I was away in West Africa last week, visiting a land I had previously heard about only through its not so distant past.

For Liberia has a past that gave us rebel soldiers, ensured that the term child soldier slipped easily into African consciousness, and showed us the depths to which the human spirit could sink, and the heights to which it could soar.

The warlords are gone, self-declared generals with names like "Butt Naked" have undergone a kind of religious metamorphosis into preachers and men of peace, the ranks of the rebel soldiers have dissolved into a heaving mass of the disarmed and unemployed, and their one time leader - Charles Taylor - is in The Hague, answering questions in the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

Liberia is a conundrum of sorts. There will come a time, one day in the far distant future, when the histories of African countries will be uttered like fables, as if the things which really did happen in the births of nations were too far-fetched to have been real.

Of course anyone can have such a thought when you look closely at where Liberia has come from - and that is not just the last 20 years or so of uncertainty and war, but also the last 162 years, since America's great colonial experiment began.

From the moment freed slaves set foot on the beaches here and lived close to the Atlantic, the natives have been restless.

In this new century, the last war has been over for some five or six years and Liberians are trying to open a new chapter with the ghosts of hostilities past still very much in their minds. Can they do it?

At Roberts International Airport, my eyes are filled with two letters of the alphabet - a "U" and an "N".

For even as the plane lands, all you can see is the archangel white of the massive United Nations presence.