According to Michelle Roberts, a reporter working for the BBC, the villagers said that a “rain of bats” then issued from the tree.
And the screaming flew back across the sky. But by then, the epidemic was raging on the ground.
2
PREPARING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD
Most of us in the developed world don’t pause to think how amazing it is that we drink water from a tap and never once worry about dying forty-eight hours later from cholera.
—Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now
My personal connection to the outbreak was through Liberia, which was soon to feel Ebola’s full force. Guinea was regarded the epicenter of the outbreak in the spring of 2014. That would soon change, and the names Ebola and Liberia soon became practically synonymous throughout the world.
Before I had ever set foot there, I knew almost nothing about it beyond the fact that it was a tiny little country on the elbow of West Africa and was originally an American colony, our only colonial imprint on the continent, founded by former slaves.
My impression would turn out not to be true. Or it was at most a half-truth, for many of the first colonists were actually freedmen. They were highly skilled and reasonably literate people, the forerunners to today’s middle class. Brickmasons, carpenters, and merchants filled their ranks. When the first settlers landed their ship, the Elizabeth, on the shores of what would become Sierra Leone and Liberia in 1824, they had enough practical knowledge to build themselves a society in much the same way that the Pilgrims did in Massachusetts Bay two hundred years before.
That they came with a white American overseer who went by the euphemistic description of “agent” must have rankled these colonists no end. Unskilled former slaves, which was the picture I conjured up when imagining the African-American founders, mostly came to Liberia in subsequent waves of immigration during the mid-nineteenth century. But the true founders, those who would eventually demand their sovereignty from an overseas government that had infuriated them with its condescension and aloofness, were people who could articulate their notions of freedom in a way that John Locke would instantly recognize. They certainly weren’t “slaves” in the way we normally understand the term.
However, it’s true that these founders, whether they came direct from the plantation or had been freed upon their master’s death, were still bound up by the legacy of slavery in much the same way. Yet I think it’s important to note the dissimilarities among those making their way in the world at the dawn of Liberia. For one thing, the idea that a bunch of unskilled and uneducated slaves just showing up on the western African shoreline, where they commence in the cheery building of a country, demonstrates the lengths to which Americans like to tell Mickey Mouse stories to avoid the unsettling implications such stories might have for the present. Only when one really stares at the Liberia origin myths does one realize that they are patently absurd—not unlike our own founding myths—and the absurdity may be designed to make us Americans feel better not only about the Liberia of here and now, but the legacy of slavery as well, and our country’s role in it.
Consider, for instance, the predicament of the Liberian founders who were most well off before Africa. The majority lived in Virginia, Maryland, and southern Pennsylvania. They had every advantage a field slave would have, quite literally, killed for: nutrition, education, literacy, and, of course, freedom. They sold goods and contracted their work just like anyone in the middle class of the early Republic. Only their skin was dark, at a time when attitudes about the inseparability of Africanness and slavery were hardening in these border states.
If slaves could observe that there were free Americans who had dark skin and African features, why should they regard their own lifetime bondage, to say nothing of the bondage of their children and children’s children, as legitimate? Had not the colonists just risen in armed revolution to secure their own freedom using a similar rationale? Having free blacks in the midst of an indefensible system created practical problems for that very system. Moreover, the economic incentives of antebellum slavery put these people at risk of being kidnapped for resale. They were a threat if they remained free, and they also presented a lucrative opportunity for those who weren’t troubled by taking away that freedom.
In short, it was not an enticing position for a free black person in the 1820s and 1830s in the mid-Atlantic states; thus, the “fact” that Liberia was founded by former slaves completely inverts the narrative. The story as I initially thought of it goes like this: Here is Liberia, Africa’s first independent country, founded by some plucky former slaves with a helping hand from its big brother, the United States. I was left with the sense of these people as being happy in their liberation, sailing to distant shores with the same kind of hopes and ambitions as George Washington.
Yet the reality was that these people were embittered by their unwinnable quandary and headed to Liberia not elated but filled with a grim determination to eke out something better than what they left, even if it meant going to their deaths—or subjecting others to a similar fate. Elijah Johnson, one of the original settlers and its first true leader, emerged from the Elizabeth onto the tiny island that would eventually be named, apparently without intentional irony, Providence. Following a brief reconnaissance of the island, Johnson’s words made his resolve clear: “I have been two years searching a home in Africa and I have found it, and here I will remain.”
Later, when the settlers teetered on the brink of collapse, threatened with annihilation by the natives, the British navy offered protection on the condition that they subjugate themselves to the Crown. Johnson would have none of that, even if it meant certain death, responding to the British offer, “We want no flagstaff put up here that it will cost us more to get down than it will to whip the natives!” Both of these sayings of Elijah Johnson have been recounted for more than one hundred years on Liberia’s Pioneers’ Day in the same way that Americans quote Jefferson on July 4. Pioneers’ Day, which celebrated military victories of the colonists over the native populations, has unsurprisingly fallen out of favor over the past generation or two. From time to time I think about the softball question sometimes asked during a job interview: If you could have dinner with anyone, whom would you choose? Back in college I answered Freud, sometimes Einstein. They still seem like fine choices, but if I had to pick one person to have an evening meal with now, I think I would pick Elijah Johnson. There would be much to talk about.
Another voice from Liberia’s past for me summarizes the eloquent rage of these early settlers. By the 1850s Liberia had become a full-fledged nation. A pair of brothers had grown disillusioned with the shitty living conditions of Liberia, frustrated by high prices and a material existence that didn’t live up to its utopian billing. They resolved to go back home to the United States as soon as the next available ship would bear them. Upon learning of this, the Liberian Reverend James Wilson quipped in retort, “As for my part I do not know what [these brothers] return for unless it was for the whip. It cannot be for something to eat, for we have a variety of foods too tedious to mention. I cannot see what a man of color wants to go back to the United States to live for unless he has no soul in him, for where there is a sign of a soul within a man it pants for freedom, in this life and the life to come.”1
The other subtlety missed by the slaves-happily-founded-Liberia nugget is that, much like our own country’s creation myths, it sidesteps the rather uncomfortable fact that there happened to be a native population on site who had no say in its foundation and mostly rejected it on principle. “The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here” is Liberia’s national motto, found on official stationery and various other government paraphernalia, but that motto raises the question of who constitutes “us” and glosses over the fact that most of the people who inhabited early Liberia weren’t brought by anything but were here from the start. The unpleasant relations between the group that would come to be known as the Americoes (or “Americo-Liberians”) and the native Afr
icans would go on to define the history of this place.2 Maybe it was Liberty for the American settlers. The natives had a different perspective.
Once you come to terms with how a simple fact about a country can be misleading in ways that are designed to pacify by deliberately avoiding troubling matters, then can you start to appreciate the peculiarly cruel ironies of Liberia’s history.
First is the entire purpose of the American Colonization Society, the organization founded mostly by white “progressives” that funded most of the early settlement missions. It was an operation aimed at getting as many people as possible of African descent off the North American continent. A policy that was little more than a benign form of ethnic cleansing through mass deportation, the enthusiasm for African colonization was a by-product of an impulse toward racial purity not altogether indistinguishable from Nazi philosophy.
The whole idea was harebrained to begin with, based on the flimsy logic that one should “return” a people to a place because their skin happened to look more like an African’s than a European’s. That makes about as much sense as the U.S. government returning me to Warsaw simply by virtue of the fact that my great-great-grandparents lived in Poland. After all, I don’t speak Polish and know nothing of the local customs. Basically, I am about as Polish as these Liberian settlers were African. Moreover, sending these African-Americans to one spot on the shores of West Africa ignores the fact that their African ancestors could easily have come from places on the continent as distant from Liberia, in both physical space as well as language and custom, as Guatemala is from Boston. Yet all the white power brokers could see was the common denominator of dark skin.
But if you were going to pick a place in Africa to return these people—and it is worth noting here that Africa is a big continent, so there was not exactly a dearth of choices—you probably couldn’t have picked a worse place to deposit them than this section of coastline. First, the original colonization attempt was bungled because Great Britain, in the midst of its own colonization experiment in what would become Sierra Leone, had already taken the region’s prime settlement spot on Sherbro Island, forcing the American colonists hundreds of miles east to the mouth of the Mesurado River, the area that would eventually become Monrovia. Regardless, the natives that awaited these colonists weren’t merely displeased with the idea of being displaced; they also relied on an economic model that was sure to encourage violent conflict and set in motion generations of ill will, for their main cash crop was human chattel. Slavery was their business.
But the most delicious irony was to come over the next few generations, as the descendants of the Americoes created a society based on subjugation and co-optation of these natives—the members of the Kru, the Bassa, the Vai, the Kpelle, the Grebo, and a dozen other tribes that always constituted the vast majority of the Liberian populace. For well over one hundred years, the Americoes dominated a country that resembled in critical ways the very society that its own founders so thoroughly detested, and although the economy of Liberia wasn’t formally based on slavery, the power wielded by the Americoes and the manner by which justice was administered was close enough. Liberia nominally had a democracy, one dominated by the True Whig Party. The True Whigs were nearly all descendants of the original settlers, or those lucky enough to marry into Americo families. The true natives, by contrast, had little power.
Elijah Johnson and his comrades, whose rage at the injustice of slavery could not have been more profound, would likely have cringed at what became of Liberia. He put his life in extreme peril to get as far away from slavery as possible, and the country he helped found re-created precisely that system, with the exception that white people were no longer running it. The cynical view is that he needn’t have bothered. But offstage in this little drama, white Americans were still busy profiting, mainly in the form of American corporate interests that coddled the Americoes and insured their ongoing control of Liberia at the expense of the tribal populations.
This was the society that had been at one of the slowest, most prolonged boils in history when the structure finally imploded in the late 1970s and the True Whigs were wiped away. It happened under the watch of President William Tolbert, who had been in office since 1971. As if there weren’t enough ironies in Liberia’s history, it turned out that Tolbert was Liberia’s most progressive president ever. Despite charges of nepotism and corruption that were almost certainly true to some degree, he was nevertheless making a legitimate attempt to right some historical wrongs through the power of policy. Only the second Liberian president fluent in one of the tribal languages, his connections to the indigenous populations led to policies designed to encourage their increased representation in government.
The final months of Tolbert’s presidency were chaotic, with much of the chaos initially created by hard-leaning conservative Americoes in the True Whig Party who refused to go along with his reforms. The resulting instability culminated in a major episode of rioting in Monrovia when the government raised the price of a one-hundred-pound bag of rice from twenty-two to twenty-six dollars. It was a putative effort to maintain what Liberian self-sufficiency there was by encouraging rural Liberians to continue farming rice and not abandon their villages for jobs harvesting rubber or doing associated industrial work in Monrovia. However misguided the rice policy was from the standpoint of economic theory, its intentions at first blush seem noble enough, although it didn’t hurt that the majority of the windfall from the increased revenues generated by the price hike fell to members of Tolbert’s own family. Whatever reformist impulses guided Tolbert, the Rice Riots created a dangerous level of instability. The turmoil forced him to crack down on the protesters, as well as the progressives who were encouraging dissent.
Into this chaos stepped a member of the Liberian military, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, who led a group of commandos into the presidential palace and eviscerated Tolbert in his sleep in April 1980. A member of the Krahn tribe, Doe was exactly the kind of person Tolbert had in mind when he attempted to promote civil servants whose pedigree was primarily tribal. Doe set in motion a coup that would culminate in the killings of thirteen Cabinet members following Tolbert’s assassination. The coup led directly to the end of the Americoes as a unified, organized force in Liberian politics, and for a time anyone from the ruling class was in danger of reprisals ranging from rape to murder.
Doe did not prove to be an adept leader. He understood little of governance, nor did those with whom he surrounded himself. He was quick to use violence as a form of political discourse. Tribal conflicts that had not existed during the rule of the Americoes started to surface, ultimately culminating in the rise to power of a man named Charles Taylor.
More on him later, but this is how the stage was set for the Liberian Civil War. The details are complex, but the gist is simple: Doe obliterated the Americoes but subsequently bungled the chance for Liberia to become a more just place, the consequence of which was prolonged, armed intertribal conflict. The Civil War lasted nearly a generation and wiped out perhaps 10 percent of Liberia’s population. It was bloody, it was unspeakably savage, and it was stupid. Unlike the American Civil War, which for all its tragedy was at least tied to some higher purpose, the Liberian Civil War was senseless from start to finish. It is better described as autophagy: the consumption of one’s own flesh.
Other than having a nodding familiarity with the name of Charles Taylor and the Civil War, and my not-quite-right view that this was a country founded by some former slaves who were content with their newfound freedom, I didn’t know any of this when I found myself in Monrovia in November 2013, staring at what had once been a beautiful white building and trying to figure out why it had become little more than a shell and why I was watching so many people die within its walls.
*
I had come to Monrovia after my annual review with my division chief, Doug Golenbock. I told Doug that I wanted to get involved in doing some work in sub-Saharan Africa, which had long been a career goal,
but I had gotten sidetracked by various opportunities and roadblocks. The logical place to start, I told him, was to go to Ghana. The University of Massachusetts medical campus is in Worcester, Massachusetts, a town with one of the largest populations of Ghanaians in the Western Hemisphere. Go figure. Moreover, Ghana was on a virtually vertical rise in its standard of living; understanding why that is and how that relates to my specialty of infectious disease, seemed to me a question worthy of exploration. So I suggested to Doug that we leverage what we’ve got right here in Worcester, which is a little piece of Ghana itself, and get over there.
“Well, the problem is that I don’t know anyone who does work in Ghana. But Katherine Luzuriaga’s group has been going to Liberia for several years now,” Doug said. “Why don’t I put you in touch with them?”
At the time, that felt like a consolation prize, but in short order I made the acquaintance of Trish McQuilkin, a pediatrician who had been going back and forth to Liberia for several years. The timing was fortuitous because the Liberian Ministry of Health, which had painstakingly been rebuilding the medical system that had been completely decimated by the Civil War, was just about to resume its residency training program. Following the end of the armed conflict and the restoration of civil institutions, the ministry had initially prioritized restarting the medical school and shepherding through new graduates. By 2013 it had produced several classes of full-fledged doctors, and so its attention turned to arranging advanced training for a small number of them in the specialties of surgery, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, and internal medicine. I would have a ringside seat at the foundation of a new program, so as consolation prizes go, that seemed more than good enough.
Inferno Page 4
