WELCOME TO LIBERIA
Nation makes Heritage Festival debut
Gizzie Arku hasn’t been getting a lot of sleep lately.
The co-ordinator of the Heritage Festival’s Liberian pavilion has been putting in a lot of 18-hour days this week, organizing dozens of Liberian community volunteers to build, to cook, to entertain. It’s a daunting task.
“For me, the hours are uncountable,” he says. “It’s our first year undertaking a major project like this.”
Last year, Liberia had a small tent as the festival where they sold some handicrafts. But this weekend, they make their debut with a full-fledged pavilion — complete with jolloff rice, fried plantains, beef kebabs and homemade ginger pineapple beer.
It hasn’t been easy, Arku acknowledges. They had to find a commercial kitchen to prepare their food and a team of volunteers willing to start cooking at 5 a.m. on Friday.
Even building the pavilion was complicated, since some of those who had offered to help got called away to construction jobs at the last moment. And since they didn’t plan or budget for a stage, they’re negotiating with neighbouring Aboriginal and Mexican pavilions to see if they can share a stage to showcase their young dancers.
But on the sunny Thursday afternoon before the festival, a small group in Hawrelak Park worked hard to paint and hammer, to hang the flags, to move in a fridge and barbecue, and hook up the hoses for the sink.
Most of the hundreds of thousands of people who visit the Heritage Festival each August are there to relax and enjoy. But guests visiting this year’s 71 pavilions might not realize the months and months of besidethe-scenes labour that makes the festival happen, the work of countless volunteers from dozens of cultural communities.
The veterans — like the Croatian, Arab, Jamaican and Scandinavian pavilions — have this down to a fine art by now. Their operations are well-oiled machines, backed by the institutional memories of organizers who’ve been doing this for decades.
But for Liberia, everything is a brand-new adventure. Arku says Heritage Festival staff have given him lots of support and mentorship.
“Your first year, you don’t know what you’re walking into. But they’ve been very, very helpful. Every week, on Tuesday, I go to a 30-minute class, and they walk me through it. Jim Gibbon, the director, has been fantastic. He even drew me a diagram for the pavilion.”
Now, the Liberian community is pulling together for its big premiere.
Liberia has a complicated history. In the early 1800s, the American Colonization Society decided this area of West Africa, between Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire, would be an ideal place to establish a colony for repatriated former American slaves and freeborn AfricanAmericans.
In 1824, the colony became the Republic of Liberia. Over the next 40 years, 19,000 AfricanAmericans settled in Liberia, along with some 5,000 Africans rescued from slave ships, and a smaller number of free blacks from the Caribbean.
In 1847, Liberia declared its independence. But there were tensions between the AmericoLiberian colonists and local populations, tensions that lasted more than a century. From 1980 to 2003, Liberia endured a punishing series of coups and civil wars that killed 250,000 and displaced thousands of refugees.
Back in 2000, says Liberian community leader Rueben Tucker, Edmonton only had about 50 Liberian residents. But hundreds came here in the early 2000s as refugees, many sponsored by local Mennonite groups. Now, Tucker says, there are more than 1,000 Liberians who call Edmonton home. And now that they are “huge,” he says, they wanted to be a full part of Heritage Days.
“We love to be at a party,” he grins.
“We decided it was best that people get to know the Liberian culture, they get to know rich and good Liberian food and experience who we are. We see all the other cultures are represented at the festival, and we decided we wanted to set a footprint for ourselves.”
Tucker says it’s also important to show their children, who are growing up here, their Liberian heritage.
“Now that Edmonton has given us so much, it’s about time that we give back to Edmonton and Canada as a whole.”