Chasing the Devil

by Tim Butcher

  Warmed by the fire, Mr Omaru’s morale picked up and he assured us he would be well enough to travel pillion on a motorbike later that day. He let Johnson take responsibility for the scratched but still roadworthy bike. We would set off as a threesome going at our slow walking pace and Mr Omaru would catch us up later in the day down the trail, whenever he got his strength up enough to ride behind a biker he would hire in Duo. According to the map and local advice, there was only one main track so we should not get lost. The plan was a bit clumsy, but it was the best I could do in the circumstances to maintain the momentum of the journey.

  It was a short time after leaving Mr Omaru that I had one of the most unexpected experiences of the trip. In all our time in Liberia we had been trekking not just through primitive jungle but through communities scarcely more developed than those seen by the Greenes in 1935, an environment where people lived in houses walled with mud from streambeds and thatched with branches cut from jungle palms, and where to cross a river you used a monkey bridge or canoe. But a little over 30 miles south of Ganta, in bush as thick as any I had seen, I discovered something utterly alien from what I had experienced so far in Liberia – modern, hi tech, heavy industry.

  The sound reached us first. We had just walked through a small forest village where a litter of piglets had squealed loudly. Pigs, or hogs as they are called in Liberian English, are a rarity but, in the few villages where I saw them, they played the role of refuse-recycler, eating pretty much anything they could find, no matter its provenance. From personal experience, I know that they happily spend much of the day snuffling around the village latrines. With the squeal still in my mind, I heard another high-pitched noise so far off as to be formless. I thought at first it too might be something to do with livestock, but it hardened into a beep – a regular, repeating beep that simply had to be manmade. Then I heard a distant metallic rumble and the sound of a man shouting.

  Johnson was having a rest, parked up on the motorbike in the shade somewhere behind us, so David and I exchanged a baffled look before edging forward, ever so slightly, nervously. With the beep growing louder, the trail turned a corner, the undergrowth parted and there before us was a large, well-resourced gang of railway workers.

  The men were all wearing pristine high-visibility vests and white, industrial workplace hard-hats. The shouting came from a surveyor with a very modern-looking piece of equipment that used a laser to measure distances, and the beep was from a large, yellow, wheeled forklift reversing with its heavy load of ballast to reinforce an embankment next to railway tracks that ran arrow-straight out of sight in both directions through the jungle. Nearby was a fully intact box-girder rail bridge spanning a river and, as if to prove it was in working order, a jeep, gleaming white and with its headlights blazing, was driving across it on a specially designed set of small metal wheels that locked onto the underside of the chassis. The apparatus made a loud, grating noise but it allowed the road vehicle to run safely along the rails.

  The workers were friendly, although rather surprised to find two white men walking past their remote jungle worksite. One expatriate worker, who was being driven past in a new Toyota pick-up, asked his driver to stop so he could ask what we were up to. When he opened the door I was close enough to sense the unnatural waft of something I had not felt for weeks – air-conditioning. Kindly he offered us bottles of water from the jeep’s onboard fridge, a welcome break from our own tepid supplies. The water was so cold it made my sinuses ache.

  I had heard about a contract to rehabilitate the railway line connecting Liberia’s Atlantic coastline to the rich Yekepa iron ore deposits way up on the country’s mountainous north-east border, but had no idea about the scale of the operation. Completed in the 1960s by a Liberian-American-Swedish consortium known as LAMCO, the 160-mile-long track was, for a long time, Liberia’s single most important piece of transport infrastructure. Much of the iron ore was found in a single peak so, like termites setting about a fallen tree, the miners spent the 1970s and 1980s dynamiting and bulldozing their way through the entire mountain, changing for ever the area’s skyline. The resulting ore – millions of tons of it – was shunted by train across the width of the country to the coastal town of Buchanan. Close to the beach, LAMCO built huge machines to wash the ore and pack it into pellets. The company also built a large harbour where cargo vessels could be loaded with the precious ore for shipment to steel smelters around the world.

  But this functioning business ran into the buffers during Liberia’s war. The mineworkers fled, foreign investors pulled out and looters set about the once elaborate infrastructure installed by the company. After securing Buchanan in the early 1990s, Nigerian peacekeepers added to their reputation for criminal opportunism when they systematically dismantled the processing plant and shipped it home as scrap. Nearby villas, built for LAMCO employees behind security fences and arranged in circular loops like middle-class homes in suburbia, were picked clean.

  In our modern on-line world, it is possible to see virtually what life must have been like in the mine’s heyday as home movies from LAMCO employees are on YouTube. One shows Scandinavian-looking children idling away sunny, pre-war days, splashing around a huge swimming pool set among the rolling forested hills of Yekepa, and in another it is possible to ride with one of the locomotives as the film was shot from the driver’s cab of an iron ore train creeping through the jungle.

  During the war some of the rails were removed for scrap but largescale theft was not easy without expensive lifting, cutting and moving equipment, so most of the track was simply left alone. Prodigious annual rains mean roads have to be carefully looked after in Liberia, so when the maintenance workers fled the conflict the road network fell apart. In desperation, rebel groups started to use the railway piecemeal, customising the axles of trucks so they could run along the rails. It was enterprising but dangerous, with numerous bloody crashes.

  After the war ended in 2003, the world’s largest steel manufacturer, ArcelorMittal, began to look covetously at the iron ore deposits in Liberia. In the eyes of the company’s planners, Yekepa was still so rich it might be worth refurbishing the railway and port so that largescale shipments could start again. The costs were daunting, as the entire LAMCO infrastructure needed work. Every inch of track, embankment, bridge and building would have to be refurbished all the way from Buchanan up to Yekepa on the other side of the country. Local Liberian industry was so damaged and unreliable after the war that, even though the country has some of the world’s best timber resources, it could not even be relied on to produce the thousands of new wooden sleepers needed for the track. So they would be expensively imported from overseas, along with almost every other item needed for the project, from heavy plant machinery to the fried potatoes cooked at the works cafeteria for the legion of expat engineers and technicians brought in to oversee the refurbishment.

  But, as is common in Africa, the profits from the project promised such riches that it still made sense to take on these prodigious investment costs. Contracts were signed by ArcelorMittal with the post-war Liberian government and, although some clauses were later disputed and had to be renegotiated, work began in 2006. The scene we stumbled across in the jungle was a small part of the refurbishment, the single most valuable commercial project in post-conflict Liberia.

  When you invest on this scale in Africa, however, you do not just play the role of business partner. In the absence of other meaningful economic activity or effective government, you become something much more important. Buchanan was the place on the coast where the Greenes finished their trek (although they knew it by its 1930s name of Grand Bassa) so, as we picked up their route again south of Ganta, we found ourselves following the rough direction of the railway track. This meant we often heard first-hand accounts from local communities about the impact of ArcelorMittal’s work. The villagers spoke not just of their high expectations for jobs and wealth from the railway, but also of their strong belief that the rehabilitation would b
e the panacea for all problems born of Liberia’s war, turmoil and decay.

  Those hopes were to be badly disappointed. The global economic downturn saw a fall in demand for steel, so in 2009 the accountants at ArcelorMittal redid their sums. A few weeks after we came across this jungle scene of hi-tech industriousness, all work on rehabilitating the track ceased. Thousands of local workers lost their only source of income and the estimated date for the first export of Yekepa ore slipped indefinitely. The beeps from reversing forklifts were no longer heard out in the jungle and the company was forced to refocus its expenditure from refurbishment to security, with guards paid to protect equipment that had been so expensively shipped in.

  On leaving the bustle of the rail gang it took only a few paces to return to the default setting of the Liberian hinterland: silence, sweat and the closed-in, washed-out green embrace of the jungle. Our routine was, as before, to trek from dawn until late morning, take a couple of hours’ rest to avoid the midday heat, and then head back on the trail until a suitable village could be found at twilight where we might find food, a hut for David, Johnson and Mr Omaru, and space where I could put up my mozzie-proof tent.

  At the end of the first day’s walk, roughly 30 miles south of Ganta, we left Nimba County and entered Bong County when we crossed a bridge over the St John. We had seen it first upstream where a section of the river forms the border between Guinea and Liberia, but from there it cuts into Liberia proper, meandering its way across the lowlands until it reaches the Atlantic. We would cross it a total of three times and always have to fight the temptation to take a dip. The river level was low because of the dry season, exposing huge flanks of pinkish rock where the water gathered in still, deep pools, almost irresistible in the cloying discomfort of our march. The only way I kept from throwing myself in was to picture guinea worm parasites climbing like toxic ivy up the insides of my legs.

  In Bong County we found villages almost identical to those up in Lofa – mud-brick huts with thatched roofs and, every so often, a tin roof, arranged around a jungle clearing, with ‘kitchens’ set away from the dwellings. Trackside stalls were a rarity, electrical power nonexistent and water came from local streams and the occasional well. But I began to notice decoration on the hut walls for the first time, repetitive hand-prints or swirls of paint in tones of ochre, brown, black and red. It was the only artistic expression I saw in rural Liberia, with the exception of initiation tattoos on the chests of men, and I grew to like it so much that as we came to each village I would search out the most interesting-looking designs to photograph.

  After three days of trekking from Ganta we crossed from Bong County into Grand Bassa County and spent the night in a roadside village called Barseegiah, which had a feature unique to our walk – a female chief. Etta Barseegiah was forty-nine, and I found her deeply impressive. Chiefdoms have a hereditary component in Liberia, although members of the ruling family have to win a vote to take over, proof that democracy is strongly rooted here, albeit democracy that always comes second to the power of the Poro. Chief Barseegiah could not have been more different to Emma Konneh, the district commissioner who had been so hostile and unhelpful back in Ganta, and, with her businesslike efficiency, I had no doubt Etta won her chiefdom vote on merit. She lived in a small dwelling which, like countless others we had seen, was overrun by vermin but kept as clean as possible in the circumstances. David and I were done in when we got to Barseegiah having just walked 29 miles, one of the longest days of the trip, but Etta dropped everything to help us, arranging food and hot water for bucket showers.

  After washing and getting my breath back, we began to talk. All Liberians from the hinterland have a tribal language as a mother tongue but most, especially a community leader such as Etta, also speak Liberian English. It’s a simple form of English, Americanised and with the peculiarity of adding ‘– oh’ on the end of the last word of any statement as a sort of lyrical sign-off. While Johnson could help translate some of the tribal languages, over time I picked up a working understanding of Liberian English.

  Through Etta I got a sense of how glacially slow the regeneration has been in rural Liberia since the war. By coincidence we had arrived on an important day in the village’s history – just hours earlier a jeep had brought important visitors.

  ‘We used to have a school here run by Pentecostal missionaries,’ she recounted. ‘It was set up way back in the 1960s and everyone from the nearby villages studied there. I myself learned English there. But with the war it became too dangerous and the missionaries all left in 1990.

  ‘I never thought they would come back but today, just a few hours ago, some of them returned to see what is left of their school. One of them was called Aunt Shelley and I remember her from before. There she was back among us today, once more in Barseegiah. It was a great day.’

  I asked what she thought would happen now.

  ‘Sadly there is not much left of the school. Our village was overrun many times during the war and we all had to flee. My husband gave me nine children, but he was killed in 1996 down in Monrovia. When we got back here our homes had been burned and we had to build again.

  ‘Aunt Shelley said the missionaries might be coming back. That would be very special, to have the school working again.’

  I asked about the elected, post-war government of Liberia which, like the village of Barseegiah, is also run by a woman. While African governments have occasionally in the past been led by women, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is the first to come to power in a national election. Her victory at the polls in 2005 was in large part because she was the chosen representative of the remarkable women who had campaigned so nobly in Monrovia during the war, the ones I saw back in 2003 standing on a muddy, rainy field chanting slogans that called for an end to fighting. I wanted to know from Etta what impact the elected government was having on projects such as schooling in her community.

  ‘This country has always been run from Monrovia by people from Monrovia who don’t care about what happens outside Monrovia. The only way a school like ours will be rebuilt is if foreign missionaries like Aunt Shelley come back.’

  In her view, Liberia’s old divide between country people and Americo-Liberians remains the same as ever, a divide between haves and have-nots.

  I went to sleep in Barseegiah in my mozzie-proof capsule watching fireflies through the mesh, pinpricks of light in motion that petered out like dying sparklers the moment my eye caught up with them. They gave me quite a light show alongside the flicker of distant electrical storms that promised an early end to the dry season. I went to sleep thinking we were going to have to pick up the pace if we were going to avoid the rains.

  Our trek brought us steadily closer to sea-level and, as the terrain flattened and the climate got even warmer, we entered Liberian rubber country for the first time. From our days in Guinea I knew what well-kept plantations look like: serried ranks of trees, each with a black beaker tied at the same height sitting snugly against the trunk below identically placed cuts in the bark, catching every available drop of valuable latex. When I saw the Liberian plantations, it was as if I was looking at the same scene through a hall-of-mirrors. No two trees were the same. There were branchless saplings the width of my wrist next to giants as thick as my torso, with boles as misshapen as recently-fed pythons. Untended lanes between the trees were choked head-high with vegetation and where in Guinea there had been order, in Liberia there was none. Trunks starburst in all directions, some knocked sideways by seasonal storms, others corkscrewing upwards seeking sunlight from breaks in the high canopy. It took quite some leap of faith to believe rubber production had ever taken place here, but every so often I would spot a black beaker clinging to a rusted twist of wire.

  The chaos was due to years of wartime neglect as rubber planters and tappers had been forced to flee, crippling an industry that had once promised to be the making of Liberia. Just as diamonds had raised the prospect of economic salvation for Sierra Leone, so rubber had
created hopes of sustainable growth. From its founding in 1847 until the 1920s, Liberia’s economic performance was dire, its trickle of earnings from import/export tariffs swallowed up servicing bank loans, so meaningful development was impossible. In 1923, Henry Fenwick Reeve, a long-serving British colonial officer who had spent much of his career in Gambia, published a book on Liberia called The Black Republic which castigated its failures at nation-building.

  Since 1894, when the writer first visited West Africa, he has witnessed the great regeneration of the whole of that part of the continent – with the exception of Liberia. She alone has stagnated, and is even now with less hope of making a successful African State than ever …

  Liberia’s gloomy prospects were to change completely the very year Reeve’s book was published when two senior representatives of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company from Akron, Ohio arrived by ship. The government was then too poor to build a proper harbour in Monrovia, so the prospectors had to come ashore in a tiny, unstable surfboat, surging past the dangerous sandbar at the river mouth below Cape Mesurado, the promontory that dominates Liberia’s capital. The city they discovered was a strange mixture of old and new. A few large buildings had been erected on a grid of wide, modern-looking streets but the absence of regular vehicular traffic meant grass grew long and untended in the thoroughfares, a playground for children and a pasture for livestock. Down on the water’s edge was a more traditional crowded shantytown of dilapidated huts and uneven alleyways.

  The peculiarities of urban Monrovia were not the concern of the two visitors, however. They were much more interested in what lay outside the city limits, a terrain and a climate that they judged perfect for large-scale rubber production.

  Firestone, then in the process of establishing itself as America’s leading tyre manufacturer, had found itself dangerously exposed after the First World War to a price-fixing scheme organised by the dominant force in global rubber production, British planters in Malaya and the Far East. To avoid paying what it saw as inflated British prices for the raw material, Firestone sought its own source of supply. Liberia promised exactly what the company was looking for, somewhere the company could create its own large-scale production.