Monrovia is the first African city Nettie describes at length and the last place on her journey where she feels among people she somewhat recognizes. It connects the return of formerly enslaved people from the United States with Liberia’s political and social hierarchies, while Nettie’s observations of the presidential palace and nearby cocoa plantations complicate the missionary language of development. Her arrival at the African coast gives the journey a more intimate meaning: a meeting with land bound to family memory and the history of enslavement.

Arrival and Historical Meaning

Nettie and Samuel’s voyage to Africa begins after a missionary assigned to accompany Corrine and Samuel marries a man who will not let her go. The resulting vacant ticket, together with Nettie’s inability to find work, makes the journey possible, although Africa had not previously seemed real to her as a destination. After leaving Southampton on July 24, the travelers stop in Lisbon and Dakar before reaching Monrovia, Liberia, on September 12.

For Nettie, Monrovia is a threshold: the last place where the people seem somewhat familiar before the travelers move farther into the continent. She understands Liberia as a country founded by formerly enslaved people from the United States who returned to Africa. The city therefore raises a difficult question about return and belonging: people with close ties to the country that bought enslaved Africans have come back to govern in Africa. Nettie wonders whether any of the returnees’ parents or grandparents had themselves been sold from Monrovia, and what it means to return under those circumstances.

The Presidential Palace and Social Hierarchy

On the travelers’ second evening in Monrovia, they have tea at the presidential palace. Samuel compares its appearance to the White House in the United States. President Tubman speaks about developing the country and about his difficulties with people he calls natives, explaining that he means native to Liberia. Nettie notices the contradiction in the room: she sees no such people in his cabinet, whose members include white people and men of color who look white.

The contrast continues among the cabinet members’ wives. Dressed in silks and pearls, they make Corrine and Nettie feel barely dressed for the occasion. Nettie finds the women dissatisfied in appearance, unlike the cheerful schoolteachers she and Corrine happen to see leading their classes to the beach for a swim. The scene places political status and public display alongside another image of Liberian life, without treating the palace as representative of everyone in the country.

Cocoa Plantations and the Meaning of Development

Before leaving Monrovia, the travelers visit a large cocoa plantation. Trees stretch as far as they can see, with whole villages situated among the fields. Nettie watches tired families return from work carrying the buckets used for cocoa seeds and, the next day, for lunch; women sometimes carry children on their backs as well. Despite their exhaustion, the workers sing, a sound that recalls singing at home.

Corrine explains the ownership behind the labor: the workers do not own the fields, nor does President Tubman; people in Holland own them, including the people who make Dutch chocolate. Overseers live in stone houses at the corners of the fields and ensure that the workers labor hard. Nettie’s account thus sets official talk of building up the country beside the material arrangement of plantation work: the land is worked by villagers, while ownership and supervision rest elsewhere.

Return, Memory, and the Journey’s Frame

The coastal arrival gives Monrovia and the journey a significance that exceeds the travelers’ first impressions of the city. Seeing the African coast, Nettie feels a powerful response that she describes as striking her soul like a large bell. Corrine and Samuel feel it too; all three kneel on deck and give thanks for seeing the land their mothers and fathers had cried and lived and died to see again. The moment links an individual voyage to generations marked by forced departure and the longing for return.

Nearly thirty years later, as Nettie anticipates returning to the United States, the long separation from Celie remains present in her thoughts. She and Samuel are preparing to come home, and the children ask about Celie, whom Nettie has not heard from in almost three decades. Monrovia therefore stands within a larger route between Africa and the United States: a place of arrival and observation in Nettie’s account, framed by an ancestral history of displacement and a hoped-for reunion with her sister.