American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  Juggling these diverse influences, the family settled into life in Dorchester. Taylor worked jobs at Sears and Mutual of Omaha, but Emmanuel was the more consistent breadwinner. She recalled Chucky as “the happiest baby” while the family lived together under the same roof.18 But the truth was that Taylor did not have the time to be a father. Around the child’s first birthday, he returned home one day to see his son drinking from a baby bottle. As Emmanuel would recall, Taylor plucked the bottle from his son’s hand and tossed it out the window, declaring, “You’re too grown for bottles.”

  More important, the politics of his homeland were changing rapidly—he longed to be involved.

  On the morning of April 14, 1979, a crowd gathered on Broad Street in downtown Monrovia. Many were students from the nearby university, but soon people from all walks of life began to join what was a rare protest. A student group, the Progressive Alliance of Liberia, had called the march over an issue felt keenly by all Liberians: the cost of rice. The staple of the national diet, its price had leaped in cost due to a disastrous government intervention. A policy aimed at boosting local rice agriculture—Liberia had once been a significant rice-producing nation—had pushed the cost of rice to more than a third of an average family’s income. This increase was meant to stimulate farming, but the primary rice producers included large plantations owned by President Tolbert’s siblings; the president appeared to be profiting from his own people’s hunger. The opposition had organized a peaceful protest, but as the crowd in Monrovia swelled to nearly ten thousand, protesters burned cars and looted businesses, unleashing tensions that had been building up for more than a century.

  President Tolbert, sitting a little more than a mile away at the Executive Mansion, had underestimated the degree of popular anger. The change that he had promised had moved too slowly or failed to materialize at all. His government had little experience or facility to deal with unrest, particularly in the capital. His impulse was to seek counsel, not from his military leaders but from the chief of the military mission at the U.S. embassy, Col. Robert Gosney.19

  Gosney, a former offensive guard for Texas A&M University with a brawny, no-nonsense attitude, had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross while serving as a U.S. Army helicopter pilot in Vietnam.20 He’d been in the country just a few months, working with the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL), but had already made his presence known as a capable trainer. He’d learned that the military leadership was “crooked as snakes.” The generals used military resources as their own, divvying out pay, housing, and rank along tribal lines. When he sat down with the president and his chiefs of staff that day, it became apparent that “the thrust of that meeting was that they wanted me to take control of the army.”

  Gosney mobilized two battalions at Barclay Training Center, a military installation on the edge of downtown Monrovia. The plan was simple: move through the capital in a show of force. Before the soldiers departed the camp, Gosney later said in an interview, he ordered them stripped of ammunition and outfitted with batons and tear gas. The rioters were unruly and violent, but they were not armed. Gosney didn’t want a massacre.

  The rioting crowds had gutted much of downtown Monrovia, emptying out storefronts and shops, many owned by Lebanese merchants who were now pleading for help from the president and the embassy. When the crowd approached the Executive Mansion, a contingent of security forces armed with live ammunition fired into the crowd. As protesters scattered, nearly forty were killed by the gunfire. The military forcibly dispersed those remaining, leaving several hundred injured in the process and setting off another rampage among the retreating protesters.

  The city’s thriving business district was scarred by fire and looting. Eventually, the Liberian government requested help from neighboring Guinea to enforce calm. Gosney later said he didn’t recall any of the shooting deaths from the riots, but he understood the implications of the rioting and violence that followed—the rising hostility was palpable not only among the Liberian people but also within the military, where inequalities angered many.

  “If you don’t get ahold of generals who were robbing their soldiers of their pay, there was going to be a coup,” Gosney recalled saying.

  The violence in Monrovia—known as the Rice Riots—was felt almost immediately in Liberian communities throughout the East Coast; the uneasy inertia of Liberian politics had been forever altered. Taylor and his friends in the United States were appalled by Tolbert’s reaction and his decision to call in troops, especially the contingent from Guinea.

  The crisis provided Taylor with an unprecedented opportunity: a path to power separate from the political establishment in Liberia. At a ULAA board meeting soon after the Rice Riots, members of the group proposed purchasing weapons to send to the opposition back in Liberia.21 One member met with a contact in Washington, D.C., to arrange the purchase of several handguns. The plan dramatically underestimated the firepower that would be required of a successful armed insurrection: the conventional force that had just used automatic rifles on a crowd of unarmed protesters was American-trained and -supplied. The ignorance, however, didn’t matter as the contact was, in fact, an FBI informer.

  At a meeting in Washington months after the Rice Riots, FBI agents arrested the Liberian weapons buyer. In the next days that followed, arrests continued through the ULAA’s ranks, including Taylor, who was apprehended a short time later in Boston. He would be brought before a grand jury in Washington, D.C., but avoided prosecution.

  For Taylor, the episode offered an abbreviated lesson. “Bad thinking,” he recalled later, “but that was the time.”22

  Even after the FBI sting, members of ULAA continued a campaign of agitation against Tolbert. Taylor led a small group of ULAA activists, mostly students and young professionals, to the Liberian consulate in New York. The group took over the consulate’s suite of fourth-floor offices at 820 Second Avenue and demanded that Tolbert resign. Taylor knew better than to think the president would be pressured by a disorganized sit-in across the Atlantic, but the group hoped to have their voices heard in Monrovia.

  Winston Tubman, a nephew of former president William Tubman and head of the consulate, showed up to remove the protesters. Without hostility, he addressed Taylor, who appeared to be leading the group. “Gentlemen,” he said, “the events at home have shocked us all. I hear that there were many deaths.”23 Trying to connect with the protesters, Tubman mentioned that he was uncertain whether a friend of his had been injured in the violence.

  “Screw your friend!” Taylor screamed. “Our country is being destroyed by killers, and here you are, talking about your friend!”

  Tubman was stunned. If the men refused to leave, he warned them, they would be arrested. Taylor challenged him to do so. Tubman didn’t want to see the men arrested, but there was little he could do. Exasperated, he left the room to confer with Monrovia. Soon afterward officers from the NYPD walked into the consulate and arrested Taylor and five of his followers.

  Even after two arrests, Taylor and the ULAA continued to press their case against Tolbert. In September 1979 the president, who was then chairperson of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), traveled to the United Nations to address the General Assembly. Taylor again drove down to New York, having organized a group to protest on First Avenue outside the UN building while several members of the ULAA entered the assembly hall.

  As Tolbert stepped up to the podium to speak, the young Liberians began shouting down their president. Rather than ignore the protesters, he engaged them. He arranged to meet Taylor and several other ULAA leaders at the Liberian embassy in Washington.

  President Tolbert did not have to meet with members of the ULAA. They represented a peripheral, dislocated component of his growing political opposition. The fact that many had received education and work experience in the United States set them apart within Liberian society, but their influence on domestic politics remained questionable.

  At the meeting, Taylor aired the group’s g
rievances: the government’s lack of reform and its failure to punish the minister of justice and police director for the killings of civilians during the Rice Riots.

  “I am doing the best that I can to bring about change,” Tolbert said. “It is slow, but I want change.”24

  Then he chose to hold out a laurel to them.

  “Look,” he said, “some of you have been in America very long and may not have all of the details of what’s going on in Liberia, so I now extend an invitation to you, Mr. Chairman, and a delegation to come and visit Liberia and tour the country, where we think you would be better informed as to what is happening on the ground.”

  Taylor had not been home since he’d arrived in the United States seven years earlier. An invitation from the president conferred upon him and the other ULAA leaders what he considered “almost rock star status.” But it also came with some risk. “It did cross our minds that we could, even if not get killed,… have gotten locked up like the other guys that were already in jail,” he later recalled.

  But Taylor also read an implicit challenge in the president’s offer, which he found impossible to resist. “It is good and well to sit in the United States and demonstrate on the streets where at most the police will arrest you, take you in, book you, and let you go,” he said. “But now when it comes to the time to—what we say literally in Liberia—to show your juice and you run away, I mean, we just couldn’t do that.”

  He and the others immediately accepted.

  Taylor’s political ambitions did not include a role for his American family. As he plied the East Coast, immersing himself in expatriate politics, he became involved with another woman, Enid Tupee Songbie, a younger Liberian who was also the niece of a popular army officer, Thomas Quiwonkpa. As Tupee later told a journalist, Taylor courted her over eight months after they met at a party years earlier in 1975, when Taylor was twenty-seven and she was just sixteen.25 By 1979, the relationship had developed into more than a liaison. There was nothing remarkable about Taylor’s infidelity to Bernice—they were not married. An ambitious Liberian man had no clear political advantage in being tied to a Trinidadian-American woman.

  Taylor, according to Bernice, did offer to take the family back to Liberia with him.26 But she didn’t even entertain the idea; her view of Africa was gleaned from television documentaries: a world of thatched-hut villages and women in straw skirts. “We weren’t educated enough to know that Africa wasn’t backward,” she said. She had an altogether different idea of how she wanted to raise Chucky, educating him at a private school, living near his cousins and grandparents. “Why would I leave here?” she asked.

  Soon afterward Charles Taylor disappeared from her and her child’s life. He married Tupee, a fortuitous alliance for Taylor because of her familial connections. Bernice, when asked about the marriage two decades later, refused to acknowledge it. She recounted their separation in March 1980 as her own decision—one that had left her a single mother caring for two children. (The split may not have been as stark as Bernice describes: other family members have snapshots that appear to show Chucky with his stepmother and stepsister in Liberia in 1982.)

  Chucky entered Berea Seventh Day Adventist Academy in Mattapan, two miles from the apartment she used to share with his father and his half sister Maisha, who was four years older than he. Bernice kept life simple for the children, she says, but she refused hand-me-downs, insisting on brand-name clothes. The children’s lives revolved around school and church; their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins; and weekly dinners at York Steak House. She tried to instill in her children manners and a sense of propriety. Eventually she found for Chucky the one thing in life he didn’t have: a father.

  Roy Belfast was a Trinidadian man from Bernice’s old neighborhood.27 A welder who had trained at Chaguaramas Naval Training School in Trinidad, he had made his way to Baltimore and then to Dorchester in the 1970s. She had met him around the same time she’d met Charles Taylor, but Roy was nearly ten years older than she, and he was married. So she became deeply involved with the young Liberian student, while Belfast faded from view.

  In 1982, when Bernice reconnected with Roy, the two were sharing a mutual experience in heartbreak. She had been without Taylor for two years; Roy was still married, but after thirteen years his marriage was little more than a formality. He and Bernice began seeing each other. When he proposed to her, his divorce had not been finalized. The following spring, after Chucky’s sixth birthday, the couple married at a ceremony in Exeter, New Hampshire. Bernice now had a new life and a new family—without Taylor.

  Yet Charles Taylor was never far from her view. News of a brutal coup in Liberia in April 1980 shocked the international community, which had long seen Liberia as a beacon of stability in the upheaval of postcolonial Africa. In the coup, William Tolbert, the last of a line of Americo-Liberian presidents, was murdered in his bedclothes by a handful of noncommissioned officers from the Armed Forces of Liberia.

  The events surrounding Tolbert’s murder are mysterious. What is known is that on the night of April 12, the president opted to sleep at the Executive Mansion, on the shores of the Atlantic in central Monrovia, rather than at his personal residence outside the city. At some point in the middle of the night, soldiers burst into the room, surprising him and his wife, Victoria.

  The first lady later described the scene in her memoir Lifted Up: “Then … six virtually naked and horrifyingly masked men rushed by me. Their bodies were painted for war, in tribal fashion—like the warriors of Cape Palmas during Liberia’s tribal wars. Only jagged and weathered scraps of fabric hung securely about their loins. I could see that their gruesome masks, designed to terrify, disguise and intimidate, were painted on.… I didn’t recognize any of those men.… Suddenly, a deafening explosion blasted our ears. One of them had shot [President Tolbert]. He sank to the chair, his walking stick dropped to the floor, and I knew he was dead.”28

  The men spared the president’s wife, who belonged to the indigenous Vai tribe.

  According to the lone surviving American embassy official present in Monrovia, the killing of the president was no cathartic purgation of tribal hatred.29 It was little more than a drunken lark, undertaken by a handful of underpaid and aggrieved soldiers. Within hours of the president’s murder, Col. Robert Gosney appeared on scene at the Executive Mansion. There he found the members of the junta, not celebrating their victory, but disoriented and terrified, sulking in a pagoda outside of the mansion. It was a dangerous situation: the capital threatened to spin out of control without a clear line of authority.

  “Is there anyone there that could run the government?” his boss, the chargé d’affaires, radioed him.

  “I reckon there is,” the colonel responded. Gosney was familiar with some of the men from training they had received from U.S. Special Forces weeks before the coup. By his own account, Gosney lined up the men and appointed them roles in the junta according to their rank. His account can’t be independently verified (the others present are deceased), but it is known that two men within this group, Master Sgt. Samuel Kanyon Doe and Sgt. Thomas Quiwonkpa, emerged as the most powerful figures in Liberia. Each would shape Taylor’s development as a political force.

  Both leaders came from tribal backgrounds—Doe was a Krahn tribesman from Grand Gedeh County in Liberia’s southeast, and Quiwonkpa was a Gio from Nimba County along the eastern border. Both men had little schooling but were professional soldiers. Doe became the president and Quiwonkpa the head of the armed forces for a new government, the People’s Redemption Council. Together they represented a new idea for Liberia: indigenous rule.

  The coup dismantled the power structure that had ruled over Liberia for more than a century and simultaneously awakened tribalism as a political force. For ordinary Liberians, the world was turned on its head: the elite became the hunted, the disenfranchised became powerful. The tension in Liberian society had been building toward such a reversal for generations, but when it finally came, t
he change was spontaneous, not the result of an organized coup plot. The violence that followed in the days after Tolbert’s murder was shocking: thirteen cabinet members and government ministers were gunned down at a military camp before a firing squad. The one thing that remained consistent was support from the United States. The Reagan administration, once it was convinced of the Doe regime’s anti-Soviet leanings, began plying the new government with military and economic support.

  For Bernice in America, the news likely confirmed that the political change that Charles and his friends had agitated for was being realized. It wasn’t clear where Taylor would fit within this violent new order, but he couldn’t have been too far from the action. Even as she moved on with her life, rumors about Taylor surfaced perennially: that he’d returned to the United States, that he’d been arrested and then broken from prison. She was left to wonder whether he was somehow connected to the crisis back in his country.

  But Bernice ultimately decided that what happened in Liberia was not relevant to the family she was trying to hold together. The father to her child had disappeared, and apparently it would be better if he remained in the void. By 1987 she and her new husband had decided to leave Boston—leaving her daughter Maisha behind with her grandparents—to raise Chucky in Florida, far from his birthplace and far from wherever his father would think to look for him.30

  Pine Hills was a stretch of suburban Orlando crafted from an idealized vision of America. Developed in the 1950s as tracts of tidy, affordable single-family homes on open farmland west of downtown, the neighborhoods and cul-de-sacs were built around fixtures of middle-class Floridian life: the community golf course, the swimming pool, and the shopping mall.31 In the 1950s a typical Pine Hills resident held a job at nearby Lockheed Martin and could comfortably afford a $4,000 starter home. In nearly all cases, a Pine Hills resident was white.