Two separate but equally important features were on display in the immediate aftermath of the brief, ill-starred Quiwonkpa uprising that would define the depths of the brutality, savagery, and self-destructiveness of what was to come five years later.
The first feature could be seen in what happened to Quiwonkpa himself. Unlike the members of the Tolbert government, who in 1980 were simply executed by a firing squad and were never to be seen again, Quiwonkpa suffered a much more humiliating fate. Although the precise mode of his death is unknown, after his body was retrieved, it was publicly mutilated, with Samuel Doe’s troops dragging it through the streets of Monrovia. Parts of his body were hacked off by the men. Some kept them as souvenirs, while others ate them, believing the act of cannibalism of a great warrior’s body would increase their own strength. The idea took hold. Because only a scant number of reliable accounts were recorded during the Civil War, nobody knows exactly how frequently various forms of cannibalism were practiced, but what accounts do exist indicate the practice was common and became a matter of routine following “military victories,” which were often nothing more than local slaughters with no real military objective.
The second feature involves President Doe’s handling of ethnic tensions. Samuel Doe was a Krahn, and Quiwonkpa’s coup attempt was seen as the collective act of the Gio tribe, and so the response was directed at the entire group. The reprisals of the Krahn against the Gio in the months that followed were ruthless and widespread. Members of a third tribe, the Mano, immediately became entangled. Both the Gio and the Mano were subject to various murderous purges in the wake of the rebellion that were designed to discourage in the strongest terms any thought of resistance. Over the next several years, especially once the war began in earnest, each act of violence begat a response increasing in depravity. Moreover, each retaliation would land on more than just its intended target, and another tribe would find itself as collateral damage, leading that next tribe to feel it incumbent upon itself to respond with at least as much viciousness.
For instance, Nimbans of Gio or Mano descent were frozen out of any job involving civil service, and whatever government contracts existed were handed out to other groups. One of the main groups to which Samuel Doe sent the government’s business was the Mandingo. The Mandingo weren’t exactly a tribe in the same sense as the others but rather formed an ethnic minority throughout Liberia. They were Muslims whose origins aren’t firmly established, but they regard themselves as the descendants and living remnants of the Mali Empire that had collapsed nearly four hundred years before. In some ways, the post-empire Mandingo were to West Africa what Jews had been to Europe during the Middle Ages; because of cross-border connections, they served as a minority who were more likely to be traders than farmers and thus performed critical tasks for local communities. The Mandingo served Doe’s purposes well enough, but their elevated status under his administration would cost them dearly years later.
In the immediate wake of the 1985 elections, Samuel Doe tightened his grip on power, and the NPFL fighters who escaped the melee in Nimba County crossed back into the territory controlled by Ivory Coast. Five years later, on Christmas Eve, they returned, this time with Charles Taylor at their head. Taylor and his Gio-dominated NPFL subsequently established a base of operations in Nimba among Liberians, many of them Gio and Mano, who after years of repression were all too ready to throw off the yoke of Samuel Doe and his fellow Krahn. As he made his way deeper into Nimba after his Christmas entrance, no doubt carefully selected for maximal effect to a deeply religious populace, Taylor must have seemed like a literal savior to his fellow tribesmen, who hoped that he would chase off Doe and life would settle down again. That hope would be in vain.
Like the Ebola outbreak hitting Guéckédou, Taylor’s entry into Liberia’s history led to a series of events whose consequences could not have been foreseen, with each additional shockwave careening in some unanticipated direction, exponentially increasing the gloom that had accompanied Doe’s reign. When the year 1990 began, Liberia was, however miserable, still a recognizable political entity. But as Taylor’s position became stronger and his power increased, a gradual dissolution of even the most rudimentary forms of unity swept across the Liberian countryside.
Within months, signs that Taylor was no less treacherous than Doe began to surface, and the NPFL split. The splinter group was led by a man named Prince Johnson, and the group became known as the INPFL, with the additional I standing for “independent.” Both the NPFL and INPFL moved on Monrovia. Since Doe, who treated other non-Krahn tribes not considerably better than the Gio and Mano, had few allies in the countryside, by September he was reduced to defending only a small portion of the capital, fighting Johnson, who held the North of the city, and Taylor, who held the East. By now, the war had become a serious regional matter, and so the strongest and wealthiest nation, Nigeria, sent the contingent known as ECOMOG to serve as peacekeepers.1 For reasons that remain shrouded in mystery, Doe sought a meeting with the general in charge of the ECOMOG troops, but their compound was in territory held by Johnson. Doe may have thought that he was arriving under some form of truce, but Johnson, described in nearly all accounts of the time as a dangerously erratic man prone to unexpected violent outbursts, did not. From Prince Johnson’s point of view, Doe had basically delivered himself up on a silver platter.
Johnson then provided an object lesson to Samuel Doe in what it must have been like to be Thomas Quiwonkpa, to whom Doe’s troops had done such unspeakable acts five years before. Doe was kept alive long enough to be mutilated—ears sliced off, shot in the leg, other parts of his flesh cut with knives—while Johnson presided over the event, drunk. Unlike Quiwonkpa’s death, whose details are known only in print, Doe’s end was recorded for posterity by a cameraman who videotaped the proceeding. In the early portion of the video, as Doe is being stripped of his uniform in the foyer of the ECOMOG headquarters, Johnson bellows at the assemblage, although the audio is too garbled to make out his meaning, while Jesus Christ quietly watches on from a portrait immediately behind him.2
From there, summarizing the plot of the Civil War in a few terse paragraphs is hopeless. By that point there were already three major players carving up Liberia—Taylor’s NPFL, Johnson’s INPFL, and Nigeria’s ECOMOG. The Krahn tribal members who had been loyal to Samuel Doe were still around as well and armed to the teeth; to defend themselves and maintain what control they had over Liberian politics, they formed a group known as ULIMO. ULIMO had gathered the Krahn and the Mandingo under one banner, but the group would quickly split along ethnic lines into ULIMO-J and ULIMO-K. Regardless, both ULIMO groups were aided by tribal and ethnic connections in Sierra Leone, a fact that did not go unnoticed by Charles Taylor, which led to the war spilling over the border. He would sponsor his own group in Sierra Leone that went by the name the Revolutionary United Front, and their creation would beget the Sierra Leone Civil War, which started in 1991 and lasted more than ten years. All these groups would engage in massacres and reprisals that eventually left no tribe or portion of Liberia free from some form of tragedy.
In contrast to Prince Johnson, Charles Taylor was not an unstable man. He was handsome, articulate, and capable of genuine charm. Videos of him on YouTube giving interviews reveal a man who could easily run for a U.S. congressional seat and give many a politician a good run for their money. In one, he easily bats away a question about the circumstances of his detention in the United States in 1984 after fleeing from Doe’s justice on the charge of embezzlement. “Oh, I was not held in the United States for any crime,” he says with a wave of his hand—and it’s a convincing performance, despite being a completely preposterous claim, as he was arrested in the States for extradition back to Liberia. (He would later escape custody, and he resurfaced in Libya to begin his military training that paved the way for him to take control of the NPFL.) The reporter eagerly swallows this answer without even a hint of skepticism. It’s like watching a CNBC interview of some ub
er-wealthy business executive spouting complete nonsense about his company.
But whatever his charms, Taylor was calculating and ruthless. As the war dragged on into the mid-1990s and tens of thousands of people, especially adults, fell victim to the fighting, an enormous group of orphaned children began to appear throughout the countryside. Taylor saw this effect not as a lamentable by-product of war but as a material advantage from which he could leverage his power. The NPFL increasingly sought out these children and incorporated them into their structure, providing them the stability of a family that they no longer had and the comfort of having a purpose in life, the purpose being advancing Charles Taylor’s interests.
They became known as the Charles Taylor Boys, and there were thousands of them. He fed them fufu, ganja, and alcohol. Because they grew up knowing only war, and an exceptionally horrific one at that, where atrocity lost its ability to shock and instead became part of the daily humdrum routine, these boys had been conditioned to show little respect for the value for life, theirs or anyone else’s. They were often in charge of manning roadblocks in the highly partitioned countryside, where they would kill on the most trivial of pretexts, without hesitation or remorse. One of the Taylor Boys, a soldier who went by the “name” of Young Killer, manned a checkpoint and distributed the most severe and arbitrary justice imaginable. Once he lined up a group of people seeking to pass, said, “I like the number twenty,” and started counting from the back of the line, shooting the twentieth person dead on the spot and letting the others pass. The checkpoints themselves often displayed trophies of skulls stacked atop one another, and at least one report surfaced that a checkpoint “rope,” used to indicate the vehicle should stop or face severe consequences, was made of human intestine. There were thousands of Taylor Boys, and those who survived would be mostly in their thirties today.
The Charles Taylor Boys were only one small part of this generation-long nightmare. Indeed, Taylor himself was only one piece of the puzzle. All of the groups competing with Taylor’s NPFL for control of Liberia were savage in equal measure; Taylor was merely the most successful and most calculating of the various faction leaders in the Civil War. But the international media, especially the U.S. media, needed to find a simple story line for Americans who would be distracted and annoyed by all the complexities. Thus, to economize the plot, Taylor was cast as chief villain, especially by the end of the bloody conflict in the early 2000s. That Taylor had, for instance, managed to accrue and maintain his power by a quiet but mutually beneficial arrangement with Firestone Corporation to keep the rubber flowing out of Liberia did not make front-page news, although eventually that story got told.3
So for anyone who was casually following headlines from this part of the world, the story was Taylor = monster = Civil War, which meant that his removal would quickly resolve all of Liberia’s ugly conflicts. That was how I would have described it if pressed. It’s true that Taylor really was a greater menace than his adversaries, but it wasn’t because of his propensity for cruelty. Rather, Taylor was simply a better manager than the other warlords, equipped with the predisposition of an MBA in the implementation of devastation. (Had he stayed in the United States, where such instincts might have been channeled toward more productive ends, one wonders whether he’d be sitting at the end of an oak-paneled boardroom as a CEO of a Fortune 500 company.)
One other point about Taylor: Prior to his occupation of the presidential palace in Monrovia, his headquarters were located in Gbarnga, the unexciting little provincial town in which I found myself that morning. Gbarnga served as a staging point for military thrusts to the south on Monrovia, as well as to the north into Sierra Leone, whose supply of arms and diamonds was bringing it deeper into the conflict. Cuttington University, which had closed down, was frequently used as a training base. I knew none of this the first time I was in Gbarnga, but was beginning to understand it by the time I returned several months later.
If you had found yourself nervously moving through an airport concourse in the fall of 2014, wondering whether you might be taking your chances by brushing past some people incubating a deadly virus, perhaps an African family, en route to your gate, or if you had lived in the Dallas area, or if you had lived in Ohio, the state to which one of the nurses that Thomas Eric Duncan had infected had flown home for a visit, or if you were among the tens of millions living in metropolitan New York in the days following the discovery of an Ebola case there—in short, if you fit any of these descriptions, your anxieties were due to events taking place in Africa that had gotten out of control in no small part because of the repercussions of the Civil War, an event the U.S. government, however unbenign in its motivations, had clearly not intended but had nevertheless fomented and exacerbated. There was almost no running water for the average Liberian following the Civil War, there was little health-care and surveillance infrastructure following the Civil War, there was exceedingly little trust in government announcements following the Civil War, and no functioning professional press corps who could serve as an alternate source of news to word of mouth.
All of these were critical ingredients that fed the growing conflagration of the Ebola crisis, so even a cursory examination of the war’s consequences might help frame the events taking place in late 2014. I have begged the reader to indulge me in this brief detour into the Civil War, which I have massively oversimplified here in just a few dense paragraphs, for a few reasons.
The first is that by specifically demonizing Taylor, the impression that Liberia had rid itself of evil and been taken over by angels, in effect just picking itself up and carrying none of the baggage from that event, is naïve in the extreme. But that is to some extent how the story was portrayed. Taylor may have been the war’s poster child for inhumanity, but he was not its instigator and does not represent its last breath. Moreover, his NPFL lived on, and the remnants of that party still hold much sway in the current government.
The Nobel Peace Prize–winning Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberia’s current president and long a darling of the international community for serving as the only democratically elected female African head of state, was a high-ranking member of the NPFL during the run-up to the Civil War. She would eventually break with Taylor before the worst of the atrocities began, but it’s not clear precisely how many abominable acts she had been aware of during her time with NPFL. None of which is to take away from President Sirleaf’s accomplishments. For instance, after the West Point disaster, Sirleaf herself went to visit the mother of the boy who had been shot by the soldiers, a bold move that helped calm Monrovia in its most desperate hour, which indicates the woman’s mettle and leadership. But the circumstances of Sirleaf’s rise to power helps to contextualize her accomplishments and gives a sense of the environment in which she continues to work.
The second is that the barbarism, of which I have related a miniscule amount, was beyond anything by which we typically measure human suffering in war. Even the most notorious industrial-grade genocides of the twentieth century—about which my people know a thing or two—lacked a viciousness that was commonplace during these years. So many of the killings that took place seemed to be exercises in one-upmanship in just how outrageous the snuffing of a human life could be. Snuff seems an apt word, for indeed some of the descriptions of murder simply defy belief. One of the more colorful figures from the Civil War was General Butt Naked, whose given name is Joshua Milton Blahyi. He earned his name by launching himself and his followers into battle entirely nude except for shoes and weaponry in the belief that this would make them impervious to bullets. To prepare for battle, the general typically would abduct children, often young girls, to be sacrificed for their blood, which was then drunk for its magical properties.
Blahyi, who is a year or two younger than me, lives today in greater Monrovia and is a Christian preacher with hundreds of followers. His notoriety in the West, in the electronic age, has brought a constant stream of vociferous criticism, which leads to a daily exercise in tru
th and reconciliation on his part. “Most of the time they get me on Facebook, they see me on Facebook. They ask me to be their friends, only to insult me,” he said to the television crew of VICE News in 2013. “And I keep telling them that they would have never known if I never said it. There are a lot of people today who did worse than me, and they are in the government. They are holding national seats. And the nation accepts them like that. And they see them as heroes.” It is not merely the nation that accepts such a simplified version of the story. It is much of the world community.
The third, and perhaps most important, consequence of the Civil War is that almost every person in my midst on that Sunday in Gbarnga had seen those days. What did they do to survive? What did they do to others to survive?
And how would that affect their interpretation of Pastor Segbee’s homily, and of the Book of Revelation itself?
*
During the time I had been contemplating the meaning of Revelation in Gbarnga, a more hopeful event was taking place at the ETU. Over the weeks that I had been working there, a host of dignitaries, from prominent Liberian politicians to U.S. Army generals and Navy admirals to leaders in global health, to say nothing of a bevy of journalists from around the world, had visited the Bong facility, meeting with Sean and Pranav to discuss the manner by which they had gotten the ETU up and running, and thus far had been doing so with a fair amount of success. But that Sunday, the biggest VIP of all showed up for a tour: Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. It was going to be a big media day for IMC. I was perfectly happy to avoid the circus, although I did feel more than a little regret at not being able to meet Power, for she had become something of a hero to me over the preceding few months.
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