James Ciment - Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It

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For Gloria

In coming to the shores of Africa, we indulged the pleasing hope that we would be permitted to exercise and improve those faculties which impart to man his dignity; to nourish in our hearts the flame of honorable ambition; to cherish and indulge these aspirations which a beneficent Creator had implanted in every human heart, and to evince to all who despise, ridicule, and oppress our race that we possess with them a common nature; are with them susceptible of equal refinement, and capable to equal advancement in all that adorns and dignifies man.

Liberian Declaration of Independence, 1847

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Matthew 5:5

CONTENTS

PREFACE

On the afternoon of April 22, 1980, Gabriel Nimely, the Republic of Liberias newly installed information minister, summoned forty or so foreign reporters to the pressroom of the Executive Mansion, which overlooked the Atlantic from its perch in Monrovia, the Liberian capital. Gentlemen, he announced, you are all invited to some executions at Barclay Beach. Ten days before and seven floors above, soldiers under the command of Nimelys new boss, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, had burst into the presidential bedroom and gunned down William Tolbert, the last in an unbroken, 133-year line of improbable rulersfreed slaves and free blacks who had fled America, established black Africas first republic, and passed it on to their descendants.

The reporters raced to the nearby oceanfront in taxis. When they arrived, they found hundreds of soldiers and thousands of civilians milling about excitedly, the focus of their attention nine telephone poles hastily erected atop a gently sloping dune. After a short while, a white Volkswagen bus pulled up. Soldiers pulled thirteen men from it, all condemned officials from the previous administration. They included, among others, Richard Henries, the former Speaker of the House; Joseph Chesson, the much-hated justice minister; and Frank Tolbert, president pro-tem of the Senate and older brother of the recently murdered president. All had endured ten days of confinement and humiliation in front of kangaroo court tribunals, and looked the part. They were unshaven and their clothes were torn. Some appeared to have been beaten. The soldiers stripped them to their waists and then grabbed nine and tied them to the poles with a single long strand of green rope.

It took half an hour for the noncommissioned officers in charge to clear the line of fire, as many of the soldiers were drunk and shouting epithets at the men. Two of the older prisoners passed out; the cloudless sky, so typical of late dry-season weather in Monrovia, offered no protection from the equatorial sun. Finally, nine rifle-wielding soldiers opened fire. Several missed their targets. Other soldiers, armed with machine guns, ran up and poured bullets into the now slumped-over bodies. The dead were untied and left lying at the base of the poles as the four remaining prisoners were lined up. This time, there was no pretense of order. When the shooting stopped, there was a brief silence and then cheering, first from the soldiers and then from the crowd. As one enlisted man told a reporter, the men had no right to live after all those years killing our people and stealing our money.

It was a rage generations in the making.

* * *

Like many American high school students, I first learned of Liberia in passinga brief aside from the heroic story of abolitionism and the headlong rush to civil war. That tiny colorless patch surrounded by British pink and French blue on colonial maps of Africa intrigued me. What happened to those freed slaves who had gone back to Africa? An answer of sorts came from the photos of the 1980 executions that appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the world. I began to think of Liberia as a noble experiment that had ended awfully. Freed slaves, given the chance to govern themselves, had turned out to be no better than the white imperialists who had descended upon Africa around the same time. If there was any lesson to be taken from Liberian history, it was a general one about human nature: an oppressed people could readily become oppressors.

Events after 1980, especially the civil war that began on Christmas Eve, 1989it would prove to be one of the most brutal in postcolonial Africas bloodstained history, shocking the world with images of drugged child soldiers, costumed as if for Halloween, AK-47s hanging loosely from their skinny brown shouldersled to a new round of questions. What could possibly have led to this? What role did that century and a half of Americo-Liberian rule play in the terror that followed? And, again, what had happened to the descendants of the former American slaves who founded the nation? When a temporary peace came in the late 1990s, I traveled to Liberia to find out.

It was not easy to get to then, not even from Abidjan, the commercial capital of neighboring Ivory Coast. There were no regular flights to Liberiathe countrys international airport had been destroyedbut there was an expat Ukrainian operation running Soviet-era turboprops into the country. From the air, I saw that Liberia began where the roads ended. For the next two hundred miles, there was nothing but endless forest and the occasional village of conical-roofed huts. Liberia appeared unchanged from Graham Greenes descriptions of the country sixty years earlier, in his travelogue Journey Without Maps.

On the ground, however, recent history was all too evident. Monrovia was in ruins, having been the objective, in 1996, of the last great offensive of the civil war, a battle residents referred to with the shorthand April 6. Few buildings had windows; many bore the distinctive gaping holes that rocket-propelled grenades left behind. Still, there were people everywherealong the streets, in the rubble, on the beaches. When Doe took power in 1980, Monrovia was home to 100,000 residents. Now it had a million, mostly refugees from the war-torn countryside.

My residence was a large, well-appointed house on the heights of Mamba Point, once Monrovias ritziest oceanfront address. With its manicured tropical gardens and solid Mediterranean furniture, the house could have been in Florida. It appeared untouched by the war. And, indeed, it hadnt been. Its owner, a scion of one of the wealthiest and most powerful Americo-Liberian families, had been the countrys sports minister before the war and had recruited a score of burly soccer players to stand guard on his property.

Getting into town every day proved difficult. Monrovias fleet of taxis, many in no better shape than its buildings, did not cruise the district where I was staying. So each morning, before the sun got too hot, I would climb the small hill that separated Mamba Point from downtown. Above and to my left stood the Ducor Hotel, where the Americo elite had once danced through the night at weddings and debutante balls. To the right loomed the gray stone, fortress-like Masonic Temple, the largest in Africa, where Americo politicians met in conclaves to decide the fate of the nation they still ran. Both buildings were derelict now, each occupied by hundreds of refugees.