Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  Jackson told me that he and another friend of ours from Abidjan, Purnell Murdock, the regional Voice of America correspondent, had spoken to Charles Taylor in Gbarnga by satellite phone and received permission for us to drive there and interview him. We were to leave in the morning, stay overnight in Gbarnga and return to Monrovia the next day, just before Taylor himself was to make his grand entry into the city he had destroyed but never managed to capture.

  I was excited about the prospect of seeing Taylor, hitherto a disembodied voice we heard almost every day, orating more than speaking, in that cocksure manner of his, via satellite telephone to interviewers from the BBC World Service’s African radio programs, where he claimed victory in battle or denied defeat with equal aplomb. Taylor’s bombastic performances had made his interviews the longest-running theatrical act in the region, and since there was little other news or entertainment available, work literally stopped in Monrovia at 5:05 p.m., when his favorite forum, Focus on Africa, began to the sound of echoing clarions.

  From Monrovia, throughout most of the war it had been impossible to visit Taylor country, a rump state that the rebel leader fancied as Greater Liberia. The alternative route in, overland via Ivory Coast, was possible only by invitation, and as a frequent critic of Taylor, who avidly followed what was written about him, I knew I would never enjoy such a courtesy.

  “Big Man” is a term that has been heavily overworked by Western journalists. It is tossed about to describe African leaders in the same cavalier and disdainful fashion that the press displays with the coded language it sometimes uses for black American politicians, like “flamboyant” or “street smart.” Quite recently, Latin America had been full of Big Men, as had Eastern Europe, and much of Asia for that matter, but only in Africa did the term—actually borrowed from anthropologists’ descriptions of Pacific island societies—become a fixed moniker employed by writers too bored or lazy to get beyond such labels.

  For Taylor, though, Big Man seemed, if anything, like a painfully inadequate description of someone with such a monstrous ego and raging paranoia. I had chuckled earlier in the day when Old Man Bah told me that the Ministry of Finance’s old Cadillac had needed to be pushed to a garage after a brief trial run in preparation for the new government’s swearing-in ceremonies. Then at the bar I overheard details of the grand entrance Taylor was planning to mark his return to the capital. Liberia was a country where most people felt lucky if they had two or three changes of clothing and enough to eat any given week, and yet Taylor’s convoy was to consist of thirty-two shiny new Nissan Patrols and fifteen Mercedes-Benzes. The only suspense was over what sort of vehicle he would arrive in, and it was taken for granted that the choice would be designed to make as grand a statement as possible.

  Robert, who had come with me from Abidjan, Jackson, Purnell and I set out the next morning with an unknown driver suggested by Bah. Taylor had become an outsized myth in the minds of Monrovia’s long-suffering residents, and even someone as cool and sure-handed as Bah imagined that the road to Gbarnga was littered with skulls and bones, so he had declined to drive us. Taylor had assured Purnell that the fighters who were guarding the route would be notified in advance of our arrival. All we had to do, he said, was show up. But as we drove through the suffocating heat, soldiers at roadblocks manned by the Nigerian-led West African peacekeeping force, ECOMOG,4 expressed ever graver doubts about our prospects.

  All morning long we had to submit to the tedious formality of walking through the checkpoints, carrying our belongings for inspection into bamboo huts manned by droopy-eyed soldiers, while the car was searched. Some of the peacekeepers openly questioned our sanity for wishing to drive into rebel territory, but there was nothing they could do to stop us. We had all of the necessary paperwork from both ECOMOG headquarters and the Liberian government.

  Early that afternoon we reached the first checkpoint controlled by Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). We were now leaving the tightly circumscribed little world of Monrovia and its surroundings and entering so-called Greater Liberia. It was a “country” recognized by no other state, but the frontier had all the makings of a typical African border crossing. And by way of confirmation, there was even a rusting metal sign proclaiming: “Welcome to Greater Liberia. Land of Peace, Progress, Prosperity and Pleasure.” I was braced for trouble as I mounted the hill to the barracks that housed the immigration offices, which peered down menacingly over the crumbling two-lane highway. But the NPFL officials were crisply efficient, if unsmiling, once I announced when they asked me my business, “The president has invited us for an interview.”

  African borders are, above all, marketplaces, and a quick glance can speak volumes about the state of the nation you are entering: how flagrant the corruption is, how well fed and clothed the people are, how smoothly things function. Here, women naked from the waist up sold little cakes on the side of the road, while skinny children dressed in the faded hand-me-down clothes imported in bulk from America scurried about. Apart from a few old-timers, there were no men in sight. They had all been killed or pressed into service as killers themselves.

  We were officially in Taylor-land now, but most of the drive beyond this first checkpoint was spent passing through a much older country within a country, the immense Firestone rubber plantation. Firestone, as Liberians called it, was a poignant example of Africa’s abiding generosity to the outside world, from the earliest days of the slave trade to the present, or perhaps better put, of the continent’s wholesale plunder.

  Liberia was formed from a Tennessee-sized sliver of coastal West African rain forest, wedged between French- and British-claimed territories—today’s Ivory Coast, Guinea and Sierra Leone. Some five thousand of the original settlers were former slaves whose return to Africa was arranged by the American Colonization Society, a group whose most famous founding member was the sitting American president of the time, James Monroe. The Colonization Society had proclaimed the lofty goal of establishing a West African beachhead for Protestantism, but its sponsors, including many of the leading American lights of the early nineteenth century—on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line—also felt that it was better to be rid of freed slaves than to have them hanging around. The specter of a slave revolt like the one successfully led by Toussaint Louverture in Haiti at the turn of the century provided strong motivation for the idea of shipping freed blacks back to Africa.

  The territory they were being sent back to sat next door to Sierra Leone, a land the British had long called the White Man’s Grave, because of the deadly epidemics of malaria and yellow fever that plagued the area. When the first settlers arrived aboard a brig named Elizabeth in 1822, a quarter of the eighty-six freedmen aboard quickly perished, forcing the survivors to flee to British-controlled territory. The same fate quickly befell a second shipload of settlers who set out from New York harbor. When a third group of freedmen arrived in the place that would come to be known as Liberia, the Colonization Society negotiated the purchase of a sixty-mile strip of coastland from the Bassa, a local people, marking the first permanent settlement of a place whose chosen name, Monrovia, for James Monroe, already bespoke sweet but misplaced gratitude.

  The new promised land was one of the meanest environments in a continent full of difficult climes. Heavy rains fell for months at a time—forty inches in an average June alone—and tropical diseases took devastating tolls. To further complicate matters, the Bassa people, who had no understanding of the contract they had signed, surrendering rights to their land, soon began mounting deadly raids against the settlers.

  Beset with myriad difficulties, the new state began to founder, and American interest, tepid at best even at the outset, waned. In the 1920s, Washington refused to lend the Liberian government $5 million to tide it over a severe financial crisis, and the American millionaire tiremaker Harvey Firestone of Akron, Ohio, suddenly stepped into the picture, changing everything. Firestone was seeking new sources of rubber to meet the booming demand fr
om the era’s big new industry, automobiles, and in 1926 he was given a ninety-nine-year lease on a one-million-acre tract.

  Firestone’s Liberian holdings instantly became the world’s largest rubber plantation, and it had cost the company only six cents an acre, barely a third of what the British had paid for their competing plantations in Malaysia. Despite the huge cost advantage over his British competitors, Firestone imposed an aggressive drive to cut corners, and for years afterward the plantation was dogged with charges of employing slave labor and coercive recruitment of laborers, eventually provoking a suspension of relations with Liberia by the Hoover administration and an investigation of the plantation by the League of Nations.

  For mile after mile as we drove through the oxygen-saturated air of the plantation, all we could see were row after lush green row of rubber trees slowly oozing their thick white sap into small cups spiked into their sides. Besides the occasional bent old man carrying a broken branch home for firewood, or small groups of stunted, dwarflike girls carrying heavy loads on their heads and bundles on their backs, the place was totally deserted. Sporadic roadblocks were the only thing to remind us that we were not in the Republic of Chlorophyll. But even when we were stopped, the mood was usually loose. Taylor’s boy soldiers and their officers were already partying over the apparent end of the war. Whenever we pulled up just short of the crude iron-spiked barriers that were laid across the road, a few words about an interview with the president usually sufficed to get one of them to drag it lazily out of the way, letting us through.

  “Wha [white] man say he gone interview da Pappy,” I overheard one of the boy soldiers say, using their customary paternal moniker to refer to Taylor in their heavy Liberian pidgin.

  Well into the afternoon, though, as the forest finally began to thin and we sensed we were drawing closer to Gbarnga, a couple of Taylor’s fighters emerged from the trees looking all business with their guns raised, and a tense interrogation ensued. One of the young men wanted to inspect the trunk, and I opened it for him. “Anything for me?” he asked, with no hint of humor. I held my ground and said sorry, but no. The other fighter stepped forward and said the two of them were hungry and wanted some food. Since we were carrying nothing more than some loose peanuts, baguettes and a few oranges, I declined once again, politely but firmly.

  As I had often felt in this region, my accent, this time in English— passably Liberian—had thrown him. Living in West Africa now for the second time, I could usually tell where someone was from after hearing only a word or two. I also found that without too much effort I could reproduce a local patois in West Africa in pretty short order, whether it was English- or French-based, without embarrassing myself.

  When a hungry man wielding an assault rifle is inspecting your car at an isolated roadblock, the value of accents might seem questionable, but more than once in my experience merely getting the tone or inflection right had proved enough to stop a menacing person in his tracks, forcing him to pause and wonder how someone who is so obviously an outsider had become so intimate with his world. The hope was that the next thought would be one of prudence; this outsider might have other unexpected powers as well.

  Seeing that I had left lots of reading material lying on the front seat, the first fighter demanded some newspapers from Monrovia. This surprised me, since I had assumed they were illiterate, but I sensed an opportunity to defuse the situation by ceding something, while avoiding any sign of submission, which I knew could be fatal. Since we didn’t have any Monrovia newspapers, I handed him a copy of The New York Review of Books that I had just finished reading and climbed back into the car, hoping that he would give the order for us to proceed before he realized the nature of my gift. It worked perfectly, and with his signal to the boy holding a rope attached to the two-by-four studded with nails that served as their roadblock, we sped off, emitting a collective sigh.

  We reached Gbarnga shortly before 5 p.m., and after passing a couple of final checkpoints at the edge of town, we were escorted by Taylor’s presidential security agents to the grounds of a compound of brilliantly whitewashed buildings surrounded by neatly manicured lawns. From the sight of things, we quickly gathered that this was where Greater Liberia’s Boss Man, as many here called him, the “Pappy” to a horde of orphaned boy soldiers, lived and worked.

  We were told to wait, and while we sat outdoors our handlers warily sized us up. I described our arrangements and insisted that an interview had been promised. They answered: By all means, of course we would see the president. Taylor went to great lengths to avoid submitting himself to unflattering questioning, and our handlers had obviously been assigned the task of making sure that we would cause him no embarrassment.

  More than an hour passed, and I relieved my boredom with the tiny Sony shortwave that I took with me wherever I went. Shortwave radio has gone the way of the vacuum tube in much of the world, but the BBC remains the state of the art in globalization in these parts, requiring only two batteries to stay connected.

  Darkness came upon us swiftly, and in the last light I began to ply Moses, the gaunt secret policeman assigned to watch us, for information. After much prodding, he slipped away to make inquiries on our behalf, and while he was gone, a lower-ranked flunky who had also been watching us drew near to me and said, “Man, we want this war to end so badly. We have no food. We’re not paid. There is no school for our children. I can’t even find clothes to put on my back.”

  When Moses returned, he apologized sheepishly for an abrupt change in plans. “I have been asked to escort the honorable journalists to the presidential guest lodge,” he said, echoing his master’s grandiloquence. “There is no problem, though. Don’t worry. The president will see you tomorrow, by all means.” By that point, the news was neither a surprise nor total disappointment. We were all dead tired, and famished, too, after a long day without food. Knowing Taylor’s penchant for ostentation, I had visions of a sumptuous meal awaiting us at the presidential guest lodge.

  As we drove away the sky opened up, unleashing the kind of diluvial rainstorm that is typical in Liberia. The raindrops fell like shot, each issuing its own little explosion, and we could barely make out the road as we plodded through the torrent with the high beams on. Moses told us that we had better get something to eat before we reached the lodge, puncturing my banquet fantasy, so with the driver sticking his head out the window every few seconds to verify his course, we crept through the unlit streets of “downtown” Gbarnga as good as blindfolded by the rain.

  After a few minutes we arrived at the town’s only sit-down restaurant, a dingy little one-room shack with wobbly tables and steel chairs that grated noisily against the cement floor. Next to it, like a scene out of a western, stood Gbarnga’s only nightclub, the Dream House Bar, and with the music already pounding away despite the early hour, we guessed the people inside had been caught in the downpour and decided to have a little party. Our spirits took another hit when we learned that the restaurant was serving only sweet tea and bread. As some of Taylor’s officers sat there in the dimly lit room partaking of this miserable fare, a shifty-looking man approached to ask me in a whisper if I wanted to buy some gold. “No,” I said, “but I would really love something to eat.”

  Keeping despair at bay in situations like these required resourcefulness. Leaning over the railing separating the restaurant from the disco, I called out to a couple of the bar girls inside and explained our problem. They wore skimpy dresses and hot pants, and giggled incredulously as they asked if I wouldn’t join them. I insisted gently on food alone, and within a few minutes they cheerfully rounded up some canned sardines, bottles of beer and a few other odds and ends. We thanked them for “saving us,” paid them for what they had brought, adding a little extra for their kindness, and headed off for the lodge.

  The rain had let up just enough for us to backtrack down the highway a few miles in the direction of Monrovia. We headed down a narrow muddy road and were guided the final few yards by a man on
foot to the dark, windowless building that we were told was the presidential guesthouse. Containing our dismay as best we could, we used flashlights and candles to unload our things and have a look inside. There were beds and a few chairs, but no sheets or tables. It was going to be a long night. The effect of the beer lightened the mood, though, and as we ate the bread and scooped sardines and Spam from the cans, Purnell kept us laughing with hilarious stories of his troubled early sex life, when, hard as it seemed to believe, he said he had been painfully shy with women.

  We rose with the sun the next morning and were surprised to find a few other presidential guests sitting in the living room where we had eaten. They had arrived overnight, after we passed out, and to my surprise, I had not heard a thing.

  Someone from Taylor’s protocol eventually came to collect us, and we set out immediately for the presidential compound. In Monrovia we had been warned that the highway back to the city would be closed that afternoon to ensure security for Taylor’s arrival by road, meaning that if we didn’t head back soon, we would not arrive in time to cover events there. Morning edged toward noon, and our stomachs growled as we sat on a veranda waiting for some word about our promised interview, just as we had the night before.

  Losing patience, I summoned Moses to tell him that we couldn’t wait any longer, and this produced a lot of nervous exchanges between our handlers. One of them, a security man, said in a menacing tone, “Nobody leaves Gbarnga without seeing the Pappy.” Out of prudence we waited another fifteen minutes. But with no sign that we were going to be ushered in for our audience, we piled into our car and drove off. We quickly collected our things from the lodge and sped out of town, wondering what would happen if the Pappy sent some of his boys to arrest us after having stood him up.

  On our way out of town we followed the same route we had taken in the rain the night before, and we could now see downtown Gbarnga, the capital of Greater Liberia, in all its glory. It was nothing more than a desolate strip of bombed-out buildings and filthy little chop-bars, or greasy spoons. In lieu of a proper market, the cornerstone of urban life in West Africa, there was a large slab of broken concrete under open skies, the foundation of a demolished building. There, on the ground, the local women traded in produce and cheap goods. Then and there I understood the future that awaited Liberia should Charles Taylor ever succeed in his obsession to become president: unlimited comfort and glory for the chief and unmitigated misery for his people.