White planters such as Gene Manis lived comfortable lives in homes atop the rolling hills of the Firestone plantation complex, situated apart from the villages and lives of the company’s Liberian workers. In the division’s lower-lying areas, too wet for rubber trees, tens of thousands of Liberian tappers, some with their families, inhabited a radically different world. Men from almost every ethnic group and district in Liberia, some hundreds of miles away, came to work on the plantations. Firestone’s plantations were “a veritable tower of Babel-babble,” observed Plenyono Gbe Wolo, the son of a Kru paramount chief and Harvard University’s first Black African graduate.
Kpelle, Bassa, Dan, Mano, and Loma men, among other ethnic affiliations, recruited largely from Liberia’s Central and Western districts, gathered together on the plantations, speaking many different languages and dialects. The ethnic groups recruited for employment matched closely the recommendations that Harvard scientists Richard Strong and George Schwab made to Firestone, based on biomedical and anthropological expeditions they undertook in Liberia in the 1920s with the company’s assistance.
As the Harvard scientists moved through the Liberian interior, their accounts were suffused with judgements and pseudoscientific estimations of who, among Liberia’s ethnic groups, would make the best plantation workers. Consequently, Kpelle men composed the largest ethnic group working as tappers on the main Firestone plantation, and Kpelle, along with Liberian English, became the lingua franca of plantation life.
Tappers were the most essential but least valued workers in Firestone’s operation. Classed as unskilled labor, Firestone tappers earned 18¢ per day until 1950. It was a wage less than half of what unskilled laborers earned across much of colonial West Africa and 1% of what a factory worker earned in Firestone’s Akron plant, where, in 1948, workers averaged $1.73 an hour.
A tapper’s day began well before dawn. At 3:30 a.m., the first muster bell rang. A half hour later, the headman passed through the camp. Gbe, a retired headman interviewed by our research team in 2018, had been responsible for waking up his gang, going “from house to house in the darkness with no light.” “Togbah, you!, Flomo you!, going just like that,” he said. If his entire gang didn’t show, the headman faced a loss in pay.