by Tim Butcher
At a special convention in Monrovia, a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution were formally agreed on 26 July 1847, using language borrowed directly from the American versions, although with some crucial differences. In the Liberian declaration, the former slaves described how they had been so ill-treated in the United States that they were forced to come to Africa as ‘asylum from our deep degradation’. And in the constitution, the American order was inverted as whites were explicitly forbidden from ever becoming citizens in Liberia. Article V Section 13 said ‘none but persons of color shall be admitted to citizenship in this republic’. The clause’s language was later hardened, restricting citizenship to ‘persons who are Negroes or of Negro descent’.
Monrovia was declared the new nation’s capital and nominal inland borders were assigned, although it would be years before any government official actually battled through the jungle to stake the frontier. The whole project was predicated on the granting of freedom to previously oppressed outsiders, an ideal enshrined in the national motto, ‘The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here’.
Life was not easy for the infant republic. Surrounded on all sides by acquisitive colonists – the British in Sierra Leone and the French in both Guinea and the Ivory Coast – it was an achievement even to make it through to the twentieth century. In an almost permanent state of bankruptcy, the young state limped along, surviving on occasional remittances from the American Colonization Society and a series of expensive bank loans. In many ways it was saved because it had nothing worth invading for – no meaningful diamond fields or gold deposits had been found – so the imperial powers let it be. The shortage of funds meant, however, economic, social and educational development stalled in Monrovia and never even began in the rest of the country. For decades, the country was formally recognised only by a few nations such as Britain, which supplied an old gunboat from the Royal Navy as the sole ship in the Liberian navy. America’s internal divisions over race meant that for years it refused officially to acknowledge the new country in case that led to a black Liberian diplomat having to be formally received in Washington.
But the most active fault-line that runs through Liberia’s history is not so much its rivalry with foreign powers as its rivalry between the small cohort of black outsiders, mainly freed American slaves, who assumed power over the country, and the much larger number of native Liberians, who effectively became their vassals, a tension that echoed that in Sierra Leone between the Krios and the indigenous tribes. With their American education, Christian faith and English language, the settlers in Liberia were as different from the animist hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers of the jungle as any white occupying colonial power arriving in Africa. To distinguish them from native Africans these ex-slaves’ descendants became known as ‘Americo-Liberians’, although the natives later came to call all black outsiders ‘Congos’, an echo from the huge number of Africans taken into slavery from homelands around the mouth of the Congo River. In turn, native Liberians would be referred to pejoratively as ‘country people’.
The image of Liberia projected around the world was one of a democratic nation run by Africans for Africans. For years the country was known as The Black Republic, even The Negro Republic, precisely because it was not run by whites, a stark exception following the colonial land-grab of the Scramble for Africa. But the reality was that tension simmered for decades between Americo-Liberians and country people, erupting first in the 1890s when fighters from southern, coastal tribes, such as the Kru and Grebo, rose against the Liberian government, and then in an almost endless cycle of clashes upcountry when administrators sent from Monrovia arrived to levy taxes. For the first time the government raised an army, known as the Frontier Force, comprising tribal soldiers from the ‘developed’ coastal towns led by officers drawn exclusively from the Americo-Liberian community. Their deployment inland was often as bloody and ruthless as campaigns by occupying white colonial forces elsewhere in the continent.
Tension reached crisis point in the late 1920s when the government of Liberia, a country with a founding charter explicitly condemning the slave trade as ‘that curse of curses’, allowed large numbers of its people to be sold into slavery. The motive remains disputed. Some argued it was a way for a broke country to make money, others said it was the best way of getting rid of troublemakers from the tribal hinterland. Defenders of the Americo-Liberian elite suggested that the authorities were simply continuing a long-standing tradition whereby tribesmen effectively ‘belonged’ to village elders who could do with them whatever they wanted.
In the end, the League of Nations inquiry found that the Liberian government had shipped its countrymen overseas ‘under conditions of criminal compulsion scarcely distinguishable from slave raiding and slave trading’. There can be no greater metamorphosis for a state founded by former slaves inspired by the ‘Love of Liberty’ than for it to start selling its own people into slavery.
The resulting scandal was one of the great international crises of the early 1930s and the issue festered on for so long that it provided grounds for the anti-slavery society in London to send Graham Greene on his journey through Liberia in 1935. Tension between the two communities would simmer in Liberia long after the Greenes passed through, although the Americo-Liberian elite skilfully contained the issue for decades. Elections were held, but through shameless gerrymandering and vote-rigging the party of the settler elite, the True Whig Party, monopolised power for a hundred years, its leaders deporting themselves like nineteenth-century Congressmen in Washington, with a dress code of morning coats and top hats – utterly inappropriate for the West African climate – that lasted deep into the 1970s, and a peculiarly strong attachment to freemasonry – one of the most prominent buildings in Monrovia is the national masonic temple. With a weak and undeveloped economy, the party’s leaders looked overseas for help, forging close links with the United States, first during the Second World War, when Liberia signed a defence agreement to allow America to develop the airport at Roberts Field, and then during the Cold War, when Liberia provided Washington with a like-minded, capitalist bulwark against the Soviet Union’s allies in post-colonial Africa.
Backed by America, economic growth in Liberia was weak but just strong enough to keep the settler elite in power, although tension with the indigenous population never went away. Modest progress towards integration was made, especially in the 1970s, but the gap between the two communities continued to such an extent that an American academic, R. Earle Anderson, could publish a book in the 1950s called Liberia – America’s African Friend in which his support of the Americo-Liberian elite led him to begin a chapter:
For every member of the ruling class in Liberia there are a hundred or more tribal people. They are the country’s greatest problem.
It would be a problem that would finally explode in 1980 and launch the sleepy but stable nation of Liberia on a path of civil war and ethnic violence.
The track from the border could not have been more perfect. Framed on both sides by elephant grass and overhung in places by palm fronds, it was shaded, comfortable under foot and easy to follow. Ecstatic to have started the trek, I was initially able to ignore the heat and humidity as Johnson, still wearing a thick body warmer and woolly hat, set a gentle strolling pace. David knew by heart Graham Greene’s description of this same moment of departure in 1935 – ‘snow in London, the fierce noon sun on the clearing, yellow fever in Freetown’. I smiled. The night before I had called my parents in Britain by satellite phone to hear a seasonal February snowfall had wrought travel chaos across the United Kingdom.
That first day’s walking has stayed with me in minute detail. I still reconstruct it in my mind when struggling for sleep, so reassuringly complete was its span. It took us from the Sierra Leone frontier for 14 miles into the forested hills of Lofa County, the northernmost region of Liberia, past clutches of thatched huts, home to subsistence-farming communities surviving on rice grown in clearings hacked from the jung
le. For the few moments it took to walk through a village we would touch on a lifestyle barely changed from that which the Greenes witnessed. There were modern T-shirts and the occasional Chinese-made plastic bucket, but the cardinal features of 1935 were the same in 2009 – communities winnowing rice for the evening meal, gathering fuel for the fire, drawing water from a stream or well, resting in the shade from the force of the sun.
We met countless groups of villagers whose curiosity at the sight of white travellers was always tempered by polite discretion. We saw no trading posts or roadside stalls but the locals invariably offered what they could, water most often and, on one welcome occasion when my internal battery was beginning to dip, bananas. The trail took us through grasslands so high the fronds arched over the footpath to plait a tunnel roof. One of the few surviving photographs of Graham Greene at the start of his trek shows him wearing a topi, walking through head-high elephant grass. David took a matching photograph of me, although on my head I had my lucky hat, a floppy thing much bleached by the African sun. The path meandered under huge trees as tall as skyscrapers, remnants of the once complete rainforest that covered this region before the advent of industrial logging, and through thickets where each trunk wore its own bulky outfit of ivy, creeper and other secondary vegetation. In places, candyfloss wisps of fibre from the in-season cotton trees drifted across a track that rollercoastered its way up and down through gullies made by the headwaters of Liberia’s principal rivers.
What made that day so important for me was that, after a year of hard planning and expectation, I could enjoy the traveller’s sense of release. I let go of bus timetables, phone connections, emails about security and fretful links to the wider world, instead committing myself to a calmer rhythm, that of rural West Africa where days were shaped by how far you could reasonably walk and where you might stop to find food, water and shelter.
My sensory receptors were primed and I can still taste the bitter heartburn that came from biting into a kola nut. Villagers traditionally offer kola nuts to visitors and I was given my first by an old man in one of the first communities we reached, Kpongoma Wayan. It was about the size of a healthy conker with flesh the purplish tinge of a radish. I could only manage a few chews before I spat out the woody, chalky pulp, noisily hawking up gobbets of acid saliva. Bearer parties in the early twentieth century subsisted on kola nuts, chewing them by the hour in part to suppress appetite. Mandingo traders would travel miles through these forests buying up kola nuts and transporting them north towards the desert communities on the edge of the Sahara where they were prized as a delicacy. And the smell of forest decomposition also stays with me. I can remember perfectly the stomach-turning stench of rotting matter when I stepped on something damp in the forest, blue and black butterflies exploding upwards from where they had been feeding.
Johnson grew in confidence noticeably that first day. He was thirty-six years old with the face of a much younger man, fresh and at first glance, perhaps, a little gullible. But he soon showed that in these remote backwoods he was anything but a fool. Since the end of the war in 2003, he had spent years working as a ‘tracing officer’ for aid groups, using remote trails like the ones we were on to reconnect people separated by war. Lofa County had seen many atrocities and every village community had, at one time or other, been forced to flee into either Sierra Leone or Guinea. The social fragmentation was deep, with family members losing sight of each other in the chaos before washing up in distant refugee camps where many lived for years unaware if their kinfolk had survived. It was the job of people like Johnson to help those returning refugees find their missing family members.
‘My family and I fled to Sierra Leone when the fighting got bad and my home village of Yassadu was burned to the ground in 1991,’ he explained. ‘It was Taylor’s people who did it, led by a man known as J P, and for years we could not go home but I got to know these forest trails well and how to survive.’
He laughed properly for the first time when I said I wanted to find a walking stick. David had brought one of those telescopic metal things that looks like something a skier would use, with a moulded plastic handle and fancy lockable flanges, but I was happy to make do with a wooden stave from the forest. All I wanted was something solid, straight and strong. Within an hour David found a good-looking specimen and threw it across to me. It reached to my shoulder, was slightly tapered and had a good feel. I began to use it immediately, enjoying its balance as I swung it forward and struck the ground every second step.
‘That is an old man’s stick,’ laughed Johnson. ‘We call a man who uses a stick like that falloe. It means an old man who cannot walk very well. You want to walk across Liberia and you need a stick like that! How are you ever going to do that? Oh falloe, what is going to happen to us?’
If anything, David was coping better than me with the pace and the terrain. Excited at having crossed the border, we both made the rather basic mistake of setting off too fast but it was David who was sensible enough to suggest slowing down.
‘We must remember the Greenes’ column of porters and cooks and hammocks would never have gone this fast. Let’s just keep going slow and steady and Bolahun will get here soon enough,’ he said.
As well as finding our route, Johnson also helped decode the forest. Many of the accounts of the Liberian interior written by foreigners, including the Greenes, describe the closed green world of the forest in unfavourable terms. Barbara Greene describes at length how boring she soon found the bush trails and Graham Greene writes that the novelty of the forest trail wore off quickly to be replaced by choking claustrophobia.
Johnson was able to leaven the experience for me. Throughout the day he kept up a commentary, naming streams and explaining how they went on to form the country’s major rivers, describing the different types of terrain we crossed and telling me the names and characteristics of trees and which animals liked to eat their fruit. At one moment he pointed out mammoth seed pods hanging from ivy strung through the branches of a large tree. The pods were brown, leathery and as long as a sword’s sheath, with eight or so egg-sized seeds rattling loose inside individual compartments. I recognised them immediately from a shop I knew in Johannesburg which specialised in Africana and sold them individually – and expensively – as ‘pygmy rattles’. Jane had bought me one and for years it has sat in my office on a stand, a larger-than-life souvenir of a larger-than-life continent.
‘The jungle elephants love eating these things,’ Johnson said. ‘They’ll knock down an entire tree just to get at them.’
Through Johnson I came to understand the centrality of the palm tree to rural Liberia. With their omnipresent rag-doll heads, palms seemed to play the role of a weed, cluttering up almost every patch of forest one looked at, but Johnson explained the inestimable social value of the oil produced by their fruit.
‘Almost everything that is cooked is cooked using palm oil,’ he said. ‘Every house has a bottle of oil in it somewhere. I cannot even imagine what life would be like without it.’
As a child, he said, he had been light and lithe enough to shimmy up palm tree trunks to cut down the dark fruit, bundled together in tight clutches. An account of West African life in the 1940s by an old European forester had taught me the colour ‘carmine’ for the fruit’s red-so-bruised-and-dark-it-is-almost-black. After harvesting, they would be crushed, heated and processed to produce oil from their flesh. The oil has a reddish-orange colour that gives it a feeling of warmth, as if it has a radioactive power of its own. The processing is not finished there, however, as the kernels can be crushed to produce another type of oil, this time fine and colourless.
‘Look at me now,’ Johnson patted his stomach extravagantly. ‘I am too old and fat to harvest palm fruit any more. It is a young person’s job.’
When we got to a hillside where the grass had been burned away he explained what had happened.
‘This is because of the bush-cow, the animal you might know as a buffalo. They live here wil
d in the bush but they are very dangerous. When the grass grows so high it can hide them, it is burned away by the locals. You don’t play around with bush-cows and if you bump into them they will attack first and then run away. They are serious animals and if you hunt them then make sure you kill them first time because if you don’t they will come after you.’
During my research I had come across several portentous mentions by Big White Hunters of encounters with Liberian buffalo. It is said these animals look at you with the eyes of someone who is owed money. Fortunately, the closest we came was some dried-out droppings that looked like fossils.
Johnson also opened my eyes to what is meant by farming in rural Liberia. At one point during the first day we came to a section of forest which he called, rather grandly, a field. To me it looked like a place where a cyclone had struck. Half-felled trees lay skewed at drunken angles, fouled by a web of ivy and undergrowth that trapped them in mid-fall, and the ground was uneven and cluttered with huge rocks the size of cars.
‘The fact that these trees have come down means the light can get through, which means you can grow rice here,’ he explained. ‘Look over there and you will see strings of coloured paper that the farmers hang out to try to scare away the birds and stop them eating their rice.’
I began to look more closely and then I saw mountain rice shoots growing here and there in disorganised clumps, strands of shiny tinsel tied to nearby stumps. The process of growing rice, known locally as ‘cutting farm’, is beyond back-breaking and the wastage prodigious but, in spite of attempts by aid workers to introduce other staples, rice remains king of food here. The people of rural Liberia are trapped, forced in their hunt for a staple foodstuff to use their energies in ‘fields’ like this. So tough was this matrix of survival that I began to understand why this area was in many ways no more developed than in 1935 when the Greenes passed through. What chance development if all your energy is used on simply surviving?