The Africans

by David Lamb

  At State House he had put a quick end to the stuffy formalities inherited from the British colonial administrators. He entertained in open-neck sports shirts and filled his mansion that overlooked the Indian Ocean with orchestras and his favorite French wines. Almost every night the house echoed until the early hours with the sounds of laughter and singing.

  On overseas trips, which he made with great regularity, he banged out press releases and telexed them back home to the local newspaper. At home, when the disc jockey at the local radio station overslept, he would slip on shorts and sneakers, drive to the station and spend a couple of hours reciting his poetry, reading the news and playing records.

  And when a British gossip columnist got wind of an extramarital affair just before his twelve-year marriage broke up, he had an unusual response. He called a meeting of the islands’ political leaders, held up a picture of the model involved and said, “This is the woman. Now, have I done anything wrong?” Apparently his people thought not. In the election three weeks later, his party won thirteen seats; René’s got two.

  But if Mancham pursued the good life with gusto, he also worked tirelessly on behalf of the Seychelles. He was a one-man public relations agency, traveling the world and telling anyone who would listen about the beauty of a nation very few people had ever heard of. He opened an international airport. Several luxury hotels sprang up. The tourist industry boomed. Visitors arrived from the distant corners of the world to enjoy this tropical paradise, whose president had a political credo he called “the Singing Philosophy”—just be happy as a person and a nation. His goal, Mancham declared, was to put a boy with a guitar under every palm tree.

  “We are a small, quiet country,” Mancham said. “We should not pretend to be anything else. We do not need great doses of political ideology. Let us just be what we are.”

  That, however, is not easy for an African country. Mancham headed off for London in the summer of 1977 to attend the Commonwealth Conference. René bid him farewell at the airport and that night sent his Tanzanian military “advisers” to the radio station. They played Peter, Paul and Mary records, and in the morning René made a simple announcement through a spokesman: Mancham had been overthrown and would not be allowed to return home. The Seychelles was just twenty-three days short of its first anniversary of independence.

  René criticized Mancham’s flamboyant life style, saying he spent too much time jet-setting and not enough minding the affairs of state. And perhaps Mancham should have been a good-will ambassador-at-large, not a president, but if any country had an opportunity to achieve the dreams of independence without a coup d’état, it was the Seychelles, Africa’s smallest country in terms of population. Its per capita income of $650 was among the highest in Africa. So was its literacy rate (75 percent for persons between fifteen and thirty years of age), and its life expectancy at birth (seventy years for a woman, sixty-three for a man). The islands were completely free of malaria and the other diseases that have brought such misfortune to the rest of Africa. The people, mostly descendants of French settlers and their African slaves, were racially harmonious. (Mancham himself had Chinese and Creole ancestry.) Their life was so quiet, so seemingly secure, that the Seychelles didn’t even have an army.

  “It’s no big heroic deed to take over the country,” Mancham said. “Twenty-five people with sticks could do it.”

  Without Mancham the Seychelles might have remained an isolated backwater. But his great failing was naïveté, his belief that his country was entitled to something that did not belong to Africa—an age of innocence. René moved the Seychelles to the left politically and started tampering. He partly nationalized the economy, locked up a few opponents and formed an army, advised by the same Tanzanian soldiers who had turned Uganda into a shambles. The influx of tourists slowed, the economy weakened, the free press died. By 1980 the Seychelles was observing the third anniversary of the coup with a military parade through downtown Victoria, the capital. There were uniformed soldiers, armored personnel carriers and lots of weapons everywhere. The palm trees along the route swayed in the balmy breezes, and under them were young men who had forgotten their guitars and now carried guns.*“Look at it this way,” Mancham said when we met in London a few days before he set off to lecture on a Lindblad tour of the South Pacific. “I’m alive. That’s more than a lot of ex-presidents in Africa can say. Besides that, everyone had fun when I was president, and how many ex-presidents can say that?”

  The United States Congress in 1816 chartered a white philanthropic group known as the American Colonization Society. Supported by a $100,000 congressional grant, the society began organizing ship caravans of freed slaves who wanted to return to the Africa of their forefathers. Six years later, after being refused admission to Britain’s Sierra Leone colony, the first shipload of freedmen landed near the mouth of the Mesurado River on the West African coast. With them was an agent of the society and a U.S. Navy lieutenant who persuaded the local chiefs, at gunpoint, to sell them the site for $300 worth of assorted hardware, knickknacks and biscuits.

  Over the next years 45,000 former slaves—or black pioneers, as they called themselves—returned to West Africa.† They named their new home Liberia (for “liberty”), and their capital Monrovia (in honor of U.S. President James Monroe). In 1847 Liberia became Africa’s first republic. It had an American-style government, a striped red, white and blue flag with a single star, and a national motto of “The love of liberty brought us here.”

  The new settlers adopted the only desirable life style they knew—that of the ante-bellum whites who had ruled them—and they turned the sixty indigenous tribes into an underprivileged majority, referring to them until the 1950s as “aborigines.” The pioneers and their “Americo-Liberian” descendants became a black colonial aristocracy. They controlled the commerce, ran the government and sent their sons abroad to be educated. The men wore morning coats and top hats, drank bourbon, joined the Masons and formed a secret society called Poro that acknowledged no African heritage. They passed on to their children their American names such as Christian Maxwell, George Browne and Barton Bliss—the army’s chief of staff in the late 1960s was General George Washington—and a member of their True Whig Party was as conservative as any Southern Republican back in the United States.

  Even today, urban Liberia seems more like William Faulkner’s South than Africa. The official currency is the same U.S. dollar bills used in New York or Chicago—though they are faded and wrinkled and long ago were taken out of circulation by American banks. Policemen wear summer uniforms discarded by the New York City Police Department, and townships have names such as Louisiana, New Georgia and Maryland. On Sundays, when the strip joints on Broad and Gurley streets in Monrovia are closed, American gospel music fills the radio stations, and the accents in the packed Baptist church on Center Street are distinctly Deep South.

  For a long time Africans poked fun at Liberia, disparaging it for adopting attitudes and importing values not in keeping with African traditions. But there was one aspect of Liberia no one mocked: stability. While governments fell like dominoes throughout Africa, Liberia seemed as solid as a rock politically. It was the essence of permanence and internal strength. By 1980 it had known 133 years of stability not marred by a single coup d’état. On top of that, it had become the first black African country to experience a peaceful, constitutional transfer of power when in 1971 President William V. S. Tubman died in office and was succeeded by his vice president of twenty years, William Tolbert. “We can take pride in the fact that this nation stands today as a true example of stability,” the new president said.

  Then fifty-eight years old, Tolbert was the grandson of a freed American slave and the son of a wealthy rubber baron. He had begun his government service as a typist in the treasury in 1935. He was an ordained minister and the first black man ever elected president of the Baptist World Alliance, and would later become chairman of the Organization of African Unity. He called his political philo
sophy Humanistic Capitalism and he lectured his people in preachy homilies.

  “In a world of rising expectations and accelerated change,” he said, “the lofty goals of national destiny still require and demand that Liberians harness and channel all their resources … in order to achieve a sustained upward thrust for ever-escalating rounds of distinction—yea, higher heights.”

  Tolbert was a decent man who, though certainly not untouched by corruption and nepotism, ruled more capably than many African presidents and more benignly than most. There were three main problems his administration had to come to grips with. First, Liberia had to be moved more into Africa’s political mainstream. Second, accommodation had to be made with the indigenous Africans who had become increasingly resentful of their second-class citizenship. Third, the economy—based on iron ore, timber, rubber and the registration of the world’s largest ghost fleet of ships*—had to be buoyed and restructured. Never having been a colony, Liberia had missed out on the benefits of colonialism (schools, roads, hospitals and a trained bureaucracy) as well as those of postcolonialism (huge European grants and foreign investment). The very independence that made Liberia unique had also cost its 1.8 million people dearly.

  Tolbert made modest progress on all three fronts. He rode to his inauguration in a Volkswagen Beetle and wore a white safari suit to show that Tubman’s stuffy, top-hat era had ended. He sold Tubman’s $2 million yacht (it was never clear what happened to the proceeds). He brought more people who weren’t the privileged descendants of slaves into the government, started a liberation fund to combat white rule in southern Africa and spoke out against the brutalities of Uganda’s Idi Amin, one of the few African presidents to do so. He introduced universal suffrage, advocated free university education and amended the constitution so he could not run for another term, something no president had ever done on the continent.

  “We’ve been so lucky in Liberia,” a businesswoman in Monrovia, Ruth Phillips, told me one day. “This is one of the few places in Africa that has known political stability and has respect for the rights of the individual. If you blame other presidents for what they did to their countries, then you have to credit Tolbert for what happened to Liberia.”

  Mrs. Phillips, who owned the West African Travel Agency, had come to Liberia from her home in Washington, D.C., in 1954. She was a nurse and had intended to stay for only six months. But she fell in love with a young Liberian businessman who was bright and industrious and eventually became the country’s minister of finance. They were married and Mrs. Phillips took out Liberian citizenship.

  “This is home now,” she said. “I still go back to the States frequently on trips, but Liberia is where my heart is. My husband has done well financially and he’s a respected member of the government. He’s very intelligent. Tolbert relies on him a great deal.”

  During his nearly three decades as vice president and president, Tolbert’s people sang his praises and sought his favors. His generals obediently carried out his commands. Then, as often happens in Africa, he was given the kiss of Judas and buried like a dog.

  Late one evening in April 1980 he left a reception for religious and diplomatic guests in downtown Monrovia and returned to his seven-story Israeli-built mansion overlooking the Atlantic. It was almost midnight and he went directly to his penthouse suite. He changed into pajamas, presumably said prayers (as he always did), and crawled into bed. Two hours later, with the help of rebels in the presidential guard, a twenty-eight-year-old army sergeant named Samuel K. Doe scaled the mansion’s iron gate with nineteen colleagues. They overpowered the few loyalist soldiers on duty, and in the fire fight a stray bullet severed the telephone line to the military barracks. It was the million-to-one shot that prevented Tolbert from summoning his army. Doe and his colleagues broke down Tolbert’s door and found him in bed. They gouged out his right eye, disemboweled him and fired three bullets into his head.

  Two days later, as Monrovia slumbered under the army-imposed curfew, a big yellow bulldozer crashed through the wrought-iron fence surrounding the Palm Grove Cemetery, and in a corner section used for dumping garbage, cut a shallow trench long enough to hold twenty-eight bodies. Tolbert’s corpse, still clad in pajamas, was collected from John F. Kennedy Hospital, where it had lain unattended on a slab. Soldiers who had served their commander in chief loyally threw the body into the back of a truck, drove to the cemetery and dumped it into the unmarked grave along with the bodies of the men killed defending him.

  Many Liberians came to peer into the open pit, but there were no prayers or eulogies for the ordained Baptist minister who was chairman of the OAU. Instead, before wandering back to town, the people threw stones and spat at their late president. “Pig,” shouted one youth, hurling his beer can at the corpse.

  Meanwhile Sergeant Doe, the semiliterate head of state, by this time had moved into Tolbert’s mansion and was riding around town in Tolbert’s chauffeured black Mercedes-Benz. (Tolbert had long since given up his VW.) Doe held a press conference to say there would be no witch hunting. “Our responsibility is to build a new society for the benefit of all our people,” he said. But all the people really meant some of the people, and first there were some old debts to be repaid.

  Swaggering soldiers patrolled the streets, shaking down civilians and looting shops. One group of drunken soldiers stormed into the Ducor Inter-Continental Hotel, and in a room-to-room foray, robbed foreign delegates who had been attending a Lutheran conference. The houses of Tolbert’s associates were attacked and sacked, and ninety-one of his top officials were arrested on charges ranging from corruption to human rights violations.

  The trials began on a Wednesday in a second-floor conference room at the military barracks on the outskirts of Monrovia. The public jammed into the stark cement-walled room, staring wordlessly at the accused, who faced the five-man military tribunal. None was permitted a defense counsel. Overhead fans cut through the heavy, stale air, and outside, hundreds of civilians watched gleefully while former cabinet ministers were paraded through the camp, wearing only their underpants. On the sandy beach nearby, nine telephone poles were erected in the sand, a sure sign that some of the accused had already been judged guilty and would be executed.

  I arrived at the barracks in a taxi, expecting to be turned back as soon as I identified myself as a journalist. Instead the soldiers at the gate nodded and waved me through. A few minutes later I was seated in the second row of the makeshift courtroom, where Frank Stewart, the budget director for Tolbert’s government, was pleading for his life.

  Stewart’s hair was flaked with sawdust from ten days of sleeping on a cement floor, and a gray stubble covered his chin. He wore a T-shirt, baggy brown trousers with no belt, and sandals. Someone said he was fifty but he looked much older. He sat on a wooden straight-back chair, squinting and sweating in the glare of camera lights from the local government station. He hunched forward to hear the accusations from the military tribunal. When the honking horns and rumbling traffic in the streets outside became too loud, he cupped his hand to his ear.

  His five accusers were army officers with spit-shined shoes and steel-cold eyes. Two weeks earlier they had been the country’s loyal servants. Now they were part of the ruling elite, sitting as judge and jury. To their left, a young army private wearing sunglasses labored unsteadily over a typewriter, recording the proceedings. In the back of the small auditorium several soldiers with rifles slumped sleepily against the unused bar. One of them kept bringing Stewart bottles of ginger ale, which he would empty in a single gulp.

  It soon became clear that Stewart had stretched his annual government salary of $18,000 a long way. He earned $32,000 a year from the rental of three houses, and he owned twenty-eight lots, a supermarket, a farm and other scattered investments. Everything, he insisted, had been obtained legally, and if the tribunal would only allow him to bring his records, he said, he could prove his innocence. But no, an officer replied, that would only be a waste of time. So Stewart presumab
ly knew he had already been judged guilty and the only question was whether he would be killed or jailed.

  “Mr. Stewart,” an officer said, “for the benefit of this tribunal, please state how many houses, lots and farms do you own.”

  “I will answer that by telling a story about how I happened to get—”

  “We are not interested in stories. How many houses you got?”

  “Well, houses … there are, let’s see—four.”

  “Four,” repeated the officer accusingly, holding up four fingers. “You got that down?”

  “Got what down?” asked the typist.

  “Four houses. Mr. Stewart got four houses.”

  “Four houses, yeah, I got it.”

  “Yes,” Stewart said, “but in 1957 the price of cement was very cheap, so my wife, who was earning one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month at the Justice Department, and I—my salary was two hundred and fifty dollars—we used small loans from the bank, and for seven years we worked building the blocks we needed to construct—”

  “Holy Christ,” an officer said, “cut this short or we goin’ to be sittin’ here right through lunch.”

  “No, let him finish,” another said. “Mr. Stewart, is it right for a government official to build a house, like you did, and then lease it back to the government? That’s a question.”