MONROVIA, Liberia — More than 30 years after Liberia’s President William Tolbert was slain in a bloody coup, his daughter has been sworn in as the mayor of Bentol, the family’s base and a town that has played an outsized role in the West African nation’s political history.
At an inauguration event over the weekend, Christine Tolbert Norman, 70, promised ‘‘speedy development’’ modeled on the work of her father.
‘‘My dad had a vision to raise this country from mat to mattress,’’ she said, evoking one of Tolbert’s famous slogans. ‘‘That man gave the people economic empowerment so they would not sleep on the floor, but would instead sleep on mattresses.’’
While Norman’s family ties evoke memories of a more stable period — before autocratic rule in the 1980s and then 14 years of civil conflict that killed more than 250,000 people — some said her appointment provided further evidence of Liberia’s continued dependence on the same families who have dominated the country’s politics for decades.
Norman worked for her father as an assistant education minister. She still speaks admiringly of his efforts to develop the country and to bridge the divide between Americo-Liberians, who descended from freed American slaves, and the country’s indigenous population. Those efforts were cut short, however, on April 12, 1980, when a 28-year-old military officer, Samuel Doe, staged a coup, killing Tolbert in the executive mansion.
Norman spent eight months under house arrest before fleeing to the United States and then moving to Ivory Coast, where she lived for 18 years. She returned not long before Ellen Johnson Sirleaf took office in 2006 as the first elected postwar president.