Ellen Launches historical website

President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has launched a historical website featuring a respectable female Liberian leader in the 1900s – the late Chief Suah Koko of Bong County. The site also includes historical moments of the Firestone Rubber and Tire Company, which secured a 99-year lease of one million acres of land here in 1926.

At the launching ceremony of the website to the project undertaken by a Liberian doctorate degree candidate, Mr. Emmanuel Urey and team, President Sirleaf described the initiative as a tremendous journey, expressing the hope that the site will be meaningful to all Liberians.
She admonished a gathering at the Center for National Documentation and Records Agency or CNDRA on 12th Street in the Sinkor suburb of Monrovia to appreciate the project as it focuses on history. “When people appreciate their history, they may also appreciate their own culture, beginning and potential.

Because it shows you that journey, coming from where you were to where you are and where you could be; and it’s in that spirit that this website should be meaningful to all of us that we can look back; we can
appreciate our own forefathers … and appreciate what they went through to bring us to where we are today,” she said.

The website – www.liberianhistory.org, was launched under the theme “recollecting our history,” is said to contain nearly 600 photographs and more than two hours of motion picture footage taken on a 1926 Harvard scientific expedition to Liberia gathered by Whitman.

Liberia’s Information Minister Lenn Eugene Nagbe said, during the ceremony, that Liberia was blending New Media with its past, as he lamented over the fact that Liberians do not know their country’s history.

He said the vacuum is affecting the country’s social fabric as the use of the social media for intellectual exchange degenerates into insults, lack of ethics, misinforming younger ones and inability to educate each another.

But Mr. Nagbe believed that Liberia’s culture is disappearing because Liberians do not know their culture, and therefore appreciated the initiative because he said it will allow “us” to educate the children through the New Media and social media, among others.

River Gee County Senator Comany B. Wesseh indicated that history was something that is missing in Liberia, saying if you don’t know your history, you will not be proud of it. As he pledged his support to the CNDRA, Sen. Wesseh noted that people who are able to refer to the past with eloquence are considered wise people in meetings, suggesting that the wise people in “our community” are people who know history.

By Winston W. Parley-Edited by George Barpeen