by Tim Butcher
‘After what happened to her we all think it is best that she has the sanctuary of a school to go to,’ Sarah confided.
For privacy Bendu invited me into her room before she started speaking. The beaten earth floor had been recently swept and her entire wardrobe of clothes, amounting to a single armful, was neatly folded on a handmade cane chair. On the mud wall hung a poster of the soccer player Thierry Henry wearing the strip of the Arsenal football club. Inside the room the heat was intense and the atmosphere close as she began to speak.
‘I was about three when the rebels first came to Kailahun. I was with my father and my mother and they tried to run away to Guinea but my mother was shot dead with me tied to her back. You know what I mean? She had a lappa, the wraps that mothers use to tie their children to their backs. Well, my mother was dead but the bullets did not hit me. A rebel woman, the wife of a man who called himself Major, found me on my dead mother and she had pity and took me to a village. The Major was a bad man and he raped me many times. I was a child of three or four or five, I do not know exactly because I have never had a birth certificate and nobody from my family survived.
‘Then some soldiers came to the rebel village and the woman who had been looking after me was killed. The Major ran away but I could not run because I was hurt from the rape. The soldiers took me to a doctor called Farida and she was kind to me. She carried me a long way through the bush and slowly I got better so I could walk and after a week we got to Makeni, where there was a hospital we called the Arab hospital. I had a pain in my stomach and liquid coming from my ear, so they took me into the hospital and gave me an operation that means I cannot have babies for myself.
‘Then the rebels came again and attacked the hospital and Dr Farida was killed. The rebels took me once more and I became one of the wives of Issa Sesay. He took me for sex whenever he wanted to. He took me every night. When Makeni was attacked by the government the rebels gave me a gun and we ran into the bush shooting. We got back together to Kailahun and Sesay was there and I was still his wife. I don’t know how long it was I was like this but it lasted for years.
‘When the war finished I earned money by having sex with men. It was the only way I could survive but the UN gave me money to go to school. They gave me 300,000 Leones [about £60] and now I am going to school here. The Methodist School is the oldest school in the town, you know. Today we marched to mark its fiftieth anniversary.’
The name Sesay jumped out from my notes. He was one of the main figures within the RUF, a sort of Himmler to Foday Sankoh’s Hitler. Both were detained at the end of the war but Sankoh died in custody, leaving Sesay the most senior RUF leader ever tried for war crimes in Sierra Leone. He was eventually convicted at the special war crimes tribunal created in Freetown on sixteen separate charges and jailed for fifty-two years. The indictment list includes many horrors, such as extermination, murder and terrorism, but he was also convicted of rape and sexual slavery. I had read some of the court testimony but found it strangely unmoving, a world away from the chaotic reality of bush villages where the rebels had committed their atrocities. Bendu gave that testimony a life the lawyers never could.
She was a broken human being. Physically she had suffered horrendous internal injuries from the sexual abuse. Sarah explained how doctors had only just saved her life when they operated on her during the war. And, emotionally, she was wrecked. The only power she had ever had during her life was sexual so she was left feeling this was her only attribute. It was an easy step for her to lapse into prostitution.
Even after all that had happened to Bendu during the war, the local community in Kailahun had still forced her, against her will, to be initiated into the Bundu bush society. This had involved her being taken under cover of darkness from her hut, and kept out in the forest for two weeks culminating in circumcision.
‘They cut my clitoris,’ Bendu told me flatly.
From the chorus of suffering that at times deafened me in Sierra Leone, Bendu’s voice stood out. For me she symbolised the entire country: a young girl whose life was cursed by a combination of outsiders fomenting war and locals imposing traditional discipline.
The moment to take on Liberia was approaching. We found a driver who claimed to know the bush tracks to Dawa, and Sarah said she would provide us with a jeep, but I was having problems with the route on the other side of the border in Lofa County, the northern region of Liberia. The Greenes drove from Kailahun towards the frontier and then, with the help of their German guide, managed to trek all the way to the Liberian village of Bolahun on the first day, where they were given sanctuary at a mission station run by the Order of the Holy Cross, a community of Anglican monks from America. The Greenes had warned the Father Superior of their arrival by sending a messenger ahead with a letter in a cleft stick. When I emailed the order’s headquarters in New York about relaying a message to Bolahun, I was told links with the mission had been cut in the early 1980s. One of the senior monks wrote back:
The facilities were turned over to the local church and then the ravages of the Civil War took a great toll. Unfortunately, I do not have any way of contacting Bolahun … I’m sorry I can’t be of much help in this. Blessings and safety in your travels. Go with God.
I had built up a database of contacts in Lofa County but by the time I got to Kailahun the only person answering his phone was a man called Moses Kallie, a field officer with an aid group named Samaritan’s Purse. The mobile phone network is intermittent in Liberia so our connection was not good. When I explained I wanted to walk from the border Moses asked me several times to repeat myself.
‘But why would you want to walk when we have motorbike tracks and jeep roads through the bush?’ he bellowed back.
It took a while for the sceptical tone to disappear from his voice but Moses eventually agreed to meet us at the border. Part of the mission at Bolahun, he said, still existed and he promised he would go there on our behalf and ask if it would be possible for us to stay. The fact that I had someone on the Liberian side of the border willing to help represented progress, so after agreeing a border rendezvous for the following morning I headed back to our Kailahun guesthouse to help David with our final preparations.
As I went to bed I received the following text message:
Mr Butcher will you please text me your diet for the 2 or 3 days or nights that you will be here at Bolahun. We are waiting.
Who needs cleft sticks in the age of the mobile phone?
The only surviving photograph of Barbara Greene in Liberia. Wearing the Freetown-made shorts that were to incense her cousin, she joins the bearer column
CHAPTER 6
Falloe’s Stick
Above: Graham Greene on foot near Sierra Leone’s eastern border, January 1935
Below: The author, similarly, February 2009
The next morning we found Mother Nature had placed markers close to the border between Sierra Leone and Liberia. As we bounced along a twisting jeep track, approaching the frontier, a pair of huge rock mounds came into view, standing proud from the otherwise low horizon, African versions of Ayers Rock rising not from the red Australian desert but from the wide jungle wastes of Sierra Leone. It had felt as if there was nothing but unbroken forest stretching all the way across the country from Freetown, so there was something a little sinister about these looming outcrops where no plant life could grow. They look like toxic fossils, scarabs of humungous Jurassic beetles. Revered by the local Kissi tribesmen as magical twins called Ginah and Joh, they radiated heat and a trace of menace from their dark flanks as we crept past on the last few miles of our journey by vehicle.
Dawa was muffled by late-morning heat when we finally arrived. A tiny nothing of a place, it consisted of a few thatched huts opening on to some bare ground, where matching sets of scuff marks in the soil and vertical bamboo poles betrayed occasional use as a football pitch. I could see people resting in the shade of mud walls watching us but nobody seemed to stir as the jeep turned and parked. Th
e driver killed the engine and fearing a long wait I glanced at David but his attention was already focused on some movement in the distance.
Two figures, improbably dressed in thick coats and woolly hats, were walking towards us. For a second I thought they might be border officials but before I had time to think through what that might mean, one of them spoke and I recognised the voice from my mobile-phone calls over the past few days.
‘I am Moses Kallie. Please can you tell me who is Mr Tim?’
We introduced ourselves and Moses explained that his companion, Johnson Boie, had agreed to act as our overland guide to Bolahun. We all shook hands before Moses took quiet control of the situation.
‘I have a motorbike which I left on the Liberian side of the border and then walked across to find you. You are late. It will take about eight hours of walking so you must get started.’
Our jeep drove us the last half mile or so to a border crossing that consisted of a bamboo cane arm lowered over a jungle track. On the Sierra Leonean side we saw no officials but on the Liberian side there was a thatched hut, Moses’ parked motorbike and an attendant gaggle of people in rags staring at it. I smiled when I saw the bike. Five years earlier when I had crossed the Congo it was exactly this model – a Yamaha AG – that had got me safely through the badlands of north Katanga. It was even painted with the same livery of red and black.
From beneath the low-slung doorway of the hut a tall, thin man emerged, unfolding himself like a mantis. I braced myself. When the Greenes passed here they had to spend long hours negotiating customs dues and import permits for almost everything they brought with them, from the water filter to tins of golden syrup. The only item the officials missed was the one thing they would have cared about most – a pistol. To speed up the whole process Graham Greene had agreed to pay a hugely inflated figure and then set off on foot, only to be pursued several days later by Liberian officials demanding yet more fees.
Our experience could not have been more different. The truth is that in the 1930s this was a meaningful border crossing regularly used by missionaries, prospectors, adventurers and scientists, so the authorities had good reason to park customs officials here. By 2009 this cross-border flow had dwindled to nothing so there was only one semi-detached official without passport-stamping equipment or customs mandate. He did not even have a piece of paper on which to write our names.
We had another advantage over the Greenes in that our border guard was not entirely with it. It might have been palm wine or some other form of alcohol or maybe jamba, but his eyes were swimming and he seemed to have lost the power of speech. I asked if he wanted to check our visas, stamp our passports or go through our health certificates; he just grinned lopsidedly and remained silent.
Even during the earliest stages of planning the trip I had been concerned about our luggage and between us David and I had stripped it down to the lightest possible load – two rucksacks and two daypacks between us. In spite of the reduction, the loads were still unfeasibly heavy for the terrain and climate. We would have to get help. The Greenes had used twenty-six bearers to carry their possessions but, to begin with at least, we would make do with Moses’ motorbike to carry our rucksacks. While he took responsibility for packing, I approached Johnson to discuss the first day’s route to Bolahun.
Awkwardly deferential to begin with, Johnson listened patiently while I explained we wanted not just to walk but to take forest tracks. In 1935 there had been no roads in the Liberian hinterland so the Greenes had had no alternative. But since the 1950s the interior of Liberia has been, to some extent, tamed by a network of roads and bridges. And the large UN peacekeeping force which has been in Liberia since the war ended in 2003 still spends much effort looking after that network, repairing years of neglect and wet-season damage. Johnson looked curious and asked why on earth we would not use jeeps and bikes like the few aid workers he had ever seen in the area. I explained, in brief, our interest in following the Greenes’ journey from 1935 and how important it was for us to keep to their exact route, starting with their first overnight stop in Bolahun. After listening closely, he asked to see my map, speaking a very polite form of English learned at a mission school.
‘Here we are at the border,’ he said, using a twig as a pointer. ‘And here is Bolahun east and a little bit south of us. I was thinking of taking you along this road marked here, which goes in a big curve to the north. That way, we can always hitch a lift or find a motorbike if you change your mind. But, if you really want, I know a way direct through the forest. It’s been years since I went that way but if you like we can try.’
I told him that was exactly what we wanted.
The moment to start had come. Moses said he would be a while yet strapping down our packs, so I shook his hand, thanked him for his help and promised to see him that night at whatever remained of the old mission house in Bolahun. Johnson and David strode off in the lead and I fiddled around with my camera to capture the moment. This was my first time back in Liberia since the death threat put on me in the dog days of Taylor’s regime so I felt just a tiny bit jumpy. I glanced back at the border official for the last time, worried he might have sobered up enough to take a closer interest in us. I had no reason to worry. He had flopped down on a wooden stool as limply as the Lone Star flag of Liberia hanging motionless on the bamboo flagstaff above him.
The flag of the independent state of Liberia has been flying since 1847 when the country was founded by freed slaves and their descendants returning to Africa to escape racism in the United States of America. Just as Sierra Leone was created by British groups urging former slaves to go ‘back to Africa’, so Liberia was created by their American counterparts. But in spite of similarities in the two African countries’ early histories there remains one major difference – Britain would eventually stake Sierra Leone as a colony while early foreign settlers in Liberia would have to survive without the embrace of any overarching colonial power. This allowed Liberia to develop its own form of black rule more than a century before the rest of the continent.
For a long time history painted the Liberian project in the glowing vernacular of philanthropy. Guilt over America’s troubled dependence on slavery was, it was argued, partly assuaged by a process of generously giving freed slaves the chance of new life in their traditional African homeland. Some of the religious supporters of the project phrased it even in terms of persecuted former slaves being born again into a life of liberty, comfort and plenty.
This was mostly bunkum. The main group behind the shipping of the former slaves, the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States (known more commonly as the American Colonization Society), was run entirely by white men with a range of agendas. There were a few altruistic souls genuinely committed to finding a better life for slaves, but many of the society’s members actively supported slavery and saw the ‘back to Africa’ project as a way not to undercut American slavery but to reinforce it. In the early nineteenth century, America was home to over two million black slaves but there was also a growing cohort, numbering perhaps as many as half a million, of so-called ‘freemen’, former slaves living mainly in the northern states who had, in some way or other, secured their freedom. White slave-owners saw them as a threat and so they supported keenly the ‘back to Africa’ project as a way to get rid of them, to ethnically cleanse America of freed blacks. James Monroe, the American president in whose honour the Liberian capital, Monrovia, would be named, described freed black slaves walking the streets of America as ‘a class of very dangerous people’.
So the purity of America’s ‘back to Africa’ project was tarnished from the outset by double standards and opportunism. Bitter divisions opened up in the coloured community in America, with those willing to go back to Africa criticised as lackeys by those who stayed behind. The dispute got so bad the American Colonization Society was even accused of kidnapping former slaves and shipping them overseas to be imprisoned in Africa against their will.
Many freed slaves argued they had as much right to live in America as whites and to get on the ships back across the Atlantic was an act of betrayal that undermined the much more important overall struggle against slavery. Controversy festered for years so the number of freed slaves willing to take part in the Liberia venture was never that large, and the American Colonization Society only ever managed to relocate to Liberia a small fraction of the number sent to Sierra Leone.
The first ships set sail from the United States in the 1820s. They had no clear idea where exactly they were aiming so they simply followed the earlier British returnees and made it up as they went along. Making landfall on the coast of Sierra Leone, by then already established as a British colony, they let the northerly winds inch them around the African shoreline southwards. There were some false starts on islands belonging to Sierra Leone but eventually they reached the Grain Coast and found what they were looking for, local African chiefs willing to hand over pockets of land. Over the next twenty years a series of piecemeal settlements was created, dotted along a 200-mile-long stretch of virgin coastline.
Life was as tough for these early American settlers as for the British pioneers thirty years earlier in Freetown. Decimated by disease, hunger and clashes with hostile tribes, some of the settlements dwindled, some died out, and others bickered among themselves over precedence. According to one count, within twenty years of the arrival of the first immigrants almost half had already perished.
By 1847 the whole American project had reached crisis point. At the identical moment in Sierra Leone’s history Britain had come in as the colonial power, mopping up the remnants of the settler communities that had been sent there and declaring it a British colony. But the government in Washington had no such territorial interest in Africa, so the few thousand surviving freed slaves in their separate communities clinging to the Grain Coast took a brave and ambitious decision: they would unite, sever official links with the American Colonization Society and go it alone as a sovereign nation to be known as Liberia.