On an oppressively hot night during the March dry season ¡ when the tropical country's heat is worst, John Hilary Tubman cools off in a light robe on the porch of his mother's house on 21st Street in Sinkor, a suburb of Monrovia. He is just pages into Dickens' Pickwick Papers, and he clears the book from the table as a young boy sets cheese and crack-ers by the candlelight. Through the iron bars and broken windows, he can watch people bustle on the street below as dusk passes into the full darkness of a Liberian night.
John Hilary throws a shadow on the wall behind him, but the ghostlier image in the flickering light is his father's face so clearly visible in his own features. The eagle eyes and sharp nose are unmistakable ¡ the only difference is his nearly shaved head. His father kept a fuller mane nearly all his life.
John Hilary shares hors d'oeuvres and cold Karlsburg beer with a guest and introduces his nephew Robert Tubman. Robert, who has come to the city to attend to John Hilary's ailing car, lives near the Tubman estate in Totota. John Hilary talks about how much he would like to rehabilitate the family's rubber plantation, estate house and grounds there.
"After what we've been through here, people hold on to what they have because we've had so many" ¡ he draws his hands together as he searches for the right words ¡ "false hopes."
As John Hilary prepares to go out for the evening, he warmly receives a visitor from the darkness below. The man's mother is not well, and John offers his prayers and encouragement. As the visitor leaves, John asks to be kept up on her condition. The man in the darkness is Ernest Barclay, whose father was president before John Hilary's and was once President Tubman's bitter political foe.
Dressed and ready to go out, John Hilary has one of the boys hail a cab. It sports a hand-painted Liberian flag and Nike swoosh on the back and in large, light blue letters screams: "REPENT!"
Every taxi in Monrovia carries a message on the back bumper. They range from the platitudinous ("YOU EAT TO LIVE") to the ominous ("YOUR BEST FRIEND IS YOUR SECRET ENEMY") to the inexplicable ("EVERY DISAPPOINTMENT IS A BLESSING").
John Hilary negotiates an hourly rate with the driver and directs him to downtown Monrovia, a few miles east, so he can see what the night life is like in the city this Friday. They pass by the executive mansion his father built. Charles Taylor, who won the war and the free election that followed in July 1997, lives there now. Thanks to its generators, the mansion is the only building in the country brightly lighted at night. John Hilary and his entourage continue down the dark roads to Broad Street and the city center. The streets teem with hustlers, sellers, beggars and revelers. On past his father's grave and the crumbling facades pock-marked with bullet holes, they pass a taxi offering up "THE WAY WE WERE."
The road bottoms out and starts back up the hill as they drive by a loud brass band entertaining two houses so full of people that they spill out and fill the sidewalk in front, swaying back and forth in a great mass.
"It's a wake," says John Hilary, pointing out the casket on the porch.
Enough of downtown ¡ he directs the driver back to his own neighborhood and out to Musu's Uni Sex Boutique and Full Service Bar.
Musu's is in fact a salon in the daytime and a bar in the evening. A generator provides air conditioning and CNN, but most of the people who come to Musu's sit under the umbrellas on the patio and watch the sun dip into the ocean as they quench their thirst and feast on some of the best chicken, pork, seafood and french fries in Monrovia.
John Hilary tells with the driver to come back for him and Robert in 90 minutes. He says he will pay him then. "That way I know he will come back," he says with a chuckle.
The music on the patio is so loud people have to shout to be heard over the strange mix of American and British pop, contemporary African dance tunes, hip-hop anthems and the occasional ballad by the likes of Shania Twain or Celine Dion.
At virtually every table he passes, John Hilary shares a full handshake and a broad, laughing-out-loud greeting with the people he knows ¡ and who know him. To be in his wake is to understand full-on, life-of-the-party celebrity.
"It's bittersweet," he sighs. "If you like to let your hair down, all eyes are on you." It goes unsaid that he does not have enough hair to let down.
He orders another German beer, Robert asks for a Guiness stout, and they light cigarettes.
John Hilary's father was, somewhat famously, a cigar and Johnny Walker Black Label man. William V.S. Tubman was known to enjoy his vices ¡ the music, dancing, smoking and drinking that led him away from the ministry. But, says John Hilary, by the time he became president in his late 40s he had begun to mellow and preferred the more sedate state functions and fancy balls.
"He liked people, and he liked to make them happy," he says. "He liked...la bonne vie."
As does John Hilary, who is quick with a laugh as he entertains the many "neighbors" who seek him out in hopes he'll buy them drinks.
Over Musu's roasted chicken and french fries, John Hilary talks about Liberia and America and his family spread out over two continents.
During a break in the conversation he raises his knife in the air, halfway between making a discovery and directing a chorus, and says, "This song was very popular during the war."
And he sings along with the sweet South African voices on the chorus.
"Wherever you go, remember me. Whatever you do, remember me."
The song plays on into the dark night, where forgetting is not a real option.
On the boulevard in front of the cafe, police in armored cars and jeeps, machine guns at the ready, begin to clear vehicles off the road. Suddenly, there is a convoy of 20 or more cars traveling at top speed with their lights flashing; it is the unmistakable parade that accompanies President Taylor wherever he goes.
When President Tubman went out for the evening, says John Hilary, there were only three cars in the motorcade. He then tells the story of two friends who were watching a Taylor traffic extravaganza like the one that just passed.
"Imagine," one of them said to the other, "all those cars just to carry one guy to work." The table erupts in laughter as the drivers swept off the road by the police cautiously creep back onto the highway.
One of them must have been Tubman's taxi driver, who shortly joins the party. But John Hilary is not ready to go home. He buys his cabbie a beer and enjoys the warm evening a little longer.
A broken place
Monrovia, not long ago, was a much sleepier place. But as the war pushed across Liberia, the growing terror herded people into the city as though they were deer fleeing a forest fire.
And they're still on the move today.
Well-dressed men and women walk to their offices past vendors cruising the sidewalks with dried fish or bags of popcorn, eggs or bread or chewing gum. Children walk hand-in-hand in their colorful school uniforms: green and gold, maroon and white, yellow and blue.
But all is not as it seems.
Some of the schoolchildren are not children at all, but young adults whose education was interrupted by the war.
Some of the offices people go to have no windows or roofs or much of anything that makes up an office. And if they need photocopies, they run to the corner where young men with the copying machines and portable generators wait under beach umbrellas.
They hustle and bustle through the war's debris: beggars, amputees, bullet holes and smoldering piles of garbage.
Going to school. Going to work. Going to market. Going to fetch water.
Water, that's the big one ¡ without electricity, there's no way to pump a municipal water supply.
Many women and children spend a good part of the day waiting in line for water, either at one of the many wells that were drilled in the relief effort after the war or at water tanks supplied every day by truck deliveries.
They go back home with great basins balanced on their heads, or heavy containers in each hand. Some make their way along the roads with wheelbarrows expertly stacked with water containers.
It is a task of such brutal monotony that it would give Sisyphus good reason to throw up his hands and quit.
But all life in Monrovia, like the water from the wells, flows underground. There is a great deal of residual fear from the many times the war ceased and rekindled from 1989 to 1997. Opinions are more often guarded than shared. They are especially well-hidden, ironically, on the radio opinion shows. At times, a conspicuous quiet overtakes the callers as they struggle to cough up the least incendiary phrase.
Silence is safe. Words are trouble.
That's because, during the most popular talk-radio hour, all activity in the executive mansion comes to a halt as the president and his minions tune in. In the press office, an assistant director turns the volume up and does her nails while the on-air discussion meanders around the country's problems without ever really landing on the truth, which can get the callers beaten, jailed, tortured or worse.
The truth is that Liberians can't get any real help fixing what's broken because the man they voted president, former warlord Charles Taylor, has become one of the world's great pariahs, and he is dragging his country down with him.
Since Taylor took office in 1997, in a landslide election that observers agree was free and fair, he has brought Liberia so low that it is treated with the same global disdain as Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Rwanda and Afghanistan.
Liberia, once a beacon of freedom to a continent owned by white colonial powers, is now shunned as a broker of death and war.
"He's a rebel. He's a bandit," says Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a banker and United Nations executive who came in a distant second in the 1997 election ¡ with 9.6 percent of the vote to Taylor's 75. Just last Saturday, she was able to return to Liberia after a two-year exile that Taylor imposed against political opponents he charged with treason.
"Now the Liberian people know that they made a big mistake with Mr. Taylor. They voted for Taylor for peace, to stop the war or resumption of war. Now they know that by voting for Taylor, they voted for Liberia's own continued economic destruction," says Johnson-Sirleaf.
"He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him!" was the widely reported rallying cry of many at the polls.
Since the election, he has made few reforms and kept a clamp on the opposition, while helping friends like Foday Sankoh wage war in next-door Sierra Leone, where squads of soldiers hack the limbs off innocent people, even children.
He is accused by his neighbors and the United Nations of running diamonds for guns to fuel the stinking, wretching war that surrounds Liberia.
For that, the world has tried to cut him off.
He and his government have lost travel privileges. The world powers, ordinarily generous when giving out development aid for ailing countries such as Liberia, have kept the spigot shut off.
The Augusta Chronicle ©2012. All Rights Reserved.
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