Tamba Hali

by David Seigerman

  That’s just the basic information, the kind you might find on the back of a baseball card if Liberia were to have one. Understanding the identity of this land and its people, though, requires more than statistics.

  Liberia literally means “the Land of the Free,” and if that sounds familiar, it should. The words spring straight from the final lines of “The Star-Spangled Banner”: “ . . . o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Standing on the sidelines before every football game he’s ever played, Tamba Hali has listened to a national anthem that evokes both of the countries he has called home.

  The name is not a coincidence. Liberia was founded by the American Colonization Society (ACS), designed to be a place where liberated slaves from the United States and across the Caribbean could live in freedom. The ACS was formed in Washington, DC, in 1816; just two years earlier, a short distance away in Baltimore Harbor, Francis Scott Key wrote his famous poem that would become the American anthem after witnessing the attempted siege of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. “The Land of the Free” was the perfect name for the place Liberia was envisioned to be.

  The connections to America don’t end there, as you can see instantly when looking at the Liberian flag. It’s not an exact replica, but it is strikingly familiar: eleven stripes, alternating red and white, and in the upper left corner, a blue field with a single white, five-pointed star. The stripes represent the eleven people who signed the Liberian Declaration of Independence. The blue square stands for the African continent. And the white star symbolizes the first African republic modeled after the governmental system of the United States.

  It was born to be a place of fresh starts. Its national coat of arms says so pretty clearly: “The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here.” Everything pictured on the coat itself reinforces that message. There’s a boat (much like the one that delivered them from bondage to freedom), a shovel and plow (which depict the hard work of building a new life), a rising sun (a new day), a white dove (the symbol of peace dating back to the days of Noah and his ark), and a palm tree. It is thought that the tree symbolizes prosperity; in time, the tree came to mean something profoundly different for the people of Liberia.

  From the beginning, English has been the official language of Liberia. This is somewhat surprising, since the colonists from America and the Caribbean represented only about 5 percent of the population. Most people were indigenous—meaning that they lived already in the land, like the Native Americans who were already in North America when the Europeans arrived—and belonged to any one of sixteen different ethnic groups, each with its own traditions, histories, religious beliefs, and in many cases, languages. But English prevailed, thanks entirely to the relationship between Liberia and its original friend to the west, America.

  Even Liberia’s capital—the coastal city of Monrovia—has American roots. It is named for James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, who was in office when the first freed African-American slaves returned to Africa. The resettlement began in the 1820s; by the time the American Civil War ended forty-five years later, more than thirteen thousand former slaves from the West had been relocated to Liberia.

  Fast forward a century or so. By 1980, the Republic of Liberia had grown, slowly, into a participating member of the international community. It had supported the Allies during World War II and was one of a few African countries to join the United Nations when it was founded in 1945.

  But in the spring of 1980, the government of Liberia was overthrown. Until that time, the president of Liberia had always been an Americo Liberian—someone descended from the African-American slaves who colonized Liberia from the start. For the first time, the new leader came from one of those many ethnic groups that made up the population.

  The 1980s became a turbulent time, with several more attempted coups d’état—which means a violent overthrow of a government. During those years, the Liberian president, Samuel Doe, retaliated against the tribes and territories where those plotters were from. Animosity between these ethnic groups escalated. Violence flared, the economy faltered. Liberia was a cauldron of unrest and mistrust and discontent—a deadly brew—and for a decade it bubbled steadily toward the point of boiling over.

  The flash point came on Christmas 1989.

  While Tamba Hali and his family prepared to celebrate the birth of Jesus (a big day throughout the country, as Liberia is primarily a Christian nation), a revolution-minded ex-government official named Charles Taylor was leading a small army of rebels from Ivory Coast into Liberia. Not much more than a hundred men marched into Nimba County on December 25, 1989, and soon the haunting sounds of explosions could be heard next door in Bong County, where the Hali children played on Christmas Day.

  War didn’t come to Gbarnga right away. The rumors arrived well before the soldiers, though they were nearly as terrifying. Taylor’s rebels, known as the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) were brutalizing the villages on their way to Monrovia, where they intended to overthrow President Doe. In 1980, it was Doe who rose to power after his men assassinated the sitting president and many of his government’s top leaders. Now, he was the target of this new coup. Battle lines between the different ethnic groups were hardening, like scratches in drying concrete that would become permanent and impossible to erase. The First Liberian Civil War had begun.

  Through the winter of 1990, the residents of Gbarnga remained on alert, listening for the sounds of war to creep closer. They were not yet in harm’s way, but they knew it was a matter of time.

  For the Hali family and their neighbors and friends, the life they had known was over. Everything had changed, like a dark cloud had come out of nowhere to swallow up a glowing sun and permanently darken the blue sky. If they had woken up one morning to find that fish could walk and birds swim, it would not have been more stunning or sudden. They had entered a new reality, where fear now hung over everyone everywhere every day.

  “All young people were forced to grow up in a matter of moments,” said Saah Hali, who is a year older than his brother, Tamba.

  Soon enough, many of their neighbors began packing up their clothes and few belongings, boarding up their homes, and leaving town. Military vehicles appeared from time to time, and villagers would not know whether it was the Liberian armed forces or the rebels. They soon would come to learn that it really didn’t matter. When the war came, they were in danger from all sides.

  CHAPTER 3

  HIDING IN THE BUSH

  There are things that happen in a war that are unimaginable to anyone who hasn’t witnessed one. In some ways, the Liberian civil war was different—maybe even worse than traditional military conflicts. Reports of the atrocities committed by and against civilians during that war—some acts done willingly, others coerced at gunpoint—are horrifying. Even scarier is the fact that some were committed not by adults, but by the thousands of children who were forced to fight as rebel soldiers.

  This book isn’t the place to recount those inhuman acts. It’s enough for you to realize that the kinds of things that would give you nightmares just to read about, Tamba Hali lived through between the ages of six and nine years old. The ghost stories of his childhood were not spooky tales saved for campfires. There were no imaginary bogeymen under his bed or skulking in his closet. His monsters were real. And they were everywhere.

  In early 1990, the war had reached all the way to Gbarnga. Tamba’s family knew it was finally time to leave. They boarded up their home and, carrying what they could manage, Tamba and his extended family—his mother and stepfather, his siblings (half and full), cousins and uncles and aunts—climbed into the back of a transport truck with twenty other people from their town and fled to a safer village deeper in the countryside.

  For people fleeing for their lives, there was safety in numbers. There was also danger.

  If they were to encounter rebel soldiers along the journey, anyone in the group might be questioned about their loyalties or their tribal background. A
t the time, the rebels were hunting primarily for Krahn people. President Doe was of Krahn descent, and he tended to show favoritism toward the Krahn people, often at the expense of other ethnic groups. That’s what lit the fuse for Taylor’s coup. Gun-wielding rebels might ask one person out of a truckload of twenty whether they were Krahn; the wrong answer could get everyone killed. Even if the person told the truth about his or her background, the armed inquisitor might choose not to believe that person. Life and death depended on a soldier’s mood.

  That scenario was a very real risk for Tamba and his family. His stepfather was from the Mandingo tribe, which was another population targeted by the rebels. That reality put everyone he traveled with in jeopardy.

  “They might think everyone with him was Mandingo, too,” said Saah. “That would be the end of the story.”

  Fortunately for Tamba and his family, no one learned his stepfather’s secret, and they were able to find refuge in another town. Tamba has vague memories of that time, settling into a mud hut when his family first escaped Gbarnga. It was a small dwelling with two or three rooms. Ten people, maybe a dozen, would live there together, with all the children—usually seven or eight, often more—sleeping on the floor of one of the rooms. Their sleeping bodies were crammed together like jigsaw-puzzle pieces, covering the floor like a breathing carpet. A bed was a luxury, like running water or toilets or electricity, that Tamba didn’t even dare to dream about.

  After six months or so, relatively good news reached Tamba and his family at their temporary home. The war had moved on from Gbarnga; it was safe to return.

  Some homes in the area had been destroyed when the soldiers passed through. Virtually all had been looted. Any possessions left behind had been taken or broken. Still, Tamba had a house to come home to, and his family could attempt to return to their normal lives. Children can be amazingly resilient, even under the most difficult of circumstances, and soon enough Tamba was back to fishing and swimming and kicking around a soccer ball with his friends—back to being a kid.

  That is how the next two years went for Tamba Hali and his family. They would live safely on the periphery of the war, until they weren’t safe and they had to go back into hiding. When it was deemed safe to return home, they would . . . until the next wave of violence crashed down on them and sent them running again. Maybe they would be in hiding for days, maybe for months. Whenever they left home, they had no idea when they might be back.

  Sometimes the threat was the rebels, with their AK-47 rifles and their viciousness. Sometimes it was the president’s men, whose planes began to pass over Gbarnga with increasing regularity. In fact, the first time Tamba experienced actual gunfire, it came from the sky. He was in the road when an F-16 swooped down and opened fire on the villagers. They figured anyone out in the open could have been a rebel soldier. Even a six-year-old boy like Tamba. The Liberian military took no chances, so they shot at whoever was outside and beneath their flight path.

  This became an all too common occurrence. The planes might come at three o’clock in the morning or at nine o’clock at night, interrupting the night with noise from their engines or their weapons. Either way, no one in the village would be able to sleep.

  One day, the F-16s returned for a daytime bombing run. Everyone outdoors at the time scattered and scrambled for safety. Tamba knew his mother had been cooking rice for the family meal. Instead of running for cover, he ran to save the food. He knew they might need it if they went into hiding, and his sharpened survival instincts drove him to protect the precious food. Tamba Hali was figuring out how to live through a war—lessons no child should have to learn.

  That’s really what every day boiled down to for Tamba and his family, and for most of Liberia’s two million residents: find something to eat and survive the day. “For me, that was what the world was about, the two main reasons for living,” Tamba said.

  That was easy enough to manage during those intermittent periods when the world was safe and stable enough for families to be living in their homes. Hiding in the bush, however, provided an entirely different set of challenges.

  Let’s be clear: Hiding in the bush is exactly what it sounds like. People forced to evacuate their homes and villages would take to the forests for cover. Remember the palm tree from the Liberian coat of arms? It no longer stood for prosperity; now, a palm tree meant protection.

  They would avoid walking on the roads, where they might be mistaken for rebels and targeted by F-16 raids. Or they might encounter actual rebels who might kill or kidnap them. Or they could confront “official” government checkpoints where they often were forced to bribe the guards with money or food or clothes in order to pass. Once, Tamba was traveling in another crowded truck through a new security checkpoint. The guards let them through, but then someone opened fire on the truck. Tamba jumped up, waving his arms and screaming, “Don’t shoot!” His older half brother, also named Tamba, yanked him down and back into the safety of the truck.

  “When you’re that age,” Tamba said, “you don’t know what’s happening or why it’s all happening to you.”

  So they would find hiding places in the forests—the one resource that Liberia had plenty to offer. At the start of the civil war, roughly 45 percent of Liberia was forest; after thirteen years of fighting, the country had lost approximately 13 percent of its forest and close to 70 percent of its coastal mangrove swamps. Thanks to “conflict timber”—trees that were cut down and sold by Taylor’s forces to help finance the rebel militias—Liberia’s rain forests were an underreported casualty of the violence. The war killed not only Liberia’s people but its land as well.

  Of the many kinds of trees common to the Liberian bush, banana trees offered some of the best hiding spots. They could grow as tall as twenty-five feet. Their leaves could reach nine feet long and two feet wide; they grew next to one another, almost like the blades of a ceiling fan, which provided a natural umbrella of protection from above.

  Banana trees often grew in dense swampy areas, which also became a common place for people to hide. Of course, they were not without their special challenges. Mosquitoes thrive in swampy conditions, and in West Africa, mosquitoes are notorious for carrying deadly diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever. Hiding in the swamps, people could be a little safer from bullets but not from bugs.

  Swamps also were home to leeches, which were decidedly the lesser of two evils. “Not much of a choice,” Saah said. “You can risk getting infested with leeches and have to seek some sort of medical help, or you get shot at.”

  Medical help, of course, was not exactly easy to come by. Clinics and hospitals throughout the country were destroyed over the course of the war, making it increasingly difficult to treat the sick, the wounded, and the dying. Tamba witnessed people being shot in the legs having to be tended to in the bush by what he called “old remedies,” which often weren’t enough to fight off infection.

  Clean drinking water wasn’t readily available, nor were sanitary conditions for bathing and other bathroom-related needs.

  And what about food?

  “Everywhere we went, we lived off the land,” Tamba said.

  There were bananas and mangoes. There were rice and potatoes. There was sugarcane. And there was cassava, a plant whose root could be eaten as well as the leaves. These already were staples of the Liberian diet, though ample amounts could be difficult to find while hiding. Nobody ate until they were full or even satisfied. They ate for survival.

  “You would eat as much as you could to maintain yourself,” Saah said. “After that, if you had anything, you gave it to other people.”

  Malnutrition can become a big problem for people living in the bush for weeks at a time, especially for babies and young children and the elderly. Meat, and the protein it provided, was scarce. Sometimes, they would be able to fish or send a party out to hunt for deer or other animals that could be caught in the wild. That could mean a supper menu featuring rodents or fruit bats or snakes.

>   “Guys would go out hunting and come back with a huge snake,” Tamba said. “That was a meal.”

  Of course, some of the food came with health risks. Poorly cooked meats could sicken someone, as would undercooked palm roots (an occasional substitute for cassava). Simply coming into contact with infected animals could bring disease, potentially putting the cook at greater risk than the people eating the food. Fruit bats were considered to be a primary carrier of the Ebola virus that in 2014 killed more than eleven thousand people across West Africa. Liberia and its neighbors, Sierra Leone and Guinea, were the epicenter of the epidemic. That’s who the refugees shared the bush with.

  Tamba and his family and neighbors lived like this for days, weeks, even months at a time. Hiding in the bush until the fighting left town, returning home until the threat returned, then back to the bush.

  Meanwhile, the war was growing more chaotic. Back in September 1990, President Doe had been captured, tortured, and killed, but that didn’t end the fighting. A different rebel group had splintered away from the Charles Taylor–led NPFL, calling itself the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL). The INPFL was responsible for Doe’s death. But now these two growing armies were fighting for control of Monrovia and power over all of Liberia.

  An intervention force, formed by sixteen different neighboring countries, also had entered the fray. It was called the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG). Eventually, Doe’s supporters reconstituted as the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO) and rejoined the fight, though it, too, would split into two groups—one primarily Krahn, the other mostly Mandingo.

  Liberia had become one giant alphabet soup of death and devastation. Hiding in the bush no longer seemed like a safe enough option. By the fall of 1992, Tamba Hali’s family decided that their homeland was lost. The time had come to leave Liberia.