A compelling view from the privileged Americo-Liberian side of the tracks of Liberia’s slide in the early 1980s into years of violence and savage civil war is given in Helene Cooper’s autobiography The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood. The author lived as a child in a large house near Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia, a strange country in which the descendants of emancipated American slaves formed a political elite which lived in opulent wealth while the natives or “country people” lived in poverty.
When the Cooper family moved into the new large house at Sugar Beach, Helene was scared to sleep alone in her own room, so Helene’s mother chose to solve the problem by “adopting” Eunice from the country people, to be a sister for Helene. Eunice’s mother was willing to give up her daughter because she knew that Eunice would have greater prospects in life being brought up in a wealthy household.
Helene’s idyllic childhood came to an end after a military coup in 1980 resulted in the rape of her mother by soldiers and the public execution of government members including her uncle. Helene left for a new life of comparative poverty in the United States, working her way through school and college before becoming a highly respected reporter with the Wall Street Journal and then the New York Times.