‘It was something like that,’ said the dark lady. ‘Except that our American invaders were black and not white. They were freed slaves or their descendants, whose relatives had been shipped from Africa to work the cotton fields of the southern states and now came back to the Mother Continent to lord it over real Africans. When we rebelled they punished us and ordered us to enjoy the liberty they had brought to (their name, not ours) “Liberia”.’
‘Well, I suppose,’ said the kindly Lunamiel, ‘that by freeing their slaves and transporting them back home the Americans thought they were being kind.’
‘I dare say,’ their attendant nodded. ‘But in my experience Americans are never more dangerous than when doing good. Especially when they go to war in order to save those less fortunate than themselves. Naturally, we real Africans didn’t like their attitude. My tribe, the Krahn, had never accepted slavery. When others around us fell to the slavers, the Krahn would kill themselves rather than be sold and shipped to the USA. It was my Krahn people who produced a saviour who threw off decades of Americo-Liberian hegemony. Our very own Master Sergeant Samuel Doe bravely attacked the presidential palace one night some ten years ago and killed President William Tolbert, who led a regime full of those we called “settler-class people”, while they called us “country people”. Some say that, perhaps, Master Sergeant Doe should not have gone on to murder President Tolbert’s ministers — that shooting thirteen of them, soon after the coup, was taking things a bit far. But you must understand we were still feeling our way.’
Jimfish, who had seen much blood flow since leaving Port Pallid, was somewhat sensitive to the sight of executions, and when he heard how Tolbert’s deposed ministers were dragged to a beach in Monrovia, bound to steel poles and shot by jeering soldiers, he could not help shaking his head. Even Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu had been given a show trial before being executed.
‘Was there no better way?’ Jimfish asked.
The dark lady regretted there was not. ‘Surely it was kinder to shoot these criminals all at once, rather than drag things out by executing them over several days? It was vital to show everyone that in the new Liberia no one was favoured because of rank or office, and that we indigenous people were in charge at last. That’s why those shot on the beach included the Speaker of the House, a one-time Budget Director, a former Chief Justice and quite a few members of the late President’s family.’
‘And yet there was no trial?’ Jimfish asked.
‘No time for that,’ said the lady. ‘Such was the people’s rage against the tyrannical ex-President Tolbert.’
On hearing the word ‘rage’ Jimfish felt a little easier — for, after all, wasn’t it anger that grew in heat till it vaporized into white-hot rage that was the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat? And if, in his heart of hearts, he found unsettling the portrait this lady painted of the trembling ministers on the beach, beaten, tormented and made to wait in line due to a shortage of steel poles, until they were cut to pieces with long bursts of automatic rifle fire by drunken soldiers, he told himself that this was probably what it took if you wanted to land on the right side of history.
Realizing he was confused, Lunamiel’s attendant added kindly: ‘There was no trial of these criminals. But nothing was hidden or underhand. Because he knew the world was watching, and in the interests of transparency, Master Sergeant Doe and his Redemption Council invited the press to the executions on the beach and encouraged them to film the proceedings for posterity.’
The kindly Lunamiel wept at the story, overcome by homesickness for her house, garden and orchard in Port Pallid, remembering her mother and father, blown to pieces while at their Sunday prayers. But she soon cheered up when Jimfish hugged her tenderly and promised to take her home to South Africa just as soon as he could.
Their giant limousine carried them safely from Gbadolite to Kinshasa and on to the port of Boma on the north bank of Congo river, some miles upstream from the sea, but where the water is deep enough for oceangoing vessels. Using a handful of the dollars he carried in the pockets of his handsome Zairean tunic, Jimfish bought tickets on a cargo ship bound for the dark lady’s country of Liberia and they sailed to the coast, at Moanda, where the mighty Congo river meets the Atlantic Ocean face to face.
CHAPTER 17
Monrovia, Liberia, 1991
On arriving in the port of Monrovia, the travellers disembarked and the dark lady was overcome with happiness to be back in her own country, which years before, as the innocent fiancée of the wicked Minister of Mines in Zaire, she had been forced to leave.
‘Welcome to Liberia, where peace prevails and we indigenous people run our own affairs!’ she told Jimfish and Lunamiel. ‘How far we have come, and how long ago it seems, when we were very like your own appalling country, where a tiny group of white bigots whips black people into line, when they don’t go about shooting them dead.’
She’d barely finished speaking when the characteristic tick-tick of heavy automatic fire around the port sent them scurrying for safety behind a line of burnt-out army trucks. They seemed to have arrived in a war zone. Fighters were everywhere: firing, falling, cheering and dying.
Crouching near them was a military man covered in medals. He was watching the battle with great calm, as if he had seen a lot of this fighting before and was undismayed. Catching sight of him, their friend was overjoyed.
‘The good Lord has saved us! Here is my uncle, one of my very own Krahn people from my home village. He’s a soldier and he will know what this violence means.’
When she introduced her friends, Jimfish was embarrassed to hear himself and Lunamiel identified as South Africans, knowing how detested his compatriots were throughout the continent. It was scant comfort that he wasn’t white or any other colour anyone could put a name to; while Lunamiel, though beautifully bronzed, was not quite coppery enough to pass for brown.
He needn’t have worried. Having embraced his niece, the military man introduced himself as Brigadier Washington Truman Roosevelt and he shook Jimfish’s hand warmly, saying how delighted he was to have another South African in his country.
‘Come more often and come in numbers! Liberia needs you. We’re in the middle of a cruel civil war that began earlier this year and gets worse every day. Thousands have been killed in the fighting.’
‘But who is fighting?’ cried the dark lady, distraught at the news that her once-peaceful country was again at war.
‘That’s complicated,’ said her uncle. ‘The army of President Doe — known as the Armed Forces of Liberia is fighting the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, which is the private army of an ambitious young warlord called Charles Taylor. Recently a third group, led by Prince Johnson, an even more ambitious warlord, calling themselves the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia, split away from the second group and joined the war.’
‘What exactly are these groups fighting for?’ Jimfish asked. ‘Land or treasure or power?’
The brigadier considered this question. ‘Those are some of the aims, perhaps, but for the most part each side simply wants to kill as many of its enemies as possible. Sometimes I think it is the only employment open to men around here. War gives them a job, a gun and a life. Well, at least for a while.’
Watching the pitched battles going on between fighters who thought nothing of decimating a line of attackers, slicing off the hands of prisoners or decapitating their enemies with enormous knives, Jimfish was struck by the impeccable logic of the brigadier’s reply.