Scott:
The advocates of American Empire should read the piece below. Liberia is not the worst basket case in the 4th world. They speak a sort of English, have some institutional similarities to the US, have a fair sized US diaspora, have resources, have access to the sea AND would be a stone bitch for us to take on. Oh it COULD be done. It would take generations,cost a fortune, the locals would constantly agitate for a faster transition to selfrule and the world of the tranzis would be totally uncooperative. It only gets worse from here. There is a 3rd-4th world crackup coming...
As Liberia Erupted,
Family Fled for U.S.
-- Except for Eunice
After 23 Years, a Trip Home
To Find a Foster Sister
Traverses a Nation's Divide
By HELENE COOPER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
SCHEIFFLIN, Liberia -- A truck full of soldiers rumbled into the yard of my family's beachfront home here at about 10:30 on Monday morning, April 14, 1980, a week shy of my 14th birthday.
Drunk after a bloody coup d'etat two days earlier that left Liberia's president dead, his cabinet facing execution and his ruling class on the run, they ordered my mother, my younger sister Marlene and me to stand against the house.
"We're going to splatter your blood against the wall like paint," they said, before shooting over our heads with machine guns.
Nearby, one member of my family stood outside the line of fire. The soldiers had told Eunice, my foster sister, to stand back. We all knew why: After 150 years as second-class citizens, native Liberians were rebelling against Americo-Liberians like my family, the lighter-skinned descendants of the freed slaves who founded the country. Eunice, then 18 years old, was a darker-skinned native Liberian, and the soldiers had no interest in terrorizing her.
Later, when the solders took my mother downstairs alone, Eunice, Marlene and I huddled in a locked room upstairs. "Don't cry, don't cry," Eunice told us. Not long after that, my family fled to the U.S. Eunice remained behind and eventually disappeared from our lives.
The story of Eunice and me -- the different way we were treated that day and the vastly divergent paths we followed afterward -- tells a lot about the history of Liberia and the reasons it remains one of Africa's most enduring tragedies.
This year, Liberia erupted in civil war again. For now a fragile peace is being maintained by Nigerian peacekeepers under a United Nations deal. But armed teenagers still roam the ruined country as rival groups dig in. Liberia has yet to resolve the ethnic strife that has characterized it since 1819, when U.S. President James Monroe and Congress authorized $100,000 to purchase land from native tribes for colonization by freed American blacks. I had never resolved my own piece of that history. So I decided to return to Liberia to find Eunice.
* * *
My mother is Calista Esmeralda Dennis. My father was John Lewis Cooper Jr. They represent two Liberian dynasties. The first ship of 88 freemen that sailed to Liberia -- from New York, in 1821 -- included Elijah Johnson, my great-great-great-great grandfather on my mother's side. He and 65 others survived the trip, and he founded the settlement that became the capital city Monrovia, named for the American president. When native Liberians attacked the newcomers, he led the fight back. My mother's side also includes a former president and a former secretary of state, my great-uncle Gabriel Dennis.
My father's side made its mark in business. My grandfather, John Lewis Cooper Sr., headed the Liberian Telephone Exchange -- a post that put him in the president's cabinet -- and was known as "Radio Cooper" for connecting phone lines to the center of the country. My uncle was minister of agriculture. My father was deputy postmaster general before he left to run a shipping company.
A photo taken of the president's cabinet in 1944 is practically a family portrait. Standing dead center is my great-uncle Gabriel, the secretary of state, and beside him is Radio Cooper. Uncle Gabriel has the same flat mouth as my mother and I. Radio Cooper stares with my father's -- and my -- deep-set eyes.
Together with other freed slaves, many of whom were the offspring of white slaveowners, my ancestors built a society and an economy that shone brightly among African nations. Its name came from "liberty," and its constitution, flag and currency were modeled after those of the U.S. A verdant slice along the Atlantic, it was the only country in sub-Saharan Africa never colonized by Europeans. Yet in the process of building a nation, the Americo-Liberians also recreated the same sort of antebellum society in Liberia that they fled in America, where skin color and education became dividing lines. The American blacks believed they were superior to the less civilized natives and largely controlled the government and economy.
In Liberia, we are called the "Congo people." It was originally a derogatory term for nonnative Liberians, coined after Britain abolished the slave trade on the high seas in the early 19th century. British gunboats forced slave ships to turn around and free their human cargo in Liberia and Sierra Leone, but because nobody knew exactly where the slaves originated, native Liberians named the newcomers after the Congo River. They gave the same label to everyone who wasn't a native Liberian. Congo people accounted for roughly 5% of Liberia's two million people.
* * *
When I was 7, my family moved to Sugar Beach, the name we gave the 22-room, 1970s ultra-modern-style house my father had had designed and built overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. For the first time I had my own room, and I was thrilled. But at night, I'd creep into my parents' room, scared to sleep alone. I complained constantly about having no one to play with. I was too old to find toddler Marlene anything more than a nuisance, and too young to be of interest to my teenage sister, Janice, and older brother, J.B.
I hated living 11 miles outside of Monrovia, where all my friends were. We had no telephone, because Radio Cooper's phone lines didn't reach Sugar Beach. I felt isolated in that behemoth of a house.
My mother's answer was Eunice. I remember clearly the day she came to Sugar Beach. Her mother and uncle, having heard my mother was looking for a playmate for me, brought her. I walked out of the house to investigate. She was 10 years old, with long skinny legs and a stutter. This was a commonplace occurrence in Liberia: Native Liberians often asked Congo people to raise their kids. It was one way for native Liberian children to get an education and three meals a day.
Eunice's mother lived about 10 miles away, in the Monrovia suburb of Sinkor. They had a one-story house with a zinc roof and an outhouse. Her mother was struggling to pay Eunice's school fees, about $25 a year. My mother and Eunice's mother both knew Eunice would have a better shot at life with us.
Calista and John Cooper at a black-tie ball in Monrovia, 1971
Eunice ran away twice in the coming months, and both times her mother brought her back. Our several servants resented her at first, because she got her own room and took her meals with us. Our washman, Galway, who belonged to the same ethnic group as Eunice, the Bassa, first refused to wash her clothes.
"How can a man like me wash a Bassa girl's clothes?" he asked my father. Threatened with dismissal, he complied.
We lived a sheltered life. The highlight of our week was the 2:00 Saturday matinee at Relda Cinema in Monrovia. By African standards, Monrovia back then was a cosmopolitan city. It had two 5-star hotels, exclusive country clubs and two civic centers that hosted black-tie balls. One of our family's two full-time drivers would usually drop all the kids off at the movies in my father's black Mercedes. My mother would give us a dollar each -- 75 cents for admission and 25 cents for popcorn with extra butter. When we were a little older, Eunice and I strutted up and down the aisles in short shorts and white go-go boots, chatting with friends, looking for cute boys.
When my mother saw us squinting at our Nancy Drew mystery books, she got us identical, huge square-rimmed glasses, which we hated. Eunice called my mother "Aunt Lah," -- using my mother's nickname -- and my father "Uncle John." Every few months, our driver would take Eunice for a day trip to visit her mother, or her mother would take one of Liberia's crowded "mammy buses" to come visit us.
On Sundays, my mother took us to the First United Methodist Church, established 1822, in Monrovia. We sat in our family pew. Everyone dressed to the nines, Eunice and I in knee-length dresses and hats. We sang made-up lyrics to the hymns, including Blessed Assurance:
"Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine," everybody else would sing.
"Breakfast this morning, with biscuits and cheese," we'd sing.
"Oh what a fortress of glory divine," they'd sing.
"I had a cold, and it made me sneeze," we'd sing.
"This is my story, this is my song," we'd all sing.
Eunice and I became inseparable. She was the first one I told about my crush on my schoolmate Philip Parker. Eunice revealed the name of her true love, a wealthy Congo boy.
We both went to private schools in Monrovia. But because my family was land-rich and cash-tight -- we lived mostly off rent from our properties -- Eunice got shortchanged. Her school was the Liberian-run Haywood Mission School. Mine was the more expensive American Cooperative School, right next door, where I made friends with students from all over the world. I got piano and ballet lessons, and learned how to speak with an American accent. Eunice didn't. I spent my summers at camp in Switzerland, or at our house in Spain, or visiting the U.S. Eunice got her vacation during the Liberian summer -- December through February -- and she stayed at our home year-round.
We were sisters, cosseted by the same servants, spanked by the same parents. But we always knew we were different.
On April 12, 1980, the roots of that difference exploded into violence. Rank-and-file army soldiers, led by a native Liberian named Samuel K. Doe, stormed the executive mansion in Monrovia and killed the president's security detail, including the chief of police and the father of one of my classmates. The president, in his dressing gown, came out of his bedroom on the top floor and tried to get to his wife and children's quarters. He was bayoneted and disemboweled. The rebels went on the radio to announce that Liberia was now under new management. They ordered all government ministers and their deputies to the main army barracks.
I woke up that Saturday morning at Sugar Beach to a bright sky, and what I thought would be a busy day: ballet class in the morning, then a wedding in which I was to be a bridesmaid. I walked out into the hallway in my pajamas. My mother was talking to Eunice. "There's been a coup," my mother said.
"What's going to happen to Daddy?" I asked.
My parents had divorced about two years before, when I was 12, and my father that weekend was staying on the family farm an hour away. There were rumors that the soldiers had a hit list of Congo people, and my father was on it. We drove into Monrovia to check on my grandmother the next day and got arrested at her house. On the way to the army barracks, a crowd of native Liberians surrounded our car, throwing rocks and chanting, "Congo people! Congo people!"
At the barracks, a soldier recognized my mother. Her father had been in the army and was much loved. The soldier freed us and escorted us back to Sugar Beach. "Don't go back to Monrovia," he told us. "Keep your doors locked."
The next day, the truckload of soldiers arrived. "Where is John Cooper?" they demanded. My mother told them he didn't live with us any more, and they told us to stand against the wall of the house. A soldier grabbed Eunice's arm. "Not you," he said.
After firing over our heads with machine guns, they all laughed. Marlene's dog, Christopher Jr., barked at them. One soldier shot at the dog and missed and took aim again. Nine-year-old Marlene ran toward him and tried to push his gun away. He flung her to the side. My mother yelled, "What the hell is wrong with you! You want to shoot women? Then shoot!"
She grabbed Marlene's arm and took us inside. The soldiers didn't believe Eunice had her own bed in our house, so she showed one of them the shoes and school uniforms in her closet. Another soldier took me into the TV room and closed the door. He put his mouth near my cheek and his hand on my back. "Are you married?" he asked. "No, I'm only 13!" I said. "You're fine, oh," he said. The door flew open and my mother charged in, with two soldiers behind her. She dragged me into the kitchen.
The soldiers left after we gave them some food. But they returned at dusk. They entered the house and took my mother aside and whispered something to her. Later I found out they gave her a choice: us or her. She pressed a key into Eunice's palm. "The three of you go into my bedroom and lock the door from the inside," she said. She went downstairs with the soldiers.
We heard gunshots. Marlene crawled onto Eunice's lap. Eunice rocked her and urged us not to cry. We heard the truck leaving. Had they killed her?
A little while later, my mother knocked on the door. "Those damn soldiers gang-raped me," she said, and went straight into the bathroom. She showered for almost an hour. When she came out, she was holding a pistol. "If they try to come back here, I am shooting them," she said.
The next morning, we moved from Sugar Beach to my aunt and uncle's house in Sinkor. We still had heard no word from my father. On April 22, my 14th birthday, Doe's soldiers marched 13 officials, most stripped to their underwear, to the beach behind the army barracks. A crowd surrounded the men, chanting: "Who born soldier? Country woman! Who born minister? Congo woman!" In Liberian English, they were voicing both a grievance and a taunt: Ministers were born to Congo mothers, and soldiers to native mothers.
They tied the men to poles and didn't bother with blindfolds. My cousin Cecil Dennis, whom we called "Uncle Cecil," the minister of foreign affairs, was among the last to die. Drunk soldiers kept missing him and moving closer, and he stared directly at his killer until his head dropped. I saw it on TV.
My father surfaced the next day in a Monrovia hospital. He told us that soldiers had gone up to the farm, taken him outside and shot at his feet, telling him to dance. "You damn soldiers are so drunk you can't even shoot straight," he told them. So they shot him near his groin. That day, my parents decided that we would go to the U.S. My mother would take us, and my father would follow after his wound healed.
Eunice would not be coming. She had just started her senior year and said she wanted to finish high school in Liberia. My mother asked her to come with us but didn't insist. She believed that Eunice, unlike our family, wouldn't be in any danger in Liberia.
We all went back to Sugar Beach one more time to pack. Marlene and I could each take two suitcases, Eunice was allowed to take as much as she wanted. I packed my record albums, my photo albums and my black teddy bear, Gentle Ben. Eunice took her clothes and hair curlers and books. I asked her to take my Nancy Drew books. "You'll come to the States soon," I told Eunice. After seven years together, it was inconceivable to me that our lives were separating for good. But we were both returning to where we'd come from: She to her mother's house in Sinkor; I to the American South, which my ancestors had fled 150 years before.
Our Pan Am flight to JFK took off from Robertsfield airport on May 16, 1980. My mother had spent nearly her entire savings, about $5,000, on our tickets. I hadn't seen her cry in the entire month since the coup. But as the flight lifted, she began to heave, big wracking sobs.
* * *
Eunice and I wrote each other at first. I told her about my new classmates but I didn't tell her that I always ate lunch in the library because I had no one to sit with in the cafeteria. I had gone from popular pre-teen at Liberia's most elite private school to the gawky "new girl from Africa" at giant public high schools in Knoxville, Tenn., and Greensboro, N.C.
Eunice wrote that she was sleeping at night with a wet towel on her chest because her mother's house had no air conditioning.
My mother wrote Eunice regularly, too, stuffing $20 bills in the envelopes. Eunice graduated from high school in December 1980, as planned. She enrolled in a computer-training school.
The next year, in August 1981, my mother returned to Liberia, leaving Marlene and me with my father in North Carolina. With Doe in power and relative peace in Liberia, some Congo people who had fled returned to restart their businesses. Though the coup had upended the political system, it didn't fundamentally change the economy -- except that virtually everyone was poorer. My mother wanted to try to collect rent on some of our remaining properties to help put me through college. She lived in a small house in Monrovia because Sugar Beach had been seized by President Doe and was being used for executions. Four years later my father died of complications from diabetes.
When I was in college, at the University of North Carolina, the letters between me and Eunice petered out. I had new friends. I went to all the Tar Heel basketball games and black fraternity parties. I took up popular causes, like demanding that our school divest from companies that did business in South Africa. In my first editorial for our school newspaper, I criticized apartheid. The paper identified me as a freshman journalism major from Liberia. A white South African student wrote a letter to the editor arguing that I had no business criticizing his country when mine had racial troubles of its own. I started telling people I was from Greensboro.
* * *
I visited Liberia just once, on a six-week trip for my older sister's wedding in 1988. I was 22, and I brought along my best friend from college. Every night, one of my friends would pick us up, and we'd go out to parties and nightclubs -- always waiting until midnight before curling our hair and putting on makeup, so we could arrive fashionably late at 1:30.
I saw Eunice just three times. She'd had a son, Ishmael, who was then 6. She was living at the Firestone rubber plantation, an hour outside of Monrovia, where she worked as a clerk in the retirement office, making $279 a month -- middle-class by Liberian standards. It never crossed my mind to visit Eunice at Firestone because we no longer had a car, and it would mean catching a mammy bus or a shared taxi, which I had never done. So the only times I saw Eunice was when she got on the mammy bus to see me.
A year later, on Christmas Eve 1989, Liberia was convulsed by war again. Since the Doe coup, the historic division between the Congo people and the native Liberians had splintered into rivalries between almost all of the country's ethnic groups. President Doe had empowered members of his Krahn ethnic group and persecuted the Gio and Mano groups. Now Charles Taylor, a Congo Liberian backed by the Gio and Mano, was invading from the Ivory Coast, where he had massed an army. My mother fled again, this time for good. Eight years of war, devastation and nearly total lawlessness ensued, including the execution of President Doe. Mr. Taylor was elected president in 1997 and was later accused of helping launch wars in Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone.
* * *
For most of this period, I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. I became a U.S. citizen. I traveled the world, writing stories about everything from poor blacks in Mississippi to the U.S. intervention in Haiti. I wrote about garment workers in Cambodia, China's embrace of capitalism and Madagascar's stab at structural reform. The one place I didn't write about for the Journal was Liberia. Whenever anyone asked me why, my answer was: "It's too complicated."
It wasn't until I went to Iraq this year as an embedded journalist with the U.S. Army that I started to realize that my professional choices made no sense. I was risking my life in a war in Iraq but had refused to do so in my own country.
When I returned to the U.S. in April, rebels gunning for President Taylor reached the edge of Monrovia. The city degenerated into anarchy, with constant bombings and summary executions on both sides. Children were kidnapped to fight for the rebels. The price of rice jumped to $100 a bag. People venturing out of their homes for food were routinely shot.
Marlene called me at work in Washington one morning, crying. She had been reading about the war in the newspaper. "I can't stop thinking about Eunice," she said.
Just like that, her words put Eunice in the center of that awful war. Before that, I had refused to let myself think about Eunice. Even when I was in Iraq, my thoughts about Liberia were as a journalist, not as someone who had a sister there. I had spent 15 years shedding my Liberian identity, which included Eunice. I knew I should have made more of an effort to make sure she was all right. Now I didn't even know where she was.
* * *
From my Ghana Airways flight, the Liberian coastline looked green, lush and completely uninhabited. Fierce white waves pounded the shore. Robertsfield airport, barely visible in a rainstorm, didn't seem quite as bad as I'd expected. There was one rusting Soviet-era plane on the tarmac, some corrugated shacks and several half-finished construction projects.
Riding into Monrovia from the airport, I stuck my nose to the window. The entire country hadn't had electricity or running water in 12 years. There were bullet and artillery holes in the buildings, and the streets teemed with garbage, refugees and armed teenagers waving machine guns. Skinny kids ran up to moving cars begging for money. Relda Cinema looked like it had been bombed. In the midst of it all, someone had painted a sign on a wall: "Secondhand smoke kills."
The place reeked -- of urine and garbage and rotting animal carcasses. But there was also a familiar smell, one I always associated with home: a scent of burning grass and coal fires. I spent the first day drinking in the sights like a hungry refugee myself. There was the gas station my father used to own, now a police station. There was the Methodist Church, oddly intact.
In Monrovia, I hired a car and a native Liberian driver to take me to the Firestone plantation. I knew Eunice still worked there because I had tracked down her boss through the headquarters of Bridgestone/Firestone North American Tire LLC in Nashville. A week earlier, he had put her on the phone just long enough for me to shout over the static that I was coming home.
We drove past Transcontinental Enterprises -- a shack surrounded by garbage -- and past God First Tire Co., down a road lined by shanties. We went through Congotown, a Monrovia suburb, and through the area called Scheifflin, where the road to our Sugar Beach house had been taken over by mud, grass and vines. Along the way, a pickup truck packed with armed teenage soldiers pulled up in front of us. One grinned as he pointed his rocket-propelled grenade launcher at me.
After an hour, we arrived at the Firestone plantation. As a child, I'd been there on school field trips to see how rubber trees are tapped. My classmates and I always scrunched up our noses at the smell coming from the raw rubber piles. It still had that same smell. Almost everything else I remembered was the same, too. It was as if all of Liberia's wars had stopped at the gates. There was a perfectly manicured golf course. Rows of rubber trees lined the drive from the gate to the center of the plantation, where the workers' neat, red-brick bungalows surrounded the offices and factories. Old men carrying barrels of rubber on each shoulder walked along the road.
We reached the labor office, and I asked for Eunice Bull. A man pointed to an office down the hall. When I opened the door, I couldn't see her at first. There were about six women in the room, most dressed in colorful native Liberian outfits.
The office grew quiet. Someone said, "Eunice, your sister's here."
Helene Cooper and Eunice on the path to Sugar Beach
Then I saw her, rising from a desk across the room. The first thing I noticed were the huge glasses -- was she still wearing the same glasses? -- and I was engulfed in a huge hug. I was crying. She immediately started chiding me. "We are not going to do that here. We are not going to do that here," she kept saying. Then we were both laughing, pulling back, then hugging again.
"You're home, you're home," she said. She turned to the people in the room like she was making a formal presentation: "This is my sister."
* * *
I began to get to know my sister again.
My driver and I took Eunice home to her husband, a customs officer. By Liberian standards, they live well. They share a two-bedroom concrete house in a Monrovia suburb, but the house has no running water and is illuminated only by candles and a single, battery-powered lightbulb. On a wooden bookshelf are a handful of books, a wedding photo, and one photo each of my sister Marlene and me. In the second bedroom are two mattresses. Eunice, now 41, has become a foster mother to four native Liberian children.
On the way to Eunice's house, we saw a crowd milling around two bodies. A rebel had stabbed a man who had accidentally stepped on his hand while trying to get on a bus. The crowd responded by beating the rebel to death.
Eunice was unfazed by such scenes. She told me that in June 1990, when Mr. Taylor's rebels came to Firestone, they forced a co-worker who was a member of a rival ethnic group to sit on the ground in his underwear, and shot him and stabbed him in the stomach. As his 10-year-old son watched all of this, weeping, the killer went over to the boy, patted him on the head and said, "Don't cry." Eunice had sent her own son, Ishmael, to live with his father in Gambia, where she thought he would be safer.
Two years later, West African peacekeepers bombed some houses in and around the Firestone compound because they thought rebels were hiding there. More than 200 people were killed. Eunice fled far into the rural countryside, ending up deep in Grand Bassa County in central Liberia, in an area known only as Territory 3C.
She stayed there for two years as fighting raged around Monrovia. She lived with the family of a young boy she had known at Firestone. Their house was a mud hut with a thatched roof. Unemployed, Eunice made cassava bread and caustic-soda soap, which she sold on the roadside. The villagers in Territory 3C were Bassa, as is Eunice, but they called her a "Congo woman." She had no friends.
Eunice cooked me my favorite meal: "fufu" and "ground-pea soup" -- a cassava dumpling and peanut soup. It was easy to use gossip to help re-establish our bond. "Guess who I had dinner with last night: Philip Parker!" I said, referring to my old crush. His father had been executed during Mr. Doe's coup, and Philip had gone to the U.S. for a few years before returning to Liberia. "Please don't tell me you still like him!" Eunice said, howling at the thought.
But it was harder to get around to the question that had haunted me for 23 years. Sitting on the bed in my Monrovia hotel room, I finally asked. "Did you hate us for leaving you?"
"Is that what you think?" she replied. "I think God made it for me to stay here so I could be strong."
* * *
I went to church and sat in our family pew wearing cargo pants, sandals and a T-shirt, despite my mother's warnings that Liberians dress up even in a war zone. Everyone except me was in full Sunday attire. One woman wore a floor-length green gown with a matching green hat with feathers on it. During the service, the pastor introduced me as "one of our own, who has returned." An old family friend pushed me to the front to take a bow. Then he used my cellphone to tell my mother that I went to church in pants and sandals.
The pastor ended her sermon by asking the congregation to sing "Blessed Assurance."
Nobody in my family had been back to Sugar Beach since the coup. Many Liberians were afraid to go there. Nine bodies, probably victims of the Doe executions, had recently been dug up on the grounds, many missing limbs. Eunice wasn't eager to go, but I begged her. We parked on the main road and hiked along a mud path to Sugar Beach.
The house still occupies its lofty position overlooking the Atlantic. My mother's carpet grass still blanketed the grounds. But looters had taken the windows, roof, marble flooring, bathroom fixtures, furniture and the kitchen sink. There were no doors. Inside, several families of Bassa squatters eyed us fearfully. A woman was cooking a pot of rice over coals in the middle of my mother's former bedroom -- the very spot where Eunice, Marlene and I had huddled on the night of my mother's rape.
I went downstairs to what had once been our recreation room, complete with a full bar and leather chairs, where my father played chess and we had our Christmas tree. It was now bare and mildewed, like some sort of ancient ruin. This was the room where the soldiers had taken my mother. Where had it actually happened? In the play area, where there had been carpet? By the sliding doors?
Driving away, Eunice and I were quiet. Eunice stared out the window. A thought popped into my head: "Hey Eunice," I said, "They sang 'Blessed Assurance' in church today."
Immediately, we were both laughing, then singing:
"Breakfast this morning, With biscuits and cheese ..."
The car rolled along, past swamps still swollen from the rainy season.
"This is my story," we sang. "This is my song."
Write to Helene Cooper at helene.cooper@wsj.com
Updated November 19, 2003 12:06 a.m.
posted by scott 10:12 PM