The Shadow of the Sun (27 page)

“Cut off his ears!” Johnson shouts, furious that Doe will not talk (although Doe says that he is willing to!). Soldiers throw the president down on the floor, hold him down with their boots, and one of them cuts off his ear with a bayonet. An inhuman roar of pain resounds.

“The second ear!” Johnson yells. There is pandemonium; everyone is excited, quarreling, each would like to cut off the president’s ear. The same screams again.

They raise the president. Doe sits propped by a soldier’s boots, swaying, his earless head flowing with blood. Johnson simply doesn’t know what to do next. Order that his nose be cut off? His hand? Leg? He has clearly run out of good ideas. The whole thing is beginning to bore him. “Take him away!” he commands the soldiers, who carry him off for further tortures (also filmed). Doe lived for several hours more, and died from loss of blood. When I was in Monrovia, the video showing him being tortured was the hottest ticket in town. However, there were few video cassette players in the city, and, furthermore, there were frequent power outages. To see Doe’s torment (the entire film lasted two hours), people had to invite themselves to the homes of their more well-to-do neighbors or go to those bars where the tape was running nonstop.

Those who write about Europe have a comfortable life. For example, the writer can stop for a while in Florence (or place his hero there). And that’s it—history does the rest for him. Endless subject matter is provided to him by the works of architects who erected Florentine churches; of sculptors, who created the extraordinary statues; of wealthy citizens, who could afford the ornamental Renaissance houses. All this he can describe without moving from one place, or by taking a short walk through the city. “I stood in the Piazza del Duomo,” writes an author who found himself in Florence. He can follow this up with many pages of description of the richness of objects, of the miracles of art, the creations of human genius and taste that surround him on all sides, which he sees everywhere, in which he is immersed. “And now I am walking through Il Corso and Borgo degli Albizi toward the Michelangelo Museum, since I must see the bas relief of the Madonna della Scala,” our author writes. How pleasant for him! It is enough that he walk and look. What is all around him practically writes itself. He can create an entire chapter out of this short walk. There is such a diversity of everything here, such profusion, such inexhaustibility! Take Balzac. Take Proust. Pages upon pages listing, recording, cataloguing objects and articles invented and executed by thousands of cabinetmakers, carvers, fullers of cloth, and stonecutters, by countless skilled, sensitive, and solicitous hands, which built streets and cities in Europe, erected houses and appointed their interiors.

Monrovia puts the newcomer in an entirely different situation. Identical cheap and unkempt houses stretch on for kilometers, streets changing into streets and neighborhoods into neighborhoods so imperceptibly that only fatigue, which you will feel quickly in this climate, will inform you that you have passed from one part of the city into another. The interiors of the houses (with the exception of a few villas belonging to the eminent and the rich) are also uniformly poor and monotonous. A table, chairs or stools, a metal conjugal bed, mats out of raffia or plastic for the children, nails on the wall for hanging clothes, some pictures, most often torn out of glossy magazines. A large pot for cooking rice, a smaller one for preparing the sauce, cups for drinking water and tea. A plastic washbowl, which in the event of flight (lately a frequent occurrence here, as battles kept on erupting) serves as a handy suitcase women can carry on their heads.

Is that all?

Yes, more or less.

It is easiest and cheapest to build a house out of corrugated sheet metal. A calico curtain takes the place of a door and the window openings are small; in the rainy season, which is long and onerous, they are covered with pieces of plywood or thick cardboard. A house like this is hot as a furnace by day, its walls blazing and flaming, its roof sizzling and practically melting in the sun. No one dares enter from dawn to dusk. The earliest daybreak, as the first light streaks the sky, will catapult the still sleepy residents into the yard and the street, where they will remain until evening. They will step outside wet from sweat, scratching blisters from mosquito and spider bites, and peering inside the pot to see if there might be a bit of rice left over from yesterday.

They look at the street, at the houses of their neighbors, without interest, without expectations.

Maybe one should do something. . . .

But what? Do what?

In the morning I set off along Carrey Street, where my hotel is. This is the downtown, the center, the commercial district. It is impossible to get very far. Everywhere against the walls sit groups of
bayaye
—idle hungry boys, with no hope of anything, with no chance for a life. They accost me, asking either where am I from, or can they be my guides, or would I arrange a scholarship to America for them. They don’t even want a dollar to buy some bread. No. Right from the start, they aim as high as they possibly can—at America.

I haven’t gone a hundred meters and I’m already surrounded by small boys with swollen faces and bleary eyes, sometimes missing an arm or a leg. They beg. These are the former soldiers from Charles Taylor’s Small Boys Units, his most frightful divisions. Taylor recruits small children and gives them weapons. He also gives them drugs, and when they are under the influence, he makes them attack. The stupefied youngsters behave like kamikaze fighters, throwing themselves into the heat of battle, advancing straight into flying bullets, getting blown up by mines. When they become addicted to the point of uselessness, Taylor throws them out. Some of them reach Monrovia and end their short lives in ditches or on garbage heaps, consumed by malaria or cholera, or by jackals.

It is unclear why Doe drove down to the port (thereby provoking his own murder). It could be that he forgot that he was the president. He had assumed the office ten years before, essentially by accident. With a group of sixeen companions, like him noncommissioned career officers, he went to President Tolbert’s residence to demand overdue wages. They encountered no one from the security forces, and Tolbert was sleeping. Taking advantage of the situation, they stabbed him with their bayonets. And Doe, the oldest among them, assumed his place. Normally, no one in Monrovia shows respect to noncommissioned officers, and now suddenly everyone started to greet him, applaud, push forward to shake his hand. He took a liking to this. And he quickly learned several things: That when the crowd is clapping, one must stretch one’s arms upward in a gesture of salutation and victory. That to various evening functions one must wear not a field uniform but a dark double-breasted suit. That if and when an opponent materializes, one must fall upon him and kill him.

But he didn’t learn everything. For example, he didn’t know what to do when his former friends, Taylor and Johnson, occupied his whole country, occupied the capital, and started laying siege to his residence. Taylor and Johnson had their gangs and were competing with each other for power (which was still in Doe’s hands). Of course, these aspirations had nothing to do with any social programs, any democratic principles or issues of national sovereignty. The only question was, who controls the till. Doe had controlled the till for ten years. They deemed that long enough. Why, they even said so outright! “We only want,” they repeated in dozens of interviews, “to remove Samuel Doe. The very next day there will be peace.”

Doe did not know how to respond to this; he simply became confused. Instead of acting, either militarily or peacefully, he did nothing. Shut in his residence, he seemed not to comprehend fully what was happening all around, although by then there had been fierce fighting in the city for three months. And suddenly someone informed him that Nigerian troops had sailed into the harbor. As the president of the republic, he had the right to inquire officially about foreign troops entering his country’s territory. He could order the commander of these troops to present himself at his residence with an explanation. But Doe did nothing of the kind. The noncommissioned officer-scout, the sergeant-burrower, reared up in him. He would see for himself what was cooking! He got into his car and drove to the port. But didn’t he know that that part of the city was under the control of Johnson, who wanted to cut him into pieces? And that it was unseemly for a country’s president to report in effect to the commander of a foreign division?

Maybe he really did not know. Or maybe he did, but his imagination failed him, he didn’t properly consider things, acted thoughtlessly. History is so often the product of thoughtlessness: it is the offspring of human stupidity, the fruit of benightedness, idiocy, and folly. In such instances, it is enacted by people who do not know what they are doing—more, who do not want to know, who reject the possibility with disgust and anger. We see them hastening toward their own destruction, forging their own fetters, tying the noose, diligently and repeatedly checking whether the fetters and the noose are strong, whether they will hold and be effective.

Doe’s final hours allow us to see history at the point of total disintegration—the dignified and haughty goddess transformed into its bloody and pitiful caricature. Johnson’s henchmen shoot the nation’s president in the legs so that he cannot escape, grab him, break and bind his arms. They then go on to torture him for more than a dozen hours. This takes place in a small city, with a legal government. Where are the ministers during this time? What are the other bureaucrats doing? Where is the police? The president is being tortured right next door to a building just occupied by Nigerian forces who have arrived in Monrovia to protect the lawful regime. So what about these soldiers—what, nothing? Don’t they care about this? And that’s not all! A few kilometers from the harbor are stationed several hundred soldiers from the elite presidential guard, whose sole mission and purpose in life is to protect the head of state. Meantime, the head of state set off in the morning on a short visit to the port, hours have passed, and there is no sign of him. Aren’t they even curious about what might have happened to him? About where he could be?

Let us return to the scene in which Johnson is interrogating the president. He wants to find out where Doe keeps his bank account. Doe is moaning, his wounds are painful; less than an hour ago he was struck by a dozen or more bullets. He is babbling something, who knows what. Is he giving the number of the account? Does he even have an account? Johnson, furious, orders his ears cut off. Why? Is this wise? Doesn’t Johnson understand that at the very moment this is done, blood will flood Doe’s ear passages and communicating with him will be even more difficult?

One can see how these people are unable to cope with anything, how the situation is getting the better of them, how they botch everything in turn. And then, enraged, they try to recover. But can one make things right by shouting? By sadism? By killing others?

The war continued after Doe’s death. Taylor fought with Johnson, the two of them fought with the remnants of the Liberian army, and all of them with the interventionist forces dispatched by other African countries, under the name of ECOMOG, to restore order in Liberia. After drawn-out battles, ECOMOG seized control of Monrovia and the city’s closest suburbs, leaving the rest of the country to Taylor and other chieftains like him. You could move about the capital, but after driving twenty to thirty kilometers, you would inevitably arrive at a guardpost manned by soldiers from Ghana, Guinea, or Sierra Leone. They stopped everyone—you could go no farther.

Farther on, hell began, and even these well-armed foreign soldiers did not have the courage to peer into it. It was country under the control of Liberian chieftains. It has become customary to call these chieftains, numerous also in other African countries, the masters, or lords, of war—warlords.

The warlord—he is a former officer, an ex-minister or party functionary, or some other strong individual desiring power and money, ruthless and without scruples, who, taking advantage of the disintegration of the state (to which he contributed and continues to contribute), wants to carve out for himself his own informal ministate, over which he can hold dictatorial sway. Most often, a warlord uses to this end the clan or tribe to which he belongs. Warlords are the sowers of tribal and racial hatred in Africa. They will never admit to this. They will always proclaim that they are leading a national movement or party. Most often it will be called the Something or Other Liberation Movement, or the Movement to Protect Democracy or Independence—never anything less grand or idealistic.

Having chosen the name, the warlord sets about enlisting an army. This is not difficult. In each country, in each city, thousands of hungry and unemployed boys dream of joining a warlord’s brigade. The commander will give them arms, and, equally important, a sense of belonging. Most frequently, their caudillo will not pay them. He will say, You have weapons, feed yourselves. That permission is enough: they know what to do next.

Obtaining weapons is also simple. They are cheap and plentiful. Besides, warlords have money. They either grabbed it from state institutions (as ministers or generals), or they reaped profits by seizing valuable sections of the country, those with mines, factories, forests to be cut down, maritime harbors, airports. For instance, Taylor in Liberia or Savimbi in Angola occupy territories with diamond mines. The war over diamonds was waged in the province of Kasai in the Congo, and has lasted years in Sierra Leone. But it is not only mines that yield money. Roads and rivers also generate a good income: one can set up guardposts and collect tolls from everyone who passes.

International relief for the poor, starving population is an inexhaustible source of profit to the warlords. From each transport they take as many sacks of wheat and as many liters of oil as they need. For the law in force here is this: whoever has weapons eats first. The hungry may take only that which remains. The dilemma faced by international organizations? If the robbers aren’t given their cut, they will not let the shipments of aid get through, and the starving will die. Therefore you give the chieftains what they want, in the hope that at least the leftovers will reach those suffering from hunger.