FREED SLAVE LAND

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1691, 26 November 1925, Page 2

FREED SLAVE LAND

LIBERIA’S ORIGIN AND FUTURE

A day or two ago an American friend mentioned to me that Firestone had his eye on Liberia. Liberia lies on the West African Coast just where that coast curves round south and eastward between Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast. Its southermosf districts come within five degrees of the Equator, but that is no special inconvenience to a populace the determining factor of which consists of ex-slaves or free negroes from the Southern States.

For that is what gives the republic of Liberia its real interest. Given the name of the State itself and the name of its chief town, Monrovia, you can get far towards the nature and date of its origin. Liberia —the State of the free, or freed, that explains itself well enough; Monrovia—-that manifestly commemorates James Monroe, and even the schoolboy who was not very sure aboot Liberia > knows that the Monroe Doctrine was promulgated in 1523. That fixes the date of Mbnroe’s Presidency, and Monrovia in point of fact got its name in 1822. It has therefore quite lately celebrated i’ts centenary, though the event may 'have made no very deep impression on the larger world. Altogether this miniature republic is something of a curiosity in the world of States. It represents an interesting experiment that largely failed, and' yet not so completely 'that the enterprise thus initiated has broken down altogether. Liberia was to have solved largely the problem of 'the freed s.ave in America. The early colonists of the strip of no man’s land on the African coast where many escaped negroes, for Liberia was founded more than forty years before Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation. American philanthropists put up the money and despatched the first contingent of migrants. Monrovia was the earliest settlement. The republic itself, which has 'the African Constitution as its'’ basis, was not recognised by France and Britain until 1847. If the colony had prospered better than it did the flow from America would, no doubt, have been steadier and ampler. As it is there are in Liberia some 12,000 persons of American origin, and they, with another 50,000 more or less civilised natives in the coast zone, form the aristocracy among a population which totals a tittle less than two millions.

But Liberia, if it has not entirely prospered, has at any rate survived, it has goc on the map and stayed,there, as quite a number of people realised lor the first time when they came on the names of Liberian representatives among the signatories of the Treaty of Versailles or in the list of delegates to .the League of Nations Assembly. To explain how they got there means answering the preliminary and inevitable question. What did Liberia do in the Great War? The answer .to that is that Liberia did her bit. It may not have been a profoundly important bit, but even Liberia’s best friends would not claim her as a profoundly important State. At all events she sustained four casualties, and lost her whole navy—an armoured steamer, which a German submarine sank by gunfire. That was after Liberia had declared war on Germany on the historic date of August 4—though not 1914, but 1917. Liberia’s relations with the Germans before the war had not been too comfortable, for most of her trade was in German hands, and the gunboat Panther, notorious on another stretch ot tiie African coast, anchored off Monrovia, with guns trained as a rather pointed reminder that the Liberians were leaving certain financial claims too long unsettled. When war broke out Liberia, by that time very largely under American tutelage, followed America’s example. In M y 1917 a few months after the United States sue broke off diplomatic relations with Germany,' and on August 4 she came right in. Hence her presence at Versailles two years later.

The future of Liberia will be watched with curiosity ami interest. The country is by no means devoid of able men. I remember years ago seeing a West End drawing-room startled into amazement by 'the fluency and flawlessness of an address in English by a coal-black member of the Liberian Supreme Court, and negro heads of the Republic, like Arthur Barclay, or the President King, who is now in his second term of office, have shown a notable capacity for affairs. American advisers are now directing Liberia’s agriculture, finance and military organisation (such as it is), and with their help the Republic may yet succeed in keeping its head above water and what the League Covenant euphemistically calls the strenuous conditions of the modern world.”