Authors: Russell Banks
Yet at any time, once my babies were born, I could have put my shoulder to the wheel of one or several of the dozens of volunteer and non-governmental charitable organizations that were stuck to their hubs in the mud of Liberian corruption, cynicism, and sloth. I could have distributed condoms, medical supplies, food, clean water, information. It was eight years between my marriage to Woodrow and my first return to America (an event I’ll tell you about very soon), and in those years I could have taught a hundred adults to read. I could have bribed a hundred parents to keep their daughters from working in the fields or on the streets and paid for the girls’ secondary-school education. I could have been a one-woman Peace Corps with no nationalist agenda, a one-woman charity with no religious program, a one-woman relief agency with no bureaucracy or salaried administrators to answer to. It wouldn’t have changed the world or human nature, and probably wouldn’t have altered a single sentence in the history of Liberia. But it would have changed me. And, a different person, I might have avoided some of the harm I inflicted later both on myself and others.
Instead, I gave out tips and Christmas bonuses and little presents on Boxing Day, a holiday that Liberians, not letting a good thing pass unappropriated, had borrowed from Sierra Leone. I dropped dimes and quarters into the cups of crippled and deformed, leprous, and amputated beggars on the streets of Monrovia, gave pennies to children who clustered around me whenever I stepped from the Mercedes, and although I myself did not attend services (a girl has to have some principles, I suppose), I supported Woodrow’s church by sending our children to its Sunday school with dollar bills for the collection plate tucked into pledge envelopes.
It was as if the people who lived there and the events that took place in those tumultuous years were deadly viruses, and I lived behind glass, a bubble-girl protected against infection from the outside world. Meanwhile, beyond my bubble the president and his cohort, which, despite my husband’s best efforts and advantageous marriage, still did not include him, grew fatter and richer and ever more flagrantly corrupt. They skimmed the cream off American foreign aid, blatantly stole from any and all non-governmental and UN public service allocations, took their cut from World Bank and IMF grants to the financial sector, and pimped the country’s natural resources, selling off at special, one-day-only rates Liberia’s rubber, sugar, rice, diamonds, iron, and water, peddling vast stands of mahogany and timber to companies owned and run by Swedes, Americans, Brits, Germans, and, increasingly, Israelis. Foreign distributors of beer, gasoline, motor vehicles, cigarettes, salt, electricity, and telephone service haggled over lunch for bargain-priced monopolies; by sundown they had the president’s fee safely deposited in his Swiss bank account and, after the celebratory banquet, partied the night away at the Executive Mansion with Russian hookers, smoking Syrian hashish, snorting lines of Afghan cocaine, and guzzling cases of Courvoisier.
The few Liberian journalists and politicians who dared to criticize the president and his cronies simply disappeared. As if sent on permanent assignment to Nigeria or Côte d’Ivoire, they were not mentioned again in public or private. Newspapers were locked down by judicial fiat, and radio stations were silenced, until the only news, little more than recycled releases from the president’s press office, was no news at all. Meanwhile, the president’s personal security force grew larger in number and actual physical size—big, scowling, swaggering men in sunglasses looking more and more like an army of private body guards than an elite corps of enlisted men—while the men in the regular army seemed to diminish in number and size, their uniforms tattered, torn, and dirty, their boots replaced by broken-backed sneakers and plastic sandals. Compared with the glistening black AK-47s carried by the president’s men, their rifles, obsolete U.S. Army leftovers from the Korean War, looked almost antique and were without ammunition. More like dangerous toys than deadly weapons, they were used mainly as clubs.
I knew all this as it happened, saw it with my own eyes, and learned the details and background and the names and motives of the people involved from Woodrow, from the few of his colleagues in government who, like Charles Taylor, trusted him, and from our social acquaintances—and, of course, I learned of it from Jeannine, who loved showing me that she knew more about the world of Liberian big men and their affairs than I did, and from Elizabeth, who had taken over my old job at the lab and whom I visited daily to be with the chimps. For, when it came down to it, the chimps had become my closest friends in Liberia, my only confidants, the only creatures to whom I entrusted my secrets, and whose secrets I kept and carried.
EARLY IN 1979
—I think it was April, because the rains were about to begin—President Tolbert tacked a ten-cent-per-pound sales tax onto the already inflated retail price of rice. That winter’s measly crop had been worse than usual, and supplies of rice had diminished to a dangerous level. Rice was the country’s staple food. Without it, the people, especially the poor, faced starvation, and the nation faced famine. Stores and shops had emptied out, and black marketeers selling rice from Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire were getting rich at prices only the rich could afford.
“Why on earth do you need so much for a little one-pound bag of rice, Jeannine?”
“On account of it so dear now. Them don’t got no more at Dot-Dot, an’ none at Congo Square, neither. Peoples only can buy rice these days from the Arab, y’ know, an’ he sellin’ it very high priced.”
A Costa Rican freighter loaded with sacks of rice grown in Louisiana, meant originally for Haiti, and stamped USAID N
OT
F
OR
R
ESALE
, lay at anchor in the harbor, waiting to be off-loaded. So far, on the president’s orders, the off-loading permit had been refused by customs, and the captain and crew hadn’t bothered to come ashore. For days, stevedores, dockworkers, retailers, and crowds of hopeful higglers with their gunny sacks, and women and girls from the countryside with empty pails and plastic buckets had gathered at the docks, waiting for the ship to tie up and the sacks of rice to be carried off and distributed among them.
While the people waited hopefully in the rain day after day and night after night for their rice to come in, it was a continuous, twenty-four-hour party, an informal, spontaneous carnival, with people dancing and singing in little groups on the docks, drinking raw palm wine, roasting scavenged groundnuts on charcoal fires, all good-naturedly, optimistically marking time. Each morning, as I passed in the Mercedes on my way to the lab, I saw that the crowd had grown larger. They seemed to be saying to themselves,
We are hungry now, but we won’t be hungry long
. Everyone believed it.
Then one morning the voice of President Tolbert himself came over the radio, and he announced the new tax on rice, a “people’s contribution” it was called, a way for Liberia to free itself from foreign debt, he said. Since rice was the main food for all Liberians, every single man, woman, and child would now be able to contribute to the nation’s independence. The legislature would pass the decree today, and then the ship currently waiting in the harbor of Monrovia would be off-loaded, and the rice distributed. And there were more ships coming, he promised. Ships from Nigeria, Brazil, and America were on the western horizon. Soon everyone would have plenty of rice—jollof rice, rice fufu, coconut rice, rice and beans, curried rice, check rice with greens, rice balls…
The ten-cent tax per pound effectively doubled the street price at that time. No one, rich or poor, held any illusions as to where the money would end up. Having extracted as much as they could from foreign governments and corporations and sold off for a pittance nearly all the nation’s natural resources, the president and his colleagues, resorting to autocannibalism, had turned to devouring their own and had begun the meal with the most numerous and defenseless of their own, the poor. There was no meat on those bones, however. The poor had nothing left to give to the wealthy, not even ten cents per pound of rice. Having nothing more to lose, as soon as the president went off the air and no longer seemed to be watching them, they rioted.
It began shortly before I passed by the harbor in the car one morning on the way to the lab, which was located on the south side of the city near the JFK Hospital. As we approached the harbor front, we saw black clouds of smoke pouring into the gray sky. There were tires burning in the lot beside the dockside warehouse, and large crowds knotted around the fires, people shouting at one another, as if angry at themselves, rather than the president. They shook their fists, men and women alike, their faces dark with anger.
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked Satterthwaite, more curious than frightened.
Satterthwaite half-turned in front and said, “It on account of the tax.”
“What tax?” I asked.
“Ten cents a pound for rice. President Tolbert say it this mornin’ on the radio.”
A battered pickup truck with a half-dozen men in the back waving machetes crossed suddenly in front of the Mercedes. Satterthwaite hit the brakes and swerved away, bumping over the curb onto the harbor-front parking lot. Another vehicle, a small red taxi, pulled in behind us, and the pickup truck followed us over the curb onto the lot, swerved, and stopped in front, effectively blocking the Mercedes. The driver and another man jumped down from the pickup to the pavement and walked towards us.
“Don’t get out, don’t open the window, don’t say nothin’,” Satterthwaite said. I heard the door locks automatically clunk into place.
A gang of men appeared out of nowhere and surrounded the car. They began to rock it from side to side and bang on the trunk and hood with their fists like hammers. Most of them were shirtless, unshaven, their hair in long, springy coils. They waved their machetes and stared wild eyed into the back of the car, trying to see through the tinted glass—though I could see plainly enough their detonating faces, huge and black and wet with rain.
Two of the men thumped purposefully on Satterthwaite’s window, the leaders, evidently, ordinary workingmen in tee shirts and loose trousers. They had the faces of men who wished to negotiate. Satterthwaite lowered his window a few inches and spoke rapidly to them in pidgin.
In response, the men were shouting at Satterthwaite, as angry as the others now, apparently confused or not believing him, but he kept talking rapidly in a calm, low voice, until finally they grew quiet and listened and then at last instructed the others to back off. Satterthwaite turned and explained, “Them think we come from the president to tell the ship to give the rice to the government. Them think we the tax collectors, but now they see who we are, Miz Sundiata and her driver, so them say it all right for us to go.”
“Thank you,” I said.
It went suddenly quiet inside the car again, and the pickup pulled away from the Mercedes, freeing us to leave. Satterthwaite put the car in gear and inched forward and gave a gentle, grateful wave to the men, who politely, almost apologetically waved back.
At that moment, as if they’d been watching and waiting for us to leave the scene, a pair of army trucks filled with helmeted soldiers appeared, engines grinding, and blocked the departure of all three vehicles, the pickup, the red taxi, and the Mercedes. Two jeeps braked to a quick stop beside our car, and dozens of soldiers jumped from the trucks and jeeps and dragged the drivers from the pickup and the taxi, beating the heads and faces of the men with rifle butts, sending their now pathetic-looking machetes clattering to the pavement, kicking the men, rolling their bodies away from the Mercedes like logs. Blood sprayed from noses, ears, broken mouths, and from inside the car I heard muffled howls cut by the sound of human bones being cracked and splintered. The wild men with machetes who moments ago had terrified me were transformed with terrible efficiency into sacks and tossed into the rear of the trucks.
I yelled at Satterthwaite, “For God’s sake, get us out of here!”
A soldier waved us on. Satterthwaite hit the accelerator, and in seconds we were back on Gamba Boulevard, headed south and out of the city. I gazed out the windows through the steady rain at the nearly empty streets and alleys. Abruptly, halfway to the lab, I told Satterthwaite to turn around and drive me home. “Take the back way, stay out of town,” I said.
And so it was back to the bubble, then. When we pulled into the yard, Woodrow was standing at the door, arms folded across his chest, waiting. The dogs posed alertly beside him like sentries. He’d returned home from the ministry as soon as he learned from the radio what had happened down at the docks and was now spreading to all parts of the city.
We watched and listened to the Rice Riot, as it came to be called, from behind the high, gated wall that surrounded our home on Duport Road. The riot sprawled uphill from the waterfront, as the crowd of ordinary folks broke away from the soldiers sent to subdue them quickly became a mob led and egged on by gangs of boys and young men drunk on palm wine and high on marijuana and Lord knows what else. They stormed up the long ridge into the center of town, smashing windows and burning trash, then looting stores, dressing in looted clothing and lugging TVs, radios, tape decks, electric fans, and blenders like trophies. They overturned cars, massed in the squares and at crossroads, swelling in size and noise as they went, beating on stolen pails and cook pans, blowing whistles, chanting, dancing. It was a headless beast, thrashing in pain and confusion.
Woodrow and I and the boys, Satterthwaite, Jeannine and Kuyo, we all peered from behind the barred windows of the house and watched the smoke rise in smudged clouds, billowing skyward through the rain, first from one district, then from another, more distant district, and felt relieved that the rioters seemed to be moving south and west, away from our neighborhood and in the direction of the Liberian government buildings and the foreign embassies, towards the dead end of palm-lined Gamba Boulevard, where the bright white Executive Mansion ruled, as if the beast were moving blindly, instinctively, towards the source of its pain.