Destined to Witness

by Hans Massaquoi

“Too bad that your grandfather is no longer with us to see what has become of you,” he would say, then give me a detailed account of his father’s distinguished life. Unlike other Vai children, Momolu was required to begin the study of Vai early, my father explained. By the time he was eight years old, he had mastered the Vai’s sophisticated, self-developed system of writing, whose alphabet of more than one hundred characters sets the Vais apart from the vast majority of analphabetic African tribes. His royal Muslim parents placed him under the tutelage of a Mohammedan priest to receive instruction in the Koran. Two years later, at age ten, he was sent to St. John’s Episcopal School at Cape Mount, to learn English. While under the influence of his Christian tutors for several years, Momolu adopted the Christian faith and was baptized and confirmed. At age sixteen, in 1888, the precocious boy was sent to the United States, where he enrolled as a freshman at Central Tennessee College in Nashville. The sudden deaths of his mother in 1892 and his father four years later put him in line for the leadership of the Vais, but he declined and instead became principal of his alma mater, St. John’s Episcopal School. After six years in that post, he finally accepted the kingship, and in a spectacular ceremony attended by indigenous dignitaries and British colonial officials, he was crowned King Momolu IV, then set up court in the Vai territory, an area about three hundred miles long and two hundred miles wide, extending along the Atlantic seaboard from Gallinas in Sierra Leone to Cape Mount in his native Liberia. Eventually, my father concluded, intratribal quarrels instigated by the intrigues of British colonials who feared the rise of a strong, charismatic, and educated indigenous leader undermined Momolu’s reign and caused him to abdicate in favor of a less-effective cousin.

  To reciprocate, I described my mother’s and my survival of the Nazi persecution and the war. He never tired of hearing these stories.

  During our daily discussions, which were more like liberal-arts lectures that ranged from the judicial concept of habeas corpus to Mendel’s laws of heredity, I learned to respect his formidable intellect and breadth of knowledge. I also began to detect a likable side in him that had escaped me earlier. At the same time I became increasingly aware of his many foibles. When it came to his religious beliefs, it appeared that he hadn’t quite made up his mind whether to call himself a Christian, a Muslim, or what, and nimbly quoted from either the Bible or the Koran, depending on which came closer to supporting his argument. He was consistent, however, in three areas: his contempt for “American Negroes” (from which his close friend the former U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary William P. Lanier was exempted); his disdain for a career in government (triggered, no doubt, by the misfortunes his father encountered as a longtime member of the Liberian government); and his worship of President Tubman, whom he quoted at every opportunity. “White or black,” he would say, “Tubman is the greatest statesman alive, barring none.” He would back up his statement by explaining the two major measures on which President Tubman had staked his administration and which, my father claimed, had yanked Liberia out of its antebellum existence into the twentieth century: Tubman’s Open Door Policy opened the country to foreign investment and his Unification Policy brought tribal people, who had been intentionally isolated and kept ignorant by the ruling Americo-Liberians, into the political life of the country.

  My father had another good reason to feel favorably toward the president. Under the previous administration of President Edwin Barclay, he and the rest of the Massaquois had been down and out. Tubman, who became president in 1944, turned things around for the Massaquois. Reversing Barclay’s policy of neutrality toward Germany and declaring war on the Nazi state, he sent German diplomats and residents in Liberia packing, then made my father the sole executor of the sizable holdings the Germans were forced to leave behind. As executor of the confiscated property, my father’s task included inventorying all German assets, office buildings—including an entire legation—homes, yachts, and warehouses stacked with goods, then selling them for the government, primarily to wealthy foreign and Liberian businessmen, for a handsome commission of ten percent. The resulting windfall was sufficient to put my father back on his feet and enable him to redeem the various properties Momolu had mortgaged before his death. They included numerous rented-out houses in and around Monrovia and considerable tracts of land. “Very soon,” my father promised, “I shall take you around and show you what will one day be yours.”

  Despite my father’s affluence, he was a workaholic who toiled single-mindedly from the moment he went down to his office at 9 A.M. sharp until late at night. The only diversion in which he indulged himself was attending weekly meetings at the exclusive seaside SAC (Saturday Afternoon Club) Pavilion, where President Tubman and his all-male inner circle would socialize with the help of fine brandy, fine whiskey, and fine cigars.

  ADJUSTING

  My father repeatedly expressed hope that my arrival in Monrovia would make it possible for him one day to take things a bit easier and even enable him to take a vacation for a change. He wanted to pay a long-overdue visit to his aged mother in Lagos, Nigeria, whom he hadn’t seen for many years. After divorcing Momolu long before I was born, my grandmother had moved to the British colony, where she married a Mr. Sonii, a Liberian-born foreman at a Lagos shipyard. “I have promised your grandmother that I will send you as soon as you get settled a bit. She can hardly wait to see you.”

  All that sounded interesting and exciting to me, but it didn’t help my present situation much. Each morning, I dreaded the moment when my father would go downstairs to his office, leaving me to figure out how to stay occupied the rest of the day.

  To keep from getting bored, I usually took long walks along Monrovia’s bustling waterfront or hung out with Fritz and his pals, all of them sons and daughters of Monrovia’s Americo-Liberian elite. They included Sewell Brewer, son of President Tubman’s top military aide; his cousin Herbert Brewer, whose father was the Liberian ambassador to Paris; Calista Dennis, niece of Liberian Secretary of State Gabriel Dennis; and other similarly privileged characters. All of them were graduates of or students at the College of West Africa, a high school-level institution, and slated to study at various colleges or universities in the United States on Liberian government scholarships. After they had earned their degrees and returned home, each was assured a high position in the Liberian government. Fritz was scheduled to leave shortly for the United States to study dairy farming at the University of Iowa. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine fastidious Fritz coming within miles of a cow, to say nothing of milking one.

  The group’s constant chatter about proms and debutante balls didn’t interest me, but I envied their carefree life. They made me realize how much of my own youth I had lost struggling to merely survive. I also envied the way their careers, and often their future marriages, had been carefully arranged by their families while I had to keep flying by the seat of my pants. It was clear to me that without formal training I would never amount to anything in status-conscious Liberia, but whenever I broached the subject with my father, he became evasive and told me to be patient.

  I also spent considerable time pounding a manual typewriter, for the dual purpose of improving my typing speed in preparation for joining my father’s business and to keep my mother, Inge, and others abreast of how I was making out. My mother wrote that shortly after I left Hamburg, the highly inflated Deutsche Reichsmark was declared worthless. In its place a new currency, called the Deutschmark, was introduced and everyone received forty D marks with which to sink or swim. Overnight, shops that had been chronically empty were suddenly stocked to the ceilings with all types of “scarce” merchandise that she had not seen since the outbreak of the war. Her letter ended on an optimistic note, expressing her confidence that the worst seemed finally over in Germany and her hope that I would like Liberia so that we could be reunited soon.

  Inge wrote that she and my mother had hit it off unusually well and were spending much of their free time together, attending movies and talking about (who
else?) me. Inge promised that there was no way in the world she would ever even as much as look at another man and wanted to know what Liberia was like, especially Liberian women. My immediate response to her question was a sincere, “Stop worrying about Liberian girls. They’re simply not my type.”

  It took a while, but as my father had predicted, slowly but surely something in my perception changed. Before I had become fully aware of it, some Liberian girls started to look rather enticing.

  Morris for some time had been teasing me to get serious and test the waters. He said that as far as my social life was concerned, I should leave everything to him. He already knew several young ladies who were interested in making my acquaintance. The more I said that I wasn’t quite ready, the more he praised the virtues of his female friends. One of them, he explained, was especially eager to meet me. He said she was the girlfriend of a very influential married Liberian who visited her maybe once a month. “But as you can imagine,” Morris added, “once a month doesn’t cut it.”

  When I kept pressing him to tell me who her boyfriend was, he finally told me that it was the president.

  “Are you crazy or something, trying to get me hooked up with one of the president’s old ladies?” I replied. “If he finds out, he’ll have me assassinated.”

  Morris tried to assure me that the president wouldn’t find out, and even if he did, he wouldn’t care. “He keeps women all over the country and has a hard time getting around to them on a regular basis,” Morris argued. “Why don’t you just come along and meet her? She lives only a couple of blocks from here.”

  Morris was delighted when I ignored my better judgment and let him talk me into meeting his friend. “Strictly to say hello,” I admonished.

  When we arrived at the lady’s house, I saw an ample-bosomed, bathrobe-clad woman leaning over the banister of her second-floor veranda.

  “That’s her,” whispered Morris.

  “Is that your little brother, Morris?” asked the woman, with a childlike, coquettish voice.

  “Yeah, that’s my baby brother from Germany,” Morris replied.

  “Why don’t you come up and let me meet him?” she suggested.

  After joining the woman on her veranda, I noticed her truly beautiful face but also that, to me, she was at least forty pounds overweight. “Too bad,” I thought, because without the extra weight she had real possibilities.

  Another turnoff for me was a life-size photograph of a stern-faced President Tubman that dominated the living room. It served me as a grim reminder that I was over my head and living dangerously.

  Morris introduced Eva and me.

  “You didn’t tell me that your brother is almost a head taller than you,” the woman chided Morris. She then disappeared into her kitchen to fetch us something cold to drink. Morris muttered something about having left his wallet somewhere and, before I could stop him, spun around and rushed down the stairs and out of the house. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back,” he hollered from the street, then disappeared around the corner. I was certain that I had seen the last of Morris that day.

  I vowed to get even with Morris for getting me into a jam like this. While the woman and I made small talk, I wracked my brain to come up with an excuse for following Morris out the door, but nothing plausible came to my mind. Meanwhile, my accommodating hostess was plying me with glass after glass of spiked punch. When I complained that I was feeling excessively hot, she suggested that I take a refreshing bath. After another glass of punch, that suggestion made a lot of sense to me, and without giving the matter any further thought, I was soon luxuriating in a tub of refreshing lukewarm water. As Eva was leaning on the floor beside the tub to wipe perspiration from my face with a towel, her bathrobe came open at the front, revealing an expanse of smooth brown skin that, at least for the moment, totally changed my mind about overweight women.

  When, a few hours later, I walked into the bright street, literally punch drunk and physically drained, my anger at Morris had completely disappeared.

  But even Morris’s tireless efforts toward enlivening my social life could not keep me from craving a more purposeful lifestyle. When I complained one day to my father that boredom was killing me and asked him to give me something constructive to do, he became agitated. “This is Africa, not Europe,” he lectured me. “People here take their time. You barely got here and want to become rich overnight. That’s not the way we do things here.”

  I hadn’t said anything about wanting to get rich overnight, but endured his lecture without argument. A few days later, he took me to a nearby warehouse crammed with what looked to me like junk. In one corner were a dozen or so large, dusty commercial scales, the kind used to weigh sacks of produce. “This used to be a German warehouse,” my father explained, “and these metric scales were left here by German businessmen during the war. They seem in pretty bad shape, but if you think you can fix them, you’ve got yourself a job.”

  After a brief inspection of some of the rusty scales, I told him that I thought I could put them back in working condition.

  In good repair, my father explained, each of the scales would be worth about $50. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “I’ll hire a couple of helpers for you. If you repair the scales, I’ll sell them for you and we’ll share the proceeds fifty-fifty.” Quickly figuring that I stood to make about three hundred bucks, I eagerly agreed.

  One early morning, after I had selected some tools from my father’s garage, I went to work on my new project with my newly hired two-man crew. I hadn’t felt as good in weeks. All of a sudden I felt useful again. It amazed me how a few rusty scales could restore my sense of purpose, which I had lost completely during my idle existence since my arrival. So with considerable enthusiasm, I threw myself into the task at hand.

  My two helpers, both barefoot and about my age, told me they belonged to the Bassa tribe. What they lacked in mechanical expertise they made up with their quick grasp and eagerness to please me. After I carefully explained to each his task, they went about their jobs chanting cheerfully and with total disregard of the stifling heat and the dust churned up by the work.

  Each noon, in keeping with a custom I had observed since I joined the workforce as a machinist apprentice at age fourteen, I told my helpers to take an hourlong break while I joined my father for lunch. A week or so into the project, my father inquired about the work. “Take a look,” I invited him, proud to be able to show some progress. As we walked into the warehouse, my helpers were sitting on crates while eating their meager lunch, consisting of raw cassava roots.

  “What’s going on here?” my father demanded, pointing at my helpers. At first, neither the men nor I understood what he was getting at until he told them harshly, “Get back to work!” Without betraying the slightest displeasure, the men immediately resumed their work. When I tried to explain to my father that, on my instruction, the men were still on their well-deserved lunch break, he took me outside the warehouse and treated me to a long lecture about the way things were done in Africa as opposed to the European way. “These people don’t know anything about lunch hour,” he insisted with a perfectly straight face. “You are confusing them by introducing them to highfalutin’ foreign ideas. I am paying them good money to work—not to take lunch breaks.”

  I thought it inconceivable that “these people” didn’t know anything about lunch hours when every day they saw their rich bosses take noon breaks. When I confronted my father with my logic during one of our subsequent breakfast chats and suggested that perhaps he feared that after being “confused” by me, others might insist on taking a lunch break, he got angry. “You just don’t understand Africa and how things are done here,” he told me, “so stop meddling.” I thought I understood very well, but kept my mouth shut for peace’s sake. Later, I asked my helpers how much they were getting paid. They told me that their daily wage was twenty-five cents, at the time the price of a pack of cigarettes. Recalling this episode some three decades later, I was
hardly surprised to learn of Sergeant Samuel Doe’s bloody 1980 revolution against the ruling Americo-Liberians.

  After three weeks of steady work, my helpers and I finished the job. Before we parted, I told them to look me up discreetly in about a month so that I could pay them a bonus once I had gotten my share of the proceeds from the sale of the scales. Perhaps they didn’t believe me, because they never took me up on my word and I never saw either of them again.

  My father was duly impressed when I showed him a dozen gleaming and freshly painted scales. After testing the scales’ accuracy with some standardized weights, he pronounced me a mechanical genius and told me that he already had buyers lined up. A few days later he handed me thirty ten-dollar bills, the first money I had earned since I left Germany.

  A WEDDING

  News of an upcoming event hit my father like a hurricane. Fatima had announced her betrothal and impending marriage to an electrician from British-ruled Freetown, Sierra Leone. While the rest of the Massaquois weren’t exactly overjoyed by what all considered a monumental mismatch, they gradually adjusted to the idea and went on with their lives. My father, on the other hand, regarded the impending marriage as one of the big disappointments of his life. Although not on speaking terms with Fatima because of the “inheritance palaver,” he was quite proud of her scholarly achievements and often bragged about his “brilliant baby sister.” As the oldest son of Momolu and titular head of the Massaquoi family, he felt entitled to have a say-so in his younger sister’s choice of a spouse. He might have forgiven her not consulting him, which he viewed as an act of defiance, had she chosen to marry someone he considered worthy. To him, the man she chose, “a bloody bushman with a slave name, Freeman,” was at best a joke and at worst an insult to him. In his elitist view, Fatima had disgraced the family and the memory of their father, Momolu.

  Fully aware of her brother’s sentiments, Fatima went ahead with her wedding plans anyway. The wedding coincided with Liberia’s Independence Day, July 26, 1948, which also happened to be the republic’s 101st birthday. Conspicuously absent from the ceremony, my father had let it be known that he couldn’t dignify such a “ridiculous spectacle” with his presence, but nevertheless had wished me a “jolly good time.” Even the fact that, as a concession to her own Vai nobility’s sensitivities, Fatima translated her married name into Vai and henceforth called herself Mrs. Fatima Massaquoi Fahnbulleh did not cause my father to look more favorably upon his sister’s nuptials.