Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  We eventually came to a clearing, an old railway town on an abandoned line. Children were playing soccer half naked in the muddy streets. The local language had changed since Kibossi, as it does every few miles in many parts of this continent, but with a bit of struggle André was able to understand enough to know that we were drawing close to our destination. Just when I thought the road could not get worse, it did. To exit this forgotten settlement, we had to move the rotting trunk of a tree from the path, and as the overgrowth became ever heavier, the car groaned and brayed through the sand and bush, threatening to stall or seize up every few minutes.

  When we finally reached another clearing, this one a patch no bigger than a two-car garage, André spotted a toothless old woman loading up a sack of kindling to carry home to prepare her evening meal. He called out to her and then approached. With only a couple of hours left to go before the sun’s demise, I was not encouraged to see her pointing off into the distance.

  When he returned, he said we would have to leave the car there and walk. “She said it isn’t too far,” André told us. “We just have to cross a river and climb the next foothill over there.”

  Robert and I got out, detecting a recurrent theme, and together with Regis, the four of us began our hike. I was in city clothes, clearly made for concrete sidewalks and tiled floors, but with a minimum of slipping and sliding, down I went, until we reached the river, which was really more like a creek. There we had to clamber across a fallen tree, all mossy and slick, to reach the other side. Then, as we huffed and puffed up the hill, Regis began to speak up a bit for the first time. I asked him why his father would come to a place like this. Was it his village? Regis said no, and tried his best to explain. “He had no peace in Brazzaville,” he said. “He must have come here to find peace.”

  At the crest of the hill I could indeed make out a small village. A few puffs of smoke were wafting up from a cluster of huts, indicating that it was inhabited, and my spirits followed them skyward.

  All the huts were constructed with bamboo and mud walls and thatched roofs, and were arranged in a semicircle around a broad, open space. As I approached, I noticed a skinny unshaven man of indeterminate age. He was barefoot, and rocked backward on a wooden chair. He was holding a pipe and turned as he heard our footsteps. “Mysteries still exist,” the man exclaimed. And as he turned toward us in greeting, his mouth opening into a huge toothy grin, I recognized him as Sony Labou Tansi. “They told me you would come, and now you are here.”

  I had no chance to ask Tansi what he meant. His hair was wildly overgrown and bore a distinctive patch of white on the crown of his head, and as I drew close to him, he began to speak agitatedly. He began explaining how he had come to this place, and his words tumbled forth, lucid enough, but still somewhat scattershot. “The treatments they were giving me in Paris were not having any effect,” he said, scratching himself constantly against the wooden chair’s backrest. “When I returned to Brazzaville I met a prophet who told me to come here.”

  As he spoke, growing more and more excited, I could hear soft murmurs coming from a bamboo and straw cabana at the edge of the carefully swept clearing. Tansi said it was his wife, Pierrette. She was very weak, he said, too weak even for the African miracles that seemed to have revived him.

  “There is sacred writing in this place. You will soon see for yourself. The Mother has been reading the Scriptures, and the Scriptures said that foreigners were on their way.” In a few minutes, I would understand to whom and to what he was referring.

  Tansi had shown a flash of tenderness, an affectionate smile, toward his son, who was trying to be brave but looked devastated. Tansi now had an audience and was holding forth, all the more vigorously since it had all been prophesied. Regis wandered off to find his mother, who, as we later saw for ourselves as we fed her peeled grapes while she lay on a cheap mat, was very near death.

  “I’ve been writing a lot. Some of my best work,” Tansi said. “But the French people don’t want to publish it. They said I am too hard on France, but in their egotism, they’ve missed the point. Asia has come into its own. Latin America has come into its own. Africa alone has failed, and I will not mince my words about the reasons why: We are still sick from a sort of contamination that began under colonization.

  “Our leaders follow the examples they were taught by the Europeans, stealing money and never doing anything for the people. I’m calling my newest work ‘La Cosa Nostra,’ because it is about Africa’s dictators and their protectors in Europe, but I am asking the world to reconsider Africa, too. I am asking for a Marshall Plan to rescue us. The cultural richness here is incredible, and it is being destroyed. It cannot be allowed to go to waste.”

  Briefly, Tansi discussed his latest passion, Solzhenitsyn, and said he had read Cancer Ward over and over in his Paris hospital room. “We are all doomed, fated to die,” he said, emitting an enthusiastic deep-voiced cackle that triggered a rattling cough. “But in the meantime there is nothing to stop us from living.”

  At this instant, we began to hear the sound of chanting in the distance. Then, emerging suddenly from the bush, came a procession of villagers led by a robust woman draped in white. At the sight of us, they began cheering ecstatically.

  Tansi identified the woman who led this troupe as Emilie Kiminou, the “Mother who receives the messages,” and suddenly the swept earth of the clearing had become a stage. Tansi produced a sheaf of loose papers filled with bold, loopy scribblings that looked like the work of a deranged child. Instructing me to watch carefully, he handed them to Mother Emilie, who, half singing, half chanting, proceeded to “read” these messages, speaking in tongues at a breakneck speed.

  When the clamor reached an end, Tansi looked at me as if I should by then have had all the proof I needed of his African miracles.

  “Kongo has existed as a nation since Beatrice,” Tansi said, growing drunk with excitement on a mixture of his own Kongo nationalism and Mother Emilie’s syncretic evangelism. But ironically, he had mangled the kingdom’s significantly longer history in the process.

  Dona Beatrice had indeed been a legendary female prophet in the Kongo kingdom in the late 1700s. Her real name was said to have been Kimpa Vita. The kingdom had controlled much of present-day Congo, Zaire and Angola, until its final defeat by the Portuguese, the first to cull slaves from the area for shipment to the Americas. Beatrice had become powerful, convincing people that she was possessed of the spirit of Saint Anthony of Padua, a popular Catholic saint of the time and reputed miracle worker. Her followers believed that Jesus, Mary and the saints were all Kongolese. Ultimately, like Joan of Arc, she was burned at the stake for heresy at the instigation of European missionaries.

  I was now implicitly being asked to believe that Mother Emilie was an incarnation of this forgotten Kongolese saint. Tansi had been longing for the resurrection of his Kongo his entire adult life, and now, only two weeks away from death, he had found it.

  “You must understand why I am feeling better now,” Tansi said to me in an embrace as we parted. “I am home at last. Finally I am in my own land. I should have come here a long time ago. It has revived me, and if I had not taken so long to come, Pierrette might have been saved, too.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Greater Liberia

  Our small Russian prop plane finally dropped down beneath the murky mass of clouds that hung low like a gray lid over Liberia, after a two-hour flight west-by-northwest from Abidjan. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that we were about to make an emergency landing, for all I could see below were brackish swamplands and the lush green of the West African bush. It wasn’t until the very final moments before landing that the first reassuring glimpse of solid land, and then, at last, the pitted landing strip of James Spriggs Payne airfield came into view. There was always a nagging thought at times like these that if anything went wrong, death was a certainty. I often wondered if there would even be a rescue operation, as I pictured instead the salvage e
ffort by villagers living nearby who would undoubtedly come scurrying to the crash site to recover whatever they could haul away from the wreckage.

  Displaying an extraordinary and totally unfeigned cool that seemed native to this corner of Africa, people on bicycles and on foot hurried their pace just enough to get across the runway in time as we landed, disappearing down orange clay footpaths that led away into the bush. As the noisy little aircraft taxied and came to a final halt, I thought there could be few better introductions to this country than Spriggs Payne. Outside, a crush of excited relatives of the two dozen or so passengers aboard our flight was already forming on the tarmac nearby. And alongside them, the ground was already thick with a demimonde of porters, greeters, “facilitators,” beggars and outright thieves.

  If you had come to Liberia just once before, you would have earned celebrity status among this crowd, for whom memory was part of the hustle, and since I had come often, as I descended from the plane cries of “Hey Mr. Howard,” “Hello Boss Man,” “My friend, come this way,” rang out from every direction.

  Beyond the distractions of this unofficial welcoming committee there were the police and immigration officers, health inspectors and the other dubious officials waiting to accost you, demanding to see travel documents before you could even make it inside the decrepit little terminal. These were people who stole by official sanction, and inside that dark and sinister place, hassling travelers had long ago become stylized ritual.

  As I headed for the immigration building, a tall, broad-shouldered Nigerian soldier dressed in that country’s distinctive green fatigues and matching cap swung a swagger stick at the jostling touts, bellowing in his deep voice for “Order!” It had all the impact of someone swatting away flies from rotting fish. They feigned scattering for just an instant, then came back just as quickly as they had dispersed.

  The confusion that attends the landing of every airplane in Liberia should be patented, I thought, so thoroughly was it Liberian. In microcosm it reflected the chaos of a country that had been bled heavily during a long civil war, and kept on knife’s edge by a myriad of rival militias ever since. Tiny Liberia, just 2.6 million people at its peak, had lost 200,000 people in a conflict that had been cruelly indiscriminate.

  We usually think of wars as having identifiable adversaries. In Liberia, search as one might, it had become impossible to discern any clear lines. The sheer number of deaths seemed to warrant a label like “genocide,” which might have drawn more attention from CNN and perhaps roused the diplomats of the world. But the Liberian civil war’s victims came from every class and description, and perversely, because there was no longer any sharp ethnic focus to the killings, the country’s atrocities eluded easy categorization, and thereby escaped attention in a world already eager to ignore Africa’s nightmares.

  Still, it was hard for me to observe the airport’s choreographed confusion without concluding that this tragic little country’s chaos also had its comical side. Almost everything in Liberia did. But it was vital never to forget that the easy joking and breezy nonchalance masked a raw struggle for survival, and that after five years of brutal civil war, nearly everything here, including airport begging and bribe-taking, had become deadly serious. It took a mere instant to lose your wallet, your passport or your laptop here at Spriggs Payne, and anywhere else in Liberia you might just as quickly lose your life.

  In August 1995, the country’s factions had negotiated a ground-breaking agreement to come together in a national unity government. Most important, the pact allowed for the war’s instigator—and all along its most stubborn protagonist—Charles Taylor, to return to the capital, Monrovia, for the first time in many years.

  Like a Roman outpost under permanent threat from Germanic warriors, during Taylor’s time in the bush Monrovia had remained a city under siege. Because of the constant skirmishing in the countryside, half of the population now lived in Monrovia, a city without electricity or running water. Another third of the nation had simply fled Liberia, and were living in UN refugee camps scattered about the region. By now, save for the fighters and their peasant captives, the hinterland was largely empty. Residents of the capital were kept alive only by the grain shipments of international charities like CARE and Catholic Relief Services, and Taylor’s rebels were kept at bay only by the presence of a huge garrison of troops from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which was overwhelmingly dominated by Nigerians. ECOWAS had originally deployed for the same purpose five years earlier, amid a major refugee emergency: to prevent Taylor from storming the capital.

  Lacking refugee camps or any other appropriate shelter, Monrovia’s huge internally displaced population took up residence in the gutted and bombed-out shells of what had been a once-proud city’s most prestigious addresses. Somehow, the entire front facade of the massive, boxy structure of the Libyan-built Foreign Ministry, for example, had been neatly sheared off in the artillery duels between the Nigerians and Taylor’s fighters during one of the rebel leader’s attempts to capture Monrovia. And squatters now used the ministry’s offices as overcrowded apartments, seeming to pay no mind to the fact that their whole lives were on display to the passersby on one of Monrovia’s busiest avenues.

  This same gritty resourcefulness was at work at the Intercontinental Hotel, once a majestic skyscraper that stood on the city’s high ground like an exclamation point, announcing the cosmopolitan pretensions of the old Americo-Liberian elite—the class of freed American slaves that had founded this country in 1847. As they settled the land, the Americo-Liberians fondly strove to reproduce the only model they knew, the plantation society of the American South. Affecting top hats and morning coats, the freedmen ruled Africa’s first republic in a clannish and conservative manner, established their own curiously paternalistic brand of apartheid, systematically excluding so-called aborigines from positions of privilege and power until 1980, when a coup by an unschooled soldier and “man of the soil” from the Krahn ethnic group, Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe, brought this anachronistic little universe to a bloody end.

  Like nearly every other monument to the Americo-Liberians, the Intercontinental Hotel had been shattered and left to rot in the moldy damp of Liberia’s persistent tropical rains. Nowadays, in exchange for their lofty sea views, and the generous breezes that served in lieu of air-conditioning on the upper floors, the hotel’s squatters had to cart their water, and anything else they consumed, up the many flights of dark stairs to wash, drink and cook.

  In fits and starts, between repeated disastrous setbacks, Monrovia had been struggling ever since Doe’s coup to resuscitate itself and rejoin the late twentieth century. But the mood of desperation had never been greater than during these last few grim years of the war, which the city’s residents had spent living under a dusk-to-dawn curfew, and every time I visited I thought there could be no more cruelly Draconian punishment for one of Africa’s liveliest people than to keep them locked up in their stifling and unlit homes from sunset to sunrise every day.

  Now, the curfew was being drastically scaled back, and I decided to test the truce and take advantage of the brightening outlook by trying to drive to Charles Taylor’s would-be rebel capital. For years, Taylor had been holed up in a small city called Gbarnga, well to the northeast of Monrovia, across a broad no-man’s-land and then deep into what everyone in the capital considered certifiably hostile territory.

  Once I’d finished the airport formalities, the Times’s stringer in Liberia, Jackson Kanneh, and my regular Monrovia driver, Old Man Bah, greeted me at the airport exit. In all the countries I visited frequently, I had made a priority of finding an exceptional driver to work with. Old Man Bah, a native of Guinea, the land next door, was reliable, which was essential, but he also had a good knowledge of the terrain and the local factions, a nose for news and a keen sense of danger, of which Liberia offered plenty. And invaluable in a country accustomed to mayhem, this pious Muslim man in his sixties, who unfailingly dressed
in a knitted prayer cap and Liberian-style safari suit, also boasted some of the best nerves I had ever seen.

  When people were scattering through the streets in panic at the outbreak of gunfire, a fairly common occurrence in Monrovia, Old Man Bah would calmly roust me from a meal or an interview and say, “Mista Howard, I think we haffa go now.” While others raced wildly through the streets looking for shelter, he would drive us at his own stately pace in his gently decaying blue Peugeot to Mamba Point, the rocky promontory on the Atlantic Ocean where my hotel was located, in the shadow of the UN headquarters.

  As we drove to the hotel, Jackson, whom we often jokingly called the mayor for his countless social connections and for his famous ease with women, announced with a wicked grin that the downtown bars had decided to celebrate ladies’ night that evening in honor of the curfew’s suspension. On Carey Street, the heart of the nightclub district, raunchy, unself-conscious Monrovia was in full blossom, and for all the smuttiness of the place, there was something utterly bracing about its lack of pretension.

  Husbands and wives, sons and daughters had been bottled up in their dark and airless little homes for months, and suddenly, like sailors on a rare shore leave, they were enjoying the outdoors again. Cheek to jowl at El Meson, Monrovia’s most famous bar, sat the threadbare and the well-to-do, knife-scarred prostitutes and pretty girls next door, the shiny-faced daughters of what remained of the country’s middle class, who had managed to slip out of the house. People of every description were mixing, talking, pouring down Club beers, cursing the ennui of their recent lives under curfew and, above all, hitting on one another with an almost total lack of inhibition.

  The house band that night was singing what had become local standards during the war, songs with titles like “Iron Titty,” about the virtues of young flesh, and “Gorbachev,” a ditty about people who trade sex for money, and men and women of all stripes were lustily joining in.