Chasing the Devil

by Tim Butcher

  Worse still for the region, Liberia’s conflict spilled over the frontier, sparking the civil war in Sierra Leone in 1991 when the Taylor-backed RUF attacked the east of the country, and causing further regional chaos as millions of refugees fled across the borders seeking sanctuary in Guinea and Ivory Coast. Liberia’s war festered for more than six years, acted out on the ground by Taylor and other local warlords but heavily influenced by foreign powers, including, most importantly, Libya and Nigeria, before a lull allowed Taylor finally to take power in 1997 through a UN-backed election.

  The international community was so desperate to put an end to Liberia’s conflict that it was willing to tolerate the coronation of a murderous thug like Taylor even though the peace his reign brought about was always going to be illusory. Like Doe before him, Taylor ran a government of such venal corruption and incompetence that its violent demise was inevitable. The rebel force that eventually did for him was sponsored by Guinea, a country led by a regime with which he had fallen out, and called itself Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD). It was the advance by LURD rebels into Monrovia that had first brought me to Liberia as a reporter in June 2003. Although the Taylor regime boasted it would never surrender, within two months Taylor had fled for his life, avoiding the gory fate suffered by presidents Tolbert and Doe by taking sanctuary in Nigeria. Under intense diplomatic pressure, in 2006 Nigeria handed Taylor over to the United Nations for trial so, rarely among African warlords, he is being held to account for his actions as he faces trial under international law for alleged war crimes. Significantly, the charges all concern his role in Sierra Leone not Liberia, which has yet to decide how to deal with the sensitive issue of accountability for wartime abuses. Before Taylor’s arrest, all war crimes suspects in Sierra Leone were tried in Freetown, but he is regarded as such a threat to stability in the fragile country that his case has been moved specially to the Hague.

  Taylor left behind him a country both wrecked and traumatised. The death toll from Liberia’s post-1980 violence is not known for sure, although public opinion in the country suggests more than 100,000 people lost their lives. But the fighting also left the pillars of Liberian nationhood in tatters, with industry, healthcare, schooling and all other infrastructure largely destroyed. When I reached Lofa County in 2009 the country might have enjoyed several years of relative peace but it remained one of the world’s most failed and scarred states.

  The morning fog made for initially comfortable trekking conditions. Johnson had complained of bad blisters since the first day, but David had patched him with plasters and we opened at a good pace along a well-beaten footpath. Grass on both sides left smears of moisture on my trouser legs and when I used my falloe’s stick to flick low-hanging branches out of the way, dewdrops would cascade to the ground. I would catch a few from time to time and smear them refreshingly on my face.

  The trail led north-east for 8 miles to the town of Kolahun where it was market day so we found ourselves not alone on the trail but accompanied by numerous women with goods for sale balanced on their heads: sacks of rice, rugby-ball-shaped lumps of cassava paste, tubs of palm butter, gourds of palm oil. In the Greenes’ day, the women wore loincloths and nothing else, prompting plenty of observations by Graham Greene throughout Journey Without Maps about breasts, nipples and thighs. Greene’s sex life has become in recent years a rather contentious issue, with some family members disappointed by the way his biographer, Sherry, focuses on it so heavily in his three-volume biography, and the subject had inevitably figured during my research. I had learned, for example, that Graham Greene had four nipples, a physical quirk that led some to draw conclusions about his libido, and that in an early draft of Journey Without Maps he describes going in search of a brothel while in Freetown at the start of the trip. He writes how Pa Oakley boasted about knowing a suitable establishment but, by the time they got there, it was closed. This brothel reference did not make it into the published version of Graham Greene’s book but nevertheless what struck me most about his writing was his frankness in addressing sex, something that feels way ahead of its time. Indeed, in the first edition of Journey Without Maps, while discussing his lack of sexual appetite during the walk, he proudly says he is unbiased racially when it came to women.

  I found it hard to believe in the need white men were said to find in the African bush for sleeping with native women. It certainly wasn’t owing to colour prejudice; a black skin has always appealed to me and I no longer had any sense of smell. It was partly, I think, their lack of sexual self-consciousness.

  His directness on matters sexual felt modern and I was disappointed to find they were excised from all later editions. As for his attitude towards sex on the 1935 trek, after experiencing the climate and rigour of the route, I found utterly convincing his observation that ‘perhaps sexual vitality was lowered by the heat and the marches’.

  Rivers and streams are still used as washroom and laundry in rural Liberia so I saw plenty of casual nudity but loincloths belonged to the past. The womenfolk we saw that morning walking into Kolahun wore more modern clothing, including T-shirts, cotton wraps and the occasional bra. Overtaking them became a bit of a game. With heavy loads locking their heads facing forwards, they had no idea there were foreigners walking their trail. As we passed there would be a teetering shudder of surprise as the periphery of their field of vision picked up the unexpected sight of white strangers. Some of the younger ones panicked, dropped their loads and ran screaming into the bush only to be reassured by Johnson speaking in Kissi, and by David and me in our own attempt at the local Krio. Just as Sierra Leone uses a modern relic of English with roots back to eighteenth-century British mariners, so Liberia retains its own broken version of American-English, known as ‘Liberian English’, brought by freed slaves from the Deep South, a Huck Finn vernacular rich with words like hog, catfish, creek, hollerin’ and railroad.

  It took two hours to reach Kolahun and the transformation in climate was phenomenal. As the dry season sun lifted the mist, down came the heat, knocking me almost senseless. By the time we emerged onto the un-shaded road leading into town I had started to feel groggy, such was the enervating power of the sun and the closeness of the humidity. The dry season might have meant there was no rain but there was plenty of moisture in the air and midday temperatures regularly surged over 35°C.

  When the Greenes reached Kolahun they had an unexpected encounter with the country’s leader, President Edwin Barclay, on a rare foray upcountry. The settler overlords of Liberia lived almost exclusively on the coast and were notorious for the distance they maintained from native people in the jungle-covered interior. The disconnection led to distrust and tension so when the slavery scandal broke in the late 1920s, it became positively dangerous for government representatives to trek inland as many tribes had turned hostile. The tension was described by Lord Lugard in a British parliamentary debate from 1934: ‘Liberia claimed sovereignty over two million natives in the hinterland, among whom no Liberian dares to show his face unless supported by troops.’

  It was President Barclay’s squad of bodyguards that caught Graham Greene’s eye when he reached Kolahun. They were parading up and down in a deliberate display of strength to the locals, so he approached and was told the president would see him.

  President Barclay had come to power in the aftermath of the slavery scandal in 1930 when his predecessor had been forced to stand down. No matter that he had been serving as secretary of state at the time and was deeply implicated in profiting from slavery, President Barclay was hurried into office. Two years later his leadership was confirmed by an election, one where only the votes of property-owners, in other words Americo-Liberians, counted. It is fair to say elections in Liberia rarely had much to do with fairness even for the Americo-Liberian elite. In the 1923 poll, President King somehow gleaned 45,000 votes, even though the entire electorate numbered only 6,000.

  Graham Greene felt self-conscious that his dusty trekking unifo
rm of shirt and shorts was inappropriate for a meeting with the Head of State but President Barclay did not seem to mind as he welcomed the Greenes politely and chatted for some time, talking mostly about his grand plans for the development of the country and grumbling about the way Liberia had been treated by the foreign press. I smirked at Graham Greene’s diary entry noting how the president was particularly critical of the Manchester Guardian, precursor of the Guardian, a rival of my old employer, the Telegraph. The written accounts of the cousins vary slightly but both recorded President Barclay’s description of the power he enjoyed as the country’s leader.

  ‘Once elected and in charge of the machine, I’m boss of the whole show,’ he said. In 1930s Liberia, tucked away in a remote corner of West Africa and with few of the checks and balances associated with modern statehood, this was no overstatement.

  The meeting with President Barclay was double-edged for the Greenes. In a way it was helpful to establish a rapport with the most powerful man in the country but it also meant they had drawn attention to a trip backed by British anti-slavery campaigners. For Graham Greene’s mission of finding out if slavery continued in Liberia he would have to dissemble, although he writes ‘it went against the grain’ when he deceived the president over the route he and his cousin hoped to take.

  There was no president for us to meet when we got to the war-damaged remnants of Kolahun. A small town, it lies on the main road that crosses Lofa County and in the short time we were there we saw a few trucks from the UN and aid groups thunder by, throwing up tumbling clouds of dust. Our priority was more mundane than a presidential encounter. We simply wanted to meet up with Mr Omaru, our new companion with two wheels to whom Johnson had entrusted our gear, and confirm the onward route to Kpangbalamai.

  There was one roadside stall in town where we stopped and bought lukewarm Coke. Our breakfast back at Bolahun had consisted of the previous night’s catfish and rice, unappetisingly re-heated, so the drink gave me a welcome blast of sugar. Mr Omaru was there, as arranged, a taciturn and earnest figure. Dressed in black and wearing ski gloves he watched carefully over his precious motorbike, another super reliable Yamaha AG, I was glad to see, and its heavy load of rucksacks strapped under a web of old inner tubes. He was not one for chat.

  ‘I have found a way to reach Kpangbalamai by bike. I will see you there this evening,’ he said, before setting off down the road at the head of his own modest dust devil.

  We spent just a few minutes in the sanctuary of the stall’s shade before Johnson hurried us back on to the trail. For the first time since I met him he looked a little nervous, so I took him to one side and asked him if everything was OK.

  ‘Something happened to me near Kolahun during the war. It was the closest I came to being killed so I don’t like this place,’ he said.

  Johnson was smart enough to know I wanted to hear more.

  ‘It was 2000, I think, when Taylor was still in power in Monrovia but the LURD had appeared for the first time. They came from Guinea which is not far away and Kolahun was one of the first towns they passed through. When Taylor’s people came here they wanted revenge, they accused the locals of helping LURD.

  ‘Taylor’s troops were commanded by Zigzag Marzah, the most terrifying man I have ever seen. He ordered his guys to collect a group of us to set an example, but me and a friend were caught by a child with a gun, a boy called Livingstone, who let us go. I don’t know why he did it but I think it was perhaps through the hand of God.

  ‘The others numbered thirty-four, women mostly. Zigzag ordered them locked into a container not far from where we are now, one of those things the aid groups bring food in on lorries. He then ordered it to be set on fire. They burned to death inside.’

  Johnson delivered the story dispassionately with no sense of self-pity, no sense of using it as a way to ask anything of me. He was not looking for sympathy or charity. He was simply telling me of his own small experience of the broader pain of Liberia. But he made one crucial point that has long-term implications for the future of the country: since the war those known to be responsible for atrocities have not been held to account.

  After the war ended in Liberia with Taylor’s departure in 2003 the decision was deliberately taken to put off dealing with the killers and the warlords. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to establish the facts of what happened during the conflict in Liberia but not to hold people to account, so known perpetrators are currently free, their victims denied the chance of closure for the suffering they endured, their scars festering unhealed. The commission may one day resolve to pursue individuals but it was considered so important to end the fighting that any action which might fuel tension and violence was delayed.

  This decision to withhold justice led to an extraordinary moment later on our journey when Johnson fell unnaturally silent as we walked past a group of villagers. His eyes dropped to the ground and his breath shortened but his stride picked up and he whispered something.

  ‘That’s him, that’s J P.’

  I was a little lost so, almost running to keep up, I asked him to explain.

  ‘There in that group of men was J P, the man I told you about who burnt Yassadu, my village, to the ground. Let’s go before he recognises me.’

  The nervousness felt by Johnson in Kolahun disappeared as soon as we returned to a bush path, replaced by his default setting of energetic enthusiasm. The stall owner had given him directions for the next section of trail, saying something about ‘passing over the big rock where the prints were left by the praying Muslim’. An hour or so later and our path climbed out of the forest and up a rocky flank. Johnson looked around for a minute or so and then pointed out two pale smudges on the rock surface and explained their significance.

  ‘I had not heard the story before but back in Kolahun the shopkeepers told me the legend of this place. A Mandingo, a Muslim man, came to town one day a long, long time ago but was treated badly. Apparently he came here and prayed to his God, asking for punishment against the people who were bad to him. The legend says he prayed so hard his knees left marks on the rock.’

  The legend of the curse continues today, blamed by the people of Kolahun whenever their crops fail, such is the power of Mandingos. Descendants of nomads who came to Liberia centuries ago from ancestral homes further north near the headwaters of the Niger River, Mandingos seeded Islam among the jungle communities in the region, creating what amounted to a significant ethnic minority. Tension between Liberia’s Mandingos and other tribal groups has been a constant theme throughout the country’s history, and the recent wars have exacerbated the isolation of Mandingo communities. Several times during our trek we would find them forced to live in their own jungle villages, apart from other tribes.

  The heat out in the open of the rocky face was fierce and it was a relief to get back under the shade of trees. As the day went on I could see that Johnson was becoming less and less confident about directions. He knew Kissi country intimately from his childhood and time as a tracing officer, but we had now moved into land shared between the Bande and Loma tribes and he was no longer on such familiar ground.

  Back under the tree cover we met a man who gave Johnson a complicated list of fresh directions. They came in a long stream but I made out one section – ‘turn left at the butter fruit tree’. I was curious about what this might mean until, a short while later, we turned left under a tree heavy with avocados.

  My notebook got steadily more smudged as that day’s journey wore on. When I later went over the day in my mind I broke it into three separate phases, each of increasing physical exhaustion. During the first I could comfortably wear both sunhat and glasses. As the hat got more and more soaked with sweat so my glasses steamed up and the second phase began when I was forced to take off my hat to keep the glasses clear enough for me to see. The final phase of tiredness came when I was sweating so much my glasses steamed up anyway. At this point I had to take them off and for the rest of the day my Liberian
forest view was blurred at the edges.

  There felt no shame in making such heavy going of it. Sir Alfred Sharpe, a British colonial administrator and old Africa hand, reached Kolahun on foot in the dry season of 1919, one of the first outsiders to do so. Bizarrely, he had taken a bicycle with him but found barely any stretches of track where it could be used, so it spent the entire trip on the shoulders of a porter. Later that year he described the rigours of his journey to an audience at the Royal Geographical Society in London.

  ‘In the Liberian hinterland there are no roads; one follows native tracks, always in dense forest, and never on level ground. These paths take you up the steepest hills and down again; the surface is a mass of rocks and intertwined tree roots. I have never been in any part of Africa where the going was so bad.’

  During my research I came across an even earlier written account of overland travel through this area. Published in 1857 by Reverend Samuel Williams, a descendant of former American slaves who spent four years in Liberia, it said ‘that day we walked six miles, which is considered in Liberia a good walk’. Our trek that day from Bolahun to Kpangbalamai was a little under 19 miles.

  For the last part of the journey, Johnson wisely conceded he needed his own guide. When we reached a forest hamlet called Pwenyeho he persuaded a young man, Amah, to lead us on the final leg of the day’s trek. It was a sound decision as the trail was becoming increasingly erratic and difficult to follow. The young man agreed a price and set off carrying nothing but his cutlass, the buccaneering name in Liberian English for a machete, which he used to cut away tendrils, vines and branches. I was learning that the arrival of vehicle-worthy roads in the 1950s and 1960s, the period of slow economic growth in Liberia under American patronage, meant many of the old forest trails, the ones used by the Greenes in 1935, had fallen into disuse. Fortunately, Amah had known this section of the forest since childhood.