Chasing the Devil

by Tim Butcher

  As the paper’s rawest recruit I was soon drafted onto the night reporting shift, a post where, it was assumed, I could do little harm. Night reporters answered directly to Silk, as he liked to be known, and I can still remember how nervous I felt when sending him my first offerings. One by one he knocked them back, seeming to take pleasure in rejecting those early pieces. A missed capital letter, an incorrectly used comma, an error in emphasis: nothing was too trivial to stop him sending back my stories. I was an Oxbridge graduate who had not served the traditional newsman’s apprenticeship on local newspapers, and I convinced myself he was picking on me out of spite, seeking to put me in my place.

  But as months passed of those long and often quiet dogwatches my opinion shifted completely. I learned his criticism was not caustic but constructive. A fiercely private person, he was actually doing something incredibly public-spirited – he was taking time out to make me a better reporter. Ego, ambition and individualism are hallmarks of Fleet Street papers, but Silk showed none of these as he conscientiously did whatever he could to improve the standards of my work and that of the other night reporters in his charge. Over the years, the one question that I longed to have answered was why he had prematurely stopped serving as the paper’s ‘fireman’? This was one of the great jobs in British newspapers, a role so exciting it made egotistical, ambitious individuals, like me, sign up to be reporters, but for some reason Silk had walked away from it. The answer was linked to Liberia.

  One night shift he mentioned that he had covered the 1980 coup but gave scant other details. So down I went to the newspaper’s cuttings library to find out more. In those pre-internet days, the work of every reporter was routinely preserved in hard copy. Librarians would carefully cut out and file every piece of work printed by the newspaper under an individual’s by-line. I went through the filing cabinets and found the folder marked ‘Silk, Brian’. It was empty. Years before he had broken the rules by destroying all his own cuttings. But Silk himself had taught me that no matter how many dead ends you hit on a story, there will always be another way through. So back I went to the library and slogged through the old, bound copies of the paper. Even Silk was not cunning enough to excise these and, true enough, there I found his coverage.

  The coup happened in the early hours of Saturday 12 April and the first Silk report, with no dateline, was put together the next day when he was still in London. Scrambled by the newspaper to get to Monrovia as quickly as possible, I could picture Silk rushing around various central-London embassies and airline offices, hunting out visas and tickets, cursing that everything was closed for the weekend. But by the Tuesday he was writing from the Ivory Coast, the former French colony that is Liberia’s eastern neighbour, although he was marooned there for several days because scheduled flights into Monrovia had been suspended since the coup. It took several more days for Silk to find a way into Monrovia and I could picture his growing frustration. Nothing irritates a foreign-news reporter more than not being able to get to the scene. But it turned out he got there in plenty of time.

  In a front-page report, datelined Monrovia and published on Wednesday 23 April 1980, he described watching the beach execution of thirteen senior members of the administration overthrown in the coup. The Telegraph’s house-style did not allow for hyperbole, making the impact of Silk’s opening paragraphs all the more dramatic.

  It was an episode of extreme barbarity and bloodlust by soldiers driven wild with hatred. After the firing party had done its job by firing volleys in strict military order, an orgy of revenge began.

  With thousands of people cheering them on, the soldiers fired hundreds of rounds into the lifeless bodies, some using sub-machine guns.

  When it was over the bodies were covered with blood and the crowd continued yelling its delight.

  He spent ten days in Liberia, and filed pieces back to Fleet Street almost daily, a feat which, in the age before satellite communications when the telex represented the most sophisticated means of transmission, was not easy. Silk eventually returned to London for what, in reporter terms, would have been a hero’s welcome but it was what happened after he got back that I found most intriguing. He basically stood down as the paper’s ‘fireman’.

  I had spent almost twenty years with the Telegraph, reporting on most of the world’s major conflicts, but in that time never did I witness anybody actually being killed. From the Balkans, through Africa, to the Middle East and South Asia I saw many corpses and met many who were soon to die, but not once did I actually witness a killing. I struggle to imagine how I would have dealt with the scenes on the beach that day – the look on the faces of the condemned as they were tied to wooden stakes driven into the sand, the long delay before the arrival of the firing squad, the macabre carnival of a crowd egged on by soldiers mocking the condemned men, the trooper with the megaphone finally calling the mob to order, the silence, the three orderly volleys of rounds and then the bloody free-for-all, broken bodies dancing as magazine after magazine was emptied into them.

  Reporters covering conflict are a strange and eclectic group but many have a limit, a moment when they know they have had enough. For Silk, that moment came during that trip to Monrovia, although he was much too private ever to discuss the minutiae of his thinking with me. He died in hospital in 2004 a few years after retiring.

  From the bow of The Skipper I spotted the beach where the killings took place, just below the headland topped by the Executive Mansion, the old government headquarters where President Tolbert was killed in his pyjamas. The stakes where the men died were long-gone and, like the rest of Monrovia’s shoreline, it was littered with rubbish. The sun was strong overhead but there were goose bumps on my forearms as I tried to picture Silk, a man who took the trouble to become my teacher, standing there that terrible day in April 1980.

  I recognised other landmarks on the final approach along Monrovia’s shoreline. First was the old tower block taken over by UN peace-keepers when they deployed to Liberia in 2003. It was now the mission headquarters, guarded by fearsome-looking women from the Indian army, who had Kalashnikovs and spotless fatigues of plumpurple camouflage. Then into view came the Foreign Ministry, now used by President Sirleaf as her seat of government, while the nearby Executive Mansion was being refurbished. The rumour mill in Monrovia suggested she was in no hurry to move her headquarters back into the mansion because of its association with Liberia’s dark past. After coming to power so bloodily, President Doe carried out ritualistic murder at the mansion in the 1980s as a means of shoring up his dictatorship, a tradition Taylor was believed to have continued in the late 1990s. Finally I saw the Mamba Point Hotel where I had stayed in June 2003, killing mosquitoes and time with the hapless Sierra Leonean ambassador. It appeared unchanged, although the wreck of a trawler on the rocks out front must have altered the view from the bar somewhat.

  In the bright sunshine the city looked very different from how I remembered it. Many of the buildings were freshly painted, with sunlight glinting off intact plate-glass windows, and there were even some new buildings, including a swanky hotel built near the large American embassy compound. By the time The Skipper rounded Cape Mesurado and swept over the same river mouth sandbar that caused the Greenes’ drunken fellow passengers to lurch dangerously to one side, I had begun to convince myself that Monrovia might perhaps have been transformed into a normal, functioning city. But when we landed on the southern bank of the Mesurado River and I climbed off the boat, two things happened that suggested otherwise. First, I stepped in the human excrement that carpeted the river mudflats and, second, we were detained by the Liberian authorities.

  We had landed in West Point, the most crowded and filthy of Monrovia’s city centre slums, so it was through narrow alleyways crammed with children, pedestrians and hawkers that David, Kofi and I were bundled, towards the offices of the immigration authorities. They were ramshackle, unlit and horrendously hot, so sweat soon started to puddle under my thighs as I sat patiently on a bench
, answering questions fired from a shifting cast of individuals who kept entering and leaving the low-ceilinged room, none of whom wore uniform.

  To begin with, it was all quite amicable and, indeed, reasonable. Nobody could remember the last time two white travellers had arrived in Monrovia by fishing boat so it was worth finding out who we were. Our timing could also be construed as suspicious as we had arrived days before an important gathering in the city, convened by Liberia’s president, of leading women from around the globe. Particular care was taken by the officials over whether we might be drug smugglers so our rucksacks were searched carefully. I rather pitied the junior officer to whom fell the horrible task of unpeeling my humming bundle of walking clothes and, in the confinement of the room, I was ashamed of the state of my socks. Close attention was paid to my medicine bag but, fortunately, my tube of Boudreaux’s Butt Paste (half-used) and supply of water sterilisation tablets and malaria pills (almost exhausted) did not represent a criminal haul.

  Under questioning, I patiently went through our motive for following the Greenes’ sea journey to Monrovia and David got out the maps of the route from their books. We showed our passports, visas, the various authority letters I had gathered along the way and our yellow fever certificates, which proved that aside from our rank clothes we represented no major public health threat.

  It was all quite straightforward and my spirits were greatly lifted because Johnson had turned up. After his lift to Monrovia with Mr Omaru, Johnson had decided to stay in the city to spend his earnings on corrugated iron for a house he would build in his village, Yassadu, back in Lofa County. By telephone he had arranged to meet us when we reached West Point but, of course, he had not anticipated the long visit to the immigration office. During a lull in questioning he told me quietly but proudly about his building plans.

  ‘I can build a home with the money you paid me so I thought I would buy the zinc here in the city. It is much cheaper here than up country. I got a good price and now I am waiting to find a taxi that will take me and the zinc.’

  On our trip he had mentioned he had never owned a house but I had no sense that the sum I handed over would be enough to make him a home-owner. I congratulated him but deliberately made no fuss. As our questioning continued, Kofi was looking increasingly nervous so I slipped three $50 bills to Johnson and got him to discreetly hand them over to settle the debt for the sea journey. The moment they reached the coast, the Greenes had noted how the possession of money can make a person a target for ‘taxes’ claimed by corrupt officials, and I remembered how taxi drivers in Sierra Leone were routinely shaken down for money by the police, even more so when carrying white passengers. Johnson made sure Kofi got the money without anyone seeing.

  But after starting off so casually, the questioning began to feel increasingly like interrogation. As the hours passed the officials began to repeat themselves, bribes were demanded and in Johnson’s eyes I recognised the first flicker of nerves. The atmosphere worsened when a stocky, rather sinister-looking man finally entered the room. All the other government employees – the policemen, customs officials and immigration officers – fell silent as the man quietly introduced himself as ‘chief of security’ and began to go over the same questions as his underlings. Kofi was now so nervous he could not bear to look up from the floor, and the sweat puddles under my legs began to chill. But then something happened that brought the atmosphere back from the edge. The security chief’s phone rang.

  ‘Answer the phone, Mother Fucker,’ boomed his personalised ring tone. The chief let out a belly laugh, I smirked and the tension was gone. Within ten minutes we were free to go, Kofi shaking my hand and scurrying back to The Skipper, anxious to put back out to sea, while David, Johnson and I went for our overdue celebration.

  The snapshot I had in my memory of wartime Monrovia was so grim that it was no surprise to find the city much improved. For a start, the dry season made the whole atmosphere appear cleaner and fresher. There were none of the overflowing gutters I remembered, the crowds of terrified refugees gathered in schoolyards or the overarching smell of decay. Someone had mended the attic floor of the national museum, and the city centre cemetery, where Elizabeth T. Nimley’s voodoo-esque gravestone had so unsettled me, was now hidden from view behind a high perimeter wall designed to stop gangs of thieves using the graveyard as a hideout.

  The shops were well-stocked and the large numbers of people milling about the streets were no longer searching in the gutters for scraps to sell. There were students heading to university, couriers delivering packages on motorbikes and internet cafés doing good business. And I made a point of visiting the central post office. It was operational once more. The zombie city was coming back to life as a modest building boom was taking place along the beachfront in the Sinkor district of town, funded mostly by various local Lebananese tycoons, so diplomats, aid workers and other foreigners could live, at a price, in some style. Generators provided power for air-conditioning and, for those who could afford it, third and fourth-floor apartments offered sea views over high security walls manned by locally employed private security guards. This was my first time in Monrovia since Taylor’s government had threatened me and, although I was a bit anxious when we arrived, by the time I had walked around the small grid of downtown streets my nerves had largely gone.

  David and I spent two days decompressing in Monrovia. He found a swimming pool to lounge by, while I took motorbike taxis to various appointments with a long list of aid workers and contacts I had to thank. The city’s roads were not as clogged as those in Freetown, so I buzzed around easily enough and met the individuals – country directors, mostly, of various NGOs operating in Liberia – who had introduced me to Johnson, made available accommodation in Zorzor and provided other helpful gems of advice and support. In turn, they were interested to hear the rare perspective of someone not chained, like them, to spreadsheets and computer screens and who had been able to get an intimate, ground-level view of the country. Back in 2003 the Mamba Point Hotel had almost the only functioning restaurant in the city but, six years later, a much wider range of eateries was available. They included a perfectly respectable Indian curry house and a very smart sushi restaurant, although, after my wobbly moment with the crème caramel, I took it easy when it came to ordering.

  True to its promise, the Foreign Office forewarned its people in Monrovia about the Greenes’ arrival in 1935 and they stayed at the old British diplomatic mission up on Cape Mesurado, described by Graham Greene as ‘a most luxurious & beautifully placed home with lashings of drink’. David and I enjoyed the hospitality of Our Woman in Monrovia, Britain’s solitary diplomat currently deployed to Liberia, although instead of alcohol I was happy to make do with lavish amounts of freshly brewed coffee and use of her washing machine.

  In many ways it was hard not to get caught up with a sense of optimism in Monrovia. In a city-centre café I found myself flicking through a glossy magazine called Liberia – Travel & Life. Produced locally, it was only in its fifth issue but the fact that there was enough money to fund full-page adverts for local businesses including mobile phone companies, insurance brokers and, I was interested to see, a restaurant in the town of Smell-No-Taste, underscored how much better things had become in peacetime. From its pages the title of a feature article jumped out – Trekking Through Nimba. When we were up in Ganta staying with Dave Waines we had been ‘trekking through Nimba County’. At the time I thought we were quite adventurous, pioneering even in the post-war period, but this article seemed to suggest otherwise. Perhaps there was already a tradition of forest walking near Ganta? I turned anxiously to the piece but found it was simply a photo-spread for shots of a beautiful Liberian model taken in and around the town. In one of the shots she draped herself down the steps leading to the Miller McAllister Memorial church at Dr Harley’s mission. In another she poses coquettishly, one leg cocked, on the veranda of Abuja, the restaurant where we had drunk with Dave Waines.

  The artic
le might have glossed over Abuja’s limitations – I remembered the waitress could not provide us with a single dish from the menu – but the point was that the magazine symbolised a country pulling itself back up off the floor. After the horrors that had gone before during Liberia’s long, dark night of dictatorship and conflict, the fact that a photo-shoot could even take place in Ganta was a monumental step forward.

  But as I got my bearings in Monrovia, I found the recovery unconvincing. The disconnect between the Liberia I had seen on the trek, a Liberia of Poro-dominated, subsistence farmers living in abject poverty, and the Liberia as represented by city-centre car showrooms and restaurants felt downright dangerous. It was this divide between the haves and have-nots that led to the 1980 coup and Doe’s dictatorship. And it was the same sense of injustice that allowed the various rebel groups spawned by Taylor’s 1989 invasion to thrive in Liberia for so long.

  Since 2003 Liberia has held elections and been relatively peaceful, with some positive economic development. But when you start at Ground Zero is there any way to go other than up? My fear was that the intrinsic problem of the country – a wealthy elite enjoying a life-style unreachable by the vast majority of the population – remained as toxic as ever. For those left behind, those unable to bridge legitimately a gap growing ever bigger, the aspiration I saw on the T-shirt worn by one of my jungle guides remained potent: Get Rich or Die Tryin’. The demons of jealousy and frustration felt a great threat in Monrovia.

  Over the weeks I spent with Johnson I came to see him as my post conflict African Everyman. He had dealt with the war as best he could, surviving in various refugee camps, maintaining an education begun at the mission school in Bolahun, winning the trust of several foreign NGOs and eventually leading his surviving family members back home to Yassadu. He was well-informed, capable and hard-working. When we discussed our children he spoke in language lifted verbatim from the pages of a western pamphlet. I found his words unforgettable.