Instead, I gave out tips and Christmas bonuses and little presents on Boxing Day, a holiday that Liberians, not letting a good thing pass unappropriated, had borrowed from Sierra Leone. I dropped dimes and quarters into the cups of crippled and deformed, leprous, and amputated beggars on the streets of Monrovia, gave pennies to children who clustered around me whenever I stepped from the Mercedes, and although I myself did not attend services (a girl has to have some principles, I suppose), I supported Woodrow’s church by sending our children to its Sunday school with dollar bills for the collection plate tucked into pledge envelopes.
It was as if the people who lived there and the events that took place in those tumultuous years were deadly viruses, and I lived behind glass, a bubble-girl protected against infection from the outside world. Meanwhile, beyond my bubble the president and his cohort, which, despite my husband’s best efforts and advantageous marriage, still did not include him, grew fatter and richer and ever more flagrantly corrupt. They skimmed the cream off American foreign aid, blatantly stole from any and all non-governmental and UN public service allocations, took their cut from World Bank and IMF grants to the financial sector, and pimped the country’s natural resources, selling off at special, one-day-only rates Liberia’s rubber, sugar, rice, diamonds, iron, and water, peddling vast stands of mahogany and timber to companies owned and run by Swedes, Americans, Brits, Germans, and, increasingly, Israelis. Foreign distributors of beer, gasoline, motor vehicles, cigarettes, salt, electricity, and telephone service haggled over lunch for bargain-priced monopolies; by sundown they had the president’s fee safely deposited in his Swiss bank account and, after the celebratory banquet, partied the night away at the Executive Mansion with Russian hookers, smoking Syrian hashish, snorting lines of Afghan cocaine, and guzzling cases of Courvoisier.
The few Liberian journalists and politicians who dared to criticize the president and his cronies simply disappeared. As if sent on permanent assignment to Nigeria or Côte d’Ivoire, they were not mentioned again in public or private. Newspapers were locked down by judicial fiat, and radio stations were silenced, until the only news, little more than recycled releases from the president’s press office, was no news at all. Meanwhile, the president’s personal security force grew larger in number and actual physical size — big, scowling, swaggering men in sunglasses looking more and more like an army of private body guards than an elite corps of enlisted men — while the men in the regular army seemed to diminish in number and size, their uniforms tattered, torn, and dirty, their boots replaced by broken-backed sneakers and plastic sandals. Compared with the glistening black AK-47s carried by the president’s men, their rifles, obsolete U.S. Army leftovers from the Korean War, looked almost antique and were without ammunition. More like dangerous toys than deadly weapons, they were used mainly as clubs.
I knew all this as it happened, saw it with my own eyes, and learned the details and background and the names and motives of the people involved from Woodrow, from the few of his colleagues in government who, like Charles Taylor, trusted him, and from our social acquaintances — and, of course, I learned of it from Jeannine, who loved showing me that she knew more about the world of Liberian big men and their affairs than I did, and from Elizabeth, who had taken over my old job at the lab and whom I visited daily to be with the chimps. For, when it came down to it, the chimps had become my closest friends in Liberia, my only confidants, the only creatures to whom I entrusted my secrets, and whose secrets I kept and carried.
EARLY IN 1979—I think it was April, because the rains were about to begin — President Tolbert tacked a ten-cent-per-pound sales tax onto the already inflated retail price of rice. That winter’s measly crop had been worse than usual, and supplies of rice had diminished to a dangerous level. Rice was the country’s staple food. Without it, the people, especially the poor, faced starvation, and the nation faced famine. Stores and shops had emptied out, and black marketeers selling rice from Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire were getting rich at prices only the rich could afford.
“Why on earth do you need so much for a little one-pound bag of rice, Jeannine?”
“On account of it so dear now. Them don’t got no more at Dot-Dot, an’ none at Congo Square, neither. Peoples only can buy rice these days from the Arab, y’ know, an’ he sellin’ it very high priced.”
A Costa Rican freighter loaded with sacks of rice grown in Louisiana, meant originally for Haiti, and stamped USAID NOT FOR RESALE, lay at anchor in the harbor, waiting to be off-loaded. So far, on the president’s orders, the off-loading permit had been refused by customs, and the captain and crew hadn’t bothered to come ashore. For days, stevedores, dockworkers, retailers, and crowds of hopeful higglers with their gunny sacks, and women and girls from the countryside with empty pails and plastic buckets had gathered at the docks, waiting for the ship to tie up and the sacks of rice to be carried off and distributed among them.
While the people waited hopefully in the rain day after day and night after night for their rice to come in, it was a continuous, twenty-four-hour party, an informal, spontaneous carnival, with people dancing and singing in little groups on the docks, drinking raw palm wine, roasting scavenged groundnuts on charcoal fires, all good-naturedly, optimistically marking time. Each morning, as I passed in the Mercedes on my way to the lab, I saw that the crowd had grown larger. They seemed to be saying to themselves, We are hungry now, but we won’t be hungry long. Everyone believed it.
Then one morning the voice of President Tolbert himself came over the radio, and he announced the new tax on rice, a “people’s contribution” it was called, a way for Liberia to free itself from foreign debt, he said. Since rice was the main food for all Liberians, every single man, woman, and child would now be able to contribute to the nation’s independence. The legislature would pass the decree today, and then the ship currently waiting in the harbor of Monrovia would be off-loaded, and the rice distributed. And there were more ships coming, he promised. Ships from Nigeria, Brazil, and America were on the western horizon. Soon everyone would have plenty of rice — jollof rice, rice fufu, coconut rice, rice and beans, curried rice, check rice with greens, rice balls…
The ten-cent tax per pound effectively doubled the street price at that time. No one, rich or poor, held any illusions as to where the money would end up. Having extracted as much as they could from foreign governments and corporations and sold off for a pittance nearly all the nation’s natural resources, the president and his colleagues, resorting to autocannibalism, had turned to devouring their own and had begun the meal with the most numerous and defenseless of their own, the poor. There was no meat on those bones, however. The poor had nothing left to give to the wealthy, not even ten cents per pound of rice. Having nothing more to lose, as soon as the president went off the air and no longer seemed to be watching them, they rioted.