• 1 “Schülerzeichnungen von Bong Town in Liberia,” Unsere ATH: Werkzeitschrift der August Thyssen-Hütt (...)
• 2 Quotes originally in German and translated by the author.

2The map was published in December 1969 as an illustration in the company magazine Unsere ATH (“Our ATH”) published by the German steel concern August Thyssen Hütte.1 On the same page, we see a compilation of another set of smaller drawings showing all kinds of scenes. Several depict children seen through window frames and looking at a passing car. At the same time, others show some built structures and cyclists but also conifer forests and different natural landscapes populated by people and animals. In the bottom left corner of the spread, a photo depicts several White children in a bright classroom together with a number of adults (one Black, several White). Some of them might well be their teachers, while others are perhaps their parents, invited to visit an exhibition of their children’s creative work. The article explains the context of this dense, multifaceted and, in its multitude, slightly chaotic arrangement to the reader as the drawings made in an art class at the expat school of ATH’s Bong Mining Company (BMC) iron ore mine in Liberia. It states that the “boys and girls of the German school branch” living in Bong with their parents working for the BMC “drew especially eagerly this year.”2 In the article, a German teacher in Bong dedicates particular attention to the elongated drawing of the map, providing a starting point for its interpretation:

• 3 The third-party funded project “Conquering (with) Concrete. German Construction Companies as Globa (...)

3The teacher reads the map in terms of connectedness between the BMC site and the port in Monrovia, describing the lines in the drawing as trajectories along which people and goods are on the move. While doing fieldwork in the area in April 2021, in the context of an ongoing research project entitled “Conquering with Concrete: German Construction Companies as Global Players in Local Contexts,”3 we could observe the continuity of this connectedness. In the past two decades, this teacher and a number of former pupils, from Germany and elsewhere in Europe, have travelled back to Liberia. They wanted to confront their memories of the iron ore mine and the surrounding settlement with what remained. Landing at Robertsfield International Airport, they drove to Kakata and then to Bong Mines. The road has been asphalted in the last decade by the Chinese company that, since 2009, has held the still active concession. In Bong Mines, the visitors confront the vestiges of the mining town, built over time by a joint venture of German, Italian, and American construction companies. Now partially hidden under lush vegetation, it borders on a lively Liberian farming town.

• 4 Tom Avermaete, “Excavating the Company Town. Small Moroccan mining cities in European archives,” i (...)
• 5 Examples are Jeannette Sordi, Luis Valenzuela and Felipe Vera (eds.), The Camp and the City: Terri (...)
• 6 There are some exceptions. One is the recent book by anthropologist Danny Hoffman, Monrovia Modern (...)

4In recent years, architectural historians working on Africa have started to engage more with the infrastructural side of the twentieth century’s built production on the continent, as it counts for a significant part of the post/colonial built legacy. The architecture of mining towns, for instance, has received some scholarly attention.4 Also, in the context of other geographies, researchers have engaged in mapping extraction sites to gain a better spatial understanding of mining’s crucial contribution to technological and industrial development.5 The BMC mining site in Liberia offers an interesting case in this respect (also given the minimal attention the architectural legacy in Liberia has received so far in architectural history).6

• 7 Arthur J. Knoll, “Firestone’s Labor Policy, 1924-1939,” Liberian Studies Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, (...)
• 8 e.g. Karl Bruno, “The Government’s Business? Swedish Foreign Policy and Commercial Mineral Interes (...)

6Such a reading of the spatial and material aspects of the BMC site complements the newly emerging scholarship on the presence, activities, and legacies of industrial companies in Africa, and Liberia in particular. In the past, studies of Liberia’s political economy, whether they focused on the dominant role of the Firestone rubber plantations or analyzed other international investments, strongly reflected Marxist perspectives.7 Historical studies on the BMC are missing altogether. However, the Swedish-American concern LAMCO has garnered some interest in international political and economic history.8

• 9 Killian Doherty and Edward Lawrenson, Uppland (2018).
• 10 Gregg Mitman, Empire of Rubber. Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia, New York, NY: (...)

7Currently, two perspectives on LAMCO and Firestone are particularly relevant to my interpretation of the children’s map. On the one hand, Killian Doherty’s documentary Uppland deals with the gap between the image of LAMCO’s mining town as a modernist settlement and the grievances of the Liberian population, protesting both the destructiveness of the mining operation and its eventual discontinuation.9 Meanwhile, Gregg Mitman analyzes the transformation processes in the environment of international investments. Mitman connects the Firestone plantation and the question of land as a central operative category for Liberians to understand Liberia’s environmental and social history, with a particular focus on matters of health and race. In so doing, he accounts for contestations and complicities (as well as the process of memory-making).10 The case study of the BMC links well to such work and highlights the influences and interactions shaping the footprints of transnational companies in the “Global South” more broadly.

• 11 Claus N. A. Siebel, Rainer Haus, Wolfgang Jacobs and Heinz Baur, Die Eisenerzbergbau-Gesellschaft (...)

8A German-directed European-Liberian consortium set up the Bong Mining Company concession under the unquestioned leadership of the August Thyssen Hütte in 1958. Located in the Bong mountain range in the Liberian hinterland, only around 90 km from Monrovia, the iron ore mine, the mining settlement, and the transport infrastructures were completed in 1965. Thanks to the German managers’ Wirtschaftswunder optimism, the mining operation was repeatedly expanded between the late 1960s and early 1970s. Among other things, a pelletizer plant was added. The structures were built by joint ventures of construction companies led by the German general contractors Grün&Bilfinger and Philipp Holzmann. Still, contracts were also handed to Italian partners, such as Imprese Italiane All’Estero or Baselli Bertani and to the US company Raymond International, which had operated in Liberia for decades. Scandinavian companies initially supplied the pre-fabricated parts for the houses in the mining settlement.11

• 12 A mental map can be described as the drawing of a cognitive map. A foundational book was Kevin A. (...)
• 13 Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, “Mental Maps. Die kognitive Kartierung des Kontinents als Forschungsgege (...)

10The 1969 children’s drawing contrasts with the historical and more conventional maps and architectural drawings described above, and differs from our fieldnote documentation on the site’s current spatial and architectural characteristics (including photographs and records of interviews). It offers not just an evocative depiction of the actual site, but also highlights the notions of “connectedness” and “environment” linked to it. As such, it can be analyzed as a “mental map” by the expat pupils of the mining complex.12 The study of mental maps in psychology and geography primarily investigates personal conceptions of immediate environments, like ways to school. Historical research into mental maps, on the other hand, is commonly more concerned with representations of social-spatial connections beyond the experiential borders of the individual.13 A perspective from architectural history is particularly well-suited to overcoming these disciplinary limitations and uncovering how immediate and broader subjectivities as described above connect through the built environment.

• 14 Compare James Fergusson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambia (...)
• 15 Thomas Hendriks points out that multinational corporations still try to establish enclaves and the (...)

12Overall, the arguably late-colonial drive of the German managers to control an African resource base went hand in hand with neglect for, or even ignorance about, the interlinkages in which the mine was enmeshed. Since the town possessed all the necessary infrastructure, it needed no assistance from the Liberian state. Instead, it could function as an autonomous enclave.14 Moreover, the managers believed in the illusion of their mining concession as a social and political enclave. In their opinion, the mine could produce ore without acknowledging the Liberian social context and accommodating the Liberian government’s demands to take an active part in the operation. This became quite clear during the period following the oil crisis (especially after 1975) when Liberian political strife spilled over to the mine. Management struggled to navigate these crises that repeatedly interrupted production and transport. They were a threat to the mine’s viability long before the Liberian civil war led to the mine’s closure in 1990.15

• 16 See my PhD project in the “Conquering (with) Concrete” research project. URL: https://leibniz-irs.d (...)

14In the view suggested in the children’s map, the mine pit itself is not the indisputable focus of the entire mining chain. Instead, transport lines and other links—or the absence of links—emerge as decisive. The port appears as a gravitational centre of equal importance, a counterpart, to the mine in the hinterland, while the immediate environment of the port in Monrovia moves into the background. The depiction of the port as a nodal point in this map ties in directly with my ongoing research on West African ports as major incisions of globalization, in which I examine the social-economic configurations to which these ports related in co-dependency.16

• 17 In these instances, notably the Doe coup of 1980, the coup attempt of 1985 or strikes in December (...)

15Following this perspective, the port and the transport lines in the 1969 children’s map appear as useful inroads to study developments at the mine and try to understand how its local and global history were expressed in its connections. In fact, upholding these infrastructures was crucial to maintaining the mine, and the personal livelihood of the personnel. The connections acquired decisive importance on several occasions, for instance during coups d’état, curfews imposed by martial law, or strikes around the railroad and port.17 At the same time, these transport lines could not function without the daily work of operation and maintenance, of dredging the port or repairing bridges. These tasks deserve their own focus.

• 18 On hybrid housing typologies in the case of Guinea-Bissau see Geraldo Pina, “Popular Architecture (...)

18Remarkably, much attention is given in the children’s map to different clusters of dwellings,18 representing housing the Liberian workers built for themselves (fig. 7). However, the dwellings of Liberians outside the mining concession are also shown (fig. 8). One settlement depicted on the children’s map, in fact, stretches on both sides of the river around an island (fig. 8, lower left corner). This reflects the core of Liberian life along the St. Paul’s River in the region before the mining site was developed. As a senator’s residence, this community remained a center of Liberian decision-making. Another settlement on a side road lies next to rubber plantations (fig. 8, middle section), whereas the vegetation seems to be much richer elsewhere and dominated by palm oil trees.

• 19 Ute Schneider, “Dimensions of remapping: Heinrich Schiffers and his mental map of Africa,” Journal (...)

20Altogether, it seems that the expat pupils omitted their own presence and their privileged living environment. At the same time, they considered Liberian surroundings in detail, including economic and living patterns. This viewpoint raises the question as to the degree to which the pupils reflected contemporarily prevalent mental perspectives on Africa.19 They represented Bong as a well-connected place, countering perceptions of remoteness. However, their depiction captures the extractive logic of the overall mining project, while the focus on the traditional forms of dwellings or the natural environment still echoes contemporarily common notions of the exotic Africa.

• 20 The concept of lieux de mémoire was pioneered by Pierre Nora. Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire, P (...)

22One wonders how the local African pupils in the Liberian school branch in the workers’ settlement would have depicted the mining complex in their own mental mapping. Yet no such paintings are available. An alternative source provides insights into how the site was viewed and imagined by the African population: spatially fixed memory expressions of the mine. These are currently appearing as part of the ongoing act of mentally mapping Bong’s historical geography. While doing fieldwork, we were interested in what constituted “lieux de mémoire” for those currently inhabiting the site. At the same time, in our research, we are also interested to learn more about how former expats remember their lives there and whether these memories are anchored to specific spaces and buildings of the BMC site.20

• 21 Aleida Assmann argues for the existence of collective memory through discourses marking boundary l (...)

23When were doing fieldwork in Bong and determining what stands at the center of the collective memory,21 spaces of education, including the possibilities of schooling and vocational training, were especially prominent. BMC focused on worker training in part because it would be cheaper for the company to run the mine with Liberian labor. Doing so would also satisfy requests from the Liberian government to “Liberianize” the workforce. A troubling element lost from sight, however, is how school education and vocational training during the heyday of the mining activities were linked to racial and social hierarchies. This racial and social discrimination could lead to conflicts between educated Liberian staff and German superiors with less formal education.

• 22 See the series of books Mémoires lieux de savoir. Archives congolaises, edited by Donatien Dibwe d (...)

24For Liberians today, the structures of everyday life are the primary shapers of memories of Bong and the mine. Many of our Liberian respondents recalled the mine as a site of job security and material opportunity. Liberian former workers pointed to BMC’s well-stocked supermarket as a convenience they enjoyed. The memory of secure work at the mine, of their own housing, and the once-existent social infrastructure remain strong as well. This leads to a prevailing sense of nostalgia. The longing for the past feeds on the gap between depictions of the past and the hardships or unfulfilled hopes of life in the present; for example, the deficient state of the hospital. Capacity has been reduced sharply, and the hospital is in abysmal condition. Most of the equipment, often originally supplied by the BMC, is in a state of disrepair. The Liberian government is struggling to supply the hospital with basic goods, such as protective masks. All of this resonates strongly with the feelings revealed by memory work in similar mining environments, like the Congolese city of Lubumbashi. Researchers investigated what constitutes lieux de mémoire for the current inhabitants of that city, known as Lushois. They, too, experienced deindustrialization as a loss, and a social crisis provoking emotions like rage.22

• 23 See the group “I lived in Bong Town (Bong Mine), Liberia West Africa” on Facebook. URL: https://ww (...)
• 24 See for instance Thomas Hendriks’s work on a logging company in today’s DR Congo. Thomas Hendriks, (...)

25Bong became a lieu de mémoire of exotic experiences for the international community as well, a perspective that gained another layer with the abrupt end of mining in 1990. The members of the German community, many of whom grew up as pupils in Bong, frequently express their memories of leisure activities, be they fishing trips or hot afternoons at the pool.23 They mourn for their now completely overgrown bungalows as generous housing and therefore remember life in Liberia as materially richer than in Germany, again something that relates to forms of expat self-making at work in similar contexts.24 Social infrastructures or work security per se are not perceived as unique features of the time spent in Liberia, however.

• 25 Thomas Hendriks also shows how landscapes embed different memory interpretations. See Ibid., p. 76

26Both groups have established their living environment around the BMC as a lieu de mémoire, joining a chorus but putting markedly different emphasis. The side-by-side of Liberians and Germans on dedicated social media platforms might be perceived as a shared experience. In fact, it is often quite disconnected and runs instead in parallel.25 During our field research, a young passerby volunteered to lead us to the remnants of one of the public swimming pools. They were by no means easily accessible or visible in the topography. The passerby’s ability shows how unusable vestiges of life with the BMC also become part of the mental maps of the younger generation in Bong Mines.

• 26 For the resilient marks of infrastructure in the post-colonial built environment, see Ana Vaz Milh (...)
• 27 Linda Shopes, “Oral History,” in Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds.), The SAGE Handbook (...)

27Reflections on blind spots of the presented sources and memory perspectives with regards to “local” Liberian environments and “global” connections of broader racial segregation and German mining interests can be a useful starting point for writing the history of the BMC. On the one hand, one has to ask which fundamental social, economic, and political structures shaped the history of the mining complex, as exemplified by what was “on the map.” On the other hand, this history should give room to the immediate living environments created by the mine and clarify which connections and separations appear regarding the lives of different communities involved.26 As I have demonstrated in this text, to start writing alternative histories, we might use less obvious sources, such as a children’s map. They can provide good entry points for a multilayered analysis of particular sites. While conventional maps are relevant to thinking spatially about places and can help us understand interlinkages, mobilities, borders, and frontiers at work, mental maps push us to assess them more profoundly. The focus on memory perspectives briefly discussed above underlined how Liberians and Germans have placed themselves differently within the built environment of Bong at different moments of the (former) mine’s long-term history until today, making changing mental maps of Bong explicit, beyond the children’s map presented. This attention to the spatial, be it physical or imagined, is intrinsic to maps, and it is essential to balance indispensable oral history accounts connecting past and present perspectives.27

• 28 Gregg Mitman, Empire of Rubber, op. cit. (note 10).

28Following the suggestions drawn from these perspectives, it would be helpful to focus further on the question of how life trajectories in Bong, as well as its institutions and infrastructures, interacted in the built environment. One possibility would be to follow the Liberian and German pupils’ and teachers’ perspectives regarding the school as a central institution situated within the settlement, but outside the mining complex itself. Here Mitman’s takes on the health facilities and matters of land in the case of Firestone might inspire. Still, such an analysis would benefit from being more precise than Mitman in localizing a specific space in town life where individuals’ perspectives and larger structures overlap.28 The sharper focus would then account for the dynamic changes in Bong’s history and Liberian aspirations. As I have tried to highlight in this discussion of the BMC site, it might demonstrate how we can gain a profound and fundamental understanding of the ways the global and the local interact in space and time—even if the source material is a remote site and an easily overlooked source like a children’s drawing.