Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (14 page)

When the clamor reached an end, Tansi looked at me as if I should by then have had all the proof I needed of his African miracles.

“Kongo has existed as a nation since Beatrice,” Tansi said, growing drunk with excitement on a mixture of his own Kongo nationalism and Mother Emilie’s syncretic evangelism. But ironically, he had mangled the kingdom’s significantly longer history in the process.

Dona Beatrice had indeed been a legendary female prophet in the Kongo kingdom in the late 1700s. Her real name was said to have been Kimpa Vita. The kingdom had controlled much of present-day Congo, Zaire and Angola, until its final defeat by the Portuguese, the first to cull slaves from the area for shipment to the Americas. Beatrice had become powerful, convincing people that she was possessed of the spirit of Saint Anthony of Padua, a popular Catholic saint of the time and reputed miracle worker. Her followers believed that Jesus, Mary and the saints were all Kongolese. Ultimately, like Joan of Arc, she was burned at the stake for heresy at the instigation of European missionaries.

I was now implicitly being asked to believe that Mother Emilie was an incarnation of this forgotten Kongolese saint. Tansi had been longing for the resurrection of
his
Kongo his entire adult life, and now, only two weeks away from death, he had found it.

“You must understand why I am feeling better now,” Tansi said to me in an embrace as we parted. “I am home at last. Finally I am in my own land. I should have come here a long time ago. It has revived me, and if I had not taken so long to come, Pierrette might have been saved, too.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Greater Liberia

Our small Russian prop plane finally dropped down beneath the murky mass of clouds that hung low like a gray lid over Liberia, after a two-hour flight west-by-northwest from Abidjan. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that we were about to make an emergency landing, for all I could see below were brackish swamplands and the lush green of the West African bush. It wasn’t until the very final moments before landing that the first reassuring glimpse of solid land, and then, at last, the pitted landing strip of James Spriggs Payne airfield came into view. There was always a nagging thought at times like these that if anything went wrong, death was a certainty. I often wondered if there would even be a rescue operation, as I pictured instead the salvage effort by villagers living nearby who would undoubtedly come scurrying to the crash site to recover whatever they could haul away from the wreckage.

Displaying an extraordinary and totally unfeigned cool that seemed native to this corner of Africa, people on bicycles and on foot hurried their pace just enough to get across the runway in time as we landed, disappearing down orange clay footpaths that led away into the bush. As the noisy little aircraft taxied and came to a final halt, I thought there could be few better introductions to this country than Spriggs Payne. Outside, a crush of excited relatives of the two dozen or so passengers aboard our flight was already forming on the tarmac nearby. And alongside them, the ground was already thick with a demimonde of porters, greeters, “facilitators,” beggars and outright thieves.

If you had come to Liberia just once before, you would have earned celebrity status among this crowd, for whom memory was part of the hustle, and since I had come often, as I descended from the plane cries of “Hey Mr. Howard,” “Hello Boss Man,” “My friend, come this way,” rang out from every direction.

Beyond the distractions of this unofficial welcoming committee there were the police and immigration officers, health inspectors and the other dubious officials waiting to accost you, demanding to see travel documents before you could even make it inside the decrepit little terminal. These were people who stole by official sanction, and inside that dark and sinister place, hassling travelers had long ago become stylized ritual.

As I headed for the immigration building, a tall, broad-shouldered Nigerian soldier dressed in that country’s distinctive green fatigues and matching cap swung a swagger stick at the jostling touts, bellowing in his deep voice for “Order!” It had all the impact of someone swatting away flies from rotting fish. They feigned scattering for just an instant, then came back just as quickly as they had dispersed.

The confusion that attends the landing of every airplane in Liberia should be patented, I thought, so thoroughly was it Liberian. In microcosm it reflected the chaos of a country that had been bled heavily during a long civil war, and kept on knife’s edge by a myriad of rival militias ever since. Tiny Liberia, just 2.6 million people at its peak, had lost 200,000 people in a conflict that had been cruelly indiscriminate.

We usually think of wars as having identifiable adversaries. In Liberia, search as one might, it had become impossible to discern any clear lines. The sheer number of deaths seemed to warrant a label like “genocide,” which might have drawn more attention from CNN and perhaps roused the diplomats of the world. But the Liberian civil war’s victims came from every class and description, and perversely, because there was no longer any sharp ethnic focus to the killings, the country’s atrocities eluded easy categorization, and thereby escaped attention in a world already eager to ignore Africa’s nightmares.

Still, it was hard for me to observe the airport’s choreographed confusion without concluding that this tragic little country’s chaos also had its comical side. Almost everything in Liberia did. But it was vital never to forget that the easy joking and breezy nonchalance masked a raw struggle for survival, and that after five years of brutal civil war, nearly everything here, including airport begging and bribe-taking, had become deadly serious. It took a mere instant to lose your wallet, your passport or your laptop here at Spriggs Payne, and anywhere else in Liberia you might just as quickly lose your life.

In August 1995, the country’s factions had negotiated a ground-breaking agreement to come together in a national unity government. Most important, the pact allowed for the war’s instigator—and all along its most stubborn protagonist—Charles Taylor, to return to the capital, Monrovia, for the first time in many years.

Like a Roman outpost under permanent threat from Germanic warriors, during Taylor’s time in the bush Monrovia had remained a city under siege. Because of the constant skirmishing in the countryside, half of the population now lived in Monrovia, a city without electricity or running water. Another third of the nation had simply fled Liberia, and were living in UN refugee camps scattered about the region. By now, save for the fighters and their peasant captives, the hinterland was largely empty. Residents of the capital were kept alive only by the grain shipments of international charities like CARE and Catholic Relief Services, and Taylor’s rebels were kept at bay only by the presence of a huge garrison of troops from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which was overwhelmingly dominated by Nigerians. ECOWAS had originally deployed for the same purpose five years earlier, amid a major refugee emergency: to prevent Taylor from storming the capital.

Lacking refugee camps or any other appropriate shelter, Monrovia’s huge internally displaced population took up residence in the gutted and bombed-out shells of what had been a once-proud city’s most prestigious addresses. Somehow, the entire front facade of the massive, boxy structure of the Libyan-built Foreign Ministry, for example, had been neatly sheared off in the artillery duels between the Nigerians and Taylor’s fighters during one of the rebel leader’s attempts to capture Monrovia. And squatters now used the ministry’s offices as overcrowded apartments, seeming to pay no mind to the fact that their whole lives were on display to the passersby on one of Monrovia’s busiest avenues.

This same gritty resourcefulness was at work at the Intercontinental Hotel, once a majestic skyscraper that stood on the city’s high ground like an exclamation point, announcing the cosmopolitan pretensions of the old Americo-Liberian elite—the class of freed American slaves that had founded this country in 1847. As they settled the land, the Americo-Liberians fondly strove to reproduce the only model they knew, the plantation society of the American South. Affecting top hats and morning coats, the freedmen ruled Africa’s first republic in a clannish and conservative manner, established their own curiously paternalistic brand of apartheid, systematically excluding so-called aborigines from positions of privilege and power until 1980, when a coup by an unschooled soldier and “man of the soil” from the Krahn ethnic group, Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe, brought this anachronistic little universe to a bloody end.

Like nearly every other monument to the Americo-Liberians, the Intercontinental Hotel had been shattered and left to rot in the moldy damp of Liberia’s persistent tropical rains. Nowadays, in exchange for their lofty sea views, and the generous breezes that served in lieu of air-conditioning on the upper floors, the hotel’s squatters had to cart their water, and anything else they consumed, up the many flights of dark stairs to wash, drink and cook.

In fits and starts, between repeated disastrous setbacks, Monrovia had been struggling ever since Doe’s coup to resuscitate itself and rejoin the late twentieth century. But the mood of desperation had never been greater than during these last few grim years of the war, which the city’s residents had spent living under a dusk-to-dawn curfew, and every time I visited I thought there could be no more cruelly Draconian punishment for one of Africa’s liveliest people than to keep them locked up in their stifling and unlit homes from sunset to sunrise every day.

Now, the curfew was being drastically scaled back, and I decided to test the truce and take advantage of the brightening outlook by trying to drive to Charles Taylor’s would-be rebel capital. For years, Taylor had been holed up in a small city called Gbarnga, well to the northeast of Monrovia, across a broad no-man’s-land and then deep into what everyone in the capital considered certifiably hostile territory.

Once I’d finished the airport formalities, the
Times
’s stringer in Liberia, Jackson Kanneh, and my regular Monrovia driver, Old Man Bah, greeted me at the airport exit. In all the countries I visited frequently, I had made a priority of finding an exceptional driver to work with. Old Man Bah, a native of Guinea, the land next door, was reliable, which was essential, but he also had a good knowledge of the terrain and the local factions, a nose for news and a keen sense of danger, of which Liberia offered plenty. And invaluable in a country accustomed to mayhem, this pious Muslim man in his sixties, who unfailingly dressed in a knitted prayer cap and Liberian-style safari suit, also boasted some of the best nerves I had ever seen.

When people were scattering through the streets in panic at the outbreak of gunfire, a fairly common occurrence in Monrovia, Old Man Bah would calmly roust me from a meal or an interview and say, “Mista Howard, I think we haffa go now.” While others raced wildly through the streets looking for shelter, he would drive us at his own stately pace in his gently decaying blue Peugeot to Mamba Point, the rocky promontory on the Atlantic Ocean where my hotel was located, in the shadow of the UN headquarters.

As we drove to the hotel, Jackson, whom we often jokingly called the mayor for his countless social connections and for his famous ease with women, announced with a wicked grin that the downtown bars had decided to celebrate ladies’ night that evening in honor of the curfew’s suspension. On Carey Street, the heart of the nightclub district, raunchy, unself-conscious Monrovia was in full blossom, and for all the smuttiness of the place, there was something utterly bracing about its lack of pretension.

Husbands and wives, sons and daughters had been bottled up in their dark and airless little homes for months, and suddenly, like sailors on a rare shore leave, they were enjoying the outdoors again. Cheek to jowl at El Meson, Monrovia’s most famous bar, sat the threadbare and the well-to-do, knife-scarred prostitutes and pretty girls next door, the shiny-faced daughters of what remained of the country’s middle class, who had managed to slip out of the house. People of every description were mixing, talking, pouring down Club beers, cursing the ennui of their recent lives under curfew and, above all, hitting on one another with an almost total lack of inhibition.

The house band that night was singing what had become local standards during the war, songs with titles like “Iron Titty,” about the virtues of young flesh, and “Gorbachev,” a ditty about people who trade sex for money, and men and women of all stripes were lustily joining in.

Jackson told me that he and another friend of ours from Abidjan, Purnell Murdock, the regional Voice of America correspondent, had spoken to Charles Taylor in Gbarnga by satellite phone and received permission for us to drive there and interview him. We were to leave in the morning, stay overnight in Gbarnga and return to Monrovia the next day, just before Taylor himself was to make his grand entry into the city he had destroyed but never managed to capture.

I was excited about the prospect of seeing Taylor, hitherto a disembodied voice we heard almost every day, orating more than speaking, in that cocksure manner of his, via satellite telephone to interviewers from the BBC World Service’s African radio programs, where he claimed victory in battle or denied defeat with equal aplomb. Taylor’s bombastic performances had made his interviews the longest-running theatrical act in the region, and since there was little other news or entertainment available, work literally stopped in Monrovia at 5:05 p.m., when his favorite forum,
Focus on Africa,
began to the sound of echoing clarions.

From Monrovia, throughout most of the war it had been impossible to visit Taylor country, a rump state that the rebel leader fancied as Greater Liberia. The alternative route in, overland via Ivory Coast, was possible only by invitation, and as a frequent critic of Taylor, who avidly followed what was written about him, I knew I would never enjoy such a courtesy.

“Big Man” is a term that has been heavily overworked by Western journalists. It is tossed about to describe African leaders in the same cavalier and disdainful fashion that the press displays with the coded language it sometimes uses for black American politicians, like “flamboyant” or “street smart.” Quite recently, Latin America had been full of Big Men, as had Eastern Europe, and much of Asia for that matter, but only in Africa did the term—actually borrowed from anthropologists’ descriptions of Pacific island societies—become a fixed moniker employed by writers too bored or lazy to get beyond such labels.

For Taylor, though, Big Man seemed, if anything, like a painfully inadequate description of someone with such a monstrous ego and raging paranoia. I had chuckled earlier in the day when Old Man Bah told me that the Ministry of Finance’s old Cadillac had needed to be pushed to a garage after a brief trial run in preparation for the new government’s swearing-in ceremonies. Then at the bar I overheard details of the grand entrance Taylor was planning to mark his return to the capital. Liberia was a country where most people felt lucky if they had two or three changes of clothing and enough to eat any given week, and yet Taylor’s convoy was to consist of thirty-two shiny new Nissan Patrols and fifteen Mercedes-Benzes. The only suspense was over what sort of vehicle he would arrive in, and it was taken for granted that the choice would be designed to make as grand a statement as possible.

Robert, who had come with me from Abidjan, Jackson, Purnell and I set out the next morning with an unknown driver suggested by Bah. Taylor had become an outsized myth in the minds of Monrovia’s long-suffering residents, and even someone as cool and sure-handed as Bah imagined that the road to Gbarnga was littered with skulls and bones, so he had declined to drive us. Taylor had assured Purnell that the fighters who were guarding the route would be notified in advance of our arrival. All we had to do, he said, was show up. But as we drove through the suffocating heat, soldiers at roadblocks manned by the Nigerian-led West African peacekeeping force, ECOMOG,
⁴
expressed ever graver doubts about our prospects.