Something about Mamie Cooper says she was born to be a mother. She looks just right, bathed in the glow of the afternoon sun, sitting in front of her baked mud house in Kingsville, Liberia, surrounded by her children. People in this corner of Africa tend not to be demonstrative with little ones, but Mamie is different: she takes obvious delight in her youngest daughter, Siane, glancing fondly at her and stroking her hair as Siane wriggles about on her lap.

Mamie is telling the story of the children we won’t see today, three of them who died before they were a year old. Her first child, Christine, was born on Christmas Eve 22 years ago, but Mamie says she still remembers the feeling of wonder when she first held her baby girl in her arms, and the stomach-churning horror a few months later when she died of measles. She often thinks of Christine, she says, and wonders how she’d be now, all grown up.

Christine’s brother, Emanuel, who was born nearly 10 years later, caught malaria at six months old and died within days. Tragedy struck again when another brother, Kamen, died of measles, like Christine. Mamie looks close to tears, but she doesn’t ask for sympathy. Too many families have suffered similar losses to make hers anything special. “But I would like you to know I loved them,” she says. “I fought with everything I had to make them survive.”

Mamie lives in Kingsville, a sprawling settlement an hour or so out of the Liberian capital, Monrovia, on a road so potholed and hair-raising it is darkly comic — wild, zigzagging lines of traffic, no markings, no signals. Kingsville is typical of the villages you find dotted among the plantain and kola-nut trees. Where the road ends, the mud tracks begin, leading you into the jungle and back in time.

Arrive any morning and you will find Mamie and her neighbours washing clothes in the creek or chivying the children off to what passes for a school. The heat and humidity will feel suffocating: the air will be heavy with the tang of charcoal smoke from fires lit to boil cassava, the bland root that is the only food for most here.

Liberia is a tiny country with an unhappy history, sandwiched between Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast. All three are strung, like blood-spattered pearls, along the perimeter of west Africa where the land bulges into the Atlantic. Civil wars have ravaged the whole region, but little Liberia seems to have absorbed the shock waves of its neighbours’ conflicts as well as its own. It has been peaceful for five years now, but has been reduced to one of the poorest places on Earth.

The people are welcoming and strangers are surrounded by crowds of excited children who want to talk and touch their hair. But the relentless grind of a life spent scraping a living from the overworked soil or tapping rubber and sleeping on dirt floors lines the prematurely aged faces. Life expectancy in Liberia is 45 years, and two-thirds of its people live on less than $1 a day. The abundance of caffeine-laden kola nuts comes in handy: they gnaw them to stave off hunger pangs.

Yet despite the privations and perils so graphically illustrated by the fate of Mamie’s children, the birth of a baby is something to celebrate: as we pass a small, mud house with rickety bamboo poles fashioned as a porch, a smiling woman holding an armful of cassava leaves wordlessly motions us inside. By the borrowed light filtering into the gloomy interior from a small, rectangular opening high in the mud wall, it’s just possible to make out the shape of a bundle on a worn mattress. It’s a baby, born just a few hours ago, his eyes still puffy from the trauma of birth. His 18-year-old mother, Siana Mulbah, is lying exhausted but serene by his side. Prince, the new baby, who appears on our front cover, is wearing a faded camouflage T-shirt a few sizes too big. His “bed” is a Barbie pillowcase and a soft cloth, one of his grandmother’s colourful wraps scrunched up around him. He looks happy enough, yawning and waving his little fists. His hair is dark and damp, with a neat curl on top. Nobody can tell us exactly what time he was born or what he weighs; the family’s best guess is that he arrived about two or three o’clock in the morning, making him about eight hours old. The name Prince sounds odd to us, but think of it as a triumph of hope over experience: in Kingsville, playing happily in the dirt, their bellies swollen by chronic malnutrition, you come across children called Prince or Princess all the time. “I want him to grow up strong. I know he will make me proud,” says Siana. Prince’s regal name was chosen by Siana’s mother, Larpu. It’s usually the father who gets to name the child, but all the men of the house, including Siana’s boyfriend, are away, desperate to find work. “If his father is able to earn a little money, we will have a celebration, with food and sweets for our neighbours,” says Siana. She looks pleased; there isn’t often an excuse for a party. If her boyfriend doesn’t bring money, it will be the usual fare — boiled cassava and the odd bowl of rice.

Prince’s birth was pretty standard for Kingsville; no pain relief, no sterile water, no medical equipment. When the pain set in, last evening, Siana says, she walked back and forth for a while to try to ease it, then sent for her Auntie Fina, a village midwife. Fina arrived soaking wet — the rains had begun and she had walked for almost an hour. As Siana’s labour intensified the rain hammered down on the shack’s corrugated roof.

“I was scared. The pain was coming faster and faster and I turned my heart to God,” she says. “The rain was so heavy. Then it stopped, and there was silence. The baby came. I felt my heart gladden when I heard his cries.”

It’s hard to imagine what it was like giving birth in the heat and the dark. Five women, including Siana’s mother and two sisters, were crammed into a room no more than 10ft by 10ft. A burnt-out candle lies discarded on a small table, the sole evidence of the night’s drama. As Prince curls and uncurls his tiny fingers, I can’t help looking around the bare room and thinking of an incident witnessed by Pep Bonet, our Spanish photographer, who is busy taking Prince’s picture. Pep was photographing a birth one night in nearby Sierra Leone: things started to go wrong and the midwife had to perform a caesarean. It was pitch-dark and there was no electricity, no light except the flash of his camera. As the midwife cut open the woman’s stomach she kept shouting, “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” so she could see what she was doing. We are all smiling, cooing over the baby, but what if a similar crisis had arisen here last night? In Africa it’s the flip of fate’s coin that decides whether you are mourning a tragedy or admiring a new arrival. As for the chances of Prince being alive when you read this, well, he was born at the beginning of last month… one in nine children in Liberia don’t make it to their fifth birthday. That’s 11 in 100. Of those 11, three don’t make it through the first month. And of those three, two don’t make it to the end of their first week. And 70% of those deaths could be prevented in stunningly cheap and simple ways.

Siana’s prospects aren’t much better than her son’s: a woman in Liberia has a one-in-12 risk of dying as a result of childbirth. When I later ask Aletha Gbowee, manager of the local clinic, supported by the British charity Save the Children, if she has any drugs she can give women to ease the pain of labour, she just laughs. Spending money on pain-relieving drugs would be as frivolous as giving women designer handbags in a place where so many die simply because they don’t stop bleeding after a birth. Or there’s nobody to stitch them or clean them if they tear; or the wounds get infected. All routine causes of death, believe it or not, so simple and preventable that to us they seem almost baffling. In Liberia, a mother dies this way every six hours.