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Liberia is one of those African countries the name of which, for most of us, is synonymous with violence and atrocity. During that country’s long civil war, teenage soldiers took to wearing children’s masks and women’s dresses in a grotesque parody of carnival, while committing some of the most inhuman acts seen in post-independence Africa.

However, Liberia’s civil war has now been over for several years. Under Charles Ghankay Taylor’s current democratic regime, the country is staggering back to its feet, and reconstructing its shattered economy and infrastructure with surprising speed.

With this recovery has come eco-tourism, or at least the beginnings of it. Liberia has some of West Africa’s most pristine stretches of lowland rain forest, the largest of which is the Sapo National Park in the southeast of the country. Here an American safari company - the appropriately named West African Safaris - has opened the Sinoe River Camp, offering guided explorations of the forest with members of the local Dan tribe, hunter-gatherers who can call animals out of the trees by imitating their calls.

Liberia’s forests offer some of Africa’s obscurer wildlife - pygmy hippo, zebra duiker (which looks like a herbivorous version of the now extinct Tasmanian wolf), dwarf forest elephant, bongo antelope and golden cat. There are also large numbers of chimpanzee, leopard and buffalo. For the adventurous traveller, the rewards of a visit seems obvious.

More importantly, the success of this new venture may prove vital to the long-term future of Liberia’s wider ecology. The country’s major currency earners - rubber, coffee and cocoa - involve planting trees, but these plantations are of little value to wildlife and bio-diversity. Moreover, the country’s desperate need for foreign currency renders its forests vulnerable to international timber consortiums. If Liberia’s rainforest is not to be raped, the government will need other reliable sources of revenue. The Sinoe River Camp is the first step in this direction. I[ West Africa eco-tourism is a virtually untapped resource, representing a fraction of the revenue-earning capacity as generated in East or Southern Africa. Liberia may be leading the way here.

This can only happen if the current political stability lasts. The country saw armed clashes as recently as September 1998, and there is still guerilla activity in the northwest, a region affected by the conflict in Sierra Leone. The US State Department still warns people not to go, but acknowledges that security in the capital, Monrovia, is ‘returning to normal’. The Liberian government, however, maintains that the capital is safer than most other West African cities and that organized safaris to the Sapo Forest in the far southeast represent no risk. Meanwhile, the first eco-safari clients are going in.

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