through it all, not one of the friends in the cabinet he had known since his teenage years stood up to back him or support him.

Less than 7 months later, the president was dead, tortured and assassinated in his own bedroom, and the 13 ministers of his cabinet lined up and shot by a group of military men led by Samuel K. Doe, a master sergeant in the Liberian Army. A delegation from the coup leaders who had taken control of the government went to Côte d'Ivoire to offer the former minister the position as Liberian Ambassador to the United States, but Andrews declined, not wanting to work with people he believed were as oppressive as the ones they removed.

The country slowly degenerated into civil war, and Doe was himself killed in the same mansion in which he killed Tolbert. A peace deal was signed in Liberia in 1992. With that, Andrews returned home to find that his stature as an honest speaker of truth had grown. When the country decided to hold elections, it was near unanimous that he was the only person viewed by the people as having both the intelligence and the integrity to run the elections. Most historians attribute Liberia's peaceful transition into democracy to his leadership.

Andrews died on September 3, 1997, of a heart attack right after returning excess money to the Nigerian government which had partly financed the Liberian election. His decision to return the money was not viewed favorably by many in positions of power and rumors persist today that his death was not natural. Andrews will be remembered as a man who rose above his faults to become a champion of his people. He was buried at Palm Grove Cemetery in Monrovia.