Liberia: Description, History, ProblemsStarr, Frederick
History
Liberia: Description, History, Problems
Starr, Frederick
Liberia
From this native mass much that has been helpful to the nation has
already been secured. Work among them has always been accompanied by
encouraging results. Two-thirds of the communicants of the Protestant
Episcopal Church are natives; they show as true a character, as keen a
mind, as high ideals, often more vigor, than the Americo-Liberians in
the same churches. Wherever the native is given the same just chance as
his Liberian brother, he gives an immediate response. At the Girls’
School in Bromley, and among the boys at Clay-Ashland, natives and
Liberians do the same work and offer the same promise; so in the College
of West Africa the Kru boys are every whit as good as the Liberians. The
number of natives who are at present occupying positions of consequence
in the Republic is encouraging. The Secretary of the Department of
Education, Dr. Payne, is a Bassa; Mr. Massaquoi, a Vai, holds the chief
clerkship in the Department of the Interior; Senator Harris is the son
of a native, Bassa, mother; Mr. Karnga, member of the House of
Representatives, is a son of a recaptured African--a Kongo; Dr. Anthony,
a Bassa, is Professor of Mathematics in Liberia College; there are
numbers of Grebo clergymen of prominence and success within the
Protestant Episcopal Church--as McKrae, who is pastor of the flourishing
Kru Chapel at Monrovia, and Russell, who is pastor of the Liberian
Church at Grand Bassa.
The natives, after all, are the chief asset of the nation. Only by their
co-operation can aggression and pressure from outside be resisted;
carefully developed and wisely utilized, they must and will be the
defense and strength of the Liberian nation. Even if immigration on an
enormous scale, a thing not to be expected, should take place, the
native population will never be submerged; it will continue to maintain
supremacy in numbers.
For support given to education, Liberia holds the first place among
West African administrations. Sierra Leone, with a revenue six times
greater than Liberia, spends only one-fifth of the sum devoted by our
State to the cause of public instruction.--A. BARCLAY.
EDUCATION.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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