Our Honorable Guest Speaker, Special Guest of Honor, Congressman Keith Ellison; members and officials of the host chapter, Minnesota Mandingo Association; Delegates and FELMAUSA members from the various chapter states; the Honorable Board of Directors of FELMAUSA; Members of the Executive Leadership Team, and various committees, and everyone else that have come from far and near, ladies and gentlemen.

As President of the Federation of the Liberian Mandingo Associations of the USA, FELMAUSA, I am exceedingly happy to see every one of you tonight as I deliver to you the State of FELMAUSA Address. This is also an occasion to celebrate the third anniversary of our dear organization. We must be very much thankful to Almighty Allah for bringing us together to celebrate the hard work and success of the past years. Hard work and success to which many of you here tonight contributed in a positive way.

Over the past two years, we have created greater awareness about the issues that matter to us as a community. During the course of these two years, we have made two trips to Liberia as a way of introducing FELMAUSA to our people on the ground. During those trips, we met our counterparts of the National Mandingo Caucus of Liberia, The Concerned Mandingo Society of Liberia, elders and opinion leaders of our community. We met some important national figures with whom we discussed issues regarding our dear country, Liberia and the role we can play as citizens in the reconstruction efforts of our homeland. We were generously welcomed by the National Mandingo Caucus of Liberia. At the dinner hosted in our honor, we met with some of the prominent national figures of Liberia.

We are exceedingly grateful for their hospitality in hosting a dinner in our honor. Through these bold and selfless initiatives in the USA and back home, FELMAUSA has become the beacon of hope for our people everywhere in the world today. We want to also thank the Concerned Mandingo Society of Liberia and the Mandingo students at the University of Liberia and the various junior colleges for generously welcoming and honoring our invitations for a meeting in Monrovia during our last visit to Liberia. We appreciate the good job our representative in Monrovia, Amara Kenneh has been doing. He is the representative of the FELMAUSA scholarship assistance project in Monrovia.

The center-piece of our two years efforts is the FELMAUSA educational assistance initiative. This is geared towards educational capacity building of our community. This is based on the realization that we lag behind other Liberian communities in education. This has put us at a disadvantage and the only corrective measure we can take is to provide educational opportunity to our brothers and sisters who have the desire and motivation for learning. As part of this education program, we launched a scholarship fund drive recently on our website. Contributions to this fund drive have ranged from $15.00 to $500.00.

We thank everyone who has contributed to this fund drive, especially our sister Mawata Fofana of Las Vegas, who has to this date made the single largest donation. Today, we have identified the first batch of students who should be the beneficiaries of this educational assistance program. We have received the forms from Monrovia, Liberia with the information of the students attending the University of Liberia and other private colleges and universities as well as some technical schools. I believe all of us will identify one or two of our own relatives on the list. We can now identify the students by names and pictures who are to be the beneficiaries of our scholarship assistance program.  This scholarship fund drive is an on-going project and we encourage you all to contribute to it. This is a worthy cause that will greatly increase the educational capacity of our community.  

On March 28, 2009, FELMAUSA’s Women Wing was formally launched in Newark, New Jersey. Among the dignitaries that graced the occasion was Councilman Donald Payne of the Newark City Council. During the program, the Councilman, on behalf of the City Council of Newark read and presented a proclamation. The other highlight of this event was the recognition and appreciation of graduates in our community. Brothers and sisters that graduated from high schools, colleges and universities received certificates of appreciation for their academic achievements. We are proud of this project as one of our most remarkable achievements and for that we want to thank our courageous women of FELMAUSA Women Wing for their tireless efforts in making this program a success.

Not only did we make contact with our folks in Liberia, we also extended our outreach efforts beyond Liberia in the sub region. Our Special Envoy, Musa Fofana, travelled and met with our brothers and sisters in the Republic of Guinea and the West African sub-region. On those occasions, our brothers and sisters in the sub region were very happy to know we are working in their interest here in the states.

Recently, we started a book drive. We made our desire for this book drive known to one of the local Universities in the Philadelphia area and obtained thousands of books which we plan to ship to Liberia and placed at our future Liberian Mandingo Cultural Center in Monrovia. This cultural center will highlight the progress we have made and continue to make as Mandingoes as well as the historical contributions of Mandingoes to the making of Liberia. Our contribution to the Liberian nation from the time it was born 162 years ago is tremendous. We have to be able to carry on research and publish materials that will highlight those contributions that people will be able to come see at our future Liberian Mandingo Cultural Center.

We are proud of these achievements which have generated so much interest in FELMAUSA. Because of these achievements, everyone is now proud to identify with FELMAUSA. This shows that as a community, we belong to each other and TOGETHER, WE CAN DO ANYTHING. If we couldn’t have achieved anything in these two years, the level of interest everyone has developed in FELMAUSA today is our proudest accomplishment. We say this with the recognition of the hard work done by the Public Relation Committee.

The progress we are making today is the continuation of what our ancestors did hundreds of years ago in Mali Empire coming down to what is now Liberia. They were great Mandingo kings, queens, and warriors. Through the ages we have been scholars, traders, artists, statesmen, soldiers, leaders and the long list go on. We hosted our brothers and sisters who returned home after hundreds of years as slaves in America. Among the people they met when they landed were our forebears. Among all the natives, they found us to be people of great learning. When they saw us, they saw scholars, traders, long distant travelers doing long distant trading, taking goods from one place to another.

In his book, “Christianity, Islam, and the African Race,” Dr. Wilmot Blyden made the following observation about the Mandingoes: “They are numerous, intelligent, enterprising, and not a few of them learned. They are found on the whole Eastern frontier of the Republic, and extend back to the heart of the Sudan. Through them Liberia at no distant day may exert a considerable influence on the great and populous interior. They have books and schools and mosques in every large town. They read and write and many speak the Arabic language. They have diffused everywhere among the pagan tribes contiguous to and within the Republic the idea of the presence and power of the Supreme Being.”

If you read the accounts of the Liberian Explorer, Benjamin JK Anderson about his trip from Monrovia to Musadou, his portrayal of the Mandingoes are splendid. We are considered as the people who had civilization that can be compared to the civilization they brought from the United States. They had great respect and admiration for our forebears. During those days when Anderson traveled to Musadou, Liberia was nowhere near what it is today. There was no country then called Guinea. Liberia was just limited to the coastal settlements and even though the settlers met the natives on the land, only the settlers themselves were considered Liberians. Natives were not then Liberians.

So when Benjamin JK Anderson traveled to Musadou, he was traveling from the Vai country, to the Kpelleh country, Lorma country, and then the Mandingo country of Musadou and its environs. Everywhere Anderson went, he saw our people to be well dignified people. He was received by King Vafin Dolleh of Musadou who wrote a letter to the Liberian government. 

We all are familiar with the story of King Sao Bosso Kamara. We know the story of Chief Vafley Kollie. I know the story of our own grandfather, Kalifala Konneh of Saclepea who was appointed as Marketing Coordinator in Saclepea in 1922. He was responsible for making sure that people in surrounding villages brought various kinds of goods to the market. The marketing system was one way the government used to extend its control in the interior. There are similar stories of powerful Mandingo leaders that commanded the respect and loyalty of other natives as well as the settlers.

Hundred and plus years later, what happened to the Mandingoes? Our status changed from being respected and highly regarded members of the emerging nation to being called “foreigners” in what it became later. What went wrong? Did we abandon our responsibility as citizens or was there a conspiracy to keep us from participating as equal partners? In my view, I will say both. If there was a conspiracy to keep us at arm-length, to keep us down, to labor us as foreigners, to harass us, intimidate us, we did not mount any resistance. Could it be that our fathers did not continue the legacies of their fathers and grandfathers? Isn’t that so mind-boggling? How could our people played so vital a role in the making of the nation only to see themselves at the raw end of the deal in that country hundred years later?

When the natives agitation against the century old minority Americo-Liberian regime was in full swing, we were conspicuously absent from that struggle. We didn’t see it necessary to be part of that agitation. We were satisfied for as long we enjoyed the freedom to worship in our mosques and make profits operating our businesses in towns and villages all across Liberia.

Giving the history of the Mandingoes in Africa, having led empires such as the Mali or Ghana, and the fact that we are the people from among whom came the legendary King Sao Bosso Kamara, probably the most powerful leader in his days in the land that became Liberia, that guaranteed the settlement of the Americo-Liberians after other natives wanted to take back the land from the settlers? What happened to the power and influence the Mandingoes exercised during those early days of Liberia? With all these stories and all these questions, it is fair to say we either went to sleep or they put us to sleep. We went to sleep for long time until the war that awoke us from our deep slumber.  

It was because of our complacency and being seen as weak that the NPFL launched its campaign of genocide against us. They believed they could do anything to us and nothing would come out of it. That unfortunate miscalculation on the part of the NPFL and its sympathizers became the wakeup call for us. That’s when we rediscovered the heroism of the past as we stood up to protect and defend ourselves against the NPFL’s unwarranted aggression. That’s when the spirit of King Sao Bosso Kamara was reborn in us. That spirit lived within the hearts of our gallant brothers and sisters of ULIMO as they mounted fierce resistance to NPFL on the battlefields. We saw that same spirit with our brothers and sisters again when they chased the brutal dictator, Charles Taylor into exile.  It is that spirit that is moving with us today as we struggle to build FELMAUSA, an organization that promote our interests at home and abroad. Mandingo Caucus, Concern Mandingo Society, and FELMAUSA all are born of the same spirit of the past.

As we move forward today, we do so by honoring the heroism of our brothers and sisters who put their lives on the line to give us the freedom and consciousness we have today. In respect of our contribution to the making of Liberia, we must recognize and respect those who have at one time or another stood up to defend and protect the dignity of our people. In this light, we pay tribute to King Sao Bosso Kamara, we pay tribute to Chief Vafley Kollie, we pay tribute to Alhaji Funcia Donzo, Chief Musa Kromah all of Ganta and we pay tribute to Chief Kalifala Konneh of Saclepea. In our own time, we pay tribute to the contributions of our leaders such as Alhaji Kromah, Sheik Kafumba Konneh, Sekou Damate Konneh and many others who have selflessly served our community and country. We pay tribute to the gallantry of our brothers and sisters who laid down their lives for us so we can enjoy the freedom and human dignity in Liberia today. Though Sheik Kafumba Konneh has led the struggle in different direction from that of Damate Konneh and Alhaji Kromah, we are proud of the works they all have done on behalf of our people.

At this moment, we thank the Almighty God for bringing us together in this forum. During the course of the convention and after, I urge you to remain committed to the goals and aspiration of FELMAUSA. No matter what the outcome of the elections, we shall remain forever committed to the goals and aspiration of FELMAUSA. May Allah bless FELMAUSA, our adopted country USA and our mother country, Liberia.