Destined to Witness

  Convinced that he was lying and that he had somehow tampered with the books and juggled our father’s properties into his own accounts, we told him that we had no intention of keeping our mouths shut or giving up without a fight. We were up against a most cunning and politically powerful adversary, but we had nothing to lose. With that in mind, we sent a short note to President Tubman, explaining our plight and asking him in the name of our late father, his friend, to intervene in our behalf. Within a week, President Tubman responded and arranged for a meeting with us and Nat.

  Our uncle was visibly uncomfortable when the president asked us to take seats in his opulent office in the Executive Mansion. After lighting his inevitable Havana, he asked me to state my case. With a trembling voice I thanked him for having agreed to see us in this extremely personal matter, then, encouraged by the president’s fatherly smile, told him that Morris and I had lost confidence in our uncle’s handling of our father’s estate, especially his claim of its meager size.

  When I had finished, the president explained that he had no legal powers to intervene and that he was acting merely as a private citizen and a personal friend of the Massaquoi family. “But,” he added, turning to Nat, “I’m appealing to your sense of fairness to see that the right thing is done, especially with regard to this young man who has just arrived from Germany and was totally dependent on his father.”

  I could see Nat squirm as the president spoke, but he quickly recovered. “Before you feel too sorry for this boy, Mr. President,” he responded, “I want you to look at this to give you a better idea of what kind of person my nephew really is.” With the triumphant expression of a prosecutor producing the smoking gun in court, Nat reached into his pocket and came up with a letter, which he handed to the president. “Please read this very insulting and disrespectful letter, Mr. President, which he wrote to my brother just before his death.”

  I immediately recognized the letter, which I had written at my family’s encouragement shortly after leaving my father. To my deepest embarrassment, the president read the letter aloud. When he had finished, he complimented me on my English. Then, turning to Nat, he said, “Judge, I don’t think this letter is insulting or disrespectful, but even if it were, it doesn’t alter the fact that you are obligated to see to it that this young man is taken care of. His father sent for him and he can’t be left here to his own devices. I’m sure you’ll be able to work something out. As far as Morris here is concerned, I’m not worried. He’ll get by with or without money from his father’s estate.”

  “I’ll take care of everything, Mr. President,” was all Nat could mumble before the president dismissed us.

  When we reached the street, Nat turned to us with an expression of undisguised hatred. “Both of you will pay for this,” he snarled. “Don’t think you dragged me before the president and embarrassed me for nothing. I can promise you one thing—just as I had to wait for your father to die before I could get my hands on my father’s estate, you will have to wait until I’m dead before you’ll see any of your father’s property.”

  I was not impressed. At age twenty-three, I couldn’t even imagine what it meant to be rich. So my uncle’s threat failed to get me upset. Morris, on the other hand, became livid, and would have started an altercation had I not pulled him away and reminded him that by assaulting a judge in front of the Executive Mansion we would have literally handed our father’s estate to Nat and landed ourselves in jail.

  LAGOS

  Several weeks after our meeting with Nat and the president, I received a brief notice on Executive Mansion stationery informing me that the president wanted to see me on an important personal matter at my earliest convenience. I called on President Tubman within the hour.

  Without referring to our last meeting, the president came right to the point. “I have received a letter from your grandmother, Mrs. Mary Sonii, in Lagos, Nigeria. She has heard of your arrival in Liberia and of your father’s death and now wants me to arrange for you to visit her.” My grandmother had asked him to advance me the necessary funds for sea passage from Monrovia to Lagos, which she promised to refund upon my return to Monrovia. With that, he extracted a wad of twenty-dollar bills from an envelope and handed it to me. “This should be quite sufficient,” he said. “Please give Mrs. Sonii my best regards.” After I thanked the president, he shook my hand and wished me a pleasant trip.

  Foreseeing a lengthy absence from Liberia, I returned to Robertsfield and quit my job. After saying goodbye to Sammy and my friends at the motor pool, I caught the next available ride back to Monrovia. When I told Morris, who had visited our grandmother on several occasions, he enthusiastically approved of my going to Lagos. But as far as my passage was concerned, he told me that he had a better idea. Instead of my buying an expensive ticket, he said he could arrange with some of the Kru people on a freighter to have me stay in the crew quarters for a few dollars and thus save most of the money the president had given me. At first I objected. His plan didn’t sound quite right to me. But after Morris explained that this was the way everybody with connections travels in Africa, I relented.

  On the day of my departure, Morris accompanied me to Monrovia’s newly completed seaport, where we boarded a Lagos-bound British freighter. There, after briefly negotiating in Kru with the foreman of the “deck boys,” Morris assured me that everything was arranged, that I would have a cabin to myself and that I would take my meals with the crew. Before long I was off to a new country and a new adventure.

  The British tub that was to become my home for the next three days was a far cry from the spic-and-span American ships I had gotten to know and love in Hamburg. Everything was dirty and in ill repair. The bunk in my cabin was filthy and crawled with roaches, and a nauseating smell permeated everything. Already I regretted having listened to Morris and cursed his idea of saving a few dollars. But my regrets turned to outright anger mixed with revulsion when mealtime came around and my “hosts” invited me to help myself to a dirty-looking bowl of rice and some putrid-smelling, unidentifiable gravy, an offer that I politely refused. The next morning, the same gravy and rice were served for breakfast. This time, however, hunger had made me more receptive to the menu and I managed to eat a bit. That afternoon, we reached the port of Takoradi, in the Gold Coast (now Ghana), where I went ashore for a quick, uninspiring sightseeing tour. It was the first time I had ever stepped on British colonial territory. The next day we reached Lagos, the capital of Britain’s largest and most populated African colony. I was glad to get off the ship and vowed to make better arrangements for my return to Monrovia.

  After a short taxi ride at breakneck speed through left-hand traffic, past teeming Tinubu Square, to my grandmother’s address at 157 Igbosere Road, I stepped into the courtyard of a one-story row house where I was greeted by a slender old lady with a pretty, light brown face and a head full of short white curls. As she hugged me, she was crying uncontrollably while repeating over and over, “My son, my son, my poor, poor son,” in a pronounced British accent. She seemed to refer to my late father as well as to me. When she had regained her composure, she introduced me to a kind-looking elderly gentleman with fine chiseled features. “This is Pa Sonii, your step-grandfather,” she explained. As we shook hands and he welcomed me, I immediately took a liking to the old gent.

  When Pa Sonii wanted to know whether I had had a pleasant trip, since I had traveled on one of his company’s freighters, I confessed Morris’s money-saving scheme and how it all had backfired with a trip straight from hell. I immediately offered to fork over the amount of money I had saved, but Pa Sonii wouldn’t hear of it. “You keep it,” he said. “You’ve earned it—every penny of it. But Morris should have known that you shouldn’t be traveling like that. I always said that boy doesn’t have good sense.”

  Then, pointing to two slender teenage girls, Ma Sonii said, “These young ladies help me run the house. This one here is Howa and that frisky one over there is Kpakanya.” Both girls had smooth, velvety b
rown skin, doll-like, dimpled round faces, and flawless white teeth.

  “After you have taken my grandson’s luggage to his room, I want you to prepare his bath,” my grandmother continued.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the girls replied in unison before going giggling about their chores.

  It was only then that I noticed that my grandmother seemed paralyzed on one side. Her left arm dangled limply at her side and she dragged her left leg while walking, with great difficulty and the help of a cane.

  “Yes, I’m an old wreck,” she said, noticing my unintentional staring at her infirmity. “Since I had a stroke about a year ago, I haven’t been much use for anything.”

  After taking a bath and changing into fresh clothes, I spent the rest of the evening feasting on a wide variety of African delicacies, shaking hands with a seemingly endless line of my grandmother’s friends and neighbors who had heard of my arrival, and answering questions about my life in Germany, “that rascal Morris,” and my father’s accident. Inevitably, the matter of Nat’s having taken control of my father’s estate came up. “Leave that to me,” my grandmother assured me. “Nat will not get away with that. I shall see to it.”

  I had no idea of what my frail old grandmother had in mind, but I was soon to find out. A few days after my arrival, shortly after Pa Sonii had left for work at the shipyard, a strange group of about a dozen tall men arrived at the house, dressed in tribal robes. At my grandmother’s request, they took seats in her spacious parlor, where Howa and Kpakanya served them freshly brewed tea.

  “I know you will laugh at what I tell you now,” my grandmother whispered to me after she had asked me to sit beside her and face the men, “but these men have the power to keep your uncle from stealing your father’s money. You don’t have to believe it and you don’t have to do anything but sit here and watch.” Despite my skepticism and out of deference to my grandmother, I did as she told me. The next hour or so, I became privy to a strange ritual consisting of a great deal of chanting and the passing around of various small objects that looked to me like ordinary stones, beads, and sticks, and that, as far as I could determine, didn’t have a thing to do with anything, certainly not with my late father’s money. When the ceremony was over, the men filed by me and touched me, then pocketed the “dash” (tip) that my grandmother handed them, before leaving as quietly as they had come.

  That evening, when Pa Sonii returned from work, he greeted me with a big grin. “How did you like all that mumbo jumbo this morning?”

  “I thought it was interesting,” I replied diplomatically, in an effort not to hurt my grandmother’s feelings.

  “Your grandmother is a strong believer in all this juju rubbish,” he continued, not caring that she was standing directly beside him. “All that education in England was a total waste. She’s more superstitious than a bushwoman.”

  “You can laugh all you want, Sonii,” my grandmother replied, unfazed. “I know what I know.”

  After taking a leisurely bath, Pa Sonii changed from slacks and shirt to a comfortable African robe, then joined us for supper. “Sometimes I wonder which problem is worse, colonialism or superstition,” he said, returning to what seemed to be two of his pet peeves. He then explained that a few years ago, the city administration had installed electric streetlights along Igbosere Road, but that “superstitious bush people,” who feared that the spirits might become offended when “the night is turned to day,” kept destroying the lamps with stones and sticks until the city gave up on repairs and left the street dark.

  He then withdrew to his favorite chair and settled down to his day’s favorite pastime, reading his West African Pilot, a militant, anticolonialist newspaper published by his hero, Nnamdi Azikiwe, a member of the Ibo tribe, known throughout Nigeria as Zik. “Zik is the only Nigerian the British are afraid of,” explained Pa Sonii. Through his hard-hitting editorials against the colonial government, Pa Sonii said, Zik had become so popular among the people that the British didn’t dare to mess with him lest they set off a huge explosion. “If he plays his cards right, he can be the first president of independent Nigeria,” Pa Sonii added wistfully.

  Unfortunately, Pa Sonii didn’t live to see his prediction come true. He couldn’t know that only fourteen years hence, as an Ebony magazine journalist, I would be conducting a personal interview with President Nnamdi Azikiwe on his yacht anchored in Lagos Harbor, within walking distance of Pa Sonii’s home.

  Much of my time I spent chatting with my grandmother, who by her own admission was “quite a card” in her young years in England, and who kept me in stitches telling me about her various antics as a young woman. At one point, she confided, she was being pursued in the most obnoxious way by three different gents, none of whom knew of the others’ existence. After they kept refusing to take “no” for an answer, she agreed to a rendezvous with each of them at exactly the same time on the same bench in London’s Hyde Park. Still chuckling when imagining the faces of her suitors when they realized that they had been duped, she said none of them ever bothered her again.

  My grandmother confided in me that my grandfather, Momolu, was really the love of her life, but that he was an intolerable ladies’ man. “Nobody would believe that man’s woman palaver,” she recalled, incredulity and admiration mingling in her voice. She said that the more than twenty children Momolu admitted having fathered in and out of wedlock were only the tip of the iceberg. Years after she broke up with Momolu and my father was in college, she met Pa Sonii in Monrovia. He had just been offered a foreman’s position in Lagos, and when he proposed marriage, she jumped at the chance and never regretted her decision. “Pa Sonii is a good man,” she said, “but Momolu was a king.”

  Occasionally, I would walk through the streets of Lagos and watch with fascination the pulsating rhythm of a big African seaport city. Unlike Monrovia, which in the late forties was a town that had yet to be awakened from its hundred-year sleep, Lagos teemed with traffic and people that crowded to overflowing its sidewalks and streets.

  The streets were lined with government office buildings and commercial enterprises that ranged from one-woman peanut vendors to huge department stores. My walks would take me along Lagos’s popular Marina, a scenic, palm-lined thoroughfare along the lagoon from which the city derived its name, and through the hustle and bustle of Tinubu Square, the hub of the city’s commercial life. Noting the consistent pattern of Africans holding low-prestige, often menial, positions under the supervision of whites made me feel fortunate that I was not a colonial subject but a free Liberian.

  Except for my run-in with the French colonial authorities in Dakar, I had had no personal contact with colonialism. I was soon to get firsthand experience of the British variety. It happened when I tried to buy some postage stamps. A discouragingly long line of customers, all Africans, awaited me when I arrived at the post office in downtown Lagos. Exposed to the city’s brutal noon sun, the queue stretched more than half a block to a small service window manned by an African clerk. I decided to get in line and await my turn. Not so a white Britisher who, dressed in colonial khaki jacket and shorts, knee socks, and sun helmet, marched straight to the window and demanded to be served. I could hear some muffled murmurs of protest from the crowd, but no open challenges. Enter Hans Massaquoi. “Who the hell do you think you are?” I heard myself address the Britisher. “Why don’t you wait your turn like anybody else?”

  Suddenly, the crowd became unruly and other voices chimed in, demanding that the Britisher get in line. The white man seemed incredulous that someone had dared to challenge what he considered his birthright. He must have concluded that he was dealing with a mentally deranged person, for as soon as he spotted me, he turned around and, to the humiliating cheers of the crowd, marched away.

  That evening, when I told Pa Sonii and my grandmother of my encounter at the post office, Pa Sonii gave me a long and stern lecture. “You are lucky that white man didn’t come back and have you arrested and thrown in jail on some trumped-u
p charge like inciting people to riot,” he said. “This is not Liberia, where black people are in charge. This is a British colony where whites are very jittery because they sense that their rule is coming to an end. Right now they are looking at every little incident as the spark that might set off an explosion. They will do anything—and I mean anything—to prolong their rule as long as they can. So the next time you see some Britisher do something you don’t like, keep your mouth shut, at least for your grandmother’s and my sake.”

  Pa Sonii’s advice was well meant, but it hastened my decision to leave Nigeria and return to Liberia as soon as possible, since I had no intention of living in a racist colony. During twelve years in Nazi Germany, I felt I had more than paid my dues.

  My decision to return to Monrovia, after more than four months in Lagos, came as a great disappointment to my grandmother. Secretly she had hoped that I would get to like Lagos enough to stay with her. Pa Sonii had already found a machinist opening for me at his company, the Elder Dempster Line, with “excellent pay”—at the nonwhite rate, of course. I told him thanks but no thanks. Although I felt sorry for my grandmother, who had hoped that I would replace the son she had lost, I still cherished my dream of one day going to America.

  So one day, with a heavy heart, I said goodbye to my grandmother and Pa Sonii, of whom I had grown quite fond. As my taxi pulled up, I gave my crying grandmother one final hug. She whispered, “I’ll miss you a lot, son.” Something told me that I would never see her again.