In Liberia – the Grebo were branded as reclusive, violent and worrisome. even today their villages are shunned and considered as of limits to all, these villages which are usually located near the coast, on barrier beaches with brackish lagoons and mangrove swamps on one side, and the ocean on the other are still nearly inaccessible.
On the other hand, in neighboring Cote devoir in which 10% of the Grebo population still resides, they are known as the Kru, probably an abortive of Krumen, (Not to be confused with the Liberian Kru), and hailed as able seamen, whose service was considered as indispensable to international navies as early as the eighteen century.
The Grebo were the Guinea Coast first free labor for hire, branding themselves from their other less fortunate countrymen by tattooing their forehead with indigo, thus setting themselves as class apart from the millions trafficked during the slave trade.
A short study of the Liberian history may explain this discrepancy.
the first Americo-Liberian settled in Grebo territories, Maryland was incorporated into the republic in 1857. The terms for which this consent was given were heatedly debated and contested by the Indigenous population as late as the 1930th.
international trade was monopolized by the Republican settlers, who acted as intermediaries between the indigenous population and the international trade, they imposed heavy taxes and capitalized on migrant labor by charging ship captains "by the head" for each worker who went abroad.
Due to territorial rights, till mid-20th century internal commerce to Monrovia was generally mediated by the Grebo (in tribal societies goods could have traveled freely but not people) therefore armed conflicts between the Grebo and the settlers erupted every few years till the late 1930th. And were settled only by American warships called to stand by the flagging republic.
Regrettably due to this embedded hostility no major study of the Grebo and their art was ever carried. And this group responsible for the most abstract of masks - the war mask hanged in Picasso dinning hall in Montrouge as early as 1917, was left uncharted.
Nearly a hundred years prior to Yves Klein registering his IKB hue in 1962 a similar ultramarine was already adopted by the Grebo and is considered as one of their key stylistic marks.
This hue was produced since the mid-eighteen century from the detergent "Reckitt Blue" which was easily accessible to the sea fairing Grebo mixed with local kaolin and coal extract.
One can easily differentiate the Liberian Grebo masks characterized by angular and ferocious appearance and their more figurative and coplex composite bete influenced Ivorian counterparts.
Most of the masks are abstractions of a leading animal – ape elephant monkey with boars tusks and other