Each July 26th, as Liberia marks another anniversary of its independence, the nation is invited to look back before it looks forward. In his writings, educator Edmund Zar-Zar Bargblor poses a pointed question: are Liberians genuinely ignorant of their own history, or do they simply choose not to act on what that history teaches? His answer is unambiguous. The record of the past, he argues, is well documented and widely available. What is missing is not knowledge but the will to apply it -- a national indifference that allows old patterns of exclusion, corruption, and self-interest to repeat themselves generation after generation.
Indifference, Not Ignorance
Bargblor's central argument rests on a distinction between not knowing and not caring. Liberia's history -- its founding, its social hierarchies, its recurring political crises -- has been recorded by scholars, orators, and journalists for well over a century. Yet successive generations of citizens and leaders have failed to internalize the hard lessons drawn from the country's socioeconomic and political missteps. The problem, in his view, is a failure of national will rather than a gap in the historical record.
The Weight of Historical Exclusion
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A recurring theme in Bargblor's analysis is the social hierarchy that shaped Liberia from its founding -- one that long alienated the country's indigenous populations from full participation in national life. He contends that when this history of exclusion is glossed over rather than confronted honestly, it forecloses the possibility of genuine reconciliation. Healing, in this framing, requires acknowledgment before it can produce unity.
Three Voices Across Generations
To make his case, Bargblor draws on the words of three Liberians who each served as national orator on Independence Day, decades apart, and whose warnings still resonate.
Leymah Gbowee (2019). Delivering the 172nd Independence Day oration, the Nobel laureate called on the Weah administration and the nation at large to make good on the values that Liberians say they hold: transparency in public office, honesty in leadership, equal opportunity for women and marginalized groups, and a sense of civic duty that goes beyond waiting on government. She was especially direct in urging officials to match their anti-corruption rhetoric with disclosed assets and verifiable action, and in challenging the underrepresentation of women in leadership.
Didwho Twe (1944). One of Liberia's early indigenous intellectuals, Twe used his oration to focus on two foundations for the country's future: mass education and agricultural self-sufficiency. He argued that no government could remain strong while its population stayed largely illiterate, and he pointed to a chronic rice shortage -- despite decades of stagnant population figures -- as evidence that the nation had failed to plan seriously for its own people.
Edward Wilmot Blyden (1857). Speaking little more than a decade after independence, Blyden warned against a national obsession with the appearance of wealth -- extravagant houses, dress, and furnishings pursued even as the country remained economically dependent on foreign schools, churches, and skilled labor. True prosperity, he argued, could only be measured by self-reliance, not by outward displays of prosperity propped up by others.
A Pattern That Persists
What strikes Bargblor most is how little distance separates these three moments in time. The concerns Blyden raised in 1857, the priorities Twe named in 1944, and the challenges Gbowee issued in 2019 are, in substance, the same conversation continued across sixteen decades. Corruption, dependency, exclusion, and underinvestment in education and agriculture remain live issues rather than settled history. For Bargblor, this continuity is the clearest evidence that Liberia's difficulty is not a lack of historical awareness but a failure to translate that awareness into lasting change.
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A Call for National Reconciliation
Bargblor closes with an appeal that is as much moral as it is political: that Liberians -- Americo-Liberian, Mandingo, Krahn, and every other ethnic community, at home and across the diaspora -- embrace a shared sense of nationhood. Liberia, he insists, belongs to all its people, not to any single faction or party. Living up to the nation's founding motto, "The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here," requires the country to finally act on the lessons its own history has repeatedly offered.
