The Dung Beetles of Liberia

by Daniel V. Jr. Meier

  “Do you really think that any of them would be here if there weren’t a huge amount of money to be made? Tubman has lured the big international corporations here with assurances of huge profits and tax relief. The only money that trickles down from that wealth is to the company employees and the satellite businesses that grew from them. Very few of them are local people. Oh, I forgot. There is the money that goes to the tribal head men to keep them happy. It’s a shitty system. And that’s where Ozzie, Colin, and Deet come in. They live in this shit. They all try and hoard their crap so that someday they will be rich enough to leave this shit hole. But they never do. They never will. Why? Because they have come to love living in shit. They are at home here. They are comfortable here. They, the international corporations, the big men are just a bunch of dung beetles getting as much of this shit as they can. You know, Ken, wealth can do some good, but most of the time it causes a lot of pain and torture.”

  I stopped and looked at her. The moon’s reflection on the water lit up her face. She was very serious. “I’m glad you didn’t include me in with Ozzie and the rest.”

  “No,” she said, smiling, “you are not the same as they are. I can see that Africa is wearing you down. I don’t think we’ll be here much longer.”

  CHAPTER 35

  THE GLASS HOUSE

  Toward the end of the wet season, Andre started having more contracts than he could fill. I flew every day, transporting Peace Corp volunteers, spare parts for mining equipment and vehicles, bags of rice, boxes of iced fish, Lebanese merchants, Portuguese traders, Mandingos and, on one occasion, a German from Heidelberg who couldn’t stop glancing around.

  Sam got into the agreeable practice of making coffee in the morning and waking me up with a cup held very near my nose. One morning, however, instead of being awakened by the delightful aroma of freshly brewed coffee, I was startled out of bed by the loud rattle of automatic gunfire. It was coming from inside the house. Trying not to imagine a million things, I leaped out of bed taking the mosquito netting with me and ran toward the sound of the gunfire. I found Sam standing in a pool of water holding the Uzi that had been the gift of Major Ahud. The new toilet looked like a pile of clay and porcelain rubble. Water was spurting from broken pipes, and in the midst of it lay what remained of the body of a rather long snake.

  “Coffee is on the stove,” she said.

  “Never mind the coffee. What the hell happened here?”

  “It’s a spitting cobra. I’ve run across them in the bush—very nasty creatures. They spit venom through their fangs at your eyes. They very seldom miss. The stuff is like suddenly having hot sand poured in your eyes, only this stuff can cause permanent blindness. It’s also cytotoxic.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Basically, it won’t get through your skin but if you’ve got an opening in the skin and the venom comes into contact with it, the cells die and liquefy—leaves a really messy wound.”

  I reached down, next to the remains of the toilet, and turned off the water valve.

  “Sorry I had to use the Uzi. With these snakes there is no time to fool around and I couldn’t think of anything else. They told us that if we ever encountered one to get at least ten feet away and cover our eyes. Well, that didn’t seem too practical since the thing was already in the house. You have to kill these things from a distance. I didn’t want to come and get you because by the time I did that and we got to the bathroom, the thing could have gotten anywhere in the house. I am sorry that I destroyed the toilet. I’ll pay for it to be replaced.”

  “Oh, forget about it. I’m glad you killed the vile thing. I don’t care about the toilet. I’ll call someone and get it fixed.”

  It was over a week before we could get a replacement and hire a plumber who seemed to know what he was doing. Mr. Habaka was not very pleased either, but he calmed down when I explained that I would fix everything and pay for all damages and that a deadly snake in his house was not his fault.

  Binji knew about spitting cobras and at first refused to get near it, but twenty dollars gradually persuaded him.

  “Mamba cobra is bad juju, boss, bad juju,” Binji said. “Da cobra na sposed ta be here, boss. It sposed ta be in da bush. An de head! Da head, da head still a danger. We got ta burn da head. Ya burn it good.”

  “We have no way to burn it, Binji. We must bury it. Bury it deep enough so the dogs will not dig it up. Will you do that?”

  Binji looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded. “I do dat, boss. I bury it. But ah gotta talk to juju man fuss. Ya, I talk to juju man.”

  After that, we formed a habit of checking everything before we used it—the bed, the closet, the kitchen stove, everything. We found a few spiders that looked quite deadly, a nest of cockroaches, traces of rats, and other suspicious sources of plague and disease. Binji didn’t like dealing with these things at first. He considered such things in a house to be part of the natural environment. Nevertheless, I offered to pay him a bonus for cleaning them up. Fortunately, in this instance, his love of capital gains outweighed his fear of bad juju.

  Later, as we sat on the beach with our gin and tonics in hand, we watched the incessant parade of beach scavengers looking for items to sell. Some little boy would always see us and try to sell us a shell or a dead fish he’d found. I’d always give them a penny or two, so I suppose that’s why they kept coming back.

  “We always see people walking the beach but never swimming,” Sam said. “Have you ever gone into the surf?”

  “No. The waves look pretty benign from here, but closer to the surf they are huge. And there is a strong undertow. Every year, one or two bodies wash up on shore. They’re usually tourists who didn’t believe the locals.”

  “Good to know. So when are you flying next?”

  “Tomorrow I have to run some supplies up the coast to Cape Mount. By the way, would you like to come along with me? There is a village on the coast there where we can rent a dugout canoe. We can get some of the local fishermen to take us out and maybe we can even do some fishing.”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “I’ll ask Binji to pack us a lunch.”

  Our canoe ride was just that, a ride. But it was fun being on the water. We didn’t have much luck fishing, but the local fishermen hauled in a net full of wiggling sea worms, which made them happy. These sea worms looked like small red sausages. Once ashore, one of the fishermen started quickly preparing the worms. They were still wiggling when they chopped them up into little o-rings. Then the o-rings kept wiggling. Right away, the fisherman covered them with pili pili hot sauce and began popping them in their mouths.

  “You wan one, missa?” the fisherman asked me.

  “Not me! Sam, how about you?”

  “Sure, I’ll try one,” she said.

  With a show of great bravery, she dropped two into her mouth. I waited. She was trying to be nonchalant. Then her eyes opened wide followed by her mouth. I thought she was going to scream, but nothing came out but a breathy, “Hey hah!”

  “What?” I said.

  “Hey Hah! The pili pili is really hah, hah!”

  “Yeah, I know it’s hot but what do the worms taste like?”

  “No taste! Hah, hah. As far as I can tell, no taste at all just hot, hot!”

  On the way home, I thought Sam would be interested in the famous, or notorious, Glass House. I altered course to take us near a stretch of isolated beach not far from Robertsport. I landed on the beach, secured the airplane, and led Sam over a couple of dunes to where we could clearly see the house.

  It was a small house with a scaled down front porch. The house was made entirely of glass bottles—soft drink bottles, whisky bottles, even perfume bottles—all mortared together as if they were bricks and resembling a three-dimensional impressionist mosaic. The only wood to be seen was at the door and window frames. The roof was made of corrugated metal.

  “I’m glad to see it’s still here,” I said. “I used to fly in here every now and then.”

/>   “What is it? Whose is it?”

  “It belonged to an ex-Luftwaffe pilot by the name of Diesel. He was here long before I got here. He lived here with his German wife, Alice, and a couple of house boys. He had his own airplane, so he set up his own air transport service, dealing almost exclusively in diamonds. All the air service operations around here deal in diamonds one way or another. Andre does and obviously,” I said, looking down at her ring, “I do too. Anyway, Diesel would fly to the Sierra Leone border every morning and pick up the diamond smugglers. Sierra Leone is one of the easiest borders for this kind of thing. It was all set up. There was a customs guy on the Liberian side, and he would collect the big bucks. But it looked legal on paper. So smugglers from Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Mali all came though Sierra Leone. Very close to where Diesel lived. He had been doing this, very successfully, for quite a long time, until suddenly, one day, he disappeared.”

  “Did one of the smugglers get him?” she asked.

  “Not likely,” I said. “The diamond buyers are 99 percent Mandingo. No, the rumor was that he was harboring a bigwig ex-Nazi and the Israelis were on to him.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Some time after he disappeared, parts of an airplane believed to be his were found washed up on a beach in Sierra Leone but nothing identifiable.”

  “So it could have been anything,” Sam said. “He could have gone down in the ocean or escaped in the bush. Nobody would have ever found him.”

  “Yes, it could have been anything, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Herr Diesel is counting his money in his suite at The Grand Hotel, Punta del Este, right now.”

  “What about his wife?”

  “Alice stayed on. She had a couple of German boyfriends move in with her but never anything permanent. She tried to keep up the diamond business. She didn’t have a plane but there was this woman, also German, whom I would fly to and from the glass house from Sierra Leone. We all got to be friends of a sort, and I enjoyed visiting. Then, one day, when I’d flown in the other woman from Sierra Leone, Alice asked me if I would go down the beach to buy some fish from the fishermen coming in. When I came back both women were gone. I never saw either of them again.”

  “Do you think they left on their own, or did someone kidnap them?”

  “Who knows,” I said. “I think we’ve both been in Liberia long enough now to know that that question will never be answered. Rumors, certainly, but no one will ever know for sure.”

  CHAPTER 36

  GUINEA WORM

  The wet season was due to start up in another month, and I really didn’t know if I could face it once again. It was April, and I wasn’t feeling well. I had been dragging for several days and decided to take it easy for a day or so. Binji arrived later than usual. He was excited and nearly out of breath from peddling his bicycle at high speed.

  “Boss!” he yelled, “Boss, did ya hee? Did ya hee?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Merica in revolt! Merica in flames! Merica in bad, bad way!”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Binji?”

  “De Big Man, boss, King—he been shot dead. Bla people all over Merica in revolt; dey shootin, robbin stores, burnin car—all ting like dat.”

  Sam walked into the room as Binji was speaking. Her face was distorted. She clasped her hand to her throat—a clear sign of distress.

  “Where did you learn this, Binji?”

  “It de radio, boss, das wuh make me late.”

  We didn’t own a radio. Radio broadcasts, when the Monrovia radio station was on the air, were usually either exercises in state propaganda or blaring local music. But, I had to admit, I wondered what the Liberian government would make out of this, since President Tubman depended on the US for various forms of aid and, ironic as it sounds, the Americo-Liberians seemed rather proud of their American heritage.

  “Should we contact the Embassy, maybe go there?” Sam asked.

  “I think the Embassy is probably going to be swamped right now. The hotel has a television in the lobby. That may have something.”

  Sam and I walked over to the Ambassador as quickly as we could. The lobby was crowded with people all gathered around a black-and-white television mounted on a table. The pictures bore no resemblance to the America I knew—people running wild, smashing in store windows with bricks and chairs, setting cars on fire, and news reporters barely able to conceal their excitement.

  “That’s it, mates,” said someone with a British accent. “America’s going down the hole. Serves um right, I’d say.”

  “They should have learned from us and adopted Apartheid. It works,” said another in a South African voice.

  “These pictures are coming from Washington,” I mentioned to Sam. “I want to try and reach my father.”

  We left the Ambassador and returned to the beach house. We had a phone there, but I was unable to get through. The Liberian phone company only worked for three to five hours a day and still used the old operator system. Monrovia Airlines had a radio transmitter that could be linked to the international phone system. It was to be used for business only, but maybe I could talk Andre into letting me use it. I drove as fast as I could to the operations office. Andre was there and had heard the news. Yes, I could use the radio.

  My father assured me that the rioting was not widespread and that the police were simply letting it run out of steam. “After that,” he said, “we can all talk. Nothing to worry about.”

  I knew that he was lying but, nevertheless, I was somewhat relieved that he was able to talk to me and confident enough to lie. I switched off the radio and thanked Andre. He looked at me and asked if I was feeling all right. I told him that I was fine.

  “You look a little pale. Maybe you should see a doctor.”

  I thanked him for his concern and, without having a good reason or any reason at all, drove over to the Airport Bar. Colin was there nursing a beer. He had heard about the shooting of Martin Luther King.

  “Well matey, looks like the US has become just another Latin American style hole that shoots the leaders they don’t like. You won’t find that in the UK, no sir. We have our problems but nutters with guns ain’t one of them.”

  I didn’t feel like discussing it with him, and I certainly did not feel like arguing. I ordered a beer and, for a moment, enjoyed the feel of the cold bottle against my forehead.

  “You feeling all right, mate? You don’t look so good—not malaria again, ya think?”

  “No, it’s not malaria, I know malaria, but you’re the second person to ask me that today. I feel a little tired, that’s all.”

  I took a long swill of the beer. I noticed Madeleine looking at me.

  “I feel fine,” I said to her. Almost immediately after I said it I felt myself slipping off the bar stool and on to the floor. I was conscious but did not seem able to move. In an instant Madeleine was around the bar and kneeling next to me. Colin was standing over me, a puzzled look on his face. I could feel Madeleine’s hands probing my midsection.

  “I’ve seen this before,” she said. She wrote something on one of the bar napkins and handed it to Colin.

  “Take him to this doctor now! Do not wait!” she said.

  Colin helped me to his car, a red 1953 Morris Minor Saloon. I don’t know which was worse, the pain I was beginning to feel in my abdomen or the bouncing, jolting, lurching ride curled up in the Morris. The waiting room was filled with patients all looking wide-eyed at me.

  “Umm sorry all,” Colin said, “but this in an emergency.”

  He opened the door to the receptionist office and sat me down on a small wooden chair. He handed Madeleine’s note to the receptionist who quickly ran out of the office.

  In a few moments she was back with a doctor—a middle-aged man with North African features. He was holding the note in his hand.

  “Follow me,” he said to Colin.

  Colin helped me out of the chair and, with my arm over his shoulders, got me to
the doctor’s examining room. The doctor told me to undress down to my undershorts and motioned that I should get up onto the examining table. Colin saluted in the British fashion and left the room followed by the receptionist.

  “Won’t your other patients be upset—putting me ahead of the line, doctor?”

  He smiled. “No, they won’t be upset with me. They’ll think that you are just another white man exercising his privilege.”

  “We both know that I don’t fit into that category. Why did you take me?”

  “Madeleine is a very old friend. I owe her from when I first came here. And from the looks of things, she was right to be concerned.” The doctor poked and pushed on my abdomen. “You are a pilot for Monrovia Airline?”

  I nodded.

  “I am Doctor Klatt. I always wanted to be a pilot but I never had the time for it. It must be wonderful.”

  “It isn’t really like that,” I said.

  “Aaaha!” he said. “Young man, you have a very common malady here in West Africa. You have the hepatitis.”

  He must have noticed the expression on my face. “If you will put yourself into my care, I will cure you of this disease, but you must do exactly as I tell you.”

  The doctor injected me with a clear fluid then wrote out a prescription and a long list of stuff that I wasn’t to eat or drink. I was to come back in a week.

  “I will repeat what I have written here so that it is clear to you. You must come back every week for glucose treatment, no fat of any kind, only lean meat if you can find it, no carbohydrates and absolutely no alcohol. That is very serious—no alcohol, not even a small beer or drop of wine. Is that clear to you?