In 1997 we did an art workshop with a group of Liberian refugees in exile in the town of Danane, in the Cote d’Ivoire. The group called itself The Liberian Refugee Visual Arts Project. Its founder and driving force was a young man belonging to the Bassa tribe called Topiyoo Nya Blimie.
In 2000, after their return from exile, we again worked with Topiyoo and his group, now called The Liberian Visual Arts Project (LIVAP). We conducted a second art workshop, this time in the concrete skeleton of a large house that was yet to be completed, in Paynesville, a few miles east of Monrovia. LIVAP had, at that time, been given permission to use the unfinished structure as a school for children from the local community.
During this period, and up to 2004, a horrendous civil war had been under way in Liberia. The country had become ‘a failed state’ with its institutions in ruins, its health and education systems hardly functioning and its people weary and suffering from the pervasive effects of extreme poverty.
There had been an election in 2005, won by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf who beat off a stiff challenge from former football star George Weah to become Africa’s first ever female president. Her government was beginning the daunting task of trying to put the country back on its feet again. She has been arguing for debt cancellation and increased foreign investment.
Not long before we left, a scandal beset the government when one of Ellen’s ministers and long-time friend and colleague, a gentleman by the name of Willis Knuckles, was asked to resign after he was photographed with no clothes on in the company of two ladies, in a similar state of undress to whom, as one report put it, “he was not legally married.”
I checked out the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s website for Travel Advice. My second mistake was to look at the equivalent US Government site. It seemed that Liberia was less safe than Afghanistan with 90% unemployment, gangs of former combatants roaming the streets, very high rates of violent crime in which foreign nationals were particularly targeted. I stumbled across another website, this one showing a recent rally against the high incidence of rape in Paynesville. Round about this time, I happened to hear, by chance, Hilary Benn talking about Liberia on Woman’s Hour. Special feature on rape and domestic violence. “People have been brutalised by so many years of war” he said. “The judicial system is dysfunctional and you can’t rely on the police. Right now, it’s the poorest place on the planet”.
I began to wonder if I was being irresponsible by thinking of going there now. I phoned Petra Rohr-Rouendaal, my Health Images colleague, to see how she was feeling about the trip. She told me about the operation she had had on her foot and how that was her main worry. Petra’s theory was that reporting of crime in Liberia was better than it had been when we were last there - this explained the scare stories. “Well, I don’t think anyone will want to rape a limping 65-year old woman”, she joked. “And anyway I’ll have you there to protect me.” Practical Petra.
Nurse Caplan got the short straw. She gave me a couple of injections at Halesworth surgery during this pre-departure period, a time that is always a bit weird, neither here nor there. The cheapest malaria pills on offer were Lariam. 8 pills for £26. I commented on how expensive I thought they were and the nurse agreed. More than 6 dollars for one pill. I said, “Where I’m going, people could live on that for a day”. I was wrong - 6 dollars would see most Liberians through a whole week!
In the last few days before leaving, I had sent Topiyoo an e-mail, asking how much money he needed me to send for workshop materials, meaning paints, pencils, paper and other art supplies that participants would use to make visual aids. He wrote back saying that the workshop venue was nearly complete and the only workshop materials they needed were 300 dollars worth of zinc, so that there would be a roof on in time.
The price of zinc...
Taking our seats on the plane at Gatwick, I noticed a book on ‘Inclusive Education’ in the seat pocket in front of the woman sitting next to Petra. A few days earlier I had been in the bookshop at the Institute of Education, buying books for Topiyoo - I got him “Building a Creative School” and “Counselling Children”. I commented on the ‘Inclusive Education’ book to our fellow traveller, who turned out to be someone with similar interests to ourselves. She was very interested in our work with teachers in Liberia and soon produced her business card. Regina Bash-Taqi, founder of the Childhood Foundation, working to improve educational opportunities in her native Sierra Leone. We have remained in contact and are jointly submitting a proposal to Comic Relief for a project to train teachers in Sierra Leone how to make and use participatory teaching aids.
It was very interesting talking to Regina, who remembered going on shopping trips with her mother and aunt to Liberia in the 1960s. At that time, you could get things in Monrovia that weren’t available in Freetown. “Monrovia was a lovely city in those days”, she recalled nostalgically. As we were talking, I suddenly noticed someone I knew standing up by the toilet.
“Oh, I know that man”, I said. “It’s Macauley. He used to work at the Health Education Unit in Freetown”.
“Oh yes”, Regina added, “He’s my uncle, a great friend of my Dad’s”.
I had worked with T.E.Macauley in Sierra Leone in 1987 when I had carried out a consultancy for UNICEF there. I have rarely met a more accomplished waster. He became Director of the government’s moribund Health Education Unit and was a great attender of workshops, such as the ones I did at that time. Never one to overdo the work side of life, he was good company in the evenings and usually took me to a lively bar where the proprietor rolled nice joints for the customers up around Njala.
Macauley was good friends with UNICEF’s then IEC officer, Jalloh. On one occasion, the two of them came over to the UK and the British Council asked me to take them around various health education institutes and departments in London. I prepared an itinerary which included places like the Institute of Child Health, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, etc. where I had arranged to meet various colleagues to share ideas about health education. Macauley and Jalloh were polite enough and made a few of the right noises at vaguely appropriate times, but their hearts weren’t in it. What they really wanted was for me to take them shopping on Oxford Street. So, cutting the academic programme short, we made our way, via a pub or two, to Oxford Street. Inevitably, we soon came across a group of blokes selling gold watches and all sorts of other shiney jewellery out of a suitcase, for what they told us were bargain prices. I couldn’t get Macauley and Jalloh away from these salesmen - they were totally transfixed! They each purchased various items of bling to take home - this was definitely the highlight of their day. I went up the aisle to where Macauley was sitting, two cans of beer on his little table, and reminisced a bit.
When the plane reached Freetown, nearly everybody got off and nobody got on. This was slightly disconcerting and rather odd to be on a plane, a Boeing 757, which could seat hundreds but on which there were no more that ten passengers. We had a chat with two incredibly young-looking Canadian youths who were going to Monrovia to fly planes and helicopters for the UN.
Before long we were standing sweating in front of a kiosk labelled Immigration. The only picture on the walls was a billboard advertising the Liberia Cement Co. Outside, we were met by our friend Topiyoo Nya Blimie, his new partner Shelda Clark and their teaching colleague Daniel Yambey. The airport at Robertsfield is quite a distance from town so we had a nice drive through the dark countryside, very happy to be there and to see Topiyoo again. There were very few lights anywhere on the journey - electricity is a luxury in Liberia. The car, a local taxi of the sort that UN and NGO staff are forbidden to use, felt like every part of it was loose and like the floor was going to fall out of it at any moment. We passed the barracks where in 2000 we had been stopped at a checkpoint by some adolescent soldiers, drunk and smelling of strong ganja. Not even a check-point now. Topiyoo started explaining that the zinc for the workshop roof had cost more than anticipated because the Indians that control the market there had withdrawn from sale the cheaper grade sheets, as there was something of a building boom taking place now that peace was being kept.
We arrived at the guest house, where we had stayed on our previous visit, to a fairly indifferent greeting from our fellow guests. It was nearly bedtime - people tend to retire at about 9 p.m. there. A young man called John introduced himself. He was carrying a Bible and wore a white t-shirt on which was written in bold black letters with fuzzy edges “STONED AGAIN”. John said “God Bless You”, or words to that effect. I went to get a drink of water, being absolutely dehydrated.
“There is no drinking water until tomorrow” came an unpleasant voice from a somewhat unattractive white woman. This was the infamous Nadine, about whom more later. I checked the water filtering machine and filled a plastic bottle with perfectly healthy drinking water.
Old pirates yes they rob I...
The guest house is right by the ocean, looking at which I thought usually about slavery, trying to imagine something of those times. Impossible, of course. When I was here last time I was reading a book by musicologist David Toop entitled “:Ocean of Sound”. All about abstract electronic music, making one very aware of ambient sound. By far the most dominant sound there is the sound of the ocean, waves breaking on a steep, shelved beach. Undertow. They never stop and seem even louder as you are falling asleep. Loudest of all is just before a storm when the wind gets up and the sea is full of sand clouds.
Liberia’s national badge is a seal on which is depicted a palm tree, a slave ship, a dove carrying a message of peace and a wheelbarrow with a spade leaning against it. Nature, slavery, peace and hard work. Palm trees line the beach here, but when we came in 2000 they had all been cut down by hungry people who had to resort to eating the ‘palm cabbage’ found underneath the bark. They have now grown back a bit and we like to think of them as a symbol for the country, our fingers crossed.
There are land crabs and lizards with black bodies and orange heads and tails. Their heads bob up and down as if they’re really interested in what’s going on. Under a palm tree across the road, the ocean for a backdrop, stands ‘the elephant man’, endlessly patient, waiting for a white man or woman to emerge from the guest house and buy one of his carved elephants.
On Sundays people come to the beach for recreation. Some come to steal things from people much richer than themselves. There can be Catholic nuns playing boules with their charges, laughing as they throw brightly coloured plastic balls along the sand. All things bright and beautiful. The Lord God made them all.
A couple of ships move along the horizon flying their Liberian flags of convenience. Rust buckets, barely seaworthy. A source of foreign exchange. Nearer to shore are the canoes of fishermen. We met one called Vincent who was a bit drunk. There had been a storm in the night so it was not good to go to sea. Vincent was having a day off, visiting his local bar, drinking cane juice out of a plastic bag. It was good to meet someone who didn’t have a Biblical name - at least I don’t think there’s a Vincent in the Bible. The fishermen use dugout canoes. I wonder if, when they look at a tree, they see a canoe in it, like Michelangelo saw David in a block of marble.
A helicopter passes over. Maybe the 12-year old Canadians are joyriding.
Smoked fish and jerk pork...
The first settlers were slaves that had been freed in the USA and “repatriated” by the American Colonisation Society. Opinions differ about whether the motive for this was altruistic or simply that it was an opportunity to get rid of a few hundred unwanted immigrants. I put repatriated in inverted commas because the freed slaves who arrived at Providence Island in Monrovia in 1822 had probably not come from Liberia originally but from other West African countries. The descendants of these people are now known as Americo-Liberians.
At roundabout the same time, according to our friend Shelda Clark, a shipload of slaves taken from the Congo was on its way to the Caribbean when they heard that slavery had been abolished. The slaves were freed and put ashore in a part of Monrovia now called, appropriately enough, Congotown. One of the landmarks in present-day Congotown is the massive concrete skeleton of a building that was to be a new Defence Ministry, but was never finished. Today it is inhabited by hundreds of homeless, displaced people whose brightly coloured washing can be seen draped over the blackened concrete, somewhat reminiscent of Hundertwasser.
The slaves from the Congo were darker skinned than those who had arrived from America, their gene pools not having been infiltrated by their owners. At first there was a sort of leadership battle between the two groups. “There was a fierce war between them”, Shelda told us. This was soon resolved, though. Descendants of both groups are now, confusingly, often referred to as ‘Congo People’ by members of Liberia’s sixteen indigenous tribes.
The indigenous people were not, of course, consulted about whether or not they wanted lots of streetwise Afro-Americans to descend upon them and start telling them what to do. Each of the tribes had its own culture and often its own language. We saw, in the museum, an example of the alphabet of the Vai people. It was quite different from any other script I have seen, a bit like Greek mixed up with Amharic. According to Shelda, there was “a bit of friction” between the locals and the settlers to begin with. This didn’t last long, though and soon the indigenous people were eating out of the hands of the newcomers. The settlers had brought with them the recipes for smoked fish and jerk pork, originally Caribbean ideas, and these food went down very well with the locals. Shelda’s partner, Topiyoo, said “We sold the country for some smoked fish and sour pork”, apparently a common saying among indigenous people to this day.
Liberia’s first president was Joseph Jenkins Roberts. He was born in Virginia in the USA. The first eight presidents, taking us up to 1884, were all also born in the USA. Mostly from Virginia, Maryland, Ohio and, the last one, Kentucky. The first to be born in Liberia was born in Monrovia. His name was Hilary Richard W. Johnson and he was in office between 1884 and 1892.
In more recent times, William Tubman was president from 1944 - 71. His ‘open door’ policy encouraged foreign investment and it was Tubman who introduced the ‘flags of convenience’ idea. It was in Tubman’s time that Regina and her mum went on shopping trips from Freetown to Monrovia. Mr. Tubman had the privelege of dying while still in office. He was succeeded by William Richard Tolbert Jr. who did not enjoy the same fate. He was overthrown and assassinated by a master-sergeant from the Liberian army by the name of Samuel Kanyon Doe, who became the country’s next president.
A hard rain’s a gonna fall...
Doe, sometimes referred to by his initials SKD, was president of Liberia from the time of his coup in 1980 until his violent death in 1990. He was ‘elected in 1985. He was a member of the Krahn tribe, a “country boy” from Grand Gedeh county, whose rule became increasingly corrupt and unbearable for most of Liberia’s people during the 1980s.
In 1985, a lady called Mother Durkley, who was known as a bit of a soothsayer, made a broadcast on both TV, such as it was, and radio in Monrovia. She predicted that “A hard rain is comin’...and proceeded to foresee several of the events that took place in the years to come, according to Topiyoo and Shelda. Those on whom the rain fell would die while those on whom the rain did not fall would live. Topiyoo told us that other more specific predictions had been made by the old lady and this was enthusiastically corroborated by the taxi driver we were with at the time. Mother Durkley concluded that there was going to be a war “which will not stop until the bridge over the river in Monrovia is broken”.
Charles M. Ghankay Taylor served as president of Liberia from 1997 until 2003, the latter being one of the bloodiest years in Liberian history towards the end of which Taylor was forced to resign under intense pressure from the ‘international community’ aka George Bush. Back in the late 80s, Taylor was in jail in the USA, on charges of embezellment. Many Liberian politicians who were opposed to the brutal, Krahn oriented rule of SKD had fled to the States. Many of them supported the idea of a rebellion against Doe. Taylor was seen as the most likely leader for such a rebel group. It seems likely that the Americans more or less freed Taylor from jail so that he could lead a rebellion in Liberia. Taylor has famously said very little about this, restricting himself to something like “If you look out from an American prison and see that the gates are wide open, who would not walk out?”
It is said that on Christmas Eve, 1989, Taylor and his rebel forces, calling themselves the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPLF) entered Liberia from Cote d’Ivoire. Taylor was an ally of president Houphouet-Boigny, long-term leader of Cote d’Ivoire, basically because SKD was their common enemy. I was told that Doe had had Houphouet’s eldest son killed a few years earlier. Houphouet’s neice had, in addition, been married to William Tolbert who had been assassinated by Doe. During the next few years, Taylor gathered support for the NPLF and gradually worked his way towards Monrovia, spurred on by, among other things, a hatred of the Krahn tribe. By 1990, Taylor’s rebels had reached the eastern suburbs of Monrovia, while another rebel group led by Prince Johnson approached the city from the north. 1990 was a terrible year of indiscriminate and brutal acts, some in the name of tribalism, some the result of lawlessness and chaos. In September of that year, Doe was captured by Prince Johnson who proceeded to have himself filmed cutting off Doe’s ears. (By coincidence, I have been reading ‘The Mapmaker’s Wife’ by Robert Whitaker in which mention is made of an earlier ear amputation which led to the War of Jenkin’s Ear between England and Spain in 1738, after Robert Jenkins, captain of a British ship, returned from South America to present his pickled ear to the House of Commons). So that was the end of SKD although for many Krahn it was the beginning of thoughts about revenge...
The early 1990s saw continued fighting. An ‘army’ of Doe’s supporters called the United Liberation Movement for Democracy (ULIMO) was formed and fought several battles with Taylor’s NPFL. By 1993 Taylor had lost a lot of the grassroots support he had earlier enjoyed - his men had abused and massacred too many innocent people.Taylor had also formed an alliance with Sierra Leonean rebel leader Foday Sankoh - they were both interested in the diamond mines of south eastern Sierra Leone.
ECOMOG, the West African peacekeeping force had arrived, consisting mostly of Nigerian soldiers intent on plundering the country and lining their own pockets. In an old Rough Guide to West Africa, it says “Taylor had always claimed that ECOMOG was a front for a Nigerian colonisation of Liberia. Financially, at any rate, the Nigerian soldiers have done very well. Buchanan (Liberia’s second largest port) has been stripped bare by them, and there is no shortage of evidence that for hundreds, if not thousands of Nigerian soldiers, their ECOMOG posting has been first and foremost a business exercise”. I had heard similar tales about ECOMOG troops some years before in Sierra Leone.
A period of fighting broke out in 1994 between NPFL loyalists and a coalition of NPFL dissidents and ULIMO Krahns. Many Liberians fled into exile in Cote d’Ivoire, including our friend Topiyoo Nya Blimie. While a refugee, Topiyoo set up the Liberian Refugee Visual Arts Project and in 1997, Petra and I went over there to run an arts workshop in Danane, in the western part of Cote d’Ivoire. Later in 1997 an unfree and unfair election was held in Liberia, as a result of which Charles Taylor was made president. People were, by then, tired of war. The country had been more or less destroyed. I remember talking with one of our workshop participants in the summer of 1997, when there were rumours of peace and the election and a return from exile. I must have said something like “You must be looking forward to going home”. He replied something like “What is home? When your house has been destroyed, your family has been killed and there is no job”. Fuck, what is home?
It wasn’t long before Topiyoo was telephoning again to say that things were, once more, taking a turn for the worse. Rebel groups opposed to Taylor’s regime were forming, the economy, if that’s the right word, was down the drain and still more hard rain was gonna fall. By 2000, Topiyoo had managed, heroically in my opinion, to continue his work for the community under the name of the Liberian Visual Arts Project (LIVAP). He had established a school which catered for the poorest kids in the local community. It was housed in the concrete shell of a huge, half-built house owned by the widow of a former minister in SKD’s government, another ‘country boy’ from Grand Gedeh. He had been Minister of Works and had received large bribes from construction and roadbuilding companies in exchange for lucrative for contracts.
Again, in 2000, Petra and I went over and did another visual aids workshop. It was weird working in that space, complete with no roof, but great to work with those people who had sufferred so much from the neverending war. People who had eaten palm cabbage and grass and were still struggling on against all the odds. They were glad of the lunches we provided at the workshop!
You may find it hard to believe but there was still worse to come for many Liberians. During the years of Taylor’s presidency, two important opposition groups developed as rebel armies, each named as inappropriately as the other. These were the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) and Liberians United for Democracy (LURD).
MODEL were mainly Krahn fighters from Doe’s old home county of Grand Gedeh - they’ve got long memories. Among their war aims was revenge for the murder of SKD. By late 2002, MODEL forces had fought their way towards the eastern outskirts of the capital, coming in from the direction of Robertsfield airport, raping and pillaging as they did so.
LURD were mainly men and boys from the Mandingo tribe. Mandingos live in Guinea, Liberia’s neighbour to the north, and in the Liberian counties which border on Guinea - Lofa County, Nimba County and Bong County. Yes, Bong. So LURD were approaching Monrovia from the north and west, while MODEL were coming from the east. LURD came right down, in early 2003, onto
Bushrod Island, one of the poorest parts of town, just across the river from Monrovia city centre. The Mandingo people are muslims and we were told by Kulubu, the Christian cook at our Christian guest house, that they wanted to make Liberia an Islamic state. I said to Kulubu “Aren’t there Fula muslims in Guinea?” She said “Yes, but they were not involved with LURD. They are not aggressive like the Mandingos. If two people have an argument, the Fula try to settle it by dialogue. The Mandingos settle it by fighting”.
Three World Wars in one year. That’s how Liberians describe 2003. WW1 took place at the beginning of the year, followed by a ceasefire that lasted for only a few weeks. WW2 then broke out. After a while, another ceasefire was agreed under pressure from the international community. “We thought that was the end of it.”, Kulubu told us, “Everybody wanted peace”. Despite this, the fighting started up again, this phase being referred to as WW3. In the latter part of the year, the international community (i.e. the Americans) forced the warring parties to adhere to a longer-lasting ceasefire, since when a fragile peace has broken out and held because of the presence of 16,000 or so UN peacekeepers.
We heard a lot about an area next to the American embassy called Greystone, which was supposed to have been a safe haven for residents of central Monrovia in 2003. Kulubu told us that her husband, Peter, had been at Greystone at that time. “Rockets were coming every day”, she said. These were from LURD forces on Bushrod Island, presumably aimed at the American embassy, said to be the largest American embassy in Africa. Kulubu said that one day five people right next to her husband were killed by a rocket. “They had to sleep next to the dead bodies - it was so crowded that they couldn’t move the corpses till the next day. They were just sittin’ there waitin’ for the next rocket to fall. Children were starvin’, there was no water. Imagine havin’ no water in this heat”, Kulubu continued. “If you had a slice of bread it was as if you had the whole world”. She made an expansive, ‘wholeworld’ gesture and told us that, if LURD had gained control, they would have taken over the country and killed all non-muslims. “It was very terrible for Christians in Liberia”, she concluded.
Between 2003 and 2005, an interim government was led by Charles Gyude Bryant. This executive was not supposed to enter into any large contracts with private companies. Surprise, surprise, they ignored this stricture, carried on in time-honoured fashion and, by all accounts, spent a very profitable time in office, before well-organised and reasonably free and fair elections (opinions differ) were held in 2005.
Now, in 2007, the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) is keeping the peace. White tanks and Land Cruisers, checkpoints manned by soldiers who are not drunk. They are training the police while motorists in the town centre shout abuse at trainee traffic police, and get away with it. There are programmes to train ex-combatants to do useful jobs. There aren’t many jobs, however, and unemployment being around 90%. Re-integration it may be but, as someone said to me,
“You can take the guns away but the minds are still the same”. Charles Taylor is about to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court. How many people have died? The answer is blowing in the wind.
Walking to work...
Our daily walk up to the school where we were working took about half an hour. It started by the beach, where the palm trees looked hopeful. Usually a child or two was silhouetted against the ocean on which floated few canoes. Turning inland we passed a school from which came the singsong sound of children learning by rote, repeating what the teacher had just said. Next we came to the football pitch. Like most African pitches, it has no grass on it. We sometimes saw training sessions with young men running and doing exercises and taking themselves seriously as only young men can.
There’s huge interest in football among the men. The women don’t understand the offside rule. English teams are supported with great enthusiasm and, of course, former footballer George Weah was a presidential candidate in the 2005 election. I saw three European Champions semi-finals while I was in Liberia. We had to pay 20 Liberian dollars (16p) to watch a small TV set perched on top of two upturned crates with ‘Monrovia Brewery’ printed on them. The bar was always incredibly noisy. From a large adjoining room came a constant thunderous, bass driven sound of very loud music, while the viewers shouted at each other throughout. Petra took some toilet paper and stuffed it in her ears for protection. The third match was the Liverpool v. Chelsea tie. To begin with about half the people in the bar were supporting Chelsea - many here like Drogba, as he’s from Cote d’Ivoire. As the game progressed, Liverpool started to get the upper hand. It seemed that the majority were now gunning for Liverpool. By the time Liverpool secured victory after a penalty shoot-out, everybody in the bar was supporting them - jumping up and down, shouting, laughing, hugging each other. In the street outside, there were joyful scenes, a party atmosphere in which the whole community, including the women, seemed to be caught up. As we picked our way through the crowd of happy fans, Petra said “So, Liberia has won the World Cup!”
Having crossed the football pitch we come to the tarmac road, busy with yellow taxis in which are lots of very squashed people, lorries with young men standing up in the back, waving, shouting, smiling. A few Land Cruiser-type vehicles, several small motorcycles and lots of people pushing wheelbarrows full of anything from coconuts to building materials. No Buses. No matatus. On a small table by the road stand a couple of large jam jars full of a pinkish liquid. This is the local
petrol station.
Religion is even more popular than football. At the roadside, there are lots of metal signs with names of churches and missions on them. Next to the petrol table, a sign reads ‘Association of Evangelicals of Liberia - Head Office’. Behind it stands a sign for an NGO called ‘Samaritan’s Purse’. The obligatory ‘Coca Cola’ sign, not to be outdone. Across the road we see another school. On one of its walls is a large mural/sign which reads ‘Prime System Church of Christ”. On our previous visit, Petra and I made a bit of a list of these signs on the road to the airport, which really are ubiquitous. ‘Dominican Christian Fellowship Centre’, ‘Faith Assembly of God’, ‘The Love Baptist Church’, ‘Family Life Mission’, ‘Bible Believing Church’, ‘Ambassador Church of Christ’, ‘Church of God in Christ’, ‘School of Christ’, ‘Foundation Church of Christ’, ‘Fellowship of Faith’, ‘Lighthouse University’, ‘Kingdom Harvest’, ‘Zion University College’, ‘Mount Sinai Church’, ‘First United Church of Christ’, ‘Free Methodist Church’, ‘Gates Apple University Church’, ‘Faith Outreach Church’, ‘Christ Life Temple’, ‘Mount Olive Bible Church’, ‘First United Christ Temple’, ‘Calver Mission Inc.’, ‘Gospel of Life Church’, ‘World Christian Revival Mission’, ‘Highway Fellowship of Liberia’, ‘Blessed Hope Assembly of God Church’, ‘Liberia Baptist Seminary’, ‘Dr. Horton
Memorial Baptist Church’, ‘Bible Way Mission’, ‘Bethesda Mission’, ‘Mount Zion Christian Church Inc.’, ‘Capernaum Baptist Church’, ‘Rock Church International’, ‘Christ Healing Temple’, ‘Lutheran Preaching Point’, ‘ARC Episcopal Church Liberia’, ‘Joseph Peter Mount Sinai Memorial Church’, ‘Rene B. Reid A.M.E. Church’, ‘New Apostolic Church’, ‘Robertsfield Baptist Academy’, ‘Inreach Mission (Lib. Inc.), Number One Christ Church’ - and so on.
We walk by the side of the road until we come to the ‘Calver Mission’ sign and take a right towards Rock Hill. As we turn into the unmade road, a small kiosk announces, in large letters, ‘God Is In Control’, beneath which is written ‘We do the ff. Local and Int’l Calls; Sell Scratch Card; Money Exchange; Charge Phones’. I’ve never seen anyone in the kiosk but maybe they appear when interest is shown. Nobody appeared when Petra went inside the kiosk to have her photo taken. Just up from the kiosk is a derelict house that belonged to a political opponent of Charles Taylor. This man had heard that Taylor’s thugs were coming to get him. He had just bundled his family into their car, when the thugs appeared, dragged him out, stabbed him in the stomach and proceeded to pull his guts out onto the street in full view of his family, children going to school and other passers-by.
As we proceed up Rock Hill we hear the allaround sound of hammers striking rock. Outcrops of granite stick out of the ground everywhere you look. A young man who we see every day at around 8.45 a.m. still sits beneath a jackfruit tree hammering lumps of rock into smaller pieces. The daily grind. More men and boys do the same work nearby, under a tree laden with the mango-like fruit that locals call ‘sweet plum’ or ‘German plum’. Cone-shaped piles of finished granite chippings sit waiting to be sold for building work - they are used for making concrete. Currently, there is a big demand as re-building work has started in Monrovia. In this part of Paynesville itself, many Liberians, recently returned from the States now that peace has come, are building houses. Tap, tap, tap, metal on granite, hard work, the sound never stops.
Hard work but there’s money in it. One man we met had dug great big holes in his garden to get at the valuable rock. It looked as if his house might collapse if he kept going. “He won’t mind if it does”, Topiyoo told us. “The garden is worth more than the house”. First you dig away the earth around the base of your boulder. The you get some old lorry tyres and pack them around your boulder. Then you set fire to them sending great plumes of black smoke high into the air. Soon the heat causes the granite to split. You work at the cracks until you can take off some large lumps. You get a sledgehammer and start breaking the rock into smaller and smaller pieces, hoping that not too many of them shoot into your eyes. Young boys carry on their heads large plastic containers full of stones. Women push fully loaded wheelbarrows of chippings from one pile to another. The lorry appears and the locals fill it up with the fruits of their labour. I think the pay is very good. Things are looking up on Rock Hill.
At the top we turn left, sweating profusely by this stage, though not hammering a sledgehammer against a granite outcrop, looking forward to another day at the workshop. Past a little stall selling tiny bundles of peppers, bars of soap, small things, run by a lady who attended our 2000 workshop. Past the fortress to the school and the smiling faces of our friends.
Among the believers...
The guest house we are staying in has five rooms which are normally used exclusively by religious fanatics. We are staying there because there’s nowhere else to stay in this area. It’s on a compound called ELWA which stands for ‘Eternal Love Within Africa’. You are not allowed to smoke or drink anywhere on the compound or to sport immodest swimwear on the beach. Didn’t someone turn water into wine? The compound has its own radio station, a huge mast making a well-known landmark in these parts, spreading the word of the believers who others might call infidels. Last time we were here we were conned into giving an interview to this radio station. At the end, the interviewer said “Normally people make a donation when we interview them”. I gave him 5 dollars for the priviledge.
John, in his “Stoned Again” t-shirt, can often be seen reading the Bible, when he’s not being bossed around by Nadine, the Swiss lady. Anything you say to John he replies “Thank God”. Nadine was apparently born in this guest house. Her parents were among the first missionaries to come to Liberia. Nadine’s mission seemed to be to make our stay at the guest house as
unenjoyable as she could. She would rattle on the toilet door every time Petra went in there, she removed toilet rolls left in the loo by other guests, she put a chair against a door to prevent Petra going to the bathroom. When I asked her once if she knew where the toilet rolls were kept she said, gruffly, “No, there are no toilet rolls. You could do like I do and go to the market and buy some”. It was rather surreal, sometimes, as Nadine used to go around with nothing on except a t-shirt tucked into her knickers. She had very bandy legs and hunched over at the shoulders and shuffled around bad-temperedly issuing instructions to “Stoned Again” John. She had brought to the guest house two or three large suitcases. One of these was filled with packets of paper tissues and another with balloons. We overheard her saying to someone that she had brought these things “Because I love the children”. When she left, a week later, the suitcases were still full.
One night, at about 11 o’clock, Nadine was waliking up and down outside the window of Petra’s room speaking in a very loud voice into her mobile phone. After some time, Petra, who had just about fallen asleep, got fed up with this and went outside to ask Nadine if she could either speak more quietly or move away from the building.
“I have to speak loudly. I’m talking to my mother in Switzerland and she’s deaf”, snapped Nadine. “Well, can you go further away, it’s late and I want to get some sleep”, Petra replied.
“I can’t help the way I am”, Nadine told her, “That’s how God made me. If I’m good, I go to heaven.
If I’m bad, I go to hell”.
“That’s probably where you’ll go”, Petra surmised, then added “You’re a very rude woman”.
Fundamentalism in action.
The only other guest, when we first arrived, was a rather overweight, short black American who introduced himself as Steve. He sufferred continually from the heat and must have lost several litres of perspiration every day. He gave me his business card, on which was a small coloured portrait of himself, somewhat compressed, vertically, making him look decidedly odd. This was Stephen Barron Zeogar of the United Bassa Organisation in the Americas, Inc. On his card, it read “For renewed Financial Accountability and Social Responsibility”.
When I asked him what he did for a living, he said “I’m a marketing expert”.
“What mission are you with”, Steve asked me. He came from Minnesota.
“What part of London are you from?”, he asked. By London he meant England. He was from Minnesota.
Steve was building a two-storey Bible College somewher over near Buchanan. A container load of computers for the college was still waiting for customs clearance in the port of Monrovia. Steve complained that bringing stuff in was a slow process these days. “The new government insists that every container is searched to make sure that no arms are being brought in”, he drawled.
One morning Petra asked Steve if he’d heard the storm during the night. “Yeah, but it didn’t do me no good”, he complained, sweating profusely. When Sunday came around, Steve was really pissed off because the Liberians wouldn’t let him attend church as he had only calf-length shorts and no proper shirt and tie. I didn’t find it difficult to see the funny side of this, I must admit.“It’s not the way you dress that matters, man”, he complained sweatily, “It’s what’s in your heart”. More fundamentalism in action.
From time to time people from a sister guest house nearby would come and join us for breakfast. One day a smugly smiling Christian man walked in followed by four silent, anxious looking Liberian orphans. Two girls, two boys, ages 5-13.One of them was called Eden. The man was adopting them and they were all flying off to start a new life in Kentucky joining his wife and the three children they already have. He thought we needed to know all about him. Most of these fundamentalists seem to find themselves endlessly fascinating.
“It says in the Bible that seven is the perfect number of children to have in a family”
“You must have a good job to be able to support such a large family in the States”, I ventured
between mouthfuls of white bread and blueberry jam.
“Yes” he said, the smug smile of the devout stuck to his mouth. “I’m a chemist”.
It turned out that he works for Lexmark, developing coatings for their computer printers. The kids ate their bread and honey and drank their tea with condensed milk in silence. What thoughts were going on behind their big eyes?
“They’re excited about going on an aeroplane.” As an afterthought, the man said, addressing the children, “Aren’t you?”
The kids just looked at him in that cool, totally non-commital way that kids can do.
Speaking of the oldest boy, the new father remarked “He’d eat chicken and rice for breakfast, dinner and tea if he had the chance”.
“He can have Kentucky Fried Chicken”, I said, helpfully.
“Are you from a religious background?”, the man asked.
Surprising Petra and myself with my politeness I said “I’m not a regular churchgoer”.
After that, he lost interest in talking to us further.
One evening four large white American men in identical t-shirts walked into the guest house. On their shirts was a badly designed badge withe the slogan “Through Education Liberating Liberia” (TELL). Fairly ambitious, I thought. It was a bit of a shock to see them as Nadine had left, Steve had gone upcountry to get on with his two-storey Bible College and Petra and I had had the place to ourselves. Suddenly, it was full up. The Americans had brought loads of supplies with them, including gallons of mineral water and their favourite breakfast cereals. What filled up the guest house, though, was their selves. Two of them were at least 6’6” tall and big with it. One was a mere 6’ and the fourth about my size.
John, Ron, Fred and Marion (the smallest) soon introduced themselves in an all-American way and began to tell us about themselves and their work here. They were here for a week to help build a Bible school. They were from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Fred, one of the giants, was a building materials salesman, Ron, the other giant, was an auto-mechanic, Marion was a retired financial advisor and John, the team leader with a craggy John Wayne face called himself an
educator.
We got to know these guys quite well. They were great, coming home knackered after a day’s work laying blocks and mixing cement in the heat, determined to enjoy themselves, praying before scoffing their spaghetti, demonstrating to the world how the West was won. Fred and Ron shared the room next to mine and at nights, we used to leave all our bedroom doors open to assist air circulation. I have a nice image in my mind of these two giants lying motionless on their backs in extremely hot and humid conditions on two normal sized bunk beds, their legs sticking out a foot or so beyond the end of the bunks. The missionary position.
One day while chatting with Ron, he referred to a speech Tony Blair had made at some point. He had said something that Ron liked - “There are only two men who will unconditionally lay down their lives for you - Jesus Christ and the American soldier”. This was all beginning to prove my theory that they were really undercover agents for the CIA, fighting the good fight against the spread of Islam in Liberia!
John gave me a copy of the newsletter that he produced. They do similar construction work on Christian schools in Russia. The newsletter started as follows - “We aim in the following pages to inform you about several educational opportunities in which God demonstrates His love for His children living in Russia. Please continue to pray for our brothers and sisters working to strengthen Christ’s kingdom in the former Soviet Union through Christ-centred education.” Their president would have been proud of them. Still, at least they had passports.
Another breakfast-time, two nice black Americans from Washington joined us. One was in his forties. The other was older, with grey curly hair and a sense of calm about him. They were about to set off on what they had been told was an 8-9 hour journey to Nimba County, in the north, where they are involved with a Mission. We chatted a bit about Bush, Blair and Iraq and some of the world’s problems. At the end of our discussion, the older man said, in a very slow Southern accent, “Well, ah take ev’ry day as it comes”. Petra said “Yes, that’s what my yoga teacher says. Each new day is a gift - enjoy the present”.
They were all pleased with that. Coincidentally, I’ve been talking a bit with Jo about that idea. She’s also a yoga teacher now and her version is “Enjoy the now”.
So, we had a little exposure to the joys of Christian fundamentalism, American-style. The missionaries appear to have done a thorough job in Liberia. The schoolteachers at our workshop scoffed at the idea of evolution, prayed a lot, attributed all good fortune to God and even made pictures to help them teach the Creation story. As a souvenir I bought some spent bullets that had been fashioned into crosses. When Petra asked one of our friends where God had been during the war, the lady said “There must have been a reason for the war but we don’t understand it”. We met a man in a little local bar who told us he was “winning souls for God”.
I keep thinking of ‘Redemption Song’. “My hand was made strong by the hand of the Almighty”.
I also remember that”The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible - it ain’t necessarily so”.
All hands to the pump...
The big house where the LIVAP school used to be has been completed. It is right next to the new school, which it dwarfs. It has a perimeter wall reminiscent of a medieval English castle, in which are stuck hundreds, if not thousands, of upturned broken beer bottles. All round the wall, fixed to its top edge, is a bundle of razor wire which, if stretched out would go from here to the moon. One morning, on our way to school, I took a couple of photos of this wall. Straight away I was approached by an unpleasant young man who wanted to know why I was taking pictures of his ‘mother’s’ house. I explained that I was an artist and had been thinking of painting a line right round the wall without once removing the brush from the surface. His ignorance welled up inside him, so we thought we’d better explain more clearly before he became violent. He was one of a group of thugs employed by the lady of the house to protect her if anybody was able to scale the broken bottles and razor wire and live to tell the tale.
Our friend Topiyoo’s house is made of wooden poles and rush matting. He has no locks on his door which is right next to a water pump that he has managed to get installed for the benefit of the local community. The borehole goes down 176 feet and the water tastes delicious.
Topiyoo had invited a journalist, George Chipoyee, to the workshop that day. George has been a ‘stringer’, as it said on his business card, in Monrovia since 1977, so he was an interesting person to chat with. Looking at the big house across the road, he said “That’s what it’s like here. A murderer has a big house like a palace. A man working for his community lives in a slum house”. George also showed me a sheet of scale charges or rates used by newspapers in Monrovia. $400 US would buy the front page of most papers, maybe $300 for the centre spread, and so on. “so, what does a politician do?”, he asked, rhetorically.
On the last afternoon of the workshop, we suddenly heard screaming and shouting coming from outside. One of the thuggish pillocks who works at the big house had come to get some water and had tried to bully his way to the front of the queue. Topiyoo had told him that he had no right to do this and that he should join the back of the queue. This enraged the man, who, I think, had been drinking, and he entered Topiyoo’s house behind him. He hit Topiyoo in the face and in the stomach. Topiyoo tried to get him out without resorting himself to violence but this didn’t work. The shouting came when Topiyoo chased the man back outside and delivered a couple of karate kicks. All the young men from the workshop ran outside and helped grab the offender and frog-marched him back to the large iron gate of his employer’s residence where he was unceremoniously pulled inside.
Talking about this incident later, Topiyoo referred to my book. “Bob’s book is very po-lit-i-caal” he said, laughing. “Powerless people need to work together”. I was relieved to discover, a few days later, that Topiyoo had received an apology from the big house and that they would be getting their own borehole soon.
We became aware of another big house, too. Just behind Mourtada beach stands the palatial residence of the former Speaker of Liberia’s parliament Edwin Snow. The new president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, with the support of many other members of her government, asked Mr. Snow to resign his position as Speaker. Snow had been an ally of Charles Taylor. In fact, he had once been married to one of Taylor’s daughters though since divorced. He remains a Representative for one of the constituencies in Montserrado County.
Snow was, basically, an embarassment to the new government, a reminder of the old days before the policy of zero tolerance for corruption was introduced. He was uneducated, according to Topiyoo and Shelda, who also said that Snow could not speak in the correct, polite way to visiting diplomats. He was just in politics for the money and, judging by his house, it worked. The razor wire alone must have cost more than the average Liberian earns in a lifetime. On of the most bizarre elements of this monument to bad taste is the presence of two tailor’s dummies on the balcony overlooking the ocean. They are dressed in combat fatigues and hold rifles at the ready. The only thing is, they never move. An unusual burglar alarm. Taylor’s dummies.
Education, education, education...
Many teachers left Liberia during the periods of war. Some stayed and many unqualified people took on the jobs of schoolteachers to make up the shortfall. When peace cam after 2003, the International NGOs started arriving, and many of the qualified teachers took jobs with the new NGOs. Teaching, like most jobs in Liberia, is badly paid. A teacher’s salary is around $20US per month and sometimes they don’t get paid for months on end. The yellow fever jab I had before going to Liberia cost me the equivalent of nearly 6 months salary for a teacher there.
There is a great need to rebuild the education system and to train the next generation of schoolteachers. Some teachers training colleges exist within the government system and a few others have been set up by committed private individuals to try to fill the gaps. Topiyoo works as a teacher at the Liberian College for Standard Education System (LICOSES) in Monrovia. He and Shelda took us to visit the college soon after we arrived. It looked very poor. The students we spoke to were weary but still committed to doing something to help rebuild the country. Becoming a teacher was certainly not the way to get rich. The LICOSES College had been set up by a man who had recently died from poisoning, Shelda told us as we wandered around the dark and dilapidated classrooms full of smiling, welcoming students. I was puzzled by the poisoning story so pressed Shelda to explain further.
“Maybe someone put sometin’ in his beer”, she explained. “It was a’ his house. They were drinkin’ and there was a man there who liked dis man wife, I don’ know”. She paused and then said, questioningly, “Maybe jealousy. People don’ like it if somebody get success”.
As well as government schools, there are several types of private schools in Liberia. These include faith schools, mostly Christian, including Catholic, and “community” schools. The one set up by Topiyoo in Paynesville is a community school, registered with the Ministry of Education and with its own board of governors. The community it serves is known as the SKD Sports Complex Community so-called because of its proximity to the national stadium. Children pay a minimal fee per term to attend but, as Shelda told us, they don’t turn any children away just because their parents can’t afford the fee.
The school has six classrooms and two hundred-plus pupils. Topiyoo and his colleagues have built the school with their own hands, using a block-maker to make the concrete blocks. They have cleared sloping ground, hammered away at granite boulders and carried out manually work that would be done in the UK by mechanical diggers and excavators. When we first saw the new school, I said to Topiyoo “Why didn’t you build a few pyramids while you were at it?”
Three of the classrooms are built from timber and matting and need to be rebuilt using blocks. Whenever an inspector comes from the Ministry, Topiyoo has to find a bribe of 500 Liberty to stop him creating a fuss. Soon, though, they are hoping to replace the mat structure - they need around $400US for this. They also need money for windows and doors, which they don’t have at the moment. This creates a security risk and they have already had some of the school chairs stolen. As well as the handpump, Topiyoo managed to get the NGO ‘Living Water’ to build three latrines for the school.
Petra and I, before we left, gave Topiyoo the money to buy a plot of land adjacent to the school which will one day be a playing field and vegetable garden for the kids to enjoy. It’s about 100m wide and 30m deep, on a slope, and cost $1000US. It is currently used as a place for local people to shit, so we had to pick our way through it fairly carefully. If we hadn’t given Topiyoo the money now, the plot would almost certainly have been sold off and a house built on it. This would have meant that the school would never be able to expand.
The way children are taught in Liberia, and in the Third World as a whole, is usually very didactic. The teacher stands at the front of the class and writes stuff on the blackboard. The children are supposed to copy it down in their copybooks. They sit in rows facing the teacher. Just like it was when I was at school in Harwich in the late 50’s/early 60’s. But very unlike the scene in Bramfield village school today, where you see small groups of children working together and the blackboard (which here is now called a chalkboard) takes a back seat. In African schools children often chant words and phrases that they may or may not understand, repeating by rote what the teacher has just said. Third World classrooms have no books or other resources. There is no visual stimulation, nothing to look at, just bare wall of rough blockwork or rotten matting half-eaten by bugs. A form of sensory deprivation that is, I think, enormously harmful to the development of a young mind. That’s why I think that even just to get the kids to paint a mural at their school is actually quite worthwhile.
Won’t you help to sing...
The reason Petra and I were in Liberia was to help run a 5-day training workshop at which the teachers from the LIVAP school, along with 20 or so other teachers and trainee teachers, would learn how to make and use low-cost pictorial teaching aids. The workshop was mainly funded by our charity ‘Health Images’, which used up the last of the money in the HI kitty. The Eva Reckitt Foundation, who had supported the publication of my book in 1995, also helped with this workshop. Petra ran a Beetle Drive at her house in Sutton Coldfield for 46 friends which raised £330 and I received donations from two friends totalling £60. Just in case anyone was wondering, Petra and I did our work free of charge! The money went on air fares, accomodation, workshop materials (including zinc for the roof) such as paper, paint, brushes, pencils, etc., food for 30 or so people every day. Some of Petra’s friends also donated some art materials.
The venue was great - the newly buit block unit with a sloping floor of laterite soil, a boulder sticking up in one place where Topiyoo and his mates had given up trying to level granite. No doors or windows, just holes in the walls. Nice and warm and humid, too, with a view of the national sports stadium that is currently being re-furbished by the Chinese. Great towers of
floodlights in a city with no electricity half the time. Looking out of another hole, you could see plumes of smoke from burning lorry tyres and hillsides which illustrated the sort of potential for soil erosion shown on a visual aid I used for demonstration purposes. We talked about this and mud slides in Peruvian slums. A bit worrying. Every day started and ended with prayers. These were often led by Mabel B. Harley who had also attended our earlier workshop here seven years ago. Mabel has a good voice and knows how to swing. It goes something like this...”We thank you O Go’ for dis wunnerfu’ ting O Go’ take your honour and take your glory we thank you fo’ bringin’ us here today O Go’ we want you to take complete control O father because we know there is a porpoise in ev’rything you do O Go’ so we will go forth from dis place O Go’ with one mind and one understandin’ O Lord...” All delivered in a continuous flow of words, like musical improvisation, with every so often domeone else chipping in with an “amen, brother” , a “praise de Lord” or a “Hallelujah”. Everybody swaying/dancing and happy clapping. Good fun even for a heathen, if a little sweaty.
I’m writing a separate report of what we did at the workshop, so I won’t bore you with too much detail here, just a few bits and pieces like some of the participants’ names. to give you a flavour of it. There was Ceasar Keleko, an oldish guy who I asked about palm-wine guitar music or similar. There was none to be found - another casualty of war. Annie T. Morgan who often wore a white baseball cal with “Election 05” printed on it.
Jerome B. Karbah. the first totally blind participant to have attended one of our visual communication workshops. He demonstrated to the group, at one point, how he was able to write on the blackboard and conduct a lesson (albeit a bit of a boring one). Ellen J.K. Jalery, a wiry lady who laughed a lot, usually at jokes made about her name which rhymes with ‘salary’. Vera K. Padmore and her picture cards telling the story of how Go’ created the world in seven days. Garmai Garbo, a young, incredibly thin woman who spoke with the quietest voice imaginable, not a great asset for a teacher. Elaine K. Weaymie, a very capable lady who, like several of the other female participants, wore wonderfully patterned clothes and headscarfs . Edwin B.K. Jackson Jr., a nice rasta-looking man always ready to laugh. Jeroline V.T.D. Wright, the youngest participant, aged about 20, and another one to whom laughing came easily. Benjamin Wehye, an intelligent and diligent young man who was always immaculately turned out in traditional African gear. Edna D. Monger, who was devastated by the news that came over her mobile phone on the last afternoon of the workshop that one of her closest friends had died. She had enjoyed the work so much but she left in tears.
It is always a bit emotional on the last afternoon of a workshop like this. Here, we had had Topiyoo’s fight and Edna’s bad news as well. We finished off, as usual, with the handing out of certificates, which are so important to people in Africa, followed by a bit of speech-making by participants and ourselves. Petra was saying her bit about how much we had enjoyed working with the group, how we admired what they have done in very difficult times, and so on, when she suddenly burst into tears. She said to me later “I don’t know why I burst into tears”. I said “I do. It’s very moving and inspiring to work with them, to see what they’ve done in spite of all the trouble. This is why we do this work - to show some solidarity with people like these”. It may sound a bit pious but it’s true.
A few days after the workshop, one of the participants, Paul Sinah, came to visit us at the guest house. Paul’s very keen on all things to do with graphics, painting and printmaking and he’s good company. Petra gave him a quick lesson in watercolour technique and then painted his portrait. Chatting to Paul, I asked if he was married. He said “Yes, but my wife died in the war. I have a seventeen year old daughter. I have brought her up on my own.”
Then, to change the subject to one less painful, Paul said “Bob, how do they bury people in England?” I was a bit puzzled by the question. “They put the body in a coffin and bury it in the ground.” Paul said “Do they do it like this ?” He gestured to indicate a horizontal interment. “Or like this?”, gesturing vertically. “I read that in America they bury them vertically”. Ha paused for a moment. “For every one person you bury like this (horizontal gesture) you can bury four or five people like this (upright gesture)”. His face lit up and he smiled a big smile, well pleased at the bright idea of upright burial. Oh yes, those Americans...so clever.
They say every man must need protection...
It goes without saying, as they say, that security is an issue in Liberia these days. High unemployment, high crime rates, lousy economy, corrupt police force, lack of independence of judiciary, extreme poverty, desperation, domestic violence...you name it.
At the junction in Paynesville, as elsewhere around the city, you can see billboards about rape, gun crime, corruption, army recruitment, respecting the law and being a good citizen. Lots of work for fellow artists as all the billboards were hand painted. Petra took photographs of several of the hoardings but we can’t look at them now as her camera was stolen from her room in the guest house one Sunday afternoon, just when a Land Cruiser marked ‘UNMIL - Military Police’ was parked right outside the door.
UNMIL is a large UN Mission, about 16,000 people, roughly the same size as the UN Missions in DRC and Sierra Leone in recent years. Looks like big business, a real presence, thousands of Land Cruisers, safety in numbers. As well as keeping the peace, they’re training the police and army. UN helicopters buzz along the coastline every morning and early evening. Regular as clockwork. On Sundays several Land Cruisers appear by the beach at ELWA. By early afternoon, there are hundreds of white men sunbathing, swimming or kicking balls while the locals watch. If you’ve got nothing there are many reasons for watching. An army in swimming trunks. A man’s world.
One evening I went along for a beer at Mourtada beach bar. Under one of the tin-roofed shelters was a group of 20 or so people, mostly men, drinking and talking. Four of them were playing a fairly relaxed game of volleyball near where I was sitting. And I was on my own, so I watched. Watching’s fun. I tried to figure our where they might be from. Obviously UNMIL, but which country of origin? They were quite large and light brown. One of them, a man, had a very high-pitched laugh. He laughed every time he hit the ball and he laughed every time he missed the ball and he often laughed, too, at what his friend did. At first I thought maybe they’re Japanese - but they looked too big. The language was singsong to my ears. Were they from Thailand? No, too big, wrong sounds.
So there I was, puzzled for twenty minutes or so. Then I heard the sound of a guitar and soon, from their shelter, which was maybe 30 metres from mine, came the unmistakeable sound of the South Seas. It was wonderful to hear those characteristic South Pacific harmonies and the relaxed strumming of the guitar. It was a great scene, too. Around their shelter were lots of palm trees blowin’ in the wind, behind which was the ocean and its white horses. I thought they looked at home here. It turned out that they were from Samoa.
Another night we were sitting on the bench outside the guest house, talking with Topiyoo and Shelda. Shelda was insisting that the main suspect for the camera theft had to be the security man. She reckoned that young men from the poorest parts of town - West Point, Bushrod Island - got jobs as security men with the idea of robbing the place they were employed to guard. We later made enquiries and it turned out that the security man had not been around on the day of the theft. In fact, I don’t know if there had been much security at any time. Anyway, as we were talking, there suddenly appeared about a dozen men running through the darkness, shouting, waving torches, truncheons and, in a couple of cases, rifles. Some dogs joined in, too. It was quite a shock. Apparently, a burglar had been disturbed trying to get in a house just along from us which explained the hue and cry. I asked Kulubu, the next day, if the thief had been caught. She said she didn’t know but that the police were involved. I asked if she had confidence in the local police and, slightly to my surprise, she said she had a lot of confidence in them. “They are the ones that UNMIL has trained”.
A few night later, the big news on the compound was that a gang of robbers had entered a house next door but one to us, in the night, tied up the man who lived there and helped themselves. Everybody was a bit jittery after these incidents. Petra spoke, soon after this, to Anneke, a young Dutch woman NGO person who had married a Liberian man, and who lives just along the beach track from us. Anneke said that you can’t really make your house impregnable - “If you lock the doors, they just come through the roof”. She was worried but told Petra “My husband thinks there are angels flying around our house who will protect us”. Anneke and her husband are both very religious.
So, what are LURD and MODEL up to nowadays? Stealing cameras from old white people? How long will UNMIL be here? George Chipoyee had told us that “As soon as UNMIL leave, we will start fighting each other again”. He was not the only person we met who took this pessimistic view. Had the causes for the wars gone away?
While I’m on the subject of security, I should mention our attempt to visit Greystone. We were taken up there by Comfort, an employee of our guitar-playing friend, Jonathan. The area called Greystone belongs to the American embassy. Comfort took us up there, past a couple of shack-like shops called things like ‘African Antique Centre’ and ‘African Art Dealer’, until we came to a large solid black metal gate which, you guessed it, was closed. I was a bit taken aback when Comfort started banging on the forebidding gate. Straight away, a small panel, about 4 inches wide and 3 inches high, was slid across to reveal the mouth and moustache of an American soldier who told us it was not possible for us to enter without security clearance. We should go to Security Gate 1 and ask there. At Gate 1 we found two or three tall, thin, black Americans, very neatly turned out in their sharply pressed black trousers, light brown shirts, identity necklaces, sewn on badges of office, epaulettes, moustaches and very long, polished truncheons. They glared at us when we smilingly greeted them, trying to put them at ease, and explaining that, strange as it may seem, we were interested in Liberian history and had heard a lot about the Greystone area.
They sent us a little further down the blocked-off road in front of the embassy, all checkpoints, barrels filled with cement and great lengths of wood, like railway sleepers, painted with red and white stripes placed zig-zaggy down the centre of the road. “Go to Gate 2 and see the Major”, we were told. We saw the Major at Gate 2. He said “If you want to visit Greystone you need to go and see the British Ambassador and get security clearance”. I said “O.K” we’ll forget it”.
The Major didn’t do smiling. The level of security around the embassy there was certainly impressive. The sort of security, in fact, that can only be afforded by a superpower.
A visit to the National Museum...
Through Sinkor and Congotown in one of those cars where the bottom’s about to fall out, past the Defence Ministry on past the university on the walls of which are some posters. “Our Judiciary is Still Corrupt” reads one, “Representatives and Senators are Accountable to the People” states another while a third demands “Cut Basic Commodity Prices Now”. We’re on our way to the National Museum. When we visited this museum seven years ago, it was incredibly sad and pathetic. I had never seen such an empty, run-down museum. It had been one of the more depressing experiences I’ve had. I was interested to see if things had changed.
On our way up the steps of the museum, Topiyoo’s phone rang. It was Saygbeh Korvah, one of the participants at the workshop we did in Cote d’Ivoire, phoning from America. Both Petra and I had a chat with Korvah who said how much they had appreciated our going to Danane in 1997 and how he has started a new life in the States. He’s living on Rhode Island and serving in the US Army. “Bob”, he shouted down the phone (he always shouted, full of life) “I gotta whole new life now. I ha’ done two degrees. One in Auto-mechanics and one in Crime Prevention and Law Enforcement”. Bizarrely, Korvah’s possibly coming to Scotland this year with a football team he’s got together over there! I always liked Korvah and remember being most impressed when he quoted something from Shakespeare to me. We’d been chatting and it turned out that he’d recently split up with his girlfriend. He was 19. He said he was upset but was getting over it and that before long he would be checking out other possibilities. “Give liberty to thine eyes”, he exclaimed, “And examine other beauty”. He laughed his loud laugh and left me thinking how unusual it would be if a 19 year old boy in the UK came out with something like that.
Inside the museum, we have a chat with the guide. His two colleagues are slouched, more or less asleep, on chairs just inside the door. My first impression is that there’s a slightly larger collection of artefacts than there was in 2000. Nothing spectacular and certainly room for improvement, but considering what has been going on in Liberia, not quite so depressing.
The guide was a pleasant, rather stout man with a pot-belly, slightly bulging eyes, calf-length shorts and beads of sweat on his shiny face and head. He showed us a large display board on which were pinned a collection of strangely pink computer printout portraits of past presidents, laid out in chronological order from J.J.Roberts to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. The guide pointed vaguely towards the display of pink presidents and said “You see as you go from past to present, the
presidents are getting darker”.
Next, we moved to a glass cabinet, the theme of whose contents was money. At some time in the 80’s, SKD introduced a seven-sided $5 Liberian dollar coin. At that time one Liberty was worth $1 US - now it’s 60-odd Liberian dollars to one American dollar. As this change took place, Liberian money got heavier until, eventually, the coin had to be withdrawn, as people didn’t have the strength to carry the coins around. We also saw banknotes made by Charles Taylors rebel
‘administration’ in Bong County. These notes were used all over the country except in Monrovia, the government stronghold. At the same time the government continued to produce its own notes. Topiyoo said that, at one point, Taylor threatened that anyone caught trying to spend government notes in rebel-held territory would face immediate execution.
Across the other side of the museum’s one large room is an interesting relief carving of a group of people. Topiyoo pointed to a figure carrying a drum and, to my surprise, said “I knew this man”. He told me the man’s story. As a boy, this guy had taken a job serving in a shop. When the shop was not busy, he sketched and drew pictures. One day the shop owner saw some of the boys drawings and was well impressed. He told the boy that he was wasting his time serving in a shop and
encouraged him to try to make a career “out of this gift you have been born with”. The man succeeded in making a career as a freelance artist and Topiyoo spoke very passionately about what a great artist he had been.
Years later, during the wartime, one of Taylor’s men took a fancy to the artist’s wife. Him and his rebel mates decided to kill the artist. After tying his hands and feet together so that his body was in a curled-up position, the rebels put him in a place close to a colony of driver ants. They arranged him so that his face was against the ground. Driver ants give a poisonous sting and completely surround any prey they get their hands on. They encircled the wonderful artist, stung him all over and then crawled into his nostrils. Before long the man was dead.
Secret societies, a bit like freemasonry, have arisen since the first settlers arrived. On a table in the museum is a large photograph of the settler who began this movement. Nearby stands a very large wooden chair, or throne, in which, more recently, William Tubman used to sit when he attended the masonic meetings. The chair is now quite tattered, the upholstery having a large tear in it right across the front. According to our guide, the secret society for men was, and possibly still is, the UBF or United Brotherhood of Friends, while the women have the SMT or Sisters of the Mysterious Thing.
Round the corner is a framed proclamation made by the government in 1945 to the effect that women could, thenceforth, play a role in politics. Further round was the first Liberian flag ever made. It’s very much the poor relative of the American flag, not that many stripes and just one star.
Pinned to some modular screens were several very interesting, dusty photographs taken in Monrovia during the World Wars of 2003. This is where we learnt about Greystone, the unsafe safe haven. Photos of mass graves for the victims of the LURD rocket attacks, street scenes wirh angry young men and their guns, streets covered almost with spent bullets, the emergency
hospital set up by the Belgian Medecin Sans Frontiers at Mamba Point. Terribly shocking images.
Petra paid the guide and put $5 into the donations box, a flimsy affair with a tiny padlock, the contents of which (i.e. $5) was, no doubt, shared between the sleepy attendants after we had left.
Down by the riverside...
After our visit to the museum we had a quick look at the rough part of town across the bridge. In fact, there were two bridges, an older one and a more modern one built in 1979 when the OAU conference was held in Monrovia. We drove across the OAU bridge and passed over the spot where the very first settlers had landed - a small piece of land in the middle of the Mesurado river called Providence Island. Although it’s a historic place, no visitors go there.
If you do, you get robbed by the locals, according to Shelda.
Across the bridge is an area called Bushrod Island, the nearest part of which is the extremely poor and, for us, dangerous slum known as Via Town. Opposite, on the other bank of the river, we looked across towards a similarly poor area known as West Point. Crime, poverty, suffering, garbage. This area really reminded me of the scariest place I have ever been, the favelas of Recife in north-eastern Brasil. There’s a certain feeling that you get - fear, I suppose, something to do with the release of unfamiliar chemicals within. The taxi driver came with us on our brief tour. We walked past the rusting shell of an upturned, burnt-out bus towards the old bridge which, just as Mother Durkley had predicted, was now broken. It broke about a year ago, on a Friday, again as foretold, according to Topiyoo and Shelda. Round about midnight so there were very few
people about so that, remarkably, nobody had been injured. A large roll of razor wire had been stretched across the approach to the bridge but we saw a couple of young men on the bridge so walked gingerly round the end of the razor wire, making sure we didn’t fall off the side into the foul-looking Mesurado river some way below.
A man was fishing, catching small fish just a few inches long. We walked towards the middle of the bridge, to look more closely at the section that had collapsed, one end of it in the river, the other just about still attached to the rest of the structure. It had not broken as a result of a particular event, simply from old age. The iron piers that supported it had just not been able to take the weight of the traffic that went over it. I peered over at the piers, which were orange with rust.
Looking outwards towards the mouth of the river we saw the freeport and the ocean beyond. Closer at hand was a sea of human misery drowning in the garbage that it produced.
Jammin’...
I was practising my Harmonic Minor Modes one day on the veranda, just running through an ionian flat 6, when a UN Land Cruiser pulled up across the road. A white man with a beard and a small trilby hat pushed back on his head hopped out of the vehicle and walked purposefully towards me. When he was still some distance away, he called out “I’m greeting you because you’re playing the guitar”. We chatted a bit and played a bit, comparing notes. My new friend’s name was Jonathan and his partner was Anna. Jonathan, it turned out, is the assistant to the deputy head of the UNMIL mission. “It’s a big job”, he said. Originally from New Zealand, he has worked for UNHCR in Africa for many years - has lived in Morocco, Eritrea, was in Rwanda in 1994, just back from Congo-Brazzaville last week. Anna works for UNICEF, so I showed them my book. “What sort of stuff do you play?” I asked. “Oh, you know, some Bob Dylan songs...”. He didn’t need to say any more and we arranged to have a jam at his house during the coming week.
We were invited for a meal, too, and they said they would also invite Anna’s boss. It was a nice prospect after a couple of weeks eating fairly random stuff at the guest house. We’d got through quite a lot of cotton wool white bread and tins of sardines and corned beef (all the way from Argentina) although, at the workshop, we’d had plenty of large-grained rice imported from China. The rice is usually served with a sauce or a piece of fish cooked in palm oil and spiced with local peppers. Sometimes we got a vegetable, like cassava leaves or a fish like cassava fish or sole fish. My favourite was ‘Jollof Rice’, eaten under a tree outside the ELWA school, costing around 20p for a large helping. Better than war food - as well as grass and palm cabbage, we had been told that people had boiled up a certain type of wild flower which was just about edible. Shelda also said that it took some time before people were able to eat more than one meal a day as their stomachs had shrunk during the war.
At Jonathan and Anna’s house we had rice with strawberries followed by wraps filled with cheese and Parma ham, washed down with red wine. Anna’s boss, the UNICEF Country Representative, was a nice Scottish lady called Roseanne who was pleasantly approachable and friendly. This was a relief, as the other UNICEF Country Reps I’ve met in Sierra Leone, Sudan and Nepal have all been very self-important and had the best chairs in their offices.
Roseanne said that Liberia had qualified in record time for a big UN/World Bank fund called the Fast-Track Initiative, which meant that The Ministry of Education will, later this year, receive $30m. The plan is for this to be used to increase teachers’ salaries to $40-50 per month and to build new schools in areas where there are none at present. She said that school enrolment was 50-60% and she generally gave us a more positive account of the education situation than we’d got from Topiyoo and Shelda. No doubt thing look different looking down from the top than looking up from the bottom. Roseanne also said that she thought that, of all the Millennium Development Goals, Liberia would get closest in the Education sector. She felt that female education is vitally important and mentioned some research done in East Africa (she used to work in Tanzania) that demonstrated that the level of female education has a direct effect on GDP. I pointed out that work done in Brasil several years ago had also demonstrated that the mother’s educational level is the major determinant of family income.
Things were worse in the health sector. One of the biggest things is teenage pregnancy. The poorest girls get pregnant youngest and are the ones least able to look after babies. This is one of the main factors contributing to the massive under-5 mortality rate of 235 per thousand, currently the fifth highest in the world. Petra and I had met a 16 year-old girl, a friend of Anneke, who had just had her third child. The first two had already died and this one, just a couple of months old, looked very ill with malaria. Malnutrition is another big issue. Roseanne said that Liberia would get nowhere near the MDG targets in health.
“Most people here live on less than a dollar a day. Half of them live on less than 50 cents a day. I don’t know how they do it”, Roseanne said. She explained that GDP has actually gone up in the last year or two but added that previously it had been a war economy so that GDP had been incredibly small and therefore not difficult to improve on in peacetime. It had increased but is still really low, in other words. It was only last year that Britain finished paying off the loan it got from America after World War 2 - 50 years of repayments. Liberia has no chance of paying off its debts to the West. This, for reasons which I don’t quite understand, apparently means that normal bilateral loans cannot yet be made.
I asked Roseanne what she thought of the president. “She’s a good woman”, she said, “But I don’t necessarily agree with her economic policies”. I was pleasantly amazed to hear this criticism of the government’s economic policy of concentrating on overseas investment by private companies, embracing, as they say, the free market. Later, I asked Jonathan if there were many other Country Reps who think like Roseanne. He said “There’s still a lot of the old guard, but there are quite a few Reps who think like that now.”
Later, we got the guitars out and played some Dylan songs. Reminded me of times with friends in bothy situations so I said, almost involuntarily, to Jonathan “I’m usually drinking whisky in a bothy somewhere when I’m singing Dylan songs”. He put down his guitar and soon re-appeared with two large glasses of malt. Had a nice, relaxed jam, particularly enjoying “I Shall Be Released”. Any day now...
So, there it is. Latest news on allafrica.com is that George Soros is giving $5m for education in Liberia. Next time the man from the Ministry visits Topiyoo’s school and demands 500 Liberty to allow the bug-eaten mat structure to stay a little longer, he can be referred to Mr. Soros.
BL May 2007.
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