Liberia's Atlantic surf village — Cape Mount point break, freed-slave founders, and an Americo-Liberian coast the world forgot
Robertsport is a small fishing town on Cape Mount in northwestern Liberia — West Africa's best-kept surfing secret, with a consistent right-hand point break that works year-round against a backdrop of fishing villages, colonial ruins, and a freshwater lake (Lake Piso) separated from the Atlantic by a narrow beach. The town holds an extraordinary history as one of the first settlements of the American Colonization Society's freed-slave colonisation programme, with overgrown ruins of 19th-century Americo-Liberian buildings still visible along the cape.
Robertsport (named for Joseph Jenkins Roberts, Liberia's first president) was established by the American Colonization Society in the 1840s as an early settlement for freed American slaves — part of the colonisation experiment that created Africa's first republic in 1847. Cape Mount is also homeland of the Vai people, one of the few ethnic groups to independently invent a writing script without outside literacy instruction — the Vai syllabary (developed around 1830) is one of the most studied examples of spontaneous script invention in human history. The civil wars of 1989–2003 depopulated mu…