It had been hundred plus years after the founding of Liberia when Liberia was living a contradictory life and there was no one conscious enough to speak out against the system of democracy that had engendered man’s cruelty to man.
After Liberia had been a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, her governments smoldered over the distribution of social justice among its citizenry. But rather ascribed selective justice to the state at the detriment of the peasants.
After a century of oppression of the majority (the indigenous) by the minority (Americo-Liberians), Liberia was at a crossroad of heightened political and social consciousness.
When brothers and sisters of no mean identity galvanized themselves into conscious movements to sharpen the contradictions that have long been festering in our country and further provided plausible recommendations for the forward mobility of the country.
Their valiance laid the basis for the progressive struggle for a more pluralistic Liberia. Where the political and social humiliations inflicted on the majority by the cliquish Oligarchy of the True Whig Party would be totally uprooted.
The progressive struggle was made of activists and advocates most of whom were peasants, classroom teachers, journalists, clergymen, student radicals, and cadres who chose uneasiness over easiness, thus making them selfless at the nascent of the promising freedom struggle.
Their endorsement of such restoration was to see Liberians of today jubilating them as heroes and stars for their roles they played back then. But to the contrary some agents of bigotry have taken solace in belittling them and ascribing their fight to a product of failure. It is indeed a tragedy for us!
Their platitudes and invectives rained on the PROGRESSIVES then inaugurate the untold fate of the progressive struggle!
Understandably to note, that Master Albert Porte, the greatest crusader for Social Justice in Liberia and a constructive nonconformist to the Whig party hegemony, who was one of the earliest rays of the emission of societal consciousness became rattled by these injustices and took on the onerous duty to apportioned himself the role of seeing through those chronological imbalances crumbling in the Liberian society.
He then set the stage to battle the inhumanity of the Oligarchy not by physical boycott to standing orders but by his wisdom of political journalism implored by his power of the pen by publishing conscious pamphlets and articles for the redemption of Liberia from the inertia of awkwardness.
The progressive’s consciousness led to the formulation of the nation’s first civil society organization, COLIDAP. After a libel case was tagged on the crusader by the Supreme Court. He stood the test of time against the tyrannical Whig government under former Presidents King, Tubman, and Tolbert.
Since fear had engulfed the country, conscious voices were silenced. Fearing untimely deaths or unnecessary incarcerations, no one else caressed the hazard or saw the need to oppose this over-concentration of power in the hands of the Oligarchy, to the detriment of the nation and its people, Master Porte saw his mission to build the requisite consciousness assumed that he had a role given him by the Almighty God.
The Progressives under Master Porte never ran in slums for barricades rather they exposed their bodies to the flogging, imprisonment and death that awaited them!
The activisms and advocacies of the progressive then brought the Oligarchy to a moral disrepute and aroused the socio-economic conscience of the Yana boys, peasants, scholars, collegians, and radicals etc. – they started detaching themselves of whatever regard they have kept sacred for the regime that has already shown a sign of economic failure.
This then became a driving tool to the triumph of the progressives’ mission when they stood tall in readiness for a change from dual party democracy to a multi-party democracy where they would elect their leaders.
Emerging were two more conscious groups, the Progressive Alliance of Liberia & the Movement for Justice in Africa led by two spirited sons of Liberia, Master Gabriel Bacchus Matthews (my role model) and Dr. Togba Nah Tipoteh. These groups were the produce of the earliest progressive, COLIDAP.
Their intensification of the Porte’s manifesto lured the masses to the dismissal of the Oligarchy. This then halted the history of the bestial exploitation of the natives and promoted the dethronement of the cruel oligarchy by the anguished people themselves.
The dream of the progressives was to live in an equitable society where all sundry (the oppressed and oppressor) will sit and recommend for the elevation of mama Liberia. Their role had since been misunderstood by lupen- intellectuals and dollar-politicians as denigrators to the nation’s sacrosanctity.
This is validated the reasons for which we have no day in our history to be celebrated as Porte’s Day of Social Justice or Matthews’ Day of Modern Liberian Democracy in remembrance of the progressive struggle. But we celebrate the despotic conservative, Tubman’s birthday with no historical improvement to the state. Woe to them that malign revolutionaries and worship cruel buffs!
This then becomes the untold fate of the Progressive struggle. Our pathfinders thought that vangaurding such movement by placing their lives against high odds would have increased their chances by posterity for the spirits of the historical inequities that they had exorcised from the political landscape of Liberia.
They felt that good works required convincing prizes, disrupting the hypocrisy of Whigs democracy of selective justice and empowering the real democracy which supports the manifesto for social justice, would have given them fleeting pages in the people’s history.
They would have appeared in the People’s Chronicles of Honors and Achievements. Today almost all of our legendary revolutionary parents walked faced down, draped in shame because of those spineless arguments averred by some ill-informed advocates of the devil.
Forgetting to know, that the fate of mankind before eating from the tree of knowledge was expected to be a painless lifestyle to be lived by man but mankind refusal to quarantine the tenets of inquisitiveness led him to tasting the pains of life.
This happened because mankind objective was thwarted and he needed not be jubilated for his defiance to God’s standing rule. To the contrary, the case of the progressive saw them pleading for the God given dignity of man to be secured by the emergence of good governance and resounding policies to relieve Liberians from the shackles of dismal lack, massive fruitlessness and the mockery to the pride of manhood.
The progressives then deserve veneration! Why should they be denied of what they worked painstakingly for? Is it because no one presages his own fate? It’s no wonder why they bowed in shame for the sheer ignorance that has emboldened their condemnation of today. Indeed this is the untold fate of the progressive struggle!
About the Author:
Mr. Daniel T. Bestman is a student of Stella Maris Polytechnic careering Civil Engineering. He is a student radical who chose to live similar to the life lived by the Progressive. He then founded the Conscious Order of Gabriel Bacchus Matthews in 2012. He is currently the Executive Director of the Voices of Societal Reform. 880618248/ [email protected]