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96. All Hail, Liberia Hail!
Written by Daniel Bashiel Warner, 1847
Music by Olmstead Luca, 1860
Performed by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra
From the CD National Anthems of the World Volume 5 (Marco Polo, USA
2005)
All hail, Liberia, hail!
All hail, Liberia, hail!
This glorious land of liberty
Shall long be ours
Though new her name
Green be her fame
And mighty be her powers
And mighty be her powers
In joy and gladness
With our hearts united
We’ll shout the freedom
Of a race benighted
Long live Liberia, happy land!
A home of glorious liberty
By God’s command!
A home of glorious liberty
By God’s command!
All hail, Liberia, hail!
All hail, Liberia, hail!
In union strong success is sure
We cannot fail!
With God above
Our rights to prove
We will o’er all prevail
We will o’er all prevail
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!
A home of glorious liberty
By God’s command!
Liberia, in fragments
All Hail, Liberia Hail! was written by Daniel Bashiel Warner, Liberia’s third president and one the country’s ten American presidents. It was adopted as the national anthem of Liberia in 1847. About Liberia’s history and geology, we bring you the following.
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The geology of Liberia is dominated by Precambrian rock formations of the West African Craton. Metamorphosed rocks of the Liberian Province underlie the western two-thirds of Liberia (Hurley et al. 1971), metamorphites and granites of the Paleoproterozoic Eburnian Province dominate the eastern part of Liberia.
Source: Rocks for Crops www.uoguelph.ca/~geology/rocks_for_crops/33liberia
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Mention has been made of the death, on the 1st of December, of the Hon. Daniel Bashiel Warner, coloured, of Liberia, who was born on Hookstown Road, Baltimore County, April 19,1815. His father obtained his freedom just one year before Daniel was born, and removed with his family to the then feeble settlement of Monrovia, arriving there by the brig Oswego from this port, sent by the American Colonisation Society, May 24, 1823. […] He never left Liberia after his arrival there in 1823.
Source: ‘Death of a Liberian Ex-President’, New York Times, March 13, 1881 www.query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html
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The American Colonisation Society was established in 1816 by Robert Finley as an attempt to satisfy two groups in America. Both these groups felt that free blacks would be unable to assimilate into the white society of this country. Ironically, these groups were on opposite ends of the spectrum involving slavery in the early 1800s. John Randolph, one famous slave owner called free blacks ‘promoters of mischief’.
Source: History: Liberia, Africa http://www.essortment.com/all/liberiahistory_rkew.htm
Liberia, located between Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea and Sierra Leone, has a 580 km long, marshy and lagoon studded Atlantic coastline. The hinterland is made up of ill-defined and dissected plateaux. The climate is humid/tropical with high rainfall, and high temperatures.
Source: Rocks for Crops
On December 21, 1816, a group of exclusively white upper-class males including James Monroe, Bushrod Washington, Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, and Daniel Webster met at the Davis hotel in Washington D.C. to found the American Colonisation Society. They met one week later and adopted a constitution. During the next three years, the society raised money by selling memberships. The Society’s members relentlessly pressured Congress and the President for support. In 1819, they received $100,000 from Congress and in January 1820 the first ship, the Elizabeth, set sail from New York headed for West Africa with three white ACS agents and 88 emigrants.
The ship arrived first at Freetown, Sierra Leone then sailed south to what is now the northern coast of Liberia and made an effort to establish a settlement. All three whites and twenty two of the emigrants died within three weeks from yellow fever.
Source: The American Colonization Society http://www.personal.denison.edu/~waite/liberia/history/acs.htm
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The iron ore deposits of the Bong range occur in the Liberian Province. A narrow belt of supracrustal rocks affected by the Neoproterozoic to lower Cambrian Pan-African event strike parallel to the coastline. Unmetamorphosed Paleozoic to recent sediments occur along the coast.
Source: Rocks for Crops
[…] The biggest challenge for the fledging nation was the establishment of its boundaries. The colony had consolidated mostly along the coast with its capital at Monrovia. Much of the country’s interior was unexplored territory occupied by hostile Malinke.
Source: ‘Liberia’. Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopaedia, 2000
Jehudi Ashmun, missionary and agent of the American Colonisation Society envisioned an American empire in Africa. During 1825 and 1826, Ashmun took steps to lease, annex, or buy tribal lands along the coast and on major rivers leading inland. Like his predecessor Lt. Robert Stockton, who in 1821 persuaded a local chief, King Peter, to sell Cape Montserado (or Mesurado) by pointing a pistol at his head, Ashmun was prepared to use force to extend the colony’s territory. His aggressive actions quickly increased Liberia’s power over its neighbours. In this treaty of May 1825, King Peter and other native kings agreed to sell land in return for 500 bars of tobacco, three barrels of rum, five casks of powder, five umbrellas, ten iron posts, and ten pairs of shoes, among other items.
Source: Scramble For Africa, Wikipedia http://216.239.59.132/search?q=cache:4l33pKTIUf0J:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Scramble_for_Africa+Jehudi+Ashmun+envisaged+an+african+empire+in+Liberia&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=uk
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Moved to a distrust of white merchants, who delighted in defrauding the little republic, [Warner] established an important Ports-of-Entry law in 1865 which, it is hardly necessary to say, was very unpopular with foreigners. Commerce was restricted to six ports and a circle of six miles in diameter around each port.
Source: A social history of the American Negro, by Benjamin Brawley, Kessinger Publications, 2004 http://books.google.co.uk/books
[…] In South Carolina and in parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma, entire communities sold their belongings and embarked for the coast to meet ships – sometimes real, sometimes imaginary – bound for the ‘promised land’ of Liberia.
Source: Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa, by James T. Campbell, Published by Oxford University Press US, 1995 http://books.google.co.uk/
[…] from the start, the promise proved empty.
Source: Mississippi In Africa, by Alan Huffman. New York: Gotham Books. Reviewed by Ira Berlin, New York Times, May 2 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/books/review/02BERLINT.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5007&en=c940e5a31777a25a&ex=1398830400&partner =USERLAND
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Phosphates. There are two small known phosphate deposits in Liberia. The deposit at the Bomi iron ore deposit, 60 km north of Monrovia, is composed of grey to cream coloured phosphatic rocks superficially resembling calcareous tufa. Secondary Fe-phosphate, mainly phosphosiderite and strengite, fill cavities and form cements between iron ore fragments. A sample from the leucophosphite (KFe2[PO4]2OH(H2O)2) at Bomi contained 33.46% P2O5 and 36.85% Fe2O3, as well as 7.86% K2O. Axelrod et al. (1952) interpreted this occurrence as a reaction product of bat excreta with iron oxides. There is an abundance of bat guano in the caves. No figures exist on volume and grade of the Bomi phosphate resources.
Source: Rocks for Crops
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[…] Back-to-Africa sentiment first welled over in South Carolina. In the winter of 1887-1878, a group of black leaders in Charleston, […] chartered the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company. As word of the company’s formation spread, thousands of people flooded into the city from the surrounding countryside. Startled company directors scraped together a few thousand dollars to purchase a ship and hurriedly arranged a voyage. In the spring of 1878, a crowd of ten thousand gathered at Charleston Harbour to bid farewell to the Azor and its compliment of 206 emigrants.
Source: Campbell
Major sources of limestone and dolomites are unknown in Liberia (Nair and Dorbor 1990). The geology of the country is generally unfavourable for the formation of limestones and dolomites. Lime products are made from local deposits of marine shells on the beaches of eastern Liberia. No other agrominerals are reported from Liberia.
Source: Rocks for Crops
[…] [ministers from the] African Methodist [Episcopalian Church] played a central role in the Azor expedition. The creation of a joint stock company was first proposed by the pastor of the local AME church, B.F Porter, who went on to serve as the company’s only president. […] As the Azor made ready, the linkage between African American and African redemption remained intact. Porter, who addressed the throng seeing off the ship, characterised the migrants as Christian soldiers whose very presence would speed ‘the evangelisation of the millions of their people who now sat in darkness’.
Source: Campbell
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Although Americo-Liberians had been denied their freedom in America, many did not think to extend their new liberty to the native Malinke. Liberians treated many Malinke like second-class citizens and denied them voting rights under their US-based constitution. Natives were also used as forced labour until an admonishment from the League of Nations in 1931 halted the practice. The indigenous population and women received the vote as late as 1951.
Source: ‘History: Liberia, Africa’. http://www.essortment.com/all/liberiahistory_rkew.htm
Agromineral potential. Apart from the occurrences of phosphates there are no major agrogeological resources reported in the country. In general, the nature of the geology of Liberia is not favourable for the formation of rocks and minerals that can be used for soil fertility improvement.
Source: Rocks for Crops
The ‘Americo-Liberians’ (of American ancestry), and the ‘Congos’ (people descended from those rescued from slave ships), though a small minority of the total population, came to dominate the political and economic life of the country. The sixteen tribes of native Liberians were actively discriminated against by them, and for many decades did not share the same legal rights. In 1980, after over 150 years of hostilities, the Americo-Liberian grip on power was brutally broken. This only led to prolonged civil war, which devastated the economy and infrastructure of the country.
Source: ‘Liberia – The Last Slave Ships’, by Mel Fisher, Maritime History http://www.melfisher.org/exhibitions/lastslaveships/liberia.htm
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After 14 years of savage civil war and two of an uneasy peace, diamond-rich Liberia, a country of 3.5 million traumatised people, has a shattered economy.
The diamond wealth was misused to fund the regional aggressions of former president Charles Taylor, now indicted as a war criminal by an international court. Diamond exports remain under UN sanctions. But western companies are moving in and attempting to cut lucrative deals with a transitional government riven by rivalries. Never far away is the lurking presence of Mr Taylor, in exile in Nigeria.
One of the key companies involved has its base in London. It is a little-known bank with a suite of offices overlooking Buckingham Palace gardens. The London International Bank (LIB) was involved in two contracts, one for diamonds and one for telecommunications. Both contracts, which would have given it monopoly powers in the alluvial diamond and telecommunications industries, have been criticised by the UN and the World Bank respectively.
Source: ‘British bank rebuked over secret Liberian diamond deal’, by David Pallister,
The Guardian, Friday June 3 2005 http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2005/jun/03/hearafrica05.westafrica
The Bambuta deposit is located 70 km north-northeast of Monrovia, 25 km east of Bomi Hill iron mine (6 o 56′ N; 10 o 33′ W). Results of a diamond drilling programme and mapping have shown a minimum reserve of 1 million tonnes of phosphate rock at 32% P2O5, or 1.5 million tonnes of ore grading 28% P2O5 (Rosenblum and Srivastava 1979). The phosphorus bearing minerals are mainly members of the variscite strengite series (secondary Al-Fe phosphates). Like at Bomi, the phosphates are associated with an iron ore deposit. The genesis of this deposit remains unclear although Rosenblum and Srivastava (1979) discuss the possibilities of a metasedimentary-metasomatic origin or, alternatively, origin as a result of phosphate precipitation from guano-derived solutions.
Source: Rocks for Crops
Monrovia, 30 March 2005. The transitional government of Liberia has forged a 10-year deal that gives a previously unheard of mining company a de facto monopoly to buy up diamonds and other minerals produced in the west of the country, according to a United Nations panel of experts. ‘The National Transitional Government of Liberia has signed a secret agreement with the West African Mining Corporation (WAMCO), a company financed by the privately-owned London International Bank Limited,’ the panel said in its latest report to the UN Security Council.
The five-member panel expressed concern that the deal had been struck in an ‘atmosphere of secrecy’ with a company of ‘unknown provenance’ and cited its existence as evidence that a four-year-old ban on diamond exports by Liberia should be maintained. The ban was originally imposed in 2001, along with an arms embargo, to prevent the government of former President Charles Taylor from using the foreign exchange earned from diamonds mined in Liberia and smuggled in from neighbouring Sierra Leone to buy guns.
Source: Humanitarian news and analysis, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=53661
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Life expectancy at birth (1999): 51 years.
Source: Rocks for Crops
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WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE WHILE OUR WEBSITE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION – LONDON INTERNATIONAL BANK.
Source: London International Bank. http://www.londonintbank.com/
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