Dakar---As Liberia's president visits the US Senate on Thursday to thank Americans for their pivotal role in the Ebola recovery, she will reflect on a sometimes fractious relationship spanning two centuries.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is due to address senators before meeting US President Barack Obama Friday to discuss the recovery from an outbreak which has claimed 9,500 lives.
Of the West African nations afflicted by the disease, Liberia -- where more 4,000 people have died -- is seen as the most advanced in curbing the spread of Ebola, largely thanks to unprecedented US support.
Around $2.5 billion has been allocated by the White House to help Liberia fight and recover from Ebola, while Obama has played a supportive role in securing IMF and World Bank cash.
Some 2,800 US troops -- the largest-ever US deployment to the region -- are being brought home after building clinics, training nurses and working around the clock to beat back the epidemic.
Analysts initially voiced concerns over how Liberians, savaged by 14 years of ruinous civil war, would react to a new foreign armed presence and questioned US motives for its sudden philanthropy.
US engagement in Liberia began in the 1820s when the Congress- and slaveholder-funded American Colonization Society began sending freed slaves to its shores.
Thousands of "Americo-Liberian" settlers followed, declaring themselves independent in 1847 and setting up a government to rule over a native African majority that it gave no right to vote.
- 'Racist motives' -
James Ciment, the author of "Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It", describes Liberia as "America's half-forgotten stepchild", poorly set up and neglected thereafter by the US.
America's engagement with Ebola was nothing more than the fulfilment of a "special obligation" to help Liberia, he argued in Slate magazine in September.
Peter Pham, author of "Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State", and director of the Washington-based Atlantic Council's Ansari Africa Center, offers a similar analysis.
"To be quite frank, some of the benefactors who financed the repatriation of former slaves and other African diaspora to what became Liberia had unabashed racist motives," he told AFP.
Pham points to the US refusal to recognise Liberian independence until nearly 20 years after Europe as evidence that the prevailing view of a "special relationship" is little more than a "comforting myth".
Liberia has nonetheless been an unswerving ally, allowing itself to be used as a US military base during World War II and backing Washington at the UN on Cold War issues, particularly the Vietnam war.
In return, the US has provided a fortune in aid -- more than $600 million since 2009, according to the State Department -- but critics say the American balance sheet remains in deficit.
- 'Moral responsibility' -
Pham, however, believes this black-and-white picture fails to recognise Liberia's own responsibility for its historical woes.
"While Doe was a brute and nowadays is universally condemned, it should be remembered that at the time he seized power, he was enormously popular with a vast majority of Liberians," he said.
In Liberia itself, academia tends to have a nuanced view of American influence on its "stepchild", seeing both good and bad.
Edward Wonkeryor, a vice-president of Liberia's Cuttington University, acknowledges US economic influence in west Africa as a motivation for helping Liberia.
AFP
