SUAKOKO – Bong County is preparing to add a new date to its calendar of remembrance, as Cuttington University moves to declare September 23 of every year “Madam Suakoko Day,” a permanent tribute to the traditional ruler whose name still marks the town, the district, and, in many ways, the university’s own sense of identity.
By Selma Lomax, [email protected]
The decision, confirmed Monday by Cuttington University President Dr. Romelle A. Horton, is being described by school officials as long overdue recognition for a woman whose life and sacrifice made the university’s presence in central Liberia possible in the first place.
Long before Cuttington’s classrooms, dormitories, and administrative buildings rose from the earth, the land belonged to a chief named Suakoko, also remembered as Nye Suah Koko or Suacoco, a Kpelle leader who governed during one of the most difficult chapters of Liberia’s interior history.
Orphaned as a child and raised by her mother, she came of age within the Sande tradition and went on to lead her people through displacement, fleeing violence in her original home before resettling on ground once called Nyalinsue, which would later take her name and become known simply as Suakoko.
She resisted the advance of the Liberian Frontier Force with striking resolve, only turning to negotiation with the government in Monrovia when survival demanded a harder kind of wisdom than combat alone could offer. Even as blindness slowed her in later years, forcing her to rule through her grandson, she never surrendered her authority or abandoned her people’s traditional beliefs, a rare consistency among leaders of her era who were pressured to convert.
It is this same chief, and her descendants, who granted more than a thousand acres of land to Cuttington University, a gift that quietly built the ground beneath everything the institution has since become.
That inheritance is still visible across the university’s Suakoko campus today, where the Chief Suah Koko Center for Rural Women’s Empowerment continues her legacy under a name deliberately chosen to honor her. Neighboring institutions such as Phebe Hospital sit on land tied to the same history, so that the district’s name is not merely geographic trivia but a daily, physical reminder of who made room for the university, literally, in the first place.
For many students and staff, walking the Suakoko campus means walking through a story that began generations before the first lecture was ever held there.
Dr. Horton has spoken at length about why this history deserves a fixed place on the university’s calendar rather than a passing mention in orientation materials.
According to university officials, she has framed the observance as an act of institutional honesty, an acknowledgment that Cuttington exists in Suakoko District because of a woman’s generosity, and that gratitude, left unspoken, tends to fade with each new class of students who arrive without knowing the story behind the ground they stand on.
She has also pointed to what she sees as a pattern in how Liberia remembers its female traditional leaders, noting that women such as Madam Suakoko are frequently reduced to place names, districts, and scholarships, while the ceremony and reflection given to other historical figures rarely extends to them in the same measure. Setting aside September 23, she has suggested, is one way of correcting that imbalance, at least within the university’s own walls.
University sources close to the announcement say Dr. Horton wants the day to carry weight beyond ceremony, tying it to renewed commitment toward programs that serve rural women, in keeping with the spirit Madam Suakoko is remembered for.
She has been quoted as saying the observance is meant to serve as “a permanent thread between the university and the people whose history it inherited,” a description that officials say captures her broader hope that the day will eventually grow into something larger than a single institution’s tradition.
She has separately expressed a wish that the observance will, in time, “grow into a countywide moment of reflection, not just a Cuttington tradition,” extending the remembrance beyond the campus gates and into the wider community that shares Madam Suakoko’s name.
Further details on the university’s first official commemoration, including activities involving traditional leaders from Suakoko District, are expected to be released as September 23 approaches.
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