Archel Bernard sits on a bar stool in the middle of her little boutique in downtown Monrovia as a handful of customers drift in and out. Pieces of West African lapa hang over wooden ladders and colorful African-Western fusion designs sit on either side. A sign beside the counter that is made up of bamboo stakes reads ‘Life is Too Short to Wear Boring Clothes’.
The 25-year-old designer and businesswoman moved from Atlanta in the United States (US) in 2011 to her family’s hometown for a job at the government’s oil corporation, and now moonlights as a fashion designer in her spare time. Bernard established a fashion label called ‘It’s Archel’ and set up a shop called Mango Rags in downtown Monrovia, with her business partner Tania Abraham, who also grew up abroad, mainly in the United Kingdom. The shop celebrated its first anniversary in February and is among a small number of boutiques specializing in contemporary African designs, in a country where small fashion businesses are just beginning to emerge over a decade after the civil war, when shopping for clothes was a luxury many could not afford.
Mango Rags, now a polished little shop located in Bernard’s grandfather’s compound that was formerly a car garage, had less glamorous beginnings. Bernard would chug around the city in a white pickup truck driven by her mother Brenda Bush, a producer and writer for CNN, with a tape measure and notebook into which she would jot down her customers’ measurements. Building up a collection of tailors from the workshops spread throughout the city, she dropped off fabric and sketches of designs in between working her nine to five job producing multimedia for the National Oil Company of Liberia (NOCAL). Bernard began to save money to open and fit the shop; now with a steady stream of mainly expatriate customers, she is looking to expand.
Born and raised in the US, but always identifying as Liberian and African, Bernard grew up in Atlanta, one of the few black kids in her community of Marietta.
When her mother did carpooling, she dressed in funky African clothes and head wraps.
“Can you dress like the normal mums do?” she had asked her, but later grew to appreciate her style. Named Archel, after her father Archie (a cultural quirk in Liberia), few of her schoolmates could pronounce her name, and so her label is ‘It’s Archel.’
When she was 16, Bernard returned to Liberia after the war to visit her grandfather, a businessman who had stayed throughout the 14-year civil war, despite the family’s insistence that he leave.
“When we landed you could have fried an egg on the runway because there was nothing. It was just a stretch of huts and then you approach the city and there are more concrete structures, but it’s still not America,” says Bernard.
She says the government offers few incentives for young educated Liberians to return, but chooses to stay because she wants to help change Liberia, and transform from a chronic charity case to a ‘place to be’ in Africa.
Now a Liberian returnee, self-described “third world socialite”, designer and government worker, Bernard has capitalized on her social networks, family connections and sense of style to build up her business in a climate that is challenging for entrepreneurs and where a fashion scene is fledgling. Three fashion weeks have been held within the past five years, with the most recent being Monrovia Fashion Week that was held in December, and only five designers have boutiques throughout the city.
“I still kind of feel like a fraud in this; I never went to fashion school,” says Bernard.
Most of the local designers haven’t studied fashion and draw on West African lapas and traditional fabrics and the flamboyant Liberian style as inspiration.
“Liberians really like to dress, they always want to have the nicest thing on,” she says.
Bernard’s main buyers are expatriates; she wishes she had more Liberian customers, but a strong bargaining culture coupled with a lack of respect for intellectual property make things difficult.
Like many Liberians who lived in exile with their families in the US during the war, Bernard returned to her family’s homeland in search of opportunity. With only one subject left to complete of her Science Technology and Culture degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Bernard decided to head home to Liberia to work in the local media. She harbored dreams of being Liberia’s Oprah and wanted to create a lifestyle series that focused on the more positive side of the nation that would air on local television stations.
Liberia wasn’t quite ready for a ‘queen of talk’, so instead Bernard worked for Monrovia’s controversial former mayor Mary Broh, and presented updates about the Monrovia City Corporation’s work through short broadcasts, and dressed up in African-inspired fashion. One day, Bernard went to her tailor to pick up a dress she had designed for a show and found the designer both wearing it and stitching it together for another customer. She decided to go out on her own and founded her label ‘It’s Archel’.
While Bernard says Liberia has offered her great opportunities that wouldn’t be available in America, she must juggle the business and a full-time job and has found it impossible to export her clothes due to the high shipping costs. Expanding her business beyond Liberia’s shores still poses a major challenge as it does for most Liberian businesses.
“We can’t be global if it costs so much. People are not going to see the point in paying so much for a little piece from Liberia. We used to make cigarettes, we used to make cans for the goods we made here. We are so small scale here,” she says.
Chid Liberty, the founder of Liberty and Justice, Africa’s first fair-trade-certified apparel manufacturer says that although the business climate is improving, lack of access to finance and the presence of “small manufacturers that can produce international quality” remain ongoing challenges for Liberian designers and the expansion of clothing manufacturing.
“I’m actually quite proud of the job Liberia is doing to make things better but we have a long way to go,” says Liberty.
Liberia’s economy is a concession-based economy with natural resources such as rubber and iron ore making up the majority of its GDP. Critics argue the government has done little to move the nation’s economy from the old plantation style model that has dominated throughout its history.
While signs of change are visible in Monrovia, new shops and office complexes have been constructed, roads repaired, the city is a shadow of the one Bernard’s parents grew up in. Access to steady electricity and running water comes at a high price and many buildings stand in a state of disrepair.
The Wealth of Liberia, a short film shot in the 1970s during the rule of President William R. Tolbert, depicted an image of modern Monrovia and industrial development – factories manufacturing paint, cigarettes, soap, windows and cement – a place where tourists flocked and the Liberia in which her parents grew up. While Bernard acknowledges the major developmental challenges ahead for one of the world’s poorest nations and is concerned about the capacity of her business to expand beyond Liberia’s borders, she is confident she can play a role in changing the image of the small nation and first independent republic in Africa.
Inspired by Louis Vuitton’s partnership with iconic alcohol brands Moët Hennessy, Bernard hopes to create a small sewing shop and African cane juice bar in the room next door.
She also has aspirations of going global and sending Mango Rags stores to Brooklyn, Cape Town and even Maui and develop a range for Swedish multinational retail giant H&amp;M and take Liberia to the world.
“We’re still dreamin’ and working,” she says.

What Do You Do If You Can’t  Be Oprah?

Takun J and his entourage weave their way between the unfinished concrete buildings, through the sandy alleyways of Monrovia’s largest slum, West Point.
“That not small star,” a young man says, as Takun, aka the ‘King of Hipco,’ Liberia’s unique take on hip-hop, passes.
Market women, teenage girls, men, young and old, and gaggles of children trail behind the tall rapper. Wearing a cap flipped backwards and punctuated with a ‘T’ and a black tank top, bracketed by his muscular arms tattooed with the word, Hipco, and a crucifix, Takun J walks into a throng of people cheering his name.
Today, his fans have opened a chapter of Code 146, a small club the Hipco star recently set up in downtown Monrovia. Takun’s club is a place for musicians to meet, jam and perform, a rarity in a country where live music is only just emerging, a decade after the civil war.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-31122 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/20130518_TakunJ_305-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/20130518_TakunJ_305-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/20130518_TakunJ_305-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/20130518_TakunJ_305-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/20130518_TakunJ_305.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Back in West Point, the stage is set: a slab of concrete covered with a silver tarpaulin, a crowd barrier made of a thin piece of rope strung between two sticks and an amplifier that is heavy and scratchy. While TakunJ has established himself as Liberia’s leading rapper and now plays at small nightclubs, entertainment centers and NGO gigs, he started his career performing on makeshift stages in places like this. The people who live here, Monrovia’s masses—the ‘living-on-less-than-a-dollar-a-day’ Liberians—are whom he makes his music for and identifies with most.
“I speak to the youth: the street guys, gronna boys, thugs,” he tells me, back at the small wooden bar inside his club that is painted in Liberian colors—red, white and blue.
In Liberian English, gronna is a pejorative term meaning a person who was raised on the street and leads a life of drug abuse and crime. But TakunJ has reappropriated the word and used it to reflect the everyday hustle of young Liberians, many of who are unemployed and with uncertain futures.
“It’s the same thug life that we all go through. You suffer like a gronna person when you don’t have money, when you don’t have the support of your mother and father, that’s a thug life, that’s a gronna life,” he says.
Hipco is a mixture of rap and Liberian English—also known as colloqui—and has been around since the 1990s, but has only taken off in recent years. Colloqui is incomprehensible to outsiders, but it is a patois, a leveling language spoken across Liberia’s tribes and classes. While most sound systems across the country blast out Ghanaian and Nigerian music, Hipco has steadily been making its way across the nation’s airwaves, onto dance floors and drinking spots and the little boom boxes of motor taxis or pehn-pehn boys.
The rapper was born with the name Jonathan Koffa but dubbed himself Takun J because he sees himself as one of the founding fathers, or pioneers of this music form.
“It’s not the T-Y-C-O-O-N, no it’s not that business tycoon Takun in our own vernacular means big brother, a giant, a strong person who been into something for a long time,” he says.
Hipco is political in nature and often critical of Liberia’s ruling establishment. Takun arrived on the Liberian music scene back in 2005, with a tune attacking the transitional government of Gyude Bryant that was accused of graft. The song titled ‘We’ll Spay You,’ meaning ‘we will expose all of your dirty deeds,’ echoed throughout the streets of a shell-shocked Monrovia. ‘Police Man,’ which spoke about police corruption and brutality, was his next big hit and landed him a beating at the hands of the Liberian National Police before a gig. Most recently he became Liberia’s anti-rape ambassador. During his performances he splices in songs condemning violence against women.
One of his biggest hits, ‘The Pot Boiling Remix’, a song about hardship and scarcity that uses a Liberian saying—‘my pot can’t boil’—has become an anthem throughout the city.
Everybody pot boiling, my pot can’t boil.
The only time my pot can boil when a car kill the dog.
The government breaking, so the youth is still jerking.
School fees got me sent from school cuz my pot not boiling.
Corruption in the city got me kicking some dust cuz my pot not boiling.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-31120 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/20130518_TakunJ_059-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/20130518_TakunJ_059-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/20130518_TakunJ_059-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/20130518_TakunJ_059-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/20130518_TakunJ_059-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/20130518_TakunJ_059.jpg 683w" sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />
Tita Nagbe, a 20-year-old fruit seller, with a pretty round face, stands barefoot on a grave in the middle of the yard with a group of women and listens to the performance.
“I like his singing, he is active. His music is fair; everything he says is true,” she claims.
For Jacob Weah, a 25-year-old tailor, the appeal of Takun J’s music is its themes and messages.
“He delivers a lot of messages and says that we should believe in ourselves,” Weah tells me as he leans up against a wall dressed in flip-flops and a Real Madrid soccer kit. “He sings about oppression we suffer in our society; we are not receiving our basic needs.”
The lack of an established music industry in Liberia makes it difficult for artists to make money, says Takun J’s manager Nora Rahimian. Unlike neighboring Ghana or Nigeria, there are no production teams, just small studios or spaces where artists can record their tracks on old equipment and collaborate with engineers. With slow internet speeds, Hipco artists have limited possibilities for expanding their audiences beyond Liberia’s borders. As a consequence, Takun J’s music has had limited play outside of the country, and can be heard in a few clubs in neighboring Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Ghana.
Music piracy and lack of legal protection poses the greatest challenge for Liberian musicians, making it difficult even for artists as well known as Takun J to make money. But for now Rahimian says piracy is a positive thing.
“At this point, piracy is great. We will encourage the gronna boys—take the song and pirate the song because there is no other way to distribute the song. Let music reach the people. It’s not about being exclusive… If you can afford to pay for it pay for it.”
Despite the challenges, thousands showed up to the first Hipco music festival held last October, with another to be held this December. Takun J will be touring West Africa and then the United States.
Back at Code 146 on Carey Street, we talk about the future of his career and the future of Hipco in Liberia. The bar is set in a sand pit under a zinc roof, with a pool table, mixing deck and flat-screen TV mounted in the corner. In front of the small concrete stage is a weight bench alongside a bar with heavy metal axels attached on either side. It is rainy season and the stage is slicked wet, but come summer, Takun J expects the place to be packed.
While being a musician in Liberia is a hustle, Takun J is optimistic about the future. ‘God Sent’ is tattooed across his chest.
“I believe that I was sent to carry on this mission and I believe that God sent me to accomplish this mission.”
The mission: to take Hipco to audiences outside of Liberia.
“We are fighting a revolution now. Hipco will take the world,” Takun declares.   FL

20130518_TakunJ_337

The Face of the Revolution

Chid Liberty is not your typical businessman, particularly not the kind you would expect to find in Liberia, a nation where big business has always been dominated by a cast of outsiders: middle-aged Lebanese men renting out overpriced apartments and selling American imports in slick grocery stores catering to high-maintenance humanitarian workers, Indians trading in electronics, rice and pharmaceuticals, and multinational companies exploring and exploiting the sea and land for oil and minerals. Nor is Liberty your usual “been to” young Liberian who has returned with a degree from a US university to take up a high-level position within a government ministry. Liberty, born in Liberia and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after his family was forced into exile in the 1980s during the military rule of the then president, Samuel Kanyon Doe, came back to his homeland with a grand ambition: to sow the seeds of an industrial revolution in a nation whose economy has been dependent on natural resource concessions and foreign imports throughout its history.
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In 2009, Liberty and his business partner and best friend from Milwaukee, Adam Butlein, set up Liberty &amp; Justice, the umbrella company that founded the Liberian Women’s Sewing Project (LWSP), the first certified fair trade factory in Africa and the first garment factory in Liberia.
“One of the core reasons we started our company is because we thought that what every developed economy has done so well is started really large industries that employ masses of people with low skills and education,” Liberty says.
Liberty and his partner focused on developing a project for women, as numerous development studies they read pointed to the important role that women’s employment can play in poverty alleviation within communities. In contrast to NGOs that train women to make handicrafts and tie-dye, Liberty combined a commitment to social justice with a shrewd business sense and approached large buyers from the United States.
But starting up a business in a non-existent industry in Liberia wasn’t easy. When Liberty began searching for funding for the project, he was often met with a harsh response.
“You talk to your first two or three people and you say, ‘Hey I am trying to put a couple of hundred thousand dollars or a couple of million dollars to build a factory in Liberia’, and they say, ‘Are you crazy?’ which is a response I got quite often,” says Liberty, a dapper man who punctuates his sentences with expletives.
Liberty and his partner started the business with a paltry amount of personal savings and raised an initial round of $600,000 partially from friends and family, but mostly from angel investors. The business that started with 30 women making T-shirts in a factory in Sinkor, Monrovia now employs 250 women, 100 in Liberia and the rest in a recently-constructed factory in Tema, Ghana. With customers like Godiva chocolate, the US-based apparel companies Haggar and prAna, and the Japanese company Itochu Corporation, Liberty says he expects the business to generate $40 million in revenue over the next year. He says he will need around 2,500 workers to fulfill his current demand and is looking at the possibility of expanding to other countries in West Africa.
Vamoma house is an odd retro geometrical cream and white building off Monrovia’s main thoroughfare, Tubman Boulevard. Like many of Monrovia’s large structures it was a battlefront during the war and was left looted, pierced with bullet holes and used as a mass gravesite. The presence of the factory on the first floor is testament to the progress Liberia has made since the end of the civil war in 2003.
Inside, women are busily cutting red cloth and stitching together a batch of T-shirts for an order. Along the two production lines, the women sit dressed in yellow aprons and black hairnets beneath fluorescent lamps and look intently at the pieces of red cloth they run rhythmically through the machines. A short, middle-aged Filipino woman named Loderena Rojas, who has spent the past 30 years working in the garment manufacturing industry in her homeland, stands at the front quietly watching over the workers. Liberty’s factory looks like one you’d expect to find anywhere in the world, only smaller. They will be moving into larger premises—an old Volkswagen distribution showroom—in the bustling downtown commercial district of Waterside in the coming months.
The women earn $100 a month, a modest wage, but well above the average annual income per capita that rests at $400 a year, in a country with an unemployment level at almost 80%. But the workers also receive $30 a month for transportation and a bag of rice, along with healthcare and an annual savings matching program that rewards them dollar for dollar with what they manage to save in their bank accounts. The women of LWSP hold a 49% stake in the factory, which is all part of Liberty’s business approach. For Liberty, worker ownership plays an important role in creating a productive workforce, particularly in the Liberian context, where it’s mostly outsiders and the elite who have benefited from successful businesses.
“Worker ownership and partnership with the Liberians, having them own a piece of company really changes the conversation. There is a ‘boss man culture’ here because it has been a chief-based society—you won’t get rid of that—but in terms of getting workers to take responsibility, if people feel that they are a partner in the company, it changes the paradigm. We have gotten timeliness and productivity out of workers that are unheard of, and we haven’t gotten it out of fear, which is the tactic they use in Asia.”
Fifty-two-year-old Leona Monger, a petite woman wearing fine gold-rimmed spectacles and a red headscarf who lives in a slum known as Vai Town, is head of the workers’ union and has held her position at the factory since it was established. While Monger says there is room for improvement in the pay, she says her wage has allowed her to keep her three children in school and set up a small provisions store.
“I see a future, not only for me, but for the younger ones who have just started. There are a lot of incentives that will enable us workers to improve our lives,” Monger says.
Unlike economies of developing countries throughout Asia that have been buoyed by investment in the manufacturing sector, Africa is still viewed by many foreign investors as a continent whose only value exists in natural resources. A survey released by Ernst &amp; Young earlier this year focusing on Africa’s perceived “attractiveness” to investors found that despite the fact that foreign direct investment grew by 27% between 2010 and 2011, there “remain lingering negative perceptions about the continent”, namely that Africa is unstable, corrupt and a risky region for investors, but these perceptions were held mostly by those who are yet to do business on the continent. For Liberty, the lack of investment in the manufacturing sector is due to misconceptions about the capabilities of African workers.
“I think the number one thing keeping the multinationals away from labor intensive industries in Africa is a complete mistrust of African human resources and African human capital,” Liberty says, adding this perception is often underpinned by racist stereotyping. “People say African workers’ hands are too big, they are too lazy, or they don’t respect time. I don’t think that can be true—if you can walk six hours to fetch water in the heat, laziness isn’t the issue.”
Under the leadership of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was re-elected for a second term in November, the government claims to have attracted $19 billion worth of investment, mainly in the form of oil, mineral and agricultural concessions. But Sirleaf and many in the government and the business community say more needs to be done to ensure sustainable and equitable economic growth that will create jobs for Liberians.
“No country is going to get growth if you don’t have it [the economy] driven by exports or some kind of manufacturing,” says Monie Captan, president of the Liberia Chamber of Commerce. “We have to identify specific sectors, plan properly, and invest in these sectors. It is not going to happen by saying it.”
For Liberty, Liberia must move beyond its economic concessions for the sake of its future security and survival.
“There are also issues of political instability. As long as you are not employing people and are only giving jobs to a few lucky well-paid people, others will feel like they are getting nothing,” he says.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in a recent policy paper expressed concerns about youth unemployment. The death toll of Liberia’s civil war made it one of the youngest nations in the world with 70% of the population below the age of 30. The IMF says that with 50,000 youths joining the labor force every year, the 90,000 jobs that the National Investment Commission estimates will be created from concession agreements over the next 10 years will do little to address the problem.
Liberia also faces major infrastructural challenges that make investment in manufacturing a challenge, among them poor road conditions and expensive and limited access to electricity—a consequence of the destruction of the Mount Coffee Hydropower Plant, for which the government only recently received funding from international donors to restore.
While Liberty acknowledges his factory is a small step towards Liberia’s industrial revolution, he is optimistic the nation can change the fabric of its economy through carefully developed government policy, investment in infrastructure and more open-minded foreign and domestic investment.
“I am positive that it will happen and at the end of the day the economics need to make sense. Currently, it doesn’t make sense, from a purely capitalist perspective… but we have labor at competitive rates, and with the infrastructure we should be able to compete with countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia and we should be able to get there in five to seven years if we are aggressive,” says Liberty.

Tag: Monrovia

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The Face of the Revolution

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