The Shadow of the Sun (26 page)

As early as the middle of the nineteenth century, long before apartheid was instituted in southern Africa by the Afrikaners, it had been invented and made flesh by the rulers of Liberia—descendants of black slaves. Nature and the impenetrability of the jungle alone created a natural barrier between the natives and the newcomers, an uninhabited no-man’s-land that divided them and fostered segregation. But this was not enough. In the small, bigoted world of Monrovia, an ordinance is instituted forbidding close contacts with the local population, particularly intermarriage. Everything is done to ensure that the “savages know their place.” To this end, the government in Monrovia allocates to each tribe (there are sixteen of them) a territory where they are allowed to live—not unlike the typical “homelands” created for Africans decades later by the white racists from Pretoria. All who speak out against this are severely punished. Punitive military and police expeditions are dispatched to places of rebellion and resistance. The chiefs of unsubmissive tribes are eliminated on the spot, the rebellious population murdered or imprisoned, its villages destroyed, its crops set afire. In accordance with the ancient, worldwide custom, these expeditions, incursions, and local wars have a single overriding goal: to capture slaves. The Americo-Liberians need laborers. And indeed, they start using slaves on their farms and in their businesses as early as the second half of the nineteenth century. They also sell them to other countries, especially to Fernando Po and Guinea. In the late 1920s, the world press discloses the existence of this trade, plied officially by the Liberian government. The League of Nations intervenes. The then president, Charles King, is forced to resign. But the practice will continue, only conducted in stealth.

From the very outset, the black settlers from America thought about how to preserve and strengthen their dominant position in the new country. At first, they did not allow its indigenous inhabitants, denied the rights of citizenship, to participate in government. They let them live, but only in designated tribal territories. Then they went further: they invented the single-party system of rule. In 1869, a year before the birth of Lenin, the True Whig Party is formed in Monrovia; it will enjoy a monopoly on power for the next 111 years, until 1980. The party’s directorship, its political bureau—a National Executive—decides everything, and in detail: who will be president, who will participate in the government, what sort of politics this government will conduct, which foreign company will get what concession, who will be appointed chief of police, head of the postal service, and so on, down to the lowest rungs of the civil service. The leaders of the party are the presidents of the republic, or the other way around—the positions are treated interchangeably. You can achieve something only if you are a member of the party. Its opponents are either in prison or abroad.

In the spring of 1963 I met its then chief and Liberia’s president, William Tubman, in Addis Ababa, during the first conference of Africa’s heads of state. Tubman was then close to seventy. He never took a plane—he was afraid. A month before the conference, he set out by ship from Monrovia, sailing to Djibouti, and from there he traveled by train to Addis Ababa. He was a short, slight, jovial gentleman with a cigar in his mouth. To troublesome questions he responded with long, resounding laughter, which devolved into an explosion of loud hiccups, followed by an attack of wheezing, convulsive breathlessness. He trembled, his eyes bugged out and filled with tears. The discomfited and frightened interlocutor would fall silent and dared not insist further. Tubman brushed the ashes from his suit and, calm once more, hid again behind a thick cloud of cigar smoke.

He was the president of Liberia for twenty-eight years, and belonged to what is today a rare category of political boss who rules his country like a squire his manor: they know everyone, decide everything. (Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, a contemporary of Tubman’s and the dictator of the Dominican Republic for thirty years, exercised power in a similar fashion. During his rule, the church organized mass baptisms of Dominican children, with Trujillo standing as godfather. With time, he became the godfather of all his subordinates. The CIA could find no volunteers to organize a coup against the dictator: no one wanted to raise a hand against his own godfather.)

Tubman received around sixty people daily. He made appointments to all official positions in the country himself, decided who should receive a concession, which missionaries were to be allowed in. He sent his own people everywhere, and his private police reported to him everything that was happening in this village, or in that one. Not much happened. The country was a small, forgotten African backwater; on Monrovia’s sandy streets, in the shade of old tumble-down houses, fat women vendors dozed behind their stalls, and dogs sick with malaria roved. Now and then, a group passed before the gates to the government palace carrying a large banner reading “A gigantic manifestation of gratitude for the progress that has taken place in the country thanks to the Incomparable Administration of the President of LiberiaDr. WVS Tubman.” Musical ensembles from the countryside also stopped at these gates, praising in song the greatness of the president:

Tubman is the father of us all,

the father of the whole nation.

He builds us roads,

brings water.

Tubman gives us food to eat,

gives us food to eat,

ye, ye!

The guards, hidden from the sun in their sentry booths, applauded the enthusiastic singers.

What elicited the greatest respect, however, was the fact that the president was protected by benevolent spirits, which endowed him with extraordinary powers. If someone wanted to hand him a poisoned drink, the glass containing the liquid would shatter in midair. The bullet of an assassin could not strike him—it would melt before it reached its target. The president had herbs that allowed him to win every election. And a lens through which he could see everything that was happening, anywhere—there was no sense in opposition or conspiracy, since it would always be found out.

Tubman died in 1971. He was replaced by his friend, vice president William Tolbert. Whereas Tubman was amused by power, Tolbert was fascinated by money. He was a walking embodiment of corruption. He dealt in everything—gold, cars, passports. The entire elite, those descendants of black American slaves, followed his example. People who begged in the street for bread or water were shot on Tolbert’s orders. His police killed hundreds.

In the predawn hours of April 12,1980, a group of soldiers forced their way into the president’s villa and hacked Tolbert to pieces in his bed. They disemboweled him and threw his internal organs out into the courtyard for dogs and vultures to devour. There were seventeen soldiers. Their leader was a twenty-eight-year-old sergeant, Samuel Doe. He was barely literate, from the small tribe of Krahn, which lived deep in the jungle. People just like him, driven from their villages by poverty, had been flowing into Monrovia for years, in search of work and money. In the course of thirty years, between 1956 and 1986, the population of Liberia’s capital increased tenfold, from 42,000 to 425,000—and this in a city without industry or a system of public transportation, in which few houses had electricity, and fewer still running water.

The trek from the jungle to Monrovia requires many days of difficult marching across roadless tropical expanses. Only young, strong people can manage it. And it is they who arrived in the city. But nothing awaited them here: neither jobs, nor a roof over their heads. From the very first day, they became
bayaye
—that army of the young unemployed squatting idly on all the larger streets and squares of African cities. The existence of this multitude is one of the causes of turmoil on the continent: it is from their ranks that local chieftains, for a pittance, often with only the promise of food, recruit the armies they will use in their struggles for power, organizing coups, fomenting civil wars.

Doe, like Amin in Uganda, was one such
bayaye
. And like Amin, he won the lottery: he got into the army. One would have thought that he had thereby attained the peak of his career. As it turned out, however, he had greater ambitions.

Doe’s coup was not simply the exchange of a corrupt political boss/bureaucrat for a semi-illiterate in uniform. It was simultaneously a bloody, cruel, and caricature-like revolt of the downtrodden, half-enslaved masses from the African jungle against their hated rulers—the descendants of slaves from American plantations. In a sense, it was a revolution within the slave world: current slaves rose up against former ones, who had imposed their rule upon them. The entire episode seemed to bear out a most pessimistic and tragic thesis: that in a certain sense, if only the mental or cultural one, there is no way out of slavery; or if there is, it is extremely difficult and takes a very long time.

...

Doe immediately declared himself president. He ordered thirteen ministers from Tolbert’s administration killed at once. The executions were drawn out and staged before a large crowd of curious gaping onlookers.

The new president constantly announced that yet another attempt on his life had been uncovered and thwarted. A total of thirty-four, he said. He had the conspirators shot. The fact that he lived and continued to rule was proof that he was protected by spells and powerful forces—the work of sorcerers from his village. One could shoot at him—the bullets simply stopped in midair and fell to the ground.

There is not much to say about his administration. He governed for ten years. The country simply came to a standstill. There was no electricity, the shops were closed, the traffic on Liberia’s few roads died out.

He didn’t really know what it was that he was supposed to do as president. Because he had a childish, chubby face, he bought himself some gold-framed glasses, to look serious and affluent. He was lazy, and so spent entire days sitting in his residence playing checkers with subordinates. He also spent a great deal of time in the courtyard, where the wives of his presidential guards cooked over fires or did their washing. He talked with them, joked, sometimes took one to bed. Uncertain as to what he should do next, and how to save himself from vengeance after having killed so many, he saw as the only solution to surround himself with people from his own tribe, the Krahn. He summoned them in huge numbers to Monrovia. Power now devolved from the hands of the wealthy, settled, and worldly Americo-Liberians (who had managed meantime to flee the country) into those of a poor, illiterate tribe of forest dwellers unnerved by their new situation and who, pulled abruptly from their huts woven of vines and leaves, were seeing a city, a car, or shoes for the first time. They understood one thing, however: that their only means of survival would be to frighten or liquidate all actual or eventual enemies, meaning all non-Krahn. And so a handful of these erstwhile paupers, lost and benighted, wanting to hold fast to the riches and power that had fallen into their hands like a golden egg, set out to terrorize the nation. They beat, tortured, hanged, most often for no reason. “Why did they do this to you?” the neighbors ask a battered man. “Because they determined that I am not Krahn,” the poor wretch answers.

It is hardly surprising that in such a situation the country awaits the slightest opportunity to rid itself of Doe and his people. A certain Charles Taylor comes to its aid, a former Doe associate who, as the president claimed, stole a milllion dollars from him before decamping for the United States, where he got into some business trouble, went to prison, escaped, and surfaced suddenly on the shores of the Ivory Coast. From here, with a group of sixty fighters, he begins a war against Doe in December of 1989. Doe could have easily destroyed Taylor, but he sent out against him an army of barefoot Krahn, who, the minute they left Monrovia, instead of fighting Taylor, fell to plundering and stealing whatever and wherever they could. News of this army of robbers spread quickly through the jungle, and the terrified populace, hoping for refuge and protection, started to flee to Taylor. Taylor’s army grew at lightning speed, and in a mere six months arrived at the outskirts of Monrovia. A quarrel erupts in the Taylor camp: who will get to actually take the city and seize the spoils? Taylor’s chief of staff, Prince Johnson, also a former associate of Doe, breaks with Taylor and forms his own army. Now three forces—Doe’s, Taylor’s, and Johnson’s—are fighting in the city for its possession. Monrovia lies in ruins, entire neighborhoods go up in flames, corpses line the streets.

Finally, the countries of West Africa intervene. Nigeria sends a landing party by sea, which reaches the port in Monrovia in the summer. Doe hears of this and decides to pay the Nigerians a visit. On September 9, 1990, he gathers his entourage and sets out for the port in a Mercedes. The president drives through an exhausted, devastated, plundered, and deserted town. He reaches the port, but Johnson’s people are already waiting for him there. They open fire. Doe’s entire security detail is killed. He himself takes several bullets in the legs and is unable to escape. He is captured, his hands are tied behind his back, and he is dragged off to be tortured.

Johnson, hungry for publicity, orders the torture scene to be carefully recorded on film. We see Johnson sitting and drinking beer. A woman stands next to him, fanning him and wiping the sweat from his brow. On the floor sits a bound Doe, dripping with blood. His face is so battered you can barely see his eyes. Johnson’s men crowd around, mesmerized by the sight of the dictator’s agony. For six months now this regiment has been crossing the country robbing and killing, yet the sight of blood can still work them up into a state of ecstasy, a frenzy. Young boys push closer; each wants to see, to sate his eyes. Doe, his head swollen from blows, is sitting naked in a pool of blood, wet from the blood, sweat, and the water they pour over him to keep him from fainting. “Prince!” Doe mutters to Johnson (he addresses him by his first name, because these men who are fighting one another and devastating the country are all friends—Doe, Taylor, and Johnson are friends). “Just have them loosen the ropes on my hands. I will tell you everything, just loosen the ropes!” Clearly, his hands have been tied so tightly that this hurts him more than his bullet-riddled legs. But Johnson just yells at Doe in a local creole dialect. It is impossible to understand most of what he says, except for one thing: he demands that Doe tell him his bank account number. Whenever a dictator is seized in Africa, the entire ensuing inquisition, the beatings, the tortures, will inevitably revolve around one thing: the number of his private bank account. In local opinion, the politician is synonymous with the leader of a criminal gang, who does business trading arms and narcotics and stashes away money in foreign accounts, knowing that his career will not be long, that eventually he will have to flee and will need the wherewithal to live.