Word: liberia
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...years I have been president of the American Colonization Society which in 1847 deeded as a free gift to Liberia the entire territory now occupied by that Republic. Consequently, I had more than a perfunctory interest in the recent comment on the Liberian situation (TIME, June 24). Your article contains many undeniable facts but there are some statements that are more picturesque than accurate. For instance, there may be a million rats in Monrovia but I have been there twice and I can only say that I never saw one. Again, you state that the Liberian Government has "never succeeded...
During the last five years conditions in Liberia have been salt in the wounds of the State Department. The British objected that the rats in Monrovia were so bad that bubonic plague was prevented from spreading through West Africa only by the fact that it had no harbor in which ships could dock; that a smallpox epidemic ravaged the interior; that the simplest health measures were unknown and Liberia might become a focus of infection for all Africa. This the U. S. State Department could believe. In 1929 U. S. Minister William Treyanne Francis died there of yellow fever...
...raid villages of their Afro-African countrymen, torture women and chiefs, seize black bucks and sell them into slavery in French Gabun and Spanish Fernando Po. When a League of Nations Commission verified the practice. President King and his followers, on stern advice from Washington, resigned. Next Liberia, under President Edwin Barclay, defaulted on its loan of $2,250,000 from Harvey Firestone. In 1925 when rubber was $1 per Ib. the State Department had encouraged Mr. Firestone to start a huge rubber plantation in Liberia and lend the African Republic money to pay off its European and other debts...
Since the U. S. could not stop these occurrences, the League of Nations tried. Liberia is a charter member of the League, for it had joined the Allies one day during the War when a British warship anchored off Monrovia. The League found that Liberia, besides having no health service, had no budget, no accounts, no money, that its trouble was, as Lord Cecil put it, "the incompetence of the Government and corruption-but rather more incompetence than corruption." The League offered to send Liberia a Government adviser to set things right. President Barclay proudly declined. The League threatened...
...least pleasant assignments in a career which had taken him from Poland to Peru. Only difficulty he was spared was the presence of a U. S. Minister at Monrovia. Charles E. Mitchell, the last to hold that post, had been retired because of the prolonged lack of recognition of Liberia. As Charge d'Affaires. Mr. Hibbard had spent long days in polite palaver with Liberian kinkywigs, long nights swatting mosquitoes and tropical vermin. Finally he proposed a deal: Mr. Firestone would cut interest on his Liberian loan from 7% to 5%; Liberia would frown on the slave traffic...