Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  We had been on the road for just a few minutes, speeding as fast as our rickety taxi could carry us, when one of our tires exploded with a boom. We were all so jittery that we thought we had come under fire. Clambering out of the car, we began to help our hapless driver with the repair, only to discover that there was no jack. Together we lifted the car while the driver jammed a new tire into place, and at that very moment, a large jeep came speeding toward us piled high with fighters, including some hanging from its sides, waving their guns. Barreling ahead as fast as it could go, the vehicle began swaying wildly from side to side, making us all dive for the bushes as it closed in on us. From the glimpse I got, I could tell immediately that these were not boys on a joy ride, but fighters on their way to battle, and we immediately understood that something big had just happened in Gbarnga.

  As we sped warily toward Monrovia, even the most carefree checkpoints of the day before had turned into nightmares manned by jumpy boy soldiers who pointed their rifles at us with fingers playing on their triggers. Word had already reached them that there was trouble in Gbarnga, and they grilled us with suspicion about what we had seen and heard.

  At one roadblock a group of children with battered assault rifles forced us off the highway at gunpoint and began shouting at us furiously. The boy in charge could not have been more than fifteen years old. His eyes were deeply bloodshot, and the smell of the marijuana that Taylor’s commanders supplied to the child combatants, along with harder drugs, hung thick in the air. I remained seated when he ordered us out of the car, and attempted to gently reason with him, trying to strike the right balance of self-confidence with respect for the authority conferred by his gun, but he would have none of it, and resumed shouting and waving his rifle.

  After a few minutes of electric tension, an officer arrived and began to calm the boy down, and when the child’s anger had slackened a notch or two, the officer waved us through. A few miles later, still well within Taylor territory, our car blew a second tire, and we discovered that there were no more spares. Desperate now to get out of Greater Liberia, we drove for ten miles on the rim alone, finally reaching a town called Kakata. There I paid the driver for his services and gave him a little extra money to get his tires fixed, and we hired another car to carry us back to Monrovia.

  Not until we reached Monrovia did we learn what had happened in Gbarnga that morning. Just moments after we had left the presidential guesthouse it had come under fierce attack with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. We were told that the other men who had arrived there while we slept were senior commanders who had been summoned by Taylor, and then were killed after an assassination plot was uncovered. Others dismissed this explanation, though, saying that the incident was a cold-blooded political execution of a kind common in Taylor’s senior ranks.

  “I started with a shotgun and three rifles and a few dozen men behind me,” Charles Taylor said in an interview with Harper’s. “The first garrison we came to put up no resistance, they ran without a fight. My dear, they thought we had a multitude. It was dark, it was night, and they just assumed. Their guilt and their corruption magnified their enemies in their sight. Now we had arms to take the next garrison. General Varney and Prince Johnson, seasoned military men, lifelong soldiers, joined our cause, of course, with many of the troops under them. Suddenly we’d become formidable!”

  Taylor’s initial drive for power began on Christmas Eve, 1989, and had very nearly succeeded, but when his rebel army reached the edge of Monrovia, its leadership split. Nigeria had rushed into the void at Washington’s urging to block the armed takeover of the capital, and Taylor, showing rare prudence, pulled his men back, sensing that a face-off against Africa’s largest army was a fool’s gamble. At the head of his splinter faction, Prince Johnson, Taylor’s volatile and wild-eyed former chief of staff, pressed ahead, and managed to capture President Doe in the process.

  Johnson’s murder of Doe on September 10, 1990, gruesome, drawn out and filmed in a herky-jerky cinema verité style, would become one of the signal events of West Africa’s post-independence history. As men sliced off Doe’s ears, kicked him and stabbed him, Johnson repeatedly demanded that Doe provide the numbers of the Swiss bank accounts to which Doe, in the long tradition of African dictators, had been sending off the money he stole from the treasury. Doe would reveal no secrets, and took his time dying; at Johnson’s insistence, the president’s captors kept the camera running throughout his agony. It was more than a gruesomely innovative twist on hunters’ stuffed and mounted cadavers. It was irrefutable proof of the victim’s demise in a land where superstitions about magic and invincibility still have a lock on the popular imagination.

  A barely literate master sergeant, Doe had disemboweled his predecessor, William Tolbert, in a 1980 coup and summarily executed twelve senior government officials on a Monrovia beach. Thus, as enthusiastic street kids cheered the firing squad, 111 years of Americo-Liberian rule came to an ignominious end. The slayings took place just one year after the Ghanaian military leader, Jerry Rawlings, a young junior air force officer who had recently seized power, publicly executed three of his predecessors. An awful, matching bookend for the end of the decade, the videotaped dismemberment of Doe confirmed for shocked West Africans that their politics were undergoing a hideous transformation, from the gentle venality they were long accustomed to into a horror show of almost biblical cruelty. Few could have imagined, though, that far worse was still to come.

  In his Harper’s interview, Taylor insisted that he had held his men back in order to mollify Washington during the 1990 offensive against Monrovia, showing restraint even while Prince Johnson pursued his Genghis Khan–style campaign against the city, skewering children, slaughtering people in churches, targeting anyone who might be from Doe’s ethnic group, the Krahn, and even killing people for sport. “Your American ambassador came to the Ivory Coast to see me in the middle of the night with a bunch from the CIA,” Taylor said. “Oh yes. They just appeared at our perimeter suddenly from the darkness, out of thin air. What your ambassador told me was that if I waited, if I didn’t plunge the capital into a bloody battle, the U.S. would back me one hundred percent. They and the West African peacekeepers would quickly take care of Prince Johnson, and I would be installed as president of Liberia. . . . They lied to me. Why did they do that?”

  The belief in mysterious powers operating in the fast of darkness, in the stealth and omniscience of the CIA, and in his own victimhood and constant betrayal by others, was classic Taylor, whose melodramatic airs and paranoia were emphasized by his practiced use of the tremolo tenor voicings of a Mississippi preacher. Taylor apparently believed that the CIA had tried to help him before, too.

  Taylor, Liberia’s most powerful warlord, had been an official in Doe’s disastrous government but fled the country after reportedly embezzling a large sum of money. In Massachusetts, where he briefly studied at Bentley College, Taylor was arrested and sent to prison, to await extradition to Liberia. Somehow he managed to escape, but the story of how he was able to flee has never been convincingly explained. “I wouldn’t even be in this country today if not for the CIA,” Taylor told Harper’s. “My escape from the American jail in Boston—I think they must have arranged that. One night I was told that the gate to my cell wouldn’t be locked, that I could walk anywhere. I walked out of jail, down the steps, out into America. Nobody stopped me.”

  However tempting, it would be wrong to dismiss Taylor’s CIA stories out of hand. Washington and Paris, each in its own way, exercised immense sway in this part of the world throughout the 1980s, and they conducted most of their important business covertly. The biggest distinction was that while France wore on its sleeve its eagerness for influence, even control, over its former colonial domain, the United States insisted on leaving as small a footprint as possible in West Africa. Although 12 percent of its population traces its roots to Africa, America’s steadfast position was to insist it had no vital interests on the continent, even
as its dependence on African oil and other minerals grew steadily. It was easier to run African affairs on the cheap that way, by using spies and special envoys instead of high-profile diplomacy and costly programs. In the end, it was a world not so far removed from Taylor’s own obsessive paranoia.

  There were countless other stories about this smallish man of gargantuan vanity and seemingly unquenchable ambition, but the most compelling ones were told by men who had fought by his side. Over the years I had gotten to know several of Taylor’s former officers, from his top generals to simple platoon commanders, and their stories were steeped in the kind of fear and respect I imagine wild animals must have for whichever beast sits at the pinnacle of their particular food chain.

  A former commander who had broken with Taylor and fled the country related the details of Taylor’s life after returning to Africa, following his escape from the American prison. “Taylor received training in Libya to overthrow Doe, and was sent later to Burkina Faso to continue his training and make preparations, recruiting fighters from around the region,” he said. “I was with him there, so I know what I am speaking of. Thomas Sankara [the late president of Burkina Faso] was supporting him, but when he [Taylor] began pressing Burkina for the green light to invade Liberia, Sankara grew impatient with him. Taylor left for Sierra Leone to seek permission to invade Liberia from there, but he was kicked out after he seduced the defense minister’s wife. Then he went to Guinea, and he was kicked out there, too, and to Ghana, where I heard he was arrested twice.

  “We have a proverb that you may have heard,” Taylor’s onetime commander told me. “ ‘Snakes don’t make pets.’ That fits Taylor to a T.”

  Sankara, a charismatic young leftist officer, had seized power in Burkina Faso in 1983 and was killed four years later. With his death, Taylor finally found an opening. Blaise Compaoré, Sankara’s former number two, his successor and the man who is widely believed to have arranged his assassination, quickly jettisoned the progressive politics that had made Sankara a hero throughout the region and drew his country close to France once again, and even closer still to Paris’s most important ally in the region, Ivory Coast.

  The story of Taylor’s rebel beginnings in Burkina Faso is a convoluted one, but its twisting contours reveal much about the way Africa has worked in the four decades since independence, with personal rivalries and grudges between leaders, and sordid under-the-table maneuvers by outside powers and their commercial interests, often driving change.

  Doe, who had proclaimed himself a general and had accumulated fictitious degrees from Liberian universities to compensate for his near illiteracy, was well on his way to becoming a West African Idi Amin. Sankara detested him as an offense to the dignity of Africans. Ivory Coast’s archconservative president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, was also offended by Doe, but for very different reasons. Doe had executed William Tolbert, the Ivorian leader’s neighbor, close friend and deeply conservative ally, along with Tolbert’s son, who was Houphouët-Boigny’s son-in-law. Taken together with the executions in Ghana, Ivory Coast’s neighbor to the east, the killings represented a terrifying precedent for Ivory Coast’s president-for-life: succession by murder.

  For all of Liberia’s connections to the United States, Washington had done virtually nothing to help rein in Doe, even as his rule became wildly murderous and flagrantly corrupt. In 1985, I had witnessed firsthand the reluctance to say or do anything that might offend Doe, when the once skinny and timid sergeant—now turned bloated and arrogant president—stole the presidential elections in a manner so blatant that the scenes at polling stations resembled slapstick. Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, George P. Shultz, breezed through Monrovia shortly afterward to endorse the “election,” badly undermining American claims of support for democracy in Africa. Had democracy been Washington’s concern, it might have called for an international observer team to monitor the vote, or it might have condemned the massacre of university students by Doe’s army a year earlier, or at least raised questions about the fact that the two leading opposition candidates were banned from the race.

  To be sure, Shultz’s endorsement did not stem from any great enthusiasm for Doe, whose presidential priorities after several years of misrule had finally boiled down to one essential—clinging to power. In fact, the secretary of state expressed his distaste for the man after meeting him, telling the American ambassador acidly, “Perhaps I made a wrong career choice, if it was people like that I was going to meet. Doe was unintelligible.” With the Cold War on, though, America’s objectives in a region that forever seemed to dangle from the margins of the world stage were as rudimentary as Doe’s: clinging to strategic assets, sewing up UN votes and containing enemies, from Moscow to Tripoli.

  America’s political involvement with most African countries has been both recent and sporadic. Liberia, though, is a screaming exception to the pattern. The Firestone plantation served as America’s strategic reserve of rubber supplies in World War II. Robertsfield was Africa’s largest airport, a huge, air-conditioned, brushed aluminum structure that sat strangely out of place in the middle of a fetid swamp, before it was destroyed in the country’s civil war. The airport was built with Department of Defense funds, but the project had nothing to do with Liberian passenger traffic. The “gift” of an outsized airport, which Liberian society was not even remotely prepared to maintain, was meant to accommodate the largest of cargo planes, and Washington used the facility for years as a refueling point for large arms shipments to the anti-communist Angolan rebel movement, UNITA, sent by the CIA and the Pentagon.

  Liberia was home, too, to Omega, a forest of soaring antennas maintained by secretive American technicians on the edge of Monrovia. Officially, this vast farm of steel towers that crackled with more electricity than all of downtown Monrovia was part of a maritime emergency navigational system. It also served as the regional rebroadcast center for the Voice of America. Liberians in the know, however, whispered that it had a less innocent function as well: transmitting coded American diplomatic and intelligence communications traffic around a large slice of the planet.

  For American policymakers of the time, interests like these easily trumped notions of democracy in a land where diplomats had always taken a patronizingly long view of Africa’s potential for political and economic development. Thus, instead of denouncing Doe’s election and exerting strong pressure on the former master sergeant for human rights improvements, Shultz’s visit was rewarding him with an extraordinary pat on the back.

  For a man like Doe the satisfaction must have been great upon hearing word of the December 1985 Senate testimony of the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Chester A. Crocker. Straight-faced, Crocker called Doe’s fraudulent elections “the beginning, however imperfect, of a democratic experience that Liberia and its friends can use as a benchmark for future elections.” Over the next few years, Washington routinely opened its checkbook to the tune of $50 to $60 million in annual aid for the Doe regime, making Liberia sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest recipient of American largesse.

  Democracy movements had just begun to sprout here and there throughout much of the continent, with Liberia at the forefront. Within five years, Africa’s political landscape would begin its most dramatic shift since the independence era in the early 1960s, with the advent in many countries of free presses, competitive elections and presidential term limits. Yet, schooled as they were in low expectations for Africa, American officials were blind to the coming changes. What is worse, in places like Liberia, the closest thing America has ever had to an African colony, Washington had placed itself on the wrong side of history, and however unwittingly, helped grease the path of Africa’s first republic toward another, far more ignominious, record: the world’s first failed state.

  It is foolish to think that Washington should carry the burden of blame for most of Africa’s problems, or even of tiny Liberia’s. But a thread of ignorance and contempt ran through American covert sponsorship of Africa
’s first coup d’état, the overthrow in 1960 of Patrice Lumumba, the elected prime minister of the Congo, to our steadfast support for dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko and Samuel Doe. It would be dishonest to pretend there is no link between what has perhaps been the least accountable and least democratically run compartment of America’s foreign policy—African affairs—and the undemocratic fortunes of the continent.

  With Liberians left to groan under Doe’s rule, Taylor was able to amass the support of a large, if incidental, coalition of local and regional powers: France and Libya were both eager to knock the United States down a rung in what each considered its own backyard; Ivory Coast wanted to show that regicide would not go unpunished; and Blaise Compaoré wanted to turn Burkina Faso, his dusty, impoverished backwater, into a force to be reckoned with in the region, and was obsessed with blotting out the lingering popular memories of Thomas Sankara.

  All Monrovia was abuzz with anticipation of Charles Taylor’s arrival. Volunteers had been enthusiastically scouring the city for days, and for a city that had the utterly charred look in some neighborhoods of Dresden after the bombings, it fairly shone. Late in the afternoon of our return, Taylor’s huge motorcade made its grand entrance into the capital. Massive crowds gathered along the route, starting in Sinkor, a once comfortable residential area built around a broad main avenue leading to the center of town. Sure enough, there were all of the Mercedes and four-wheel-drive escorts filled with gun-toting NPFL thugs that we had been told to expect, and for his own transportation Taylor had chosen an armored, gold-trimmed Land Rover, an all-terrain vehicle the likes of which Liberia had never seen before.