Going Home

Student’s Liberian homeland was once only a place in his imagination

by Jeff Joiner

Sean Tolbert will tell you that he took a trip of a lifetime last year over Christmas break and that visiting the African nation of Liberia was like visiting home for the first time. Sean, an Oklahoma State University student, was on a journey of discovery when he visited the country where his father was born and where his family played a large role throughout its 20th-century history.

The Spears School of Business junior is a member of a lineage of Tolberts who were part of a prosperous class of Liberian government and business leaders before the country was torn apart by a bloody civil war. Sean’s great-uncle, William Tolbert, was president of Liberia in 1980 when he was assassinated in a coup, which sparked the country’s civil war. Stephen Tolbert Jr., Sean’s father, was a young child when the war broke out and fled Liberia with family. Educated in England, he ultimately settled in the United States, where he went to college, married Tammy, a young woman from Texas, joined the U.S. military and raised two sons, including Sean, now 19.

Born and raised in the U.S., and a graduate of Lawton High School in Oklahoma, Sean grew up knowing little about Liberia’s stormy modern history, or that of his family there. He knew his father was born in Liberia and he had met aunts, uncles and his grandmother in the States over the years, but Liberian history wasn’t discussed. Liberia was largely settled by freed American slaves in the early 19th century. In 1847, the country on the continent’s Atlantic coast became the first African state to declare its independence from colonial rule. Sean is a descendant of those early Liberian settlers.

“I grew up not really knowing much about our family and Liberia, which to me was just this place in Africa where my grandmother lived,” Sean said.

His dad, Stephen Tolbert Jr., was so young when his family fled that he doesn’t remember Liberia.

“I first came to the U.S. in 1980 because of the civil war,” said Stephen. “Many Liberians fled the country during that time period due to the civil and political upheaval.”

As Sean and his younger brother, Michael, grew up, their parents discussed visiting Liberia, but it was difficult for the family of an American military officer to find the time to travel to Africa between postings. The Tolberts have been stationed across the U.S. and in Germany; Stephen is currently an Army major stationed in South Korea.

West Africa’s deadly Ebola virus outbreak in 2014 ended the family’s first solid plans to visit there until the health crisis ended. Finally, the parents told Sean and his 17-year-old brother last year that they could visit Liberia on their own over the Christmas holiday.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Sean said. “My whole life it’s been like, ‘We’re going, we’re going, we’re going,’ then something happens, and we can’t. Now we’re really going.”

Sean and Michael, a junior at Lawton High, spent a few days touring Morocco before flying to Liberia, where they were met by family. During the two weeks the pair spent exploring the country and its capital, Monrovia, the few stories Sean had heard began to crystalize as they visited places notable in the country’s, and his family’s, history. Aunts, uncles, cousins and his grandmother, Carmenia Abdullah, began filling in the blanks including stories about Sean’s grandfather, Stephen Tolbert Sr., who was a successful businessman, academic and government minister who was killed in a plane crash in Liberia in 1975.

The grandson of freed American slaves who settled in Liberia, Stephen Sr. graduated from Howard University and the University of Michigan before starting a school of forestry at a Liberian university in 1942, later serving as its dean. He also worked as the country’s minister of agriculture and forestry on two occasions and operated an internationally successful fishing company.

“I found out he did a lot of cool stuff,” said Sean. “I met a cousin in Liberia who used the word tenacious when he described my grandfather.”

Sean learned a lot about his grandfather, including so many things his dad wasn’t able to tell him because Stephen Jr. never met his father.

“My father died (in the 1975 plane crash) eight months before I was born,” Stephen Jr. said. “I left Liberia when I was very young, so I don’t remember anything about living there.”

The Liberia that Sean and his brother explored included both the comforts of affluence as well as the crush of the country’s poverty. An aunt who is a Liberian journalist introduced the brothers to the realities of life in a desperately poor African nation where the gulf between rich and poor was hard to grapple with, especially in the desperately poor slums of West Point, a seaside suburb of Monrovia.

“She wanted to show us the whole picture of where we’re from, not just the beautiful resorts and the rooftop restaurants, but also the nitty-gritty issues of life there, too,” Sean said.

As he described it, they immersed themselves in the town’s economic despair. But at the same time, Sean said he was lifted by the infectious hope of the people, an experience that deeply affected him.

“There’s a difference between learning about poverty and being immersed in it,” Sean said. “I was amazed at the people there who struggled and who didn’t have anything, but they’re still so happy and so passionate about each other.”

Sean said he experienced an “aha” moment in West Point, realizing he could use his business education to help people in Liberia, many of whom face life with little economic opportunity and the accompanying shortages of health care, clean water and other factors most take for granted.

“I want people to see Liberia and West Africa as a place of tremendous opportunity where the economies are starting to develop and mature,” Sean said. “I want to help Liberians develop businesses and their economy, so I plan to get a graduate degree and then take what I’ve learned and give it to Liberia for a few years.”

His dad supports his plans. “I think it’s important that he understands his family history and is interested in learning more,” Stephen said. “Growing up, he was not around his Liberian side of the family but it’s great that he is seeking to make those connections.”

Sean said he admires his Liberian family members who are business leaders following in the footsteps of Stephen Tolbert Sr. by building the country’s future. “My uncle loves his country and the people and wants to rebuild the economy,” Sean said. “That’s what he wanted to show me — all the opportunity that there is there.”

For Sean, the trip to Liberia brought home to him for the first time how much the African nation meant to him and how much he now wants to be a part of it. He wants to connect with the part of his past that civil war nearly destroyed when his dad was a little boy.

“My father couldn’t stay there and did what he had to do to create a life for his family, and I’m blessed for that,” Sean said. “Now I want to do something to give to the country where my family’s success started with the first generation of Tolberts who settled there as freed slaves.”