I was familiar with this particular text, because I had read Revelation carefully as a teenager. Growing up Jewish in Mansfield sometimes felt a little like being a six-fingered person: I was for the most part treated just like everyone else, but the recognition that I was different would sometimes bubble up as classmates gave voice to a number of misconceptions, most of them trivial, but some of them disturbing—as in, “your people killed Jesus Christ,” a fact my Sunday school teachers had neglected to mention, and thus was something of a surprise to me. Trying to understand what made Christian and Jewish theology different became a priority for me in those years, and Revelation seemed a logical place to start.
The portion that they were to read is in the early chapters of the book and describes the unwrapping of a unique scroll held in God’s right hand. In order to expose the scroll, seven seals must be opened, a feat accomplished by a seven-eyed, seven-horned lamb. Each successive opening of the seals unleashes a judgment upon the world. These passages provide some of the most vivid visions of Christian apocalyptic language.
They read:
And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.
And I saw, and behold, a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.
And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.
And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.
And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, a measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.
The reading continued through the chapter, and then the pastor ascended the stage for his homily, during which he reflected on the passages, occasionally asking the assistant pastor to read back from a particular verse. Listening to the words of John of Patmos, who had committed them to parchment nearly two thousand years before, I gradually became more and more uneasy as I heard the words spill from the pulpit.
And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.
And I looked, and behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
What was the pastor thinking? I could imagine people back in the States sitting around at some dinner party when talk would turn to what was happening in Liberia at that very moment, with someone describing it as “a disaster of biblical proportions,” using the phrase mostly for emphasis and effect. Yet this really was a calamity that many Liberians would instinctively think of in biblical terms, for they believed in the Bible in a way that all but the most hard-line of fundamentalists in the United States did not. As we sat there, Liberia had been slowly imploding over about four months, and everyone sitting here knew it. How could these faithful not think of this moment as anything other than God’s wrath visited upon them? A new virus as exotic to them as it was to any American had been unleashed, and now even the most remote villagers knew something novel in its wickedness lurked in the countryside. Some Liberians still didn’t believe in Ebola, but by mid-October, more and more people did, and they had a powerful template on which they could interpret the data. How could they not think that perhaps the End of Days was upon them, with the final battle between good and evil to commence?
And if those thoughts had flashed through their minds—which, though I am not Liberian and do not claim to be an expert on Liberian thought, seemed an entirely sensible chain of reasoning—then what other evidence could support this view? Could the fire that God was to unleash on Gog and Magog at the Battle of Armageddon really be the burning fever of Ebola? Was not the pale horse at full gallop throughout the Liberian countryside, to say nothing of Sierra Leone and Guinea, taking care to make a special, daily visit to the hilltop where I worked?
And if that were true, that people conversant with Scripture and believers in the prophecies of Revelation could infer that the End of Days were indeed upon us, then wasn’t it also reasonable to assume that they might no longer be interested in the minutiae of everyday living? We trudge to the markets, throw out our refuse, quarrel with neighbors, perform kindly acts to strangers, and pay our taxes to the government all as part of our routine. This is as true in the tony suburbs of Boston as it is in the far-flung reaches of the interior of a small West African nation.
But if that routine should be so upended—by, say, the end of the world being nigh—then why bother? If the rapture really is around the corner, does it matter much if we follow the rules that create the hive of human activity we call “society”? God will sort ’em all out, and soon we and our loved ones will be in heaven. To hell with the others. Literally.
Surely that’s a logical thought process if one truly believes that an unprecedented Ebola outbreak is the manner by which God’s Revelation is taking place. These questions were furiously assembling in my head as the pastor churned through the verses and meditated on their meaning. More than once I found myself turning around to see just how this message was being received.
And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held:
And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?
And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled.
Fortunately, the pastor’s homily went on forever. He passed the ten-minute mark as if he hadn’t taken a breath, and seemed as if he was just warming up to his subject at twenty minutes. Combined with the ambient temperature—it was well over ninety degrees Fahrenheit outside, and this was a packed room full of people making it hotter still inside, with only a few ineffectual fans to put any kind of a dent in the mugginess—the congregants started to do what congregants around the world do in such situations: They politely and subtly, but gradually and definitively, tuned him out. I turned to my right to see Sam’s eyelids grow heavy. At the half-hour mark, I glanced over my shoulder and surveyed the room to see the vast majority of people in a not-quite-comfortable Sunday late-morning doze. What a picture this must constitute, I thought: a West African pastor talking about the end of the world, his flock at least three hundred strong, all more or less in the midst of a collective nap, while his most keen listener, who was sitting bolt upright with eyes darting from the pulpit to the verses at the end of the King James Bible, happened to be a white, atheist Jew.
And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;
And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.
And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.
And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;
And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:
For the great day of his wrath
is come; and who shall be able to stand?
It wasn’t until the pastor reached the discussion about the sixth seal, nearly an hour into his discursion, that I finally grasped his point. What was the great earthquake? Well, he noted, many people thought it was the San Francisco earthquake of 1906—the fact that many people thought this was a bit of a surprise to me—but then a long explanation ensued about how it was actually the Anchorage earthquake of 1964 because it fell on Good Friday. Not much known outside of Alaska, the Anchorage ’64 event measured 9.2 on the Richter scale, which was more than one hundred times stronger than the San Francisco 1906 trembler. I had happened to read Simon Winchester’s book A Crack in the Earth about the San Francisco quake only a few months before, hence my knowledge.
The point he was making, as best I understood, was that because the Anchorage earthquake happened about sixty years after the supposed opening of the sixth seal, we’ve got the chronology all messed up. The breaking of the seventh seal isn’t nigh; it’s still way off in the future. Ebola, in other words, was not a herald of the end of the world. It was God’s judgment, to be sure, just not God’s final judgment. Everyone: At the end of this service, please go back to your homes, your jobs, your routines, and resume your lives. The message was as Byzantine as the language of the Book of Revelation itself, especially because he never once said the word Ebola in his talk, and this all had to be inferred. But as he reached his conclusion, I found myself comforted by the whole theological exercise.
After the homily, they asked people to give testimonials. I was more than a little surprised when Sam told me to stand up and tell the pastor my name. I dutifully did so, and some nice words were said about me. Then they asked me to come forward and talk about Ebola. There I stood, not at all sure what people knew and what they didn’t, terrified I was going to say something Very Wrong, hoping I wasn’t going to commit some unspeakable faux pas by, say, discussing body fluids, maybe a taboo topic in a church, when mentioning the vomit and diarrhea of Ebola. But that was the disease; how could I not? The only optimistic thought flashing through my head was that, based on my time at the ETU, up-country Liberians find it quite difficult to understand American English, and it was much easier for me to understand them. Maybe I would put them back to sleep, though somehow I doubted this.
I took a gamble and decided to start off by playing to the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to know that we are in the midst of the strongest man in Liberia. Dennis, will you stand up?” I gestured to Dennis, who stood up, and I asked we all acknowledge his bravery. Dennis had spoken earlier in the service, even taking a moment to tease me publicly about how I cajoled him to take his medications when he was in the unit. The fact that he had been embraced by the church leadership and proudly displayed as a survivor, rather than treated with suspicion and contempt, was perhaps the single most impressive display of this group of believers. Other survivors throughout the three countries were not always so lucky. A round of enthusiastic applause ensued.
With the crowd warmed up and, I hoped, open to my message, I told them about how I came to Liberia the year before and met Dr. Borbor, and I felt I had to come back to help once he died. I had no idea how that was received since everyone sat there silent, staring at me. I then told them about very basic infection control: Glove up and protect yourself if someone gets sick and sweats or throws up or has diarrhea, a lovely topic to discuss when everyone was dressed in their Sunday best. Though while I said this, I began to wonder, What if there might not be any gloves to be had since the aid organizations have bought them all up? I happened to work in a place that could implement maximum infection-control procedures without any thought of cost or availability; what could these parishioners do to protect themselves in Gbarnga, a town that was hours from the capital, in a country where supply lines had been severely stressed by the outbreak? Was I just another clueless American giving pie-in-sky advice?
I had little time to ponder this as the service wrapped up, after which I was ushered outside for a series of pictures with various church leaders. And then, before I could process any of what had just happened, I was whisked back into one of IMC’s cars and was on my way back to Cuttington.
The car ride took maybe forty-five minutes, and even across cultural divides I’m typically a chatty person, but I spent that time silently mulling over the implacability with which that congregation had politely absorbed a message about the end of the world. The end of the world. The literal end. The evidence was all around them. Friends, neighbors, and members of their families had either been sent to our ETU to take their chances or were being rounded up in the holding centers by their own local politicians who were eager to curry favor with the national government, the international media, and the aid organizations. That didn’t include those who had already died of the disease. The parishioners in Gbarnga would have been more than justified in thinking that every man, woman, and child was going to end up in one of those places eventually. In short, the environment could have easily been described as apocalyptic. How could they have looked around at what was happening to them and bear this cataclysm with such equanimity and gracefully receive one of its white-skinned alien messengers?
The answer, I thought, was that they already had witnessed the end of the world, and yet, here they still were. In the West, we call it the Liberian Civil War.
To say that story is a little complicated is an understatement. I’m going to make my best attempt at simplifying it here. Trying to keep track of the three-dimensional chessboard of the myriad groups and players involved in the Civil War makes following internecine political squabbles in the United States feel like a game of checkers. However, without at least a general idea of what the Civil War was about, a critical part of the Ebola story doesn’t make any sense.
Traditionally, the date given for the start of the Civil War is December 24, 1989. On that day, a group of a few hundred insurgents belonging to a group known as the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, or NPFL, moved across the river that separates Ivory Coast from Liberia’s Nimba County. From there, the fighting expanded outward and raged for the next fifteen years. Each act of war was met with a retaliation even more violent—and, ultimately, savage—leading to an ever-worsening feedback loop that would decimate the country, destroying virtually every part of the infrastructure and ripping apart its social fabric. When Liberians emerged from the generation-long nightmare in the early 2000s, they would be forced to rebuild their entire society almost completely from rubble.
But to get a better sense for what kind of butchery was in store for the country, one might look to events five years before. In 1985 President Samuel Doe had bowed to international pressure to hold elections. The pressure mainly came from the United States, without whose support Doe was finished, so elections it would be. Doe’s principal rival was a man named Jackson Doe, of no relation to the president. Jackson Doe was the son of a Gio tribal chief from Nimba County, but because of political connections, he had been raised and supported by wealthy and powerful Americo-Liberians, who paid for his education at the University of Liberia, a degree from which was an exceedingly precious commodity in Liberian society, as it provided the key to open the doors of social advancement. Though not an Americo himself, Jackson Doe nevertheless had ascended through the ranks of the True Whig Party during the 1970s, becoming the country’s minister of education, and represented in essence the kind of gradual progress that was taking place under President William Tolbert.
Then came the coup. As a high-ranking member of the now-deposed government, Jackson Doe was initially imprisoned in Monrovia but was later released by now-president Samuel Doe, and he returned to Nimba County. Over the next five years, President Samuel Doe’s administration proved itself to be at least as corrupt as and even more ineffectual than the True Whigs who had come before. Embezzlement was endemic. Its most talented purveyor was Charles Taylor, who had been appointed by President Doe to be the director general of the General Services Age
ncy—a position that made him essentially the Liberian government’s purchaser in chief. Taylor had skimmed the cash and cooked the books, making deposits in an American bank account estimated to be around $1 million. He was eventually found out and charged, and fled to the States in 1984. By that time, the United States was applying heavy diplomacy to persuade President Doe to hold elections, and he reluctantly agreed.
Because of his experience and education, Jackson Doe was a natural choice for president, and he became Samuel Doe’s principal opponent. It was clear, however, that Samuel Doe never intended to relinquish power. In an election universally deemed fraudulent by the international community, the president was reelected, and Jackson Doe remained in Nimba County to take his lumps.
Enter Thomas Quiwonkpa. Quiwonkpa was one of the original members of commandoes who had staged the coup five years before. He was generally seen as a competent soldier, the real orchestrator of the military in the early days of the junta. He was President Samuel Doe’s close confidant until Doe started to consolidate power by eliminating rivals. President Doe executed two important members of the People’s Redemption Council (the body that had taken over the government from the True Whigs in the aftermath of the coup) and eventually had Quiwonkpa removed from his post as commanding general of the Liberian army. Seeing the writing on the wall, in 1983 Quiwonkpa fled with many of his fellow Gio tribe members who had served as his military protégés.
When the 1985 election was stolen from the challenger, Jackson Doe, Quiwonkpa returned from exile to support Jackson, who was a fellow Gio, and his claim to the presidency by launching a coup against Samuel Doe. The group Quiwonkpa founded to achieve this aim was named the National Patriotic Front of Liberia—the same NPFL that would be headed by Charles Taylor, also a Gio, a few years later. But the coup attempt was botched. The United States, for all its frustration with the president, was not yet prepared to gamble on a new administration that might not be friendly to American interests—the irony being that its support of the corrupt and increasingly inhumane Samuel Doe was sending opposition into the arms of American adversaries on the world stage. Regardless of the lack of long-term wisdom of that calculation, when the NPFL fighters started their uprising in Nimba County, U.S. embassy officials tipped off President Doe, who immediately dispatched his most trusted generals in the Armed Forces of Liberia to crush the rebellion in a swift stroke. They were defeated quickly and with ease.
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