The Africans (25 page)

Mrs. Phillips, who owned the West African Travel Agency, had come to Liberia from her home in Washington, D.C., in 1954. She was a nurse and had intended to stay for only six months. But she fell in love with a young Liberian businessman who was bright and industrious and eventually became the country’s minister of finance. They were married and Mrs. Phillips took out Liberian citizenship.

“This is home now,” she said. “I still go back to the States frequently on trips, but Liberia is where my heart is. My husband has done well financially and he’s a respected member of the government. He’s very intelligent. Tolbert relies on him a great deal.”

During his nearly three decades as vice president and president, Tolbert’s people sang his praises and sought his favors. His generals obediently carried out his commands. Then, as often happens in Africa, he was given the kiss of Judas and buried like a dog.

Late one evening in April 1980 he left a reception for religious and diplomatic guests in downtown Monrovia and returned to his seven-story Israeli-built mansion overlooking the Atlantic. It was almost midnight and he went directly to his penthouse suite. He changed into pajamas, presumably said prayers (as he always did), and crawled into bed. Two hours later, with the help of rebels in the presidential guard, a twenty-eight-year-old army sergeant named Samuel K. Doe scaled the mansion’s iron gate with nineteen colleagues. They overpowered the few loyalist soldiers on duty, and in the fire fight a stray bullet severed the telephone line to the military barracks. It was the million-to-one shot that prevented Tolbert from summoning his army. Doe and his colleagues broke down Tolbert’s door and found him in bed. They gouged out his right eye, disemboweled him and fired three bullets into his head.

Two days later, as Monrovia slumbered under the army-imposed curfew, a big yellow bulldozer crashed through the wrought-iron fence surrounding the Palm Grove Cemetery, and in a corner section used for dumping garbage, cut a shallow trench long enough to hold twenty-eight bodies. Tolbert’s corpse, still clad in pajamas, was collected from John F. Kennedy Hospital, where it had lain unattended
on a slab. Soldiers who had served their commander in chief loyally threw the body into the back of a truck, drove to the cemetery and dumped it into the unmarked grave along with the bodies of the men killed defending him.

Many Liberians came to peer into the open pit, but there were no prayers or eulogies for the ordained Baptist minister who was chairman of the OAU. Instead, before wandering back to town, the people threw stones and spat at their late president. “Pig,” shouted one youth, hurling his beer can at the corpse.

Meanwhile Sergeant Doe, the semiliterate head of state, by this time had moved into Tolbert’s mansion and was riding around town in Tolbert’s chauffeured black Mercedes-Benz. (Tolbert had long since given up his VW.) Doe held a press conference to say there would be no witch hunting. “Our responsibility is to build a new society for the benefit of all our people,” he said. But
all
the people really meant
some
of the people, and first there were some old debts to be repaid.

Swaggering soldiers patrolled the streets, shaking down civilians and looting shops. One group of drunken soldiers stormed into the Ducor Inter-Continental Hotel, and in a room-to-room foray, robbed foreign delegates who had been attending a Lutheran conference. The houses of Tolbert’s associates were attacked and sacked, and ninety-one of his top officials were arrested on charges ranging from corruption to human rights violations.

The trials began on a Wednesday in a second-floor conference room at the military barracks on the outskirts of Monrovia. The public jammed into the stark cement-walled room, staring wordlessly at the accused, who faced the five-man military tribunal. None was permitted a defense counsel. Overhead fans cut through the heavy, stale air, and outside, hundreds of civilians watched gleefully while former cabinet ministers were paraded through the camp, wearing only their underpants. On the sandy beach nearby, nine telephone poles were erected in the sand, a sure sign that some of the accused had already been judged guilty and would be executed.

I arrived at the barracks in a taxi, expecting to be turned back as soon as I identified myself as a journalist. Instead the soldiers at the gate nodded and waved me through. A few minutes later I was seated in the second row of the makeshift courtroom, where Frank Stewart, the budget director for Tolbert’s government, was pleading for his life.

Stewart’s hair was flaked with sawdust from ten days of sleeping on a cement floor, and a gray stubble covered his chin. He wore a T-shirt, baggy brown trousers with no belt, and sandals. Someone said he was fifty but he looked much older. He sat on a wooden straight-back chair, squinting and sweating in the glare of camera lights from the local government station. He hunched forward to hear the accusations from the military tribunal. When the honking horns and rumbling traffic in the streets outside became too loud, he cupped his hand to his ear.

His five accusers were army officers with spit-shined shoes and steel-cold eyes. Two weeks earlier they had been the country’s loyal servants. Now they were part of the ruling elite, sitting as judge and jury. To their left, a young army private wearing sunglasses labored unsteadily over a typewriter, recording the proceedings. In the back of the small auditorium several soldiers with rifles slumped sleepily against the unused bar. One of them kept bringing Stewart bottles of ginger ale, which he would empty in a single gulp.

It soon became clear that Stewart had stretched his annual government salary of $18,000 a long way. He earned $32,000 a year from the rental of three houses, and he owned twenty-eight lots, a supermarket, a farm and other scattered investments. Everything, he insisted, had been obtained legally, and if the tribunal would only allow him to bring his records, he said, he could prove his innocence. But no, an officer replied, that would only be a waste of time. So Stewart presumably knew he had already been judged guilty and the only question was whether he would be killed or jailed.

“Mr. Stewart,” an officer said, “for the benefit of this tribunal, please state how many houses, lots and farms do you own.”

“I will answer that by telling a story about how I happened to get—”

“We are not interested in stories. How many houses you got?”

“Well, houses … there are, let’s see—four.”

“Four,” repeated the officer accusingly, holding up four fingers. “You got that down?”

“Got what down?” asked the typist.

“Four houses. Mr. Stewart got four houses.”

“Four houses, yeah, I got it.”

“Yes,” Stewart said, “but in 1957 the price of cement was very cheap, so my wife, who was earning one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month at the Justice Department, and I—my salary was
two hundred and fifty dollars—we used small loans from the bank, and for seven years we worked building the blocks we needed to construct—”

“Holy Christ,” an officer said, “cut this short or we goin’ to be sittin’ here right through lunch.”

“No, let him finish,” another said. “Mr. Stewart, is it right for a government official to build a house, like you did, and then lease it back to the government? That’s a question.”

“What’s the last part?” the typist asked.

“I said, ‘That’s a question.’ You don’t have to write that down.”

“None of it?”

“No, just the last part, the part about the question.”

“My answer to that,” Stewart said, “is that it depends on the demand and the need and the government policies in force.”

“How about your water bills, electricity, things like that. They up to date?”

“As far as I know.”

“I ask that ’cause I don’t ever know no government people who pays their utility bills.”

“Mr. Stewart,” said an officer, reading from a prepared question he had struggled over for some time, “according to the history of Liberia, this is the first coup d’état in history. If this is correct and true, please refresh your memory and tell this tribunal from your keen observations what the progressive differences are between the administration of the late president Tubman and President Tolbert. I want you to evaluate the different administrations as far as serving the masses and the importation of goods.”

“The importation of goods?” Stewart replied. “Well, I’m not really in a position to evaluate that—”

“To what?” the typist asked.

“Evaluate. E-v-a-l-u-a-t-e. I really can’t evaluate that. Certainly, during the Tubman years goods were cheaper and the cost of living was less.”

“So,” the officer said, “you indirectly made us understand that the Tubman administration better managed the affairs of the nation, particularly”—and he kept repeating “particularly” while the typist put in a new piece of paper—“particularly in regard to the masses, commonly referred to as the poor people.”

“Yes.”

“May we then conclude that the coup of April 12, 1980, was necessary to relieve the people of Liberia of their suffering?”

“Not only was it necessary—”

“Wait,” said the typist. “Not what?”

“Not only was it necessary, it was long overdue.”

The questioner smiled and nodded in agreement. “This trial is recessed so we can get some lunch. Mr. Stewart, you are finished.”

“Finished? How do you mean? Will I be coming back again?”

“Maybe,” the officer said with a shrug.

The next morning Sergeant Doe, the new head of state, held his first press conference for the forty or so foreign correspondents who were now in Monrovia. He strode into the ballroom of Tolbert’s mansion wearing a wide-brimmed army ranger hat, crisply pressed fatigues and combat boots. He carried a ceremonial sword, a .357 magnum revolver and a walkie-talkie. In halting English he read a prepared statement, handled two brief questions and sat down. “Ladies and gentlemen,” his new information minister, Gabriel Nimely, announced in a casual voice, “you are invited to some executions at two-thirty.”

Back at the Barclay Training Center, where the trials had been held, the mood was festive. Thousands of civilians had packed the beach, and hundreds of soldiers, many of them drunk, danced and pranced around a small white mini-bus in which thirteen condemned officials of the Tolbert regime were locked. They pounded on the windows and kicked at the doors, laughing and jeering at the men inside.

“Hey, there, Cecil boy,” one soldier shouted at the former foreign affairs minister, “I’m going to get the first shot. If I don’t kill you, don’t worry much. We’ll let you die slow.”

Sergeant Doe’s motorcade arrived with a roar and nine of the condemned men were dragged from the bus—the remaining four would witness the spectacle and be pulled out later—and bound to the telephone poles. They wore only underpants. The soldiers taunted them and tickled them during the twenty minutes it took the firing squad to get organized. The officer in charge cursed as he tried to unjam his rifle.

Cecil Denis, the distinguished foreign affairs minister whom I had known well over the past few years, glared with disgust at his tormentors. Frank Tolbert, the late president’s brother, fainted. Frank Stewart glanced about wide-eyed, as though it were all a nightmare from which he would suddenly awake. James Phillips, the finance minister and the husband of my travel-agent friend from Washington, D.C., wet his underpants.

“Squad, fire!” the commander ordered, his rifle finally functioning properly. For three minutes the executioners unleashed volley after volley. Bullets smacked into Phillips’ arms and shoulders before one struck his forehead. Stewart was hit in the stomach, then thirty seconds or so later, in the heart. Denis continued to stand upright, eyes closed, as one bullet after another zinged harmlessly by. Finally a soldier stepped out of the ranks and killed him with a burst of machine-gun fire. A great shout of joy rose from the mob: “Freedom. We got our freedom at last!” The soldiers rushed forward to kick and pummel the corpses.

One of Doe’s first moves as head of state was to double the wages of soldiers and civil servants, whose support he needed to retain power. The treasury was already in the red, though, and the $34 million annual expenditure for the salaries only heightened Liberia’s economic crisis. Before long it became evident that the people’s ecstasy at the executions had been premature. Power had changed hands but little else changed. Sergeant Doe promoted himself to General Doe, and each morning a hairdresser came to the executive mansion to fluff up his Afro. He raced around town with an escort of motorcycle cops, and he took care of his opponents at secret trials and public executions. In no time at all, he became quite comfortable with his new job as head of state, and the United States, not wanting to lose its toehold of influence in West Africa, courted him like a hero.

But in killing Tolbert, Doe and his soldier-politicians had merely identified the symptoms of Liberia’s discontent. The causes remained. Running a government, they found, was more demanding than staging a coup; formulating remedies for national illnesses was more complex than shooting government officials bound to telephone poles. Freedom, the people learned, did not come from the barrel of a gun. Only one thing seemed certain as a result of the army takeover: Liberia’s first coup d’état would not be its last.

The Liberian coup unnerved every president in Africa. If the chairman of the OAU could be murdered by a gang of enlisted men, who was safe? The answer was: No one. Political stability is largely an illusion in sub-Sahara Africa and almost any government can be overthrown as suddenly and as easily as Tolbert’s. And below the paper-thin veneer of civilization in Africa lurks a savagery that waits like a caged lion for an opportunity to spring.

Tolbert’s downfall was founded on the same mistakes that have led to the overthrow of so many other African presidents. First, he raised his people’s expectations and aspirations, economically and socially, but delivered little of what he promised. Second, he allowed governmental corruption and the gap between rich and poor to grow beyond that undefined limit which Africans accept and tolerate. And finally, he misread the pretense of obedience that Africans pay almost any man with authority as a sign of love and respect for him. In the end, he was destroyed by the system he had helped create and try to liberalize.