Michel Dioubate (modified from Book-Laughter of a Crazy Man)
It started in the villages; the youth joined armies with no list of recruits, no uniforms issued, no salary paid, and when injured or killed, no message of condolence went to parents and family. As they say, the flies on the corpse took the death news home. When the death news did go, many times, it was received with relief rather than grief. They desecrated the shrines, stripped the elders and whipped or killed them, but this was just the beginning of terror. Their commitment to mutual slaughter, wanton destruction and cruel atrocities was impassioned. The child soldiers and children of war transformed a sick country into one on its deathbed.
Men and women of action, unsatisfied with the natural evolution of affairs, had kindled a revolution that ran amok. These politicians were men and women who deemed it more important to satisfy their sexual organs and fill their bellies than worry about the common man. They wrestled power from a leader, who refused to give it up. Things were wrong long before then but this time, it was different. Something went wrong and everyone had to pay a terrible price for it. They were most certainly wrong; the people who thought Liberians too unserious to start anything, and most certainly, not a war.
Liberia left the forgotten people in villages, in another era, a more primitive time, omitted from planning or development. There was no national scholarship program to pluck out the intelligent ones, no national service that sent people back to offer hope or service the poor, no farsighted road-building program to connect the people; there was no way for the people to change the inequality of opportunity and economic circumstance. These forgotten ones became warriors or “rebels”, as they would be called and they came, taunted, tortured, threatened and made a concerted effort to take the entire country back to where the country left them, in the forgotten hell.
The country was established with the lofty ideal of civilizing and elevating the natives but after over a hundred years, the Americo-Liberians or Congor as they were called, did not think any native worthy of leadership. Leadership was for “son and daughters of the pioneers” and they saw nothing wrong with that. The table of solidary was surrounded by unequals and after a hundred and thirty years, no “native man” was good enough. Everyone educated and capable of that class was condemned, denigrated, maligned and branded a radical or worse an insurrectionist and jailed. The Fahnbullehs, Brownells, Twehs of that era and many others faced this fate. Blyden warned that if they continue to destroy every “country man” that was capable, they will end up with one forced upon them, one who was not prepared to lead. For some, Samuel Doe, epitomized the country man, but they had refused, maligned and cast out many like him, who were more capable, until he was forced on them. His rise to power ushered an era of naked brutality but it was no different then-this same evil was perpetrated in a more subtle manner for more than a century. The Americo-Liberians firm hold on power for almost 140 years was no dinner party and if it was, the Samuel Does of that era were never invited guests.
All during that time, the evil grew, festered and became incarnate, and its demonic fire ran through the blood of the youth. This depravity entered and seized the souls of the forgotten people in the villages and remote towns, and they descended like swarms of locust on the masses. The hard reality and warning of the sages were forgotten— either you took the people from the hole or all of you would be condemned to live in the hole with them.
They were unaware but surely fulfilling the prophecy of doom. The politician and seer Didwo Tweh predicted, “As surely as the sun follows the moon, a son of this soil shall rule the land,” and that came to pass. The intellectuals worried about the future; Edward Blyden intoned, “It is not difficult to predict what the end will be, if there be no change” and University of Liberia President Emeritus T. Ebenezer Ward said, “The peril of the Liberian democracy lies in the illiteracy of its youth.” The people felt they were dreamers or ivory-tower intellectuals but these pragmatic men who foresaw a future of tragedy, worked at averting this terrible fate. They laughed at them and poked fun at their apocalyptic prediction of doom; they were crying wolf and causing unnecessary alarm to people who cherished laughter, fun, jokes and revelry.
Others give more specific and terrible warnings, but these messengers were scoffed at and their character put to the litmus test. Mother Dukuly, nightclub proprietress turned evangelist, who transformed her bar into a church and turned her reputation for concocting a popular stiff alcoholic drink called Devil’s Blood into that of having prescient visions, told her president he had ten years to rule, and if he did not give up power, there would be bloodshed. No one listened to this prophetess of a dark destiny.
The “rebels” reached the cities, leaving a path of desolation, destruction, pain and suffering. These neglected ones had slogans, but they were empty, drug-induced words, and their eyes showed only hate and pain. Their anger and grievance were real and some set out to avenge those wrongs. Maybe it was the mistreatment or brutality endured by their parents and grandparents or the distain and curses experienced by them as a group; the pain was real. These forgotten people, many of which had not seen electricity or wires, storied buildings or ice, suddenly became the rulers.
To say these people were deprived was an understatement since many of the advances of modern life appeared magical to them. A child soldier described his first foray out of the village. The most shocking thing in the first house he entered was the toilet bowl. For sure, he thought, the people had allowed the river water to flow into the house so they could get water to drink because it would be considered unclean to defecate in the same building where one slept and ate in his village. It never crossed his mind that this was a place for bodily function; where he came from, they had a place outside the house for that. So, he drank water from the commode. The first Storied building was another thing of disbelief. It looked like one house stepped on top of the other house and the other house stepped on the other one. It was also in the city that he first drank cold, refrigerated water. He refused the first cup of water because of the ice; it looked like broken glass. But most unbelievable was how much power he wielded with the gun in his hand.
The nightmare was interminable. Chaos reigned, and the state of the nation careened from the pillar of despair to the post of uncertainty. Every class claimed victimhood in the blame game, but there was enough blame to share. Calumny was heaped on the Americo-Liberians for not transforming the country, but many sons of the soil ascended and transcended the barriers and never looked back to offer a hand to their own people. At other times, better conditions were offered, but the people were satisfied with subsistence rather than a life of plenty, happy to be hewer of wood and bearer of loads; they refused to lace up their shoes and join in the march to progress.
They learned with bitter regret that war did not come for any special group and that “stray bullets don’t know the difference between Gio, Krahn, or Mano[1] man,” as said by Samuel Doe, but people still refused to see that in suffering, they were the same. The war ushered an end to the age of pretense; evil was everywhere. In this time of desperation, some looked up to the sky expecting divine intervention for they believed God would not allow the innocent to suffer. But the innocent had been suffering, and no one noticed during the Fernando Po crisis, the Kru Coast Campaign of the 1930s, the rice riot of 1980s; everyone was guilty.
The resting place for the battered men and women was J.F. Kennedy Medical Center, which had a twisted acronym or nom de guerre of Just For Killing. This tertiary referral center had known better days and retained only the shell of its former glory. It was both a place of miracle and a place of horror. There were gaping disparity and mismatch between expectation and capacity. The people and the warlords expected everything but contributed nothing; this was the human junkyard, where broken men were deserted and left to rot. All the warlords had men in the hospital, but they never supported the hospital. These men were not disappointed since they had no expectations and understood the agreement they had inked with their blood. They promised to take the emblem and standard of their warlord and minions to acclaim and victory; in the process, they had carte blanche to steal, kill, maim and loot as much as they wanted but with the caveat that if they got hurt in the process no one would lift a finger. They never complained to their commanders or warlords, who never visited and never cried for assistance while in the hospital. The agreement was implied and understood, and the broken men were the responsibility of charity or someone else.
The medical center was the watering hole for strange bedfellows. People with all manner of injuries and wounds, amputations and human sufferings, different but the same in the commonality of their pain and pathos since they emanated from the same wellspring. Despite their different dialects and languages, the moans and groans of pain spoke only one language, the most primitive language of suffering. Enemies in the battlefield suddenly lying next to each other on the wards, perpetrators and victims crying the same cry in response to the pain and bleeding the same blood, forgotten. Many prayed for death to relieve the pain. And in this group were the casual casualties, innocent people destroyed by the lack of a health system, lack of drugs or services, traumatized by the demons who could not see the people hurt by their war. They had no choice and marched slowly to the medical center, praying it was not to their graves and hoping that fate and circumstances would give them a chance.
Into this living nightmare, a ten-year-old boy was admitted into JFK Medical Center with tetanus. Apart from having one of the worst possible conditions at the wrong time, he was admitted to what was at that time an unfavorable place for treatment, and his family had limited support to offer. Unable to talk due to lockjaw, incapable of toiletry functions, he could not move and was in a rigid fixed position. His spine was hyperextended, and his teeth were clenched with a fixed sardonic smile. He was given intravenous support, tube fed, offered toiletry support and bed baths. Every sound, voice, light or movement triggered painful excruciating spasms. In 1995, the war ravished Government Hospital itself, which needed rehabilitation but ironically undertook the onerous task of removing specks from its patients’ eyes rather than the plank from its own eye. Most of the hospital was closed, and only an extension, the Friendship Hospital, was being used.
Ideally, he needed medications for good sedation along with muscle relaxants, nutritional support and direct therapy for tetanus and complete isolation from noise, light and activities. The hospital, however, was chronically short of drugs, and his family could barely afford much to augment the need. He was placed in the back, an area patients called Saigon. No isolation room was available, and the facility was not air-conditioned; the ten-year-old was cordoned off with dividers. The window had shingles that were loose, the room was not dark and the nearby patients were not models of tranquility. Every indicator said he would not survive, but he willed himself to beat the odds.
It was either God or a higher calling that kept people in the medical profession in those days. Salaries were abysmally inadequate. The medical profession offered some protection since demons were less likely to kill people they needed, but this protection was not assured—nothing was safe. Whole hospitals had been massacred, many medical professionals were falsely accused of not saving a leg or an injured “general” and suffered the consequence. This boy was different, for some reason; everyone helped. Doctors, medical students, nurses assisted; they would get medications from their other jobs or buy meds to help him, but mostly, it was his overwhelming drive to stay alive that kept him living. He eventually survived and left the hospital. For his doctor, seeing him leave the hospital despite the odds was a crowning glory. He remembered one of his preceptors, Dr. Neal, saying, “Graduating from medical school will give you a degree, but you will have self-doubts until you solve that special case or heal that difficult patient successfully, and after that case, no one will need to tell you; you will know that you are a doctor.” The recovery of the boy with tetanus vaulted his confidence and made him a new man. Truly, his words of courage and empowerment were the rallying cry for survival. The boy refused to disappoint the people invested in his recovery.
A year after, doctor and patient had a chance meeting near the health ministry. It was a happy reunion; recovery was good. He walked with some rigidity and beamed with joy and gratefulness but had only one belated complaint: “They didn’t know that I could see when they came back there to do all kinds of bad, bad things.” The hospital had many active young men from the war recovering from injuries, and a few of them had recovered sufficiently to sneak a patient or worker in his “isolation room” and have sex. He could not move or talk. This was painful for him since every stimulus led to strong cramping and spasms. The boy had lockjaw and could not talk to report these happenings. The most prolific offender, he reported, was a soldier who was injured in a recent battle and had an above-knee amputation that apparently accentuated his sexual desire. “Sometimes, he came there two times in one night,” the boy relayed. Any stimulation was terrible in that state, and the stimulation of live sex caused painful spasms. Indeed, this was the classic irony of vicarious pleasure being transformed into painful spasmodic torture.
[1] Liberian tribes