American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  Liberia’s political culture also inherited unique contradictions from the United States. In Bitter Canaan, the definitive history of the creation of Liberia, Charles S. Johnson points out that Liberia’s “constitution was a quickly drawn instrument,” embodying the ACS’s idealistic intentions rather than the realities the settlers faced.14 It was crafted to echo the U.S. Constitution, lauding democratic notions that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The author of the constitution was Simon Greenleaf, a Harvard professor who had never set foot on the African continent. He lacked any direct knowledge of the indigenous people who would be “governed” by the constitution, let alone the complex political systems they had developed. Moreover, there was little precedent in Africa for the establishment of a democracy by a foreign power: the typical structures imposed on indigenous peoples were colonial governments that “made no pretense of democratic principles.”

  At its founding, the government in Liberia professed to be a representative democracy, while it was in fact a one-party semifeudal state. It would take a century before indigenous Liberians would be granted suffrage. Even then the political elite remained entirely Americo-Liberian for 132 years, a ruling minority of 2 percent that was attached to the mainline Christian churches and Masonic societies, unwilling to yield their political power.

  Yet the exchange between cultures wasn’t entirely one-sided. Tribal societies, traditionally governed by powerful chiefs who distributed power and wealth within the community, provided an example for the settlers. Monrovia’s top-down style of governance was more reflective of the society of the indigenous people.

  The society’s division manifested within the settlers’ households, even just a generation removed from the Valdosta settlers. Serena Anne Bracewell and Philip Andrew Taylor, both first-generation Americo-Liberians, married in March 1918.15 As had become customary among settler families, the couple took in a teenage indigenous girl as a house servant, a practice that hearkened back to white slave masters who brought young black women into the home to perform domestic duties (and also to field sexual advances). Her name was Yassa Zoe, from the Gola tribe. Family members recalled her as a strikingly gorgeous young girl; yet as was common for her tribal background, she spoke limited English and had received only a third-grade education.

  Serena Taylor ran a strict Baptist home, but her son, Neilson, in his early twenties, became romantic with Yassa Zoe, who became pregnant. Faced with the impending birth of a child, the family’s religious leanings ran headlong into the prejudice against indigenous Liberians. One side of the family saw intermarriage between the two communities as a greater taboo than allowing the child to be born outside marriage; the other disagreed. Ultimately, Neilson Taylor married Yassa Zoe, who took on the Anglo name Louise.

  In the early twentieth century, the marriage of Neilson and Louise, if ahead of its own time, reflected the inevitable intermingling of cultures. With each generation the settlers became less American and more Americo-Liberian, a unique culture synonymous with power. In 1948, nearly seventy-five years after the Bracewells departed Valdosta, Neilson Taylor and Louise brought their third child into the world. They did not choose for him a Gola name like Jahmale. They chose Charles, a name descended from his father’s American line. The child’s place of birth, Arthington, made clear that he was a son of this new nation, Liberia, but his name—Charles Taylor—left no doubt as to which tribe he belonged.

  When Chucky first heard from his father in late 1991, the call was not entirely unexpected.16 Many Americans caught their first glimpse of Charles Taylor on ABC’s Nightline in June 1990. He presented himself not as the military leader of a revolution but as a clearheaded civilian leader, dressed in a blue-and-white tracksuit with a single gold chain around his neck, speaking forcefully but persuasively into the camera about his ambitions to remove the peacekeepers from his country. His accent was not American, but the manner in which he spoke was.

  “We want … for the American people to understand that this is not a bunch of headhunters out here in West Africa trying to shoot up a country for power. I’m not interested in that,” Taylor said.17 The statement was typical: a bit of truth balanced by a lie. Taylor’s army—really a coalition of ethnic militias—served little purpose other than to seize control of Liberia. For American audiences, it was a faraway conflict with little connection to U.S. national security. The interest for the U.S. government was to try to minimize the damage done to the intelligence and communications facilities it operated in Liberia.

  When Bernice changed Chucky’s name in the weeks following Taylor’s December 1989 invasion, she sought to make him more difficult to find, should Taylor seek him out.18 For Roy, the name simply reflected the reality of the situation: he was the little boy’s father. He supported the family with his welding business and organized a steel drum band to connect his stepson and other neighborhood children to their Trinidadian heritage. In Pine Hills there was nothing unusual about the family or how they were raising their son. But as the war in Liberia dragged on, Bernice’s view of Charles Taylor began to shift.

  In another report, nearly two years later, he portrayed a cool charm in an interview.19 The camera panned the scene, a portrait of the provisional and, to outsiders, exotic nature of his power: fighters milled around him, holding automatic rifles, clad in mismatched military and civilian gear. Some men wore corsets, top hats, welding goggles, and large crucifixes.

  He did not mince words. “We will fight to the last man. I will get weapons from wherever I have to get it. If the Pentagon got some,” he said, turning to look into the camera, “please give me some. I’ll use it.”

  The man Taylor had become was all but unrecognizable from the man Bernice had lived with and loved for years. To be sure, he was still charming, intelligent, and well spoken, but he was no longer an overeducated, underemployed student rich only in ambition. He was a leader of men now, the face of a revolution. He was a man who had—if only for a moment—the attention of the world.

  It’s unclear whether Chucky had any recollection of his father, but after the call, his life suddenly expanded to include an alternate reality: Liberia. In Bernice’s retelling, she was stunned, but her protective instinct had disappeared. She would not comment on this inexplicable change of heart. While Charles Taylor did represent lawlessness and violence as the face of his revolution, he also represented power, ambition, and a sense of larger purpose. When he offered her and their son a chance to come to Africa, she accepted. In the summer of 1992 she prepared Chucky to reunite with his father.20

  Chucky could see, upon their arrival, that he was not in Florida anymore. The landscape outside the car window resembled nothing that either he or his mother had ever known. There was no planned sprawl of county roads lined with fast-food restaurants, billboards, stoplights, and barren sidewalks. Instead, he passed villages of thatched huts along crumbling red dirt roads, shoeless children in gleaming white shirts walking to school without a backpack or a book.

  It was the summer of 1992 and he and his mother had traveled to West Africa to see his father, despite the considerable danger the trip presented. Their destination was Gbarnga, a tiny city in central Liberia, home to Taylor’s political movement and the capital of his rebel territory. Their journey provided an unedited version of sub-Saharan Africa, and their arrival inducted the American mother and son into the civil war. The city teemed with fighters and weaponry, but the soldiers didn’t appear to belong to any army; they were clad in pieced-together uniforms, T-shirts, and shorts, carrying hand-me-down rifles and machetes. Liberia was entirely foreign to everything Chucky had known in life.

  His father was the most powerful man in the country.21 Controlling the most men and the most territory, he had a firm grip on the nation’s fate. Chucky had little basis to understand what this meant. Liberia was a nation of two million people, roughly ten times the number in Orlando at the time, but it had little significance for Americans. Few
understood the historical connections between the two nations, and even fewer knew about the U.S. role in supporting the Doe regime and engendering the hatred that had fueled Charles Taylor’s rise.

  Despite Taylor’s power, the war had made it difficult to access his territory. Gbarnga, the bush capital he had carved out for himself, lay in the nation’s lush heartland, 120 miles from the capital. The city and the territory surrounding it were called Taylorland. Living there, he bided his time and plotted to retake Monrovia and, with it, the nation. Monrovia, for its part, was fortified by an African peacekeeping force that protected the weak interim government from Taylor’s army (and from another competing band of rebels comprised of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia’s [NPFL] ethnic rivals).

  There were two types of teenage boys in Taylorland: those who carried weapons and those who did not. Many of the teenagers Chucky initially met—distant cousins and the children of members of Taylor’s National Patriotic Reconstruction Assembly Government—fit into the latter category. Their familial connections protected them from the demand to participate in Taylor’s revolution. They attended private schools or, like Chucky, lived in the United States during the school year.22 If Taylor’s revolution succeeded, they would be the beneficiaries of their parents’ alliance with the rebel leader.

  The other type of boys were poor and often had been violently taken from their families; they had fewer choices or prospects. In some cases, these children had been forced to commit an atrocity within their community—such as killing their own parents or raping a neighbor—that would effectively exile them into Taylor’s revolution. Once within the NPFL, they typically fell under a commander—the closest thing to a parent—who introduced them to the means of survival within Taylorland: the gun.

  For a teenage boy from Orlando, the arsenal available to these boys seemed to come straight from action films: G-3 and AK-47 automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, mortars, and truck-mounted missile systems.23 When an American diplomat asked one of Taylor’s deputies why they used child soldiers, he said, “Because you can control them.” Children followed through on orders regardless of the moral implications of their actions. These children represented a troubling paradox of power: they were powerless to control their own lives, but they were empowered to take the lives of others.

  In many senses, Liberia’s civil war was an amplified version of the environment Chucky’s mother had sought to spare him from in Orlando: armed gangs, territorial feuds fueled by the imperatives of violence. Moreover, the environment orbited around Charles Taylor, the man she had once felt it necessary to keep her child distanced from.

  Bernice had known for some time that Charles Taylor was looking for his son.24 Even before the two spoke a year earlier, friends and family had been receiving calls from him. He had also asked for her, but according to Roy Belfast, Bernice did not want Taylor to know where she was or how to contact her. Nearly a dozen years had passed since she had spoken with him. She had assumed the relatively quiet life of a suburban homemaker and had immersed herself in the West Indian community in Orlando. Nothing should have been farther from her concerns than the war in Liberia.

  Even the source of the initial contact between Taylor and her is unclear. She insists that Taylor sought out his child and her, but those close to Taylor understood that it was Bernice who initiated contact. “She was trying, in her own motherly way, trying to get what’s his for her son,” said a businessman close to Taylor’s inner circle, likening her to an “overbearing, beauty pageant mom.”25

  In either case, Bernice reunited Chucky with his father, undertaking a difficult trip to one of the most dangerous places on earth. In 1992 flights were still available to Liberia, into Robertsfield, the airport outside Monrovia, but that area lay behind enemy lines. To get from there to Taylor’s stronghold would have required crossing territory that was contested by Taylor’s army and its enemies. Not even Taylor himself would have been able to guarantee their safety. The most common route to reach him, which visiting journalists and diplomats often took, was to fly into Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and travel by road to the border with Nimba County, where Taylor had launched his war a few years earlier.26 There an escort would meet them and bring them to Gbarnga.

  Throughout that journey, the fighters made an impression on Chucky. Weapons were ubiquitous, carried in broad daylight by strange figures clad in civilian garb, many adorned with fetishes, occasionally complemented by a camouflage or olive drab garment. Checkpoints manned by these men dotted the roads leading to Gbarnga.

  Taylor’s residence sat atop the town’s highest point. It was a single-story concrete open-air structure with rooms fanning off a long interior corridor. From the hilltop, Bong County’s low, green hills radiated out toward the horizon. Gbarnga’s few roads and clusters of homes on neighboring hillsides could be seen, but otherwise the location was rural. The seat of Taylor’s government sat far removed from Monrovia—where the majority of Liberia’s population lived, and where the nation’s economy was centered. Taylor needed to control the capital before he could claim true political legitimacy.

  In the absence of constitutional authority over the country, Chucky’s father’s had created its appearance in Taylorland. The territory had its own newspaper, radio, and television station, which broadcast the message of the revolution. Taylor outlawed Liberian money and issued his own currency, backed by a newly opened bank in Gbarnga. His representatives soon began seeking out the lifeblood of Liberia’s economy, foreign investment, negotiating with Firestone Rubber to restart production on the plantations within their control.27 Above all, Taylorland seemed to function. The authority of the government in Monrovia had been fractured, and Taylor presented an alternative state, one that seemed to suggest what Liberia could be under his ultimate authority.

  It was there that mother and son arrived to see a man whom neither had ever known. Taylor had left when Chucky was too young to develop anything more than distant childhood memories of his parents’ time together. The man Chucky knew as his father was the man who had raised him: the soft-spoken, Trinidadian welder who was more interested in preserving his culture through music than in attaining political power through armed insurrection.

  Charles Taylor, too, was struck by their first encounter. His followers knew that their leader had several wives and daughters, but the appearance of a son marked something new. “I remember the first time Taylor [saw] him [saying], ‘Oh my God, he looks just like me,’ ” Taylor’s brother-in-law—and Chucky’s uncle—Cindor Reeves said.28 In the years that had passed, Chucky had grown from a child to a teenage boy on the cusp of manhood. “It was kind of astonishing to see that he had such a big son,” Reeves recalled.

  The emotion of the moment caught Bernice off guard. “I thought time had passed and everybody had moved on with their life [sic],” she said.29 Just as Bernice had moved on, so had Taylor: he had married and remarried and had fathered daughters both with Tupee and with his new wife, Agnes. Bernice now saw in stark terms the consequences of the decision she’d made a decade earlier to not follow Taylor to Liberia. “It destroyed our family,” she said. She also recalled being surprised at “how much it hurt [Taylor].”

  In the few public statements Taylor has made about the couple’s relationship, his feelings are unclear. In any case, he told Bernice that he’d prepared separate accommodations for her; his son would be staying with him.

  Chucky spent that first night in Liberia with his father. It was a departure from the narrow horizons of Orlando and grim streets of Pine Hills, where his mother had raised him. Liberia presented to Chucky the possibility that he was heir to something larger.

  3

  Jailbreak

  Man was born in pain, Alpha hold the frame, maintain like a monk, forever shifting the pain.

  —United States vs. Belfast, EXHIBIT CE 9

  Seven years earlier, in 1985, long before Charles Taylor became a warlord, he had been a prisoner at the Plymouth C
ounty House of Corrections in Massachusetts.1 One September evening he found himself trying to squeeze out of a laundry room window on the third tier of the aging jail. His plan was to clamber down to the rooftop below, drop another level into the courtyard, and scale a tiny span of fence that was not strung with razor wire. If he got that far, he’d have to jog to the waiting getaway car—all without attracting the attention of the guard patrolling the jail’s perimeter.

  His incarceration in Plymouth resulted from the April 1980 coup that overthrew President Tolbert, when Taylor had risen from a student activist to a senior government administrator nearly overnight. As someone born of mixed Americo and tribal blood, he could have been arrested or killed in the days following the uprising, which represented a rupture between the indigenous and settler communities. Indeed, during the coup, Taylor was staying at the Holiday Inn near the Executive Mansion in downtown Monrovia as a guest of the deposed president. (Taylor had been part of a delegation of diasporan activists whom Tolbert had flown in in January 1980.2) But, rather than being targeted for his settler background, Taylor had been summoned by members of the junta within hours of the president’s murder for help in kick-starting the revolutionary government.

  This first meeting on the morning following the coup made clear the reversal of the power structure in Liberia—and Taylor learned where he fit in. He recounted how soldiers had arrived at his hotel and loaded him into a jeep, making clear he was not a prisoner but a potential collaborator with the junta. When he arrived at the spare military office at the Barclay Training Center, Taylor noticed several men lying on the floor, their arms bound behind them—including several senior government ministers and the speaker of Liberia’s legislature. Behind the desk sat Thomas Quiwonkpa, a twenty-two-year-old army officer. Even though he was a relative of Tupee’s, the men had never met, according to Taylor.