Destined to Witness

  RETURN TO MONROVIA

  This time, I booked a cabin passage on an American steamer that was stopping at Monrovia before crossing the Atlantic to New Orleans. After stowing my luggage in my cabin, which had a bunk with inviting snow-white sheets, I went on deck to take one last look at Lagos.

  At once I felt at home on the ship, which, like all American ships I had visited in Hamburg, was meticulously clean and smelled of fresh paint. As usual, the steward department, with the exception of the chief steward, was black. As most freighters, the ship had only limited passenger space. I had two fellow passengers, whom I met at suppertime in the small dining room for passengers. One was a young Nigerian student, Felix Osi. The son of a Yoruba chieftain, he was bound for his freshman year at a black college in the southern United States. The other passenger was Virginia Langston, a pleasant thirtyish blonde with a twangy Southern drawl, who insisted we call her Ginny, and who said that she was returning to her hometown of Mobile, Alabama, after spending two years in Nigeria as a Methodist missionary.

  Just as we were about to eat, the chief steward told Ginny that the captain had given instructions that, beginning at once, she was to take all her meals with the officers. Visibly annoyed, the missionary left with the chief steward after telling us that she had been looking forward to dining with us and would miss our company. Recalling that the ship’s home port was the segregated Southern city of New Orleans, Felix and I were convinced that the captain’s special invitation to the missionary was intended to spare a Southern white woman the ordeal of dining with two black men. We were still discussing the insult to us, especially in view of the fact that we were traveling in African waters, when Ginny returned and told us with a big smile that she was going to dine with us after all. She said that when she had been seated beside the captain in the officers’ mess, the black messman, in an ironic twist, refused to serve her, saying that it was against union rules for him to serve passengers, something the captain had apparently overlooked in his zeal to uphold Southern tradition.

  We spent the next three days lounging lazily on deck while the ship’s white crew worked steadily to keep the ship in tiptop shape. They bombarded us with hostile looks suggesting that they did not like the idea of two black men in the company of a white woman relaxing while they worked. Since they were merely scrubbing and painting, I failed to see what Felix found so fascinating as he watched the seamen for hours with undiminished interest. When I finally asked what he found so intriguing, he told me that in all of his twenty-two years he had never seen a single white person do menial work. “In Nigeria,” he explained, “white people only supervise or do office-type work. Dirty or menial work is done only by Africans.”

  “Well, in the United States, things are different,” Ginny assured him. “You’ll find that white people do all kinds of dirty, menial work. Strangely enough,” she added, “the same thing is true in England. Only in the colonies do white people regard menial work as beneath them.”

  Ginny explained that at the various missions where she had been stationed, many white missionaries, men and women, had been doing menial work. But Felix, a Muslim, wasn’t satisfied. Turning on her with sudden anger, he asserted that Christian missionaries were mostly to blame that Africa was colonized by European states. Had it not been for Christian missionaries who taught “us heathens” to turn the other cheek and made black warriors docile, he charged, whites would never have succeeded in conquering an entire continent.

  “If you want to blame us Christian missionaries for helping to prepare Africa for colonialism, you Muslims must accept the blame for getting slavery started,” Ginny shot back. She then gave Felix a long lecture on how Arab Muslims led raiding parties throughout Africa and either captured or bought from greedy African chiefs large numbers of slaves, whom they then sold to eager European and American slave traders.

  When we arrived in Takoradi in the Gold Coast, where I had briefly visited on my way to Nigeria, a deck crew of several dozen Africans was chanting dockside in the heat while preparing to load the ship with a large cargo of cocoa.

  “Just look at them,” a tall blond ship’s officer in a khaki uniform invited me in a thick German accent. “They’re nothing but a bunch of lazy bums!”

  “Why do you say these people are lazy?”

  “Because they don’t want to work. All they want to do is dance and sing. To load this ship takes them three times as long as it would take an American crew in the States.”

  The officer’s comments were typical of the prevailing attitude of whites toward blacks in the colonies. Africans were expected not only to submit to being exploited, but to do so cheerfully and under conditions no white person would tolerate.

  I didn’t feel like arguing with this smug Landsmann. If he couldn’t figure it out by himself, how could I make him understand why people who were forced to survive in a system that paid them only a starving wage didn’t feel motivated to work as hard as workers who received literally fifty times the pay, plus union-guaranteed benefits of all kinds? It was impossible for these Africans to buy homes and automobiles. How hard would he work in the grueling sun if all he’d have to show for it at the end of the day was the price of a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer?

  When the ship docked in Monrovia, I said goodbye to Felix and Ginny, whom I envied for soon being in the land of my dreams. I told them that I hoped to see them again one day in the States, but that it would have to be “up North,” since I had no intention of ever setting foot in the Jim Crow South.

  In Monrovia, my first mission was to keep my promise to my grandmother. I returned the money President Tubman had advanced for the trip. This time I did not get to see the president, but left the amount with Colonel Brewer, his aide-de-camp.

  Then I intensified my efforts to get out of Liberia and emigrate to the United States. I no longer felt that my staying in Africa served any useful purpose. I resumed my correspondence with my Aunt Clara in Barrington, Illinois, explaining to her that I was more than ever interested in coming and imploring her to complete the necessary paperwork to support my application for a U.S. visa. In her reply, she assured me that she had already set things in motion, but that the best she could do at the time was get me a temporary non-quota student visa rather than a permanent immigrant visa. The German immigrant quota was still suspended, it was explained to her, since U.S.-German relations had yet not been normalized.

  In order to obtain the student visa, Aunt Clara explained, she had enrolled me at the Aeronautical University of Chicago, a trade school, which she hoped would meet with my approval. I frantically responded that I approved of anything that would get me into the United States.

  POLICE INSPECTOR MORRIS

  The next time I saw Morris, I was in for a big surprise. He was wearing a crisply starched khaki uniform with the insignia of a ranking Liberian police officer. When I demanded to know what he was doing in that uniform, he explained that President Tubman, his Masonic brother, had granted his request and commissioned him an inspector in Liberia’s National Police Force. “One word of disrespect out of you, bro,” he joked, “and your sorry ass goes to jail.”

  Turning serious, Morris said that his new duties consisted of patrolling the roads of the interior in a police pickup truck and making sure that the loads of commercial trucks were within the weight limit. The idea was to prevent Liberia’s road and bridge system from being overstressed and prematurely damaged. “If you want to,” he added, “you can hit the road with me tomorrow. I’ll be leaving early in the morning for the interior.”

  I took Morris up on his offer and became his unofficial traveling companion as he drove hundreds of miles over the dusty clay roads in search of overweight rice trucks. Once he had caught up with a suspected vehicle, he would order the driver to follow him to the next weigh station, where he’d assess the correct fine and direct the driver to jettison the excess rice bags. Usually, the owners of the rice trucks were Lebanese or Syrian businessmen from Monrovia
. Invariably, they would argue that the government scales were inaccurate. When that failed to make an impression on Morris, they would try to settle the “small misunderstanding” with a bribe. Morris was familiar with President Tubman’s permissive policy on graft, which expected government employees to steal a little as long as they remembered to reach into the government till no farther than their elbows instead of all the way to their armpits. Consequently, Morris kept only a tiny percentage of the fines he collected; his ethics, on the other hand, made him steadfastly refuse any bribes. This, he assured me, was well within the parameters of President Tubman’s “wrist-to-elbow policy.”

  One evening, we stopped at a village. I was fast running out of steam after a long day of taking turns at the wheel, and the next government compound was still more than two hours away. Morris could go for extraordinary lengths of time without food or sleep by chewing on a bitter raw kola nut, but not I. As we drove into the open square of the small settlement, our pickup was surrounded by a swarm of children who were reaching out their hands for some kind of “dash.” After divesting ourselves of all our pennies, Morris asked the kids in their native language for the chief. They pointed toward a group of men sitting around a fire eating their evening meal. Seated apart from them was a group of women who were also in the midst of supper.

  There was no mistaking who was the chief. An old man, he was seated on an elaborately carved chair, while everyone else sat on the ground. After Morris introduced himself as a police officer and me as his brother, he told the chief that we were looking for some food and a place to spend the night. The chief immediately invited us to join him as his honored guests and urged us to help ourselves. I noticed two gigantic bowls in the center of the human circle; one containing rice and the other meat with gravy. Morris, in effect, urged me to do like the Romans when in Rome. So I followed his example and scooped up some rice with my hand, made it into a ball, then dunked it—hand and all—into the other bowl of meat and gravy. It smelled and tasted delicious, and I was soon munching as fast as my teeth could chew. But then I noticed one of the men wipe his sweaty brow and use the same hand to reach into the bowl. Suddenly, the food got immovably stuck in my throat. Morris snarled, “You can’t insult these people by puking up their food.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” I snarled back, but bravely kept chewing and swallowing until the last bit cleared my throat. Just in case someone had noticed my struggle with the food, Morris explained that I had just come from a “far-off white man’s land” and hadn’t yet become accustomed to delicious African food.

  Later, a young boy took us to a hut that, he explained, the chief wanted us to use for the night. As we stepped inside, I noticed the clay floor and walls were immaculately clean. Glancing at the skinned carcasses of several small animals with long tails hanging from the ceiling rafters, I inquired what they were. “Monkeys, sah,” the boy replied. “Monkeys make very good chop.”

  A sense of revulsion grabbed me for the second time that evening. “Who in the world would eat monkeys?” I wondered.

  “You would,” replied Morris with unconcealed glee. “What do you think you were eating tonight? It tasted pretty good, didn’t it?”

  Grudgingly I had to admit he was right. “Your father warned me you were no good,” I joked. “Now I know what he meant.” After we put the monkey palaver to rest, we made up our cots and went to sleep.

  Soon we were awakened by loud shouts. Looking out, we saw a huge column of fire rising from one of the nearby huts. Several people tried frantically to douse it with buckets of water from a well, but to no avail. Within minutes, the hut was consumed by fire and only the clay walls remained.

  The next morning, when we tried to thank the chief for his hospitality and to take our leave, we found the entire village assembled in front of the chief’s hut. Our little friend from the previous evening explained that there would be “a big palaver” regarding the fire. Arson was suspected and three suspects had already been apprehended. Each denied the deed, the boy said, so the chief asked the village shaman to do his magic and identify the culprit.

  Since we were in no particular hurry, Morris suggested that we stick around and watch. “You’ll find this interesting,” he promised, “especially since you Europeans believe that only Jesus can do magic.”

  We maneuvered ourselves to a front-row position. After the chief and some of the elders had taken their seats, the crowd went silent. At a hand signal from the chief, the circle opened and three “constables” in tattered khaki uniforms entered. Each was leading a distraught-looking suspect by a rope. The suspects, hands tied behind their backs, were made to sit on the ground in the center of the circle.

  On a second signal from the chief, amid murmurs of veneration, the circle opened again and a frail man with a scraggly white beard whom everyone referred to as “the wise one” entered. Dressed only in loose white pants and leather sandals, he revealed a chest and back covered with white painted markings. Strapped to his right side was a huge antique cavalry saber whose rusty curved steel blade still managed to look menacing. While the wise one was slowly walking around the arson suspects, several men built a waist-high pile of kindling wood and started a fire. When the fire reached its peak, the wise one held the blade of his saber over the flames. After several minutes, he withdrew the blade and viewed it critically. I could see the blade turn a dark red and the air around it vibrate from the heat. The wise one took the red-hot blade and held it to his cheeks, chest, and back, without any adverse effects. He then walked around the circle and asked for volunteers. Immediately, several villagers stepped forward and offered their cheeks, hands, and legs to the blade, with the same result—no visible burns. When the wise one stopped in front of me and gestured to me to join the volunteers, I hesitated, but Morris stepped forward and took the plunge. “If you didn’t set the fire, the saber won’t hurt you,” he promised.

  “Why not?” I wanted to know.

  “Because of magic, African magic,” was his response.

  Having gotten severely burned once because of Morris, I wasn’t about to give him another chance. But curiosity got the better of me. Emboldened by what I had just seen with my own eyes, I let the shaman touch my cheek with his blade. The blade felt cool on my cheek, although it still looked red hot.

  While the wise one reheated the blade, the chief conducted a brief interrogation of the suspects during which each maintained his innocence. After the chief gestured him to continue, the shaman advanced with his saber toward the suspects, who eyed the weapon with horror. With a swift motion, the wise one laid the blade on the first suspect’s cheek, then repeated the procedure with suspect number two, each time without producing burns or pain. But before he could turn to the last man, the suspect suddenly jumped to his feet, pulled away from the constable who had held him on a tether, and made a mad dash through the crowd, his hands still tied behind him.

  In only a few minutes, the constables had caught up with the fugitive and returned him to the center of the circle. There, the wise one resumed his task of administering the test of fire to the captive. This time, however, the result was quite different. As soon as the blade touched the man’s cheek, he let out a loud scream, and when the wise one withdrew the blade, it left behind a blistering red wound from ear to chin. The wise one repeated the procedure on the other cheek, again with the same results. As the crowd roared its applause, the prisoner admitted his crime before being hauled away by the constables.

  “What you just saw was juju,” Morris explained. “It’s the same thing they call voodoo in Haiti.”

  “I don’t know how he did it,” I allowed, “but I’m sure there was some trick involved. Don’t tell me about magic; there simply is no such thing.”

  Openly, I held on to that view, but secretly, I was no longer convinced. Could it be that Africans had come up with something that defied Western logic and could only be explained as magic? In time I was to learn that in Liberia nearly everybody, from the presi
dent on down, believed in and feared the power of juju, although most educated people refused to admit it.

  Morris decided one day to patrol Saniquellie, on the French Guinea border to the north, and pay our respects to Uncle Jaiah. One of Momolu’s numerous sons, Uncle Jaiah held the exalted position of provincial commissioner. He represented the Liberian government throughout Nimba County along Liberia’s frontier. I had met Uncle Jaiah only briefly during my father’s funeral and looked forward to getting to know him better. According to Morris, he was a decent man who had achieved his position through diligence and dedication to duty instead of political maneuvering. Yet he was not held in high esteem by the rest of the family. One reason was that while Jaiah had the Massaquoi name, unlike many of his siblings, he lacked the polish of a European education. The other was that he was officially married to several native women, a custom frowned upon by “civilized” Liberians.

  When we arrived at the gate of the commissioner’s compound, which consisted of several office buildings, a private residence, and military barracks, a rifle-toting soldier from the Liberian Frontier Force saluted Morris and let us pass. Once inside, another soldier led us to an office. Uncle Jaiah, a stocky dark man with a massive bald head and dimpled cheeks, got up as soon as he recognized us. “Hello, big shot,” he greeted Morris, with obvious reference to Morris’s new status. “And how are you, Hans?” he asked as he shook my hand. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I have to leave in less than an hour for a meeting with some colonial officials at the Guinea border and won’t be back for about a week. But you two are welcome to stay here as long as you want. Just make yourselves at home.”

  He then introduced me to one of his wives, a slender beauty less than half his age, and instructed her to look after our comfort and to make sure that we had plenty to eat. Following a brief chat during which Uncle Jaiah assured us that he didn’t approve of his brother Nat’s handling of our father’s estate, a soldier announced that the commissioner’s “motorcar” was ready. Through a window we could see a jeep with three soldiers, including the driver, waiting outside. He invited us to come back soon, then rushed out of the door and mounted the jeep, which soon disappeared in a cloud of dust.