The last straw that breaks the camel’s back. Or more appropriately the closing of the stable door after the horse has escaped.”
“My appeal is directed to the young people of Liberia, and particularly to the young people of the Kru tribe, and it is an appeal for us to prepare ourselves for world leadership.”
“Coming home to ourselves, we ask the question, what has Liberia contributed, and is contributing towards world advancement and improvement? What are we doing individually to make the world better, and Liberia safe for democracy?”
“With such a situation confronting the patriotic citizens of the country, and as loyal True Whigs, the question remains, what shall we do to be saved? It is highly gratifying to tell you boldly from genuine personal and otherwise reports received from Cape Palmas to Cape Mount we have the day for King. Watch out and see us victoriously rise.”
“The Congo Progressive Association met in semi-annual conclave at the residence of Hon. Abayomi Karnga last week, and while there feasted and talked liberally. The feast ended in a clean sweep, and the talk in a muddle. Thus in this first coup nothing was added to the Unit. But if it keeps on springing such surprises upon “unsuspecting guests, even that which it seemed to have will be taken away from it, and itself cast out as being unprofitable.”
FLOREAT COLLEGIUM LIBERIA By R. T. D.
When Church was o’er, the line was formed as
before, In caps, gowns, hoods, black and white, we did
implore The sympathy of the noblest and all the poor Who made us feel like still, Floreat Collegium Liberia,
On Thursday noon, the Commencement was begun, Methought I heard the sound of thundering gun, Telling us the day is come, the night is gone-The day was calm, serene and fine, Floreat Collegium Liberia,
I heard the Band to sound, the Clay-Ashland Band, And busy though I was, I could no later stand, For the sound was mighty and did peal through
the land. It made me sing this sweet refrain, Floreat Collegium Liberia.
The College sang a song and prayer was said, Then the “Sal” rose, greeted us and nobly pled, And he roused the silence of the heroic dead. My heart did throb within and say: Floreat Collegium Liberia.
Then followed the “Val”, the leader of the Class. And with word transparent as a shining glass, He gave us true mental food, yet not in brass.
He made us feel and wish within : Floreat Collegium Liberia.
A song was sung; then rose the Speaker of the Day, This humorous man did make us laugh and play; His speech was fine; full of humour and delay. He made us feel and wish within : Floreat Collegium Liberia.
Unlike the Commencements of the previous days, A thing was done that true credit wrought and
praise-It was worthy prizes offered for the plays, By the first Lady of the land : Floreat Collegium Liberia.
Unlike the Commencements preceded this, The degrees were conferred in ceremonious ways, And all who saw this would truly praise for days The efforts of the Acting Sage, Floreat Collegium Liberia.
AU hail! all hail! ! hail the closing day of mirth, That to us this day doth give a joyous birth And make us prone heavenward and not to earth, Lux in Tenebris, from thee is heard. Floreat Collegium Liberia.
Farewell, farewell, to thee thou dying year of toil Now is ease as then was labour for our soil, In thee our time we nonetheless did spoil; But laboured hard and wishing still, Joreat Collegium Liberia.
Welcome, welcome, thou season of rest and ease, The year has brought thee from across the seas; O bid fair, bid fair to us to make us please, To sing this longing strain for aye, Flo-re-at Col-le-gi-um Li-be-ria!
Return
But though it was this impression that followed me on board the cargo steamer which had been wirelessed to call off Monrovia for passengers, the memory, too, of hundreds of children in the Catholic school bellowing out the National Anthem:
With heart and hand our country’s cause
defending, We’ll meet the foe with valour unpretending. Long live Liberia, happy land, A home of glorious liberty by God’s command
-one realised, going out by surf boat towards the bar, that thin line of white which divided this world from the other, the world of the smokestack, the siren that called us impatiently on board, the officer on the captain’s bridge who watched us through glasses, how much less separated they really were from the true primitive than we. It was at their back, it wasn’t centuries away. If they had taken the wrong road, they had only to retrace their steps a very little distance in space and not in timelittle The little jetty moved jerkily backwards, the river came into sight, the silver mangrove branches straddling like the ribs of old umbrellas on either side. Two hundred and fifty miles up that stream still existed the exact spot, the broken tree-trunk, the swarm of red ants where I had waited for my lost companions. The half-built Customs house, the waterside squalor of Kru Town, the asphalt road up to grassy Broad Street, they slipped behind with the sweep of the oars, but they belonged to the same world as the huddled huts at Duogobmai, the devil’s servant fanning away the storm, the old woman who had made lightning trailing back to her prison with the rope round her waist. They were all gathered together behind the white line of the bar no European steamer ever crossed.
How happy I had thought I should be, while I was struggling down to Grand Bassa, back in my world. The bar took the prow and lifted it out of the water, one wave curled beneath us and broke along the beach of Kru Town, the second line broke above us, stinging the face, washing along the boards of the wide shallow boat, and there we were beyond, looking back at the bar and behind it Africa. A mammy chair came rattling down from the tarred English side. Of course I was happy, I told myself, opening the bathroom door, examining again a real water-closet, studying the menu at lunch, while out of the porthole Cape Mount slid away, Liberia slid away, with Abyssinia the only part of Africa where white men do not rule. One had been scared and sick and one was well again, in the world to which one belonged.
But what had astonished me about Africa was that it had never been really strange. Gibraltar and Tangier-those extended just parted hands-seemed more than ever to represent an unnatural breach. The ‘heart of darknesslittle was common to us both. Freud has made us conscious as we have never been before of those ancestral threads which still exist in our unconscious minds to lead us back. The need, of course, has always been felt, to go back and begin again. Mungo Park, Livingstone, Stanley, Rimbaud, Conrad represented only another method to Freud’s, a more costly, less easy method, calling for physical as well as mental strength. The writers, Rimbaud and Conrad, were conscious of this purpose, but one is not certain how far the explorers knew the nature of the fascination which worked on them in the dirt, the disease, the barbarity and the familiarity of Africa.
The captain leant over the rail, old and dissatisfied, complaining of his men : “Boil the whole bloody lot of the men in the ship together and you wouldn’t make an ordinary seaman”; he was looking back-to the age of sail; At Freetown guests came on board and we drank ourselves free from Africa. An officer came and eyed me like an enemy across the table in the smoking-room. ‘I’d send my ticket to the Board of Trade, my dear friend, and tell them to tell you, my dear friend… .” The captain stuck his fingers down his throat, brought up his drink and was dead sober again, and the ship went out of harbour, out of Africa. But their dissatisfaction was like a navel-string that tied them to its coast.
For there are times when the nearest the European has ever got to the interior, to the communal life with its terror and its gentleness, seems to be the Coast; Major Grant ringing up the brothel in Savile Row, the Old Etonian in Kensington Gardens, the Nottingham ‘tart’ and the droshky-drivers of Riga dwell on that rim of land which is known all the world over as the Coast, the one and only coast. They are not, after all, so far from the central darkness: Miss Kilvane listening to the ghost of Joanna just as the circle of blacks in Tailahun listened to the enigmatic speech of Landow; the Catholic priest saying, “And now the Immaculate Conception” as the bus drove through the market, the tangle of stalls and overhead wires, the neo-Gothic hotels under the black overhead Midland fog. This may explain the deep appeal of the seedy. It is nearer the beginning; like Monrovia its building has begun wrong, but at least it has only begun; it hasn’t reached so far away as the smart, the new, the chic, the cerebral.