A few nights ago, a well-dressed man from the Foreign Ministry walked out on the verandah of the Mamba Point Hotel, ordered a beer, and proceeded to explain what happened here.
The hotel looks out on the Atlantic Ocean, over a beach where many bodies are buried, and into the horizon where three American warships bob in the mist. Here is where the diplomats, aid workers and reporters drawn to the disaster of Liberia gather to discuss, over drinks and dinner, the death and destruction around them.
All of Liberia's troubles, said the man from the ministry, all the death and misery, were the fault of the aborigines.
The aborigines?
The aborigines, said the man from the ministry. When, led by Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, they overthrew the government in 1980, the world turned upside down, the bottom on the top.
A few days later, one of Liberia's most prominent lawyers begged to differ.
"It was the settlers who, in many ways, brought the destruction upon themselves," the lawyer said.
The settlers? The word has a certain resonance in Africa, where most people use it to describe the white Europeans who colonized the continent and created apartheid in South Africa.
The man from the ministry, an urbane descendant of a former president, and the distinguished lawyer, born in a little village without American roots, had divided their nation in two. This divide, they explained, ran so deep that it was like a geologic fault in the earth. It was the source of the wars that have ruined Liberia.
By settlers, the lawyer meant the American Liberians, whose ancestors are the freed slaves who founded this republic in 1847. They have names like Scott, Dennis, Roberts and Payne. They belong to Baptist, Catholic, Episcopal and United Methodist churches, and a dozen other Christian denominations. Some are members of the Masonic Order established here in 1851. Today they represent 4 percent or 5 percent of Liberia's 3 million people.
By aborigines, the man from the ministry meant almost everybody else in Liberia, the people who were here first. They belong to the Kpelle, the Krahn, Kru, Gola and Mandingo tribes, and a dozen others. Half are Christians, a fifth are Muslims. Some follow traditional African rites and religions; some belong to secret societies called Poro and Sande.
The settlers made two sets of laws: a civil law for the civilized, an indigenous law for everyone else.
From 1930 to 1935, the US and Britain broke diplomatic relations with Liberia for its sale of human labor, or slaves, to Spanish colonists in Africa. Civil rights, including the right to vote, were not granted to indigenous Liberians until 1963.
Change came.
"The population was coming together in the 1970s," said Gloria Musu-Scott, 50, the chief justice of the Supreme Court in Liberia. "There was intermarriage. Very few of the settler population could say they had pure blood. Now, I have a lot of respect for them. They came here with nothing and established something. It was like they transported the US to Africa."
Intermarriage did not dissolve disunion. Nor did it solve inequality. "There are very few people who can say, `I'm an American-Liberian'," said Hilary Dennis, 58, president of the nation's biggest shipping company. "The problem has been one of have and have-not."
Those tensions grew as the era of colonialism ended and tribal pride and passions rose against the power of the settler community.
They exploded with a murderous 1980 coup led by an "aborigine," Doe, of the Krahn tribe. The "settler" president, William Tolbert, was killed in his bedroom, and 13 government ministers were tied to telephone poles and shot on the beach.
They raged on as the warlord Charles Taylor began fighting his way to power in 1989 (around that time, Taylor, who has said he is a child of intermarriage, changed his middle name from McArthur to Ghankay, which means "warrior" in Gola).
The tensions never left. Taylor, after bringing 14 years of civil war to Liberia, stepped down as president last month, leaving much of the country in the hands of rebels: Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, a largely Mandingo force backed by Guinea and Ivory Coast, and the Movement for a Democratic Liberia, also backed by Ivory Coast, and dominated by Krahn tribesmen.
"And this is what has led Liberia to self-annihilation," said Musu-Scott, whose court and chambers were sacked by government soldiers three weeks ago. "This is what our selfishness, our lack of nationhood, our lack of compassion for our fellow citizens has brought our country to. This is what we have done for our country. Our existence as a nation is threatened."
The rancor and sadness were banished Saturday night at K.D.'s, an open-air roadhouse on the edge of Monrovia, which reopened two weeks ago. The beer was cold, the barbecue hot. The band began looking for a beat, and found it in a groove somewhere between Nigerian high-life and Jamaican reggae.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS