By Will Reno
Dr. Amos Claudius Sawyer, interim president of Liberia from 1990 to 1994, died this past February 16th in Baltimore, Maryland. He was a towering defender of freedom in his Liberian homeland. In his extensive writings and in his work, he maintained a faith that organizing for liberation requires a grassroots approach in which the spontaneity of common people’s actions is not separate from organization. This belief grew from his personal experience and observations of Liberian politics, the subject of his political science dissertation at Northwestern University (1973). On his return to Liberia, Sawyer took a post as a professor of political science and rose to become dean of the College of Social Sciences and acting director of the University of Liberia. He used his position to decry how Liberia’s ruling oligarchy did not shrink from the use of violence but maintained power more insidiously through denigrating common people as “uncivilized” to encourage internalized notions of inferiority. Through the 1970s and 1980s, his writings also uncovered the details of the inner workings of a massive patronage system designed to extract wealth from common people to further enrich the privileged.
Sawyer played a notable role as a political figure to put his ideas into action. He was one of several prominent intellectuals who founded the Movement for Justice in Africa in 1973, a Pan-African organization with branches in Gambia and Ghana that focused on political change. He ran a night school dedicated to nurturing the intellectual tools that enabled his students—ordinary Liberians taking time after their busy days—to become masters of their own fates. In 1979, he ran as an independent for mayor of
the capital city Monrovia. He remained in Liberia after the military takeover in 1980 and in 1981, was chosen to head the National Constitution Commission to draft a new democratic constitution. The military government did not appreciate his influential voice and he was forced to leave the country. Sawyer found refuge at Indiana University’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, where he dedicated his energies to addressing Liberia’s substantial problems of governance.
Sawyer’s influential Emergence of Autocracy in Liberia: Tragedy and Challenge (1992) appeared shortly after he returned to Liberia as president of the Interim Government of National Unity from 1990 to 1994. He led this UN and ECOWAS-backed authority amidst a brutal civil war that broke out in 1989 and ended only in 2003. Sawyer used his time as Liberia’s head of state to put his ideas about dialogue and debate to the task of building popular trust in a democratic government. Peace and security were not restored to Liberia under Sawyer’s government, but he remained active in Liberia’s politics as a voice for democratic governance. He served as chairman of the Governance Commission of Liberia from 2007 to 2018, a powerful voice for the appointment of experienced and technically competent government officials and the reform of the governance of Liberia’s natural resources.
In 2011, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf awarded him the Grand Cordon of the Knighthood of the Most Venerable Order of the Pioneers, Liberia’s highest distinction. In 2018 he was awarded an honorary degree from Indiana University, where he maintained strong ties through many decades.
Will Reno is chair of the Department of Political Science and a former director of PAS.