The Shadow of the Sun

The Cooling Hell

The pilots have not yet turned off the engines, and already people are rushing toward the airplane. Steps are pulled up. We walk down and fall straight into a panting, yelling crowd, which has now reached the plane and is shoving, grabbing at our shirts, pushing at us with all its might: “Passport? Passport?” insistent voices are barking. And immediately after, in the same threatening tone: “Return ticket?” And still others, sharply: “Vaccination? Vaccination?” These demands, this attack, are so violent and disorienting that, shoved, asphyxiated, pawed at, I start to commit error upon error. Asked about my passport, I obediently take it out of my bag. Instantly, someone rips it out of my hands and vanishes. Hectored about a return ticket, I show that I have it. A second later, it, too, is gone. The same thing with my record of vaccinations: someone pulled the form out of my hand and evaporated. I was left with no documents! What do I do now? To whom should I complain? To whom should I appeal? The crowd that had accosted me has suddenly dispersed and disappeared. I am left all alone. A few minutes later, two young men approach. They introduce themselves: “Zado and John. We will protect you. Without us, you will perish.”

I didn’t ask any questions. All I could think was: how terribly hot it is here! It was early afternoon, the air so humid and heavy, thick, burning, that I couldn’t breathe. If only I could leave here, get to a place with a smidgen of coolness! “Where are my documents!” I started to shout, irritated, despairing. I was beginning to lose control; in heat like this you become nervous, enraged, aggressive. “Try to calm down,” said John, when we got into his car, which was parked in front of the airport building. “Soon you will understand everything.”

We drove through the streets of Monrovia. On both sides jutted forth the black, charred stumps of burned, demolished houses. Not much remains here of such destroyed buildings, because everything — bricks, tin, and surviving beams included — will be instantly dismantled and plundered. There are tens of thousands of people in the city who have fled the bush, have no roof over their heads, and are just waiting for a bomb or a grenade to strike a house. When it does, they descend upon it at once. With the materials they are able to carry away, they will erect a hut, a shack, or simply a roof to protect them from the sun and the rain. The city, which was probably built initially of simple, low buildings, is now cluttered with these haphazardly knocked together structures and looks even more stunted, having assumed the appearance of something makeshift, impermanent, recalling more than anything an encampment of nomads.

I asked John and Zado to take me to a hotel. I don’t know if there were any choices in this matter, but without a word they drove me to a shabby, two-story building with the sign El Mason Hotel. The entrance was through a bar. John opened the door, but could go no farther. Inside, in the artificial colored twilight and hot stagnant air, stood prostitutes. To say that the prostitutes “stood” does not begin to convey the situation. There were maybe a hundred girls in the small room, sweaty, exhausted, and so tightly pressed together, squeezed, jammed in, that one could scarcely push one’s hand in, let alone enter. It worked this way: if a client opened the door from the street, the pressure inside the bar propelled one of the girls, as though from a catapult, straight into the arms of the surprised customer. Then another girl took her place near the exit.

John retreated and looked for another way in. In a small currency-exchange booth next door sat a young Lebanese man with a sunny, kindly appearance — the owner. The girls belonged to him, as did this disintegrating building with its slimy, mold-covered walls, on which long black water stains arranged themselves into a mute procession of elongated, thin, and hooded apparitions, chimeras, and ghosts.

“I don’t have any documents,” I confessed to the Lebanese, who just smiled. “That’s not important,” he said. “Here, few people have them. Documents!” he laughed, and looked knowingly at John and Zado. To him, I was clearly a visitor from some other planet. On the one called Monrovia, the main preoccupation was how to survive from one day to the next. Who cared about papers? “Forty dollars a night,” he said. “But food is not included. You can eat around the corner. At the Syrian’s place.”

I invited John and Zado for a meal. The old, distrustful proprietress, looking constantly at the door, had only one dish: shish kebabs with rice. She stared at the door because she never knew who might come in — customers, to eat something, or robbers, to take everything from her. “What else can I do?” she asked us, setting the plates down in front of us. She had already lost all her nerve and all her money. “I lost my life,” she said, without despair, matter-of-factly even, just so that we would know. The restaurant was empty, a motionless fan hung from the ceiling, flies buzzed, one beggar after another stopped in the door and held out his hand. More beggars crowded on the other side of the dirty window, staring at our plates. Men in tatters, women on crutches, children whose legs or arms had been blown off by land mines. Here, at this table, over this plate, one didn’t know how to behave, what to do with oneself.

For a long time, we were silent; finally, I inquired about my documents. Zado answered that I had disappointed the airport personnel, because I had all my papers. It would have been best if I had had nothing. Unregulated airlines fly in various con men and adventurers here — this, after all, is a country of gold, diamonds, and narcotics. Most of their ilk do not have visas or vaccination records; they pay to be let in. The airport staff live off this, because the government has no funds and does not pay them their salaries. These aren’t even particularly corrupt people. They are simply hungry. I will have to buy back my documents. Zado and John know from whom and where. They can arrange it.

The Lebanese came and left me the key. It was near dusk, and he was going home. He advised that I too should go to the hotel. In the evening, he said, I will not be able to walk around the city by myself. I returned to the hotel, entered through a side door, and walked up to the second floor, where my room was located. By the ground-floor entrance and along the stairs I was accosted by ragged men, who assured me that they would guard me during the night. Saying this, they stretched out their hands. From the manner in which they looked at me, I understood that unless I gave them something, in the night while I slept they would come and slit my throat.

The only window in my room (number 107) gave out on a gloomy, fetid air shaft, from which a revolting odor arose. I turned on the light. The walls, the bed, the table, and the floor were black. Black with cockroaches. I have encountered throughout the world all imaginable types of insects, and have even developed indifference toward the fact, even come to accept, that we live among countless millions of flies, roaches, and ticks, among ever-replenished swarms of wasps, spiders, earwigs, and scarabs, amid billows of gadflies and mosquitoes, clouds of voracious locusts. But this time I was stunned; not so much by the number of cockroaches — although that, too, was shocking — but by their dimensions, by the size of each one of these creatures. These were roach giants, as big as small turtles, dark, gleaming, covered in bristles, and mustached. What made them grow so large? What did they feed on? Their monstrous proportions paralyzed me. For years now I had been swatting flies and mosquitoes, fleas and spiders, with impunity; now, however, I was facing something of an entirely different order. How should I deal with such colossi? What should I do with them? What stance should I adopt toward them? Kill them? With what? How? My hands shook at the very prospect. I felt that I wouldn’t know how, that I wouldn’t even have the courage to try. More — because of the cockroaches’ extraordinary dimensions, I felt certain that if I leaned over them and listened, I would hear them emitting some sound. After all, many other creatures their size communicate in a variety of ways. They squeal, croak, purr, grunt — so why not a cockroach? A normal one is too small for us to be able to hear it, but these giants? Surely they will make noises! But the room remained absolutely quiet: they were all silent — closed, voiceless, mysterious.

I noticed, however, that when I leaned over them, straining my ears, they rapidly retreated and huddled together. Their reaction was identical whenever I repeated the gesture. Clearly, the cockroaches were revulsed by a human being, recoiled with disgust, regarded me as an exceptionally unpleasant, repugnant creature.

I could embellish upon this scene and describe how, infuriated by my presence, they advanced on me, attacked, crawled over me; how I became hysterical, started to tremble, fell into shock. But this would not be true. In reality, if I didn’t come near them, they behaved indifferently, moved about sluggishly and sleepily. Sometimes they pattered from one place to another. Sometimes they crawled out of a crack, or else slid into one again. Other than that — nothing.

I knew that a difficult and sleepless night awaited me (also because the room was inhumanly airless and hot), so I reached into my bag for some notes about Liberia.

…

In 1821, a ship arrived at a place near where my hotel now stands (Monrovia lies on the Atlantic, on a peninsula), bringing from the United States an agent of the American Colonization Society, Robert Stockton. Stockton, holding a pistol to the head of the local tribal chief, King Peter, forced him to sell — for six muskets and one trunk of beads — the land upon which the aforementioned American organization planned to settle freed slaves (mainly from the cotton plantations of Virginia, Georgia, Maryland). Stockton’s organization was of a liberal and charitable character. Its activists believed that the best reparation for the injuries of slavery would be the return of former slaves to the land of their ancestors — to Africa.

Every year from then on, ships came from the United States carrying groups of liberated slaves, who began to settle in the area of present-day Monrovia. They did not constitute a large population. By the time the Republic of Liberia was proclaimed in 1847, there were only six thousand of them. It is quite possible that their number never even reached twenty thousand: less than 1 percent of the country’s population.

The fate and behavior of these settlers (they called themselves Americo-Liberians) is fascinating. Yesterday still they were black pariahs, slaves from America’s southern plantations, with no legal rights. The majority of them did not know how to read or write, and had no trade or professional skills. Their fathers had been kidnapped years earlier from Africa, transported to America in chains, and sold in slave markets. And now they, the descendants of those unfortunates, until recently slaves themselves, found themselves once again in Africa, in the land of their ancestors, among kinsmen with whom they shared common roots and skin color. At the will of liberal white Americans, they were brought here and left to themselves, to their own fate. How would they conduct themselves? What would they do? In contrast to their benefactors’ expectations, the newcomers did not kiss the ground or throw themselves into the arms of the local Africans.

From their experience in the American South, the Americo-Liberians knew only one type of relationship: master-slave. Their first move upon arrival in this new land, therefore, was to recreate precisely that social structure, only now they, the slaves of yesterday, are the masters, and it is the indigenous communities whom they set out to conquer and rule.

Liberia is the voluntary continuation of a slave society by slaves who did not wish to abolish an unjust order, but wanted to preserve it, develop it, and exploit it for their own benefit. Clearly, an enslaved mind, tainted by the experience of slavery, a mind born into slavery, fettered in infancy, cannot conceive or conjure a world in which all would be free.

A large portion of Liberia is covered in jungle. Thick, tropical, humid, malarial, and inhabited by small, impoverished, and weakly organized tribes. (Powerful communities, with strong military and state structures, lived most often on the wide, open expanses of the savannah. The unhealthy conditions and difficulty of movement and communication in the African jungle prevented such societies from arising there.) Now, newcomers from across the ocean start to move onto these terrains, traditionally occupied by an indigenous population. Relations develop badly and are hostile from the very start. To begin with, the Americo-Liberians proclaim that only they can be citizens. They deny that status, that right, to the rest — to 99 percent of the population. Laws are passed defining this majority as merely “tribesmen,” people without culture, savage, heathen.

The two groups usually live far from each other, and their contacts are infrequent and sporadic. The new masters keep to the coast and to the settlements they have built there, of which Monrovia is the largest. It would not be until one hundred years after the creation of Liberia that its president (it was then William Tubman) ventured for the first time into the country’s interior. The newcomers from America, unable to set themselves apart from the locals by skin color or physical type, try to underline their difference and superiority in some other way. In the frightfully hot and humid climate, men walk about in morning coats and spencers, sport derbies and white gloves. Ladies usually stay at home, or if they do go out into the street (until the middle of the nineteenth century there were no asphalt roads or sidewalks in Monrovia), they do so in stiff crinolines, heavy wigs, and hats decorated with artificial flowers. The houses the members of these high, exclusive echelons live in are faithful reproductions of the manors and palaces built by white plantation owners in the American South. The religious world of the Americo-Liberians is similiarly closed and inaccessible to the native Africans. They are ardent Baptists and Methodists. They build their simple churches in the new land, and spend all their free time within, singing pious hymns and listening to topical sermons. With time, these temples will come to serve also as venues for social gatherings, as exclusive private clubs.

As early as the middle of the nineteenth century, long before apartheid was instituted in southern Africa by the Afrikaners, it had been invented and made flesh by the rulers of Liberia — descendants of black slaves. Nature and the impenetrability of the jungle alone created a natural barrier between the natives and the newcomers, an uninhabited no-man’s-land that divided them and fostered segregation. But this was not enough. In the small, bigoted world of Monrovia, an ordinance is instituted forbidding close contacts with the local population, particularly intermarriage. Everything is done to ensure that the “savages know their place.” To this end, the government in Monrovia allocates to each tribe (there are sixteen of them) a territory where they are allowed to live — not unlike the typical “homelands” created for Africans decades later by the white racists from Pretoria. All who speak out against this are severely punished. Punitive military and police expeditions are dispatched to places of rebellion and resistance. The chiefs of unsubmissive tribes are eliminated on the spot, the rebellious population murdered or imprisoned, its villages destroyed, its crops set afire. In accordance with the ancient, worldwide custom, these expeditions, incursions, and local wars have a single overriding goal: to capture slaves. The Americo-Liberians need laborers. And indeed, they start using slaves on their farms and in their businesses as early as the second half of the nineteenth century. They also sell them to other countries, especially to Fernando Po and Guinea. In the late 1920s, the world press discloses the existence of this trade, plied officially by the Liberian government. The League of Nations intervenes. The then president, Charles King, is forced to resign. But the practice will continue, only conducted in stealth.

From the very outset, the black settlers from America thought about how to preserve and strengthen their dominant position in the new country. At first, they did not allow its indigenous inhabitants, denied the rights of citizenship, to participate in government. They let them live, but only in designated tribal territories. Then they went further: they invented the single-party system of rule. In 1869, a year before the birth of Lenin, the True Whig Party is formed in Monrovia; it will enjoy a monopoly on power for the next 111 years, until 1980. The party’s directorship, its political bureau — a National Executive — decides everything, and in detail: who will be president, who will participate in the government, what sort of politics this government will conduct, which foreign company will get what concession, who will be appointed chief of police, head of the postal service, and so on, down to the lowest rungs of the civil service. The leaders of the party are the presidents of the republic, or the other way around — the positions are treated interchangeably. You can achieve something only if you are a member of the party. Its opponents are either in prison or abroad.

In the spring of 1963 I met its then chief and Liberia’s president, William Tubman, in Addis Ababa, during the first conference of Africa’s heads of state. Tubman was then close to seventy. He never took a plane — he was afraid. A month before the conference, he set out by ship from Monrovia, sailing to Djibouti, and from there he traveled by train to Addis Ababa. He was a short, slight, jovial gentleman with a cigar in his mouth. To troublesome questions he responded with long, resounding laughter, which devolved into an explosion of loud hiccups, followed by an attack of wheezing, convulsive breathlessness. He trembled, his eyes bugged out and filled with tears. The discomfited and frightened interlocutor would fall silent and dared not insist further. Tubman brushed the ashes from his suit and, calm once more, hid again behind a thick cloud of cigar smoke.

He was the president of Liberia for twenty-eight years, and belonged to what is today a rare category of political boss who rules his country like a squire his manor: they know everyone, decide everything. (Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, a contemporary of Tubman’s and the dictator of the Dominican Republic for thirty years, exercised power in a similar fashion. During his rule, the church organized mass baptisms of Dominican children, with Trujillo standing as godfather. With time, he became the godfather of all his subordinates. The CIA could find no volunteers to organize a coup against the dictator: no one wanted to raise a hand against his own godfather.)

Tubman received around sixty people daily. He made appointments to all official positions in the country himself, decided who should receive a concession, which missionaries were to be allowed in. He sent his own people everywhere, and his private police reported to him everything that was happening in this village, or in that one. Not much happened. The country was a small, forgotten African backwater; on Monrovia’s sandy streets, in the shade of old tumble-down houses, fat women vendors dozed behind their stalls, and dogs sick with malaria roved. Now and then, a group passed before the gates to the government palace carrying a large banner reading “A gigantic manifestation of gratitude for the progress that has taken place in the country thanks to the Incomparable Administration of the President of LiberiaDr. WVS Tubman.” Musical ensembles from the countryside also stopped at these gates, praising in song the greatness of the president:

Tubman is the father of us all,

the father of the whole nation.

He builds us roads,

brings water.

Tubman gives us food to eat,

gives us food to eat,

ye, ye!

The guards, hidden from the sun in their sentry booths, applauded the enthusiastic singers.

What elicited the greatest respect, however, was the fact that the president was protected by benevolent spirits, which endowed him with extraordinary powers. If someone wanted to hand him a poisoned drink, the glass containing the liquid would shatter in midair. The bullet of an assassin could not strike him — it would melt before it reached its target. The president had herbs that allowed him to win every election. And a lens through which he could see everything that was happening, anywhere — there was no sense in opposition or conspiracy, since it would always be found out.

Tubman died in 1971. He was replaced by his friend, vice president William Tolbert. Whereas Tubman was amused by power, Tolbert was fascinated by money. He was a walking embodiment of corruption. He dealt in everything — gold, cars, passports. The entire elite, those descendants of black American slaves, followed his example. People who begged in the street for bread or water were shot on Tolbert’s orders. His police killed hundreds.

In the predawn hours of April 12,1980, a group of soldiers forced their way into the president’s villa and hacked Tolbert to pieces in his bed. They disemboweled him and threw his internal organs out into the courtyard for dogs and vultures to devour. There were seventeen soldiers. Their leader was a twenty-eight-year-old sergeant, Samuel Doe. He was barely literate, from the small tribe of Krahn, which lived deep in the jungle. People just like him, driven from their villages by poverty, had been flowing into Monrovia for years, in search of work and money. In the course of thirty years, between 1956 and 1986, the population of Liberia’s capital increased tenfold, from 42,000 to 425,000—and this in a city without industry or a system of public transportation, in which few houses had electricity, and fewer still running water.

The trek from the jungle to Monrovia requires many days of difficult marching across roadless tropical expanses. Only young, strong people can manage it. And it is they who arrived in the city. But nothing awaited them here: neither jobs, nor a roof over their heads. From the very first day, they became bayaye—that army of the young unemployed squatting idly on all the larger streets and squares of African cities. The existence of this multitude is one of the causes of turmoil on the continent: it is from their ranks that local chieftains, for a pittance, often with only the promise of food, recruit the armies they will use in their struggles for power, organizing coups, fomenting civil wars.

Doe, like Amin in Uganda, was one such bayaye. And like Amin, he won the lottery: he got into the army. One would have thought that he had thereby attained the peak of his career. As it turned out, however, he had greater ambitions.

Doe’s coup was not simply the exchange of a corrupt political boss/bureaucrat for a semi-illiterate in uniform. It was simultaneously a bloody, cruel, and caricature-like revolt of the downtrodden, half-enslaved masses from the African jungle against their hated rulers — the descendants of slaves from American plantations. In a sense, it was a revolution within the slave world: current slaves rose up against former ones, who had imposed their rule upon them. The entire episode seemed to bear out a most pessimistic and tragic thesis: that in a certain sense, if only the mental or cultural one, there is no way out of slavery; or if there is, it is extremely difficult and takes a very long time.

…

Doe immediately declared himself president. He ordered thirteen ministers from Tolbert’s administration killed at once. The executions were drawn out and staged before a large crowd of curious gaping onlookers.

The new president constantly announced that yet another attempt on his life had been uncovered and thwarted. A total of thirty-four, he said. He had the conspirators shot. The fact that he lived and continued to rule was proof that he was protected by spells and powerful forces — the work of sorcerers from his village. One could shoot at him — the bullets simply stopped in midair and fell to the ground.

There is not much to say about his administration. He governed for ten years. The country simply came to a standstill. There was no electricity, the shops were closed, the traffic on Liberia’s few roads died out.

He didn’t really know what it was that he was supposed to do as president. Because he had a childish, chubby face, he bought himself some gold-framed glasses, to look serious and affluent. He was lazy, and so spent entire days sitting in his residence playing checkers with subordinates. He also spent a great deal of time in the courtyard, where the wives of his presidential guards cooked over fires or did their washing. He talked with them, joked, sometimes took one to bed. Uncertain as to what he should do next, and how to save himself from vengeance after having killed so many, he saw as the only solution to surround himself with people from his own tribe, the Krahn. He summoned them in huge numbers to Monrovia. Power now devolved from the hands of the wealthy, settled, and worldly Americo-Liberians (who had managed meantime to flee the country) into those of a poor, illiterate tribe of forest dwellers unnerved by their new situation and who, pulled abruptly from their huts woven of vines and leaves, were seeing a city, a car, or shoes for the first time. They understood one thing, however: that their only means of survival would be to frighten or liquidate all actual or eventual enemies, meaning all non-Krahn. And so a handful of these erstwhile paupers, lost and benighted, wanting to hold fast to the riches and power that had fallen into their hands like a golden egg, set out to terrorize the nation. They beat, tortured, hanged, most often for no reason. “Why did they do this to you?” the neighbors ask a battered man. “Because they determined that I am not Krahn,” the poor wretch answers.

It is hardly surprising that in such a situation the country awaits the slightest opportunity to rid itself of Doe and his people. A certain Charles Taylor comes to its aid, a former Doe associate who, as the president claimed, stole a milllion dollars from him before decamping for the United States, where he got into some business trouble, went to prison, escaped, and surfaced suddenly on the shores of the Ivory Coast. From here, with a group of sixty fighters, he begins a war against Doe in December of 1989. Doe could have easily destroyed Taylor, but he sent out against him an army of barefoot Krahn, who, the minute they left Monrovia, instead of fighting Taylor, fell to plundering and stealing whatever and wherever they could. News of this army of robbers spread quickly through the jungle, and the terrified populace, hoping for refuge and protection, started to flee to Taylor. Taylor’s army grew at lightning speed, and in a mere six months arrived at the outskirts of Monrovia. A quarrel erupts in the Taylor camp: who will get to actually take the city and seize the spoils? Taylor’s chief of staff, Prince Johnson, also a former associate of Doe, breaks with Taylor and forms his own army. Now three forces — Doe’s, Taylor’s, and Johnson’s — are fighting in the city for its possession. Monrovia lies in ruins, entire neighborhoods go up in flames, corpses line the streets.

Finally, the countries of West Africa intervene. Nigeria sends a landing party by sea, which reaches the port in Monrovia in the summer. Doe hears of this and decides to pay the Nigerians a visit. On September 9, 1990, he gathers his entourage and sets out for the port in a Mercedes. The president drives through an exhausted, devastated, plundered, and deserted town. He reaches the port, but Johnson’s people are already waiting for him there. They open fire. Doe’s entire security detail is killed. He himself takes several bullets in the legs and is unable to escape. He is captured, his hands are tied behind his back, and he is dragged off to be tortured.

Johnson, hungry for publicity, orders the torture scene to be carefully recorded on film. We see Johnson sitting and drinking beer. A woman stands next to him, fanning him and wiping the sweat from his brow. On the floor sits a bound Doe, dripping with blood. His face is so battered you can barely see his eyes. Johnson’s men crowd around, mesmerized by the sight of the dictator’s agony. For six months now this regiment has been crossing the country robbing and killing, yet the sight of blood can still work them up into a state of ecstasy, a frenzy. Young boys push closer; each wants to see, to sate his eyes. Doe, his head swollen from blows, is sitting naked in a pool of blood, wet from the blood, sweat, and the water they pour over him to keep him from fainting. “Prince!” Doe mutters to Johnson (he addresses him by his first name, because these men who are fighting one another and devastating the country are all friends — Doe, Taylor, and Johnson are friends). “Just have them loosen the ropes on my hands. I will tell you everything, just loosen the ropes!” Clearly, his hands have been tied so tightly that this hurts him more than his bullet-riddled legs. But Johnson just yells at Doe in a local creole dialect. It is impossible to understand most of what he says, except for one thing: he demands that Doe tell him his bank account number. Whenever a dictator is seized in Africa, the entire ensuing inquisition, the beatings, the tortures, will inevitably revolve around one thing: the number of his private bank account. In local opinion, the politician is synonymous with the leader of a criminal gang, who does business trading arms and narcotics and stashes away money in foreign accounts, knowing that his career will not be long, that eventually he will have to flee and will need the wherewithal to live.

“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.

The warlords are at once the cause and the product of the crisis in which many of the continent’s countries found themselves in the postcolonial era. When we hear that an African country is beginning to totter, we can be certain that warlords will soon appear on the scene. They are everywhere and control everything — in Angola, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Chad. What does a warlord do? Theoretically, he fights with other warlords. Most frequently, however, he is busy robbing his own country’s unarmed population. The warlord is the opposite of Robin Hood. He takes from the poor to enrich himself and feed his gangs. We are in a world in which misery condemns some to death and transforms others into monsters. The former are the victims, the latter are the executioners. There is no one else.

The warlord doesn’t have to look far to find his victims. They are right there: the inhabitants of nearby villages and towns. Bands of half-naked condottieri shod in ragged Adidas sneakers prowl ceaselessly over the lands of their warlord in search of food and other plunder. For these brutal, hungry, and often drugged wretches, everything is booty. A handful of rice, an old shirt, a piece of a blanket, a clay pot — all are objects of desire, bring a gleam to the eye. But people have grown experienced. It is enough for them to receive word that a warlord’s army is approaching, and instantly everyone in the area starts packing and fleeing. It is these people, walking in kilometer-long columns, that the residents of Europe and America see on their television screens.

Let us look at them. Most often, they are women and children. The warlords’ forays are aimed at the weakest, at those who cannot defend themselves. They do not know how to defend themselves; they do not have anything to defend themselves with. Let us turn our attention to what these women are carrying on their heads: a bundle or a bowl containing their most indispensible possessions — a little sack of rice or millet, a spoon, a knife, a piece of soap. They have nothing more. That bundle, that bowl, is their entire treasure, their life’s earnings, the riches with which they enter the twenty-first century.

The number of warlords is growing. They are the new power, the new rulers. They take for themselves the best morsels, the richest parts of the country, with the result that the state, even if it does survive, will be weak, poor, and ineffective. That is why, in order to defend themselves, states enter into alliances and confederations: to fight for their lives, their very existence. It is the reason there are few international wars in Africa: countries are united in adversity, share the same anxiety about their fate. On the other hand, there are many civil wars, i.e., wars during which warlords divide up a country among themselves and plunder its population, raw materials, and land.

Sometimes the warlords decide that everything worthy of plunder has been extracted, and that the hitherto rich sources of revenue have dried up. Then they begin the so-called peace process. They convene a meeting of the opposing sides (the “warring factions conference”), they sign an agreement, and set a date for elections. In response, the World Bank extends to them all manner of loans and credits. Now the warlords are even richer than they were before, because you can get significantly more from the World Bank than from your own starving kinsmen.

John and Zado arrive at the hotel. They will drive me around town today. But first we must get something to drink, because already the heat is exhausting and oppressive. Even at this early hour the bar is full of people; they are afraid to walk the streets, they feel safer inside. Africans, Europeans, Indians. I met one of them earlier: James P., a retired colonial bureaucrat. What is he doing here? He doesn’t answer, just smiles and executes a vague gesture with his hand. Idle prostitutes sit at the sticky, rickety tables. Black-skinned, sleepy, very pretty. The Lebanese owner leans toward me across the counter and whispers in my ear: “These are all thieves. They want to make some money and go to America. They are all diamond dealers. They buy the stones for a pittance from the warlords and fly them out to the Middle East on Russian airplanes.” “Russian airplanes?” I ask, surprised. “Yes,” he answers. “Go to the airport. There are Russian planes there, which transport these diamonds to the Middle East. To Lebanon, Yemen, Dubai. Especially Dubai.”

In the course of our conversation the bar suddenly emptied. It became roomy, spacious. “What happened?” I asked the Lebanese. “They noticed that you had a camera. They’d rather leave than risk being caught on film.”

We too walked out. Wet, hot air instantly enveloped us. One doesn’t know what to do with oneself here. Inside, it’s hot; outside, it’s hot. It is impossible to walk, impossible to sit, lie down, or drive. Such temperatures drain all energy, sensation, curiosity. What does one think about? How to get through the day. OK, morning is already past. Good, noon is over. Dusk is finally approaching. But there isn’t much relief at dusk; things are hardly better. Dusk too is stifling, sticky, slimy. And evening? The evening steams with a hot, smothering mist. And night? Night envelops us like a wet, burning sheet.

Fortunately, one can take care of many things in the hotel’s close vicinity. First — exchange money. Only one banknote is in circulation, one bill: five Liberian dollars. It is worth approximately five cents U.S. Stacks of these five-dollar bills lie on tables set up in the streets — for exchange. To buy almost anything, you must carry a large bag of money. But our transaction is simple: we exchange money at one table, and buy fuel at the next. Gasoline is sold in one-liter bottles; gas stations are closed, there is only a black market. I look at how much people are buying: one liter, two liters; they have no money. John is rich, so he buys ten liters.

We set off. I am curious about what John and Zado will want to show me. First, I must see the impressive things. Everything impressive is American. Several kilometers beyond Monrovia a great metal forest begins. Masts upon masts. Tall, massive, and sprouting ever higher branches, spurs, webs of antennas, poles, wires. These structures go on for kilometers, and we have the impression of being in a science fiction world, hermetic, incomprehensible, not of this earth. It is a Voice of America relay station for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, built in the presatellite era, during World War II, and now inactive, abandoned, consumed by rust.

Next, we drive to the other side of the city, where we see before us an enormous, flat stretch of land, an endless plain bi-sected by a concrete landing strip. This is the Robertsfield airport, the largest in Africa and one of the largest in the world. Now deserted, ruined, closed (the only airport open is the small one in town, at which I landed). The airport building: bombed out. The landing strip: riddled with craters from shells and bombs.

Finally, the largest object, the state within the state: the Firestone rubber plantation. Getting to it is difficult. We are constantly encountering military guardposts. There is a roadblock in front of each, and one must stop. Stop and wait. After a while, a soldier emerges from the booth. From a booth, from behind sandbags — this varies. He begins to interrogate — who? what? The slowness of gestures, the sparse words (syllables, really), the flat, enigmatic expression, the deliberation and solemnity evident in his face, are meant to imbue his person and function with seriousness and authority. “Can we drive farther?” Before he answers, he will wipe the sweat from his brow, adjust his weapons, inspect the car from various angles, and so on. Finally, John decides to turn around; we will not be able to reach our destination before evening, and from dusk on all the roads are closed — we risk being stranded somewhere.

We are back in the city again. They take me to a square to see the remnants of the statue of President Tubman, overgrown with vegetation. It was ordered blown up by Doe, to show that the rule of the ex-slaves from America had come to an end and that power was now in the hands of the oppressed Liberian people. Here, if anything is destroyed, broken, ruined, it will simply be left that way. Along the road we notice rusted scraps of metal imbedded in a tree trunk: years ago a car collided with the tree, and what’s left of it is there to this day. If a tree trunk falls across the road, it will not be removed; people will go around it, onto the adjoining field, and eventually beat out a new road. An unfinished house will stay unfinished, a ruined one will stay ruined. Similarly with this statue. They have no intention of ever rebuilding it, but they will also not cart away the debris. The act of destruction itself ends the matter: if some material trace remains, it has no meaning anymore, no weight, and therefore is not worth paying attention to.

A bit further, closer to the harbor and the sea, we stopped in an empty area, before an atrociously foul mountain of garbage. I saw rats scurrying everywhere. Vultures circled above. John jumped out of the car and vanished amid the tumbledown shacks scattered nearby. After a moment he reemerged with an old man. We followed him. I could not keep from shuddering, because the rats were walking between our feet, fearlessly. I squeezed my nose between my thumb and fingers, I was suffocating. Finally, the old man stopped and pointed at a slope of rotting garbage. He said something. “He said,” Zado translated for me, “that they threw Doe’s corpse here. Somewhere here, somewhere in this place.”

To breathe cleaner air, we drove on to the St. Paul River. The river constituted the border between Monrovia and the territory of the warlords. It was spanned by a bridge. On the Monrovia side, shacks and the huts of a refugee camp stretched almost as far as the eye could see. There was also a large market — a colorful kingdom of impassioned, zealous women vendors. Those from the other side of the river, from the warlords’ inferno, a realm governed by terror, hunger, and death, could cross over to our side to shop, but before stepping onto the bridge they had to leave their weapons behind. I observed them as they crossed and, once on this side, how they stopped, distrustful and uncertain, surprised that a normal world exists. How they stretched out their hands, as if this normalcy were something material, something that could be touched.

I also saw a naked man, walking about with a Kalashnikov over his shoulder. People stepped out of his way, avoided him. He was probably a madman. A madman with a Kalashnikov.