Wilton Sankawulo believed in traditions. He was respectful of leadership. He was passionate about people and stories. He was passionate about food.  We met at least a dozen times in very different settings, each filled with symbolism of some kind. We had half-way conversations. As our paths crossed year after year, I found him embroiled in dramatic situations that seemed to be taken straight out of a novel. In some of those situations, he seemed to be clothed in great nobility; others made him appear simply quixotic. All in all, he believed in the goodness of human beings: a naïve concept, I thought, for the times we lived through.

It was 1980. I had just returned home, fresh from the University and was hired by the University of Liberia to teach French. I had been happy to interrupt my studies to go home. The man who hired me, Dr. Amos Sawyer, was part of a political movement that had decided to challenge the old political order. He belonged to the now famous (or infamous) oppositional organization MOJA, the Movement for Justice in Africa, which attracted students and many in the middle class. In the streets, Baccus Matthews, another intellectual protester against the status quo, had another sort of revolt going. His was bent on direct confrontation with the government. The old foundations of the oldest republic on the African continent were beginning to shake.

During a faculty meeting, it was decided that students would no longer be allowed to enter the faculty lounge where teachers relaxed, conversed and had their meals because of the political turmoil. One afternoon, I went to the faculty lounge for a soft drink between classes. Professor Wilton Sankawulo was there, involved in a serious discussion with Professor Manly. They abruptly stopped talking and Manly said to me, pointing to a sign on the door: “Can’t you read, young man? No students allowed in here.” I looked around, not sure he was talking to me.

Professor Alpha Bah, who was sitting at the other end of the counter, laughed and said, “Manly, you have not met Professor Dukulé, our new colleague? “Both Sankawulo and Manley looked at me with some surprise, and then Sankawulo went on with a hearty laugh, “Well, this means we are really getting old!” He extended his hand and I greeted him. He offered to pay for my soft drink and I thanked him. He and Manley carried on their conversation and I left for my office down the hall.

A few days later, I met Wilton Sankawulo in the faculty lounge again. He invited me to share his meal but I declined and offered him a drink. We ended up talking about literature. After he was through with his meal, we went to his office and he gave me a copy of his novel, The Rain and the Night.  That night, after football practice, I returned home and got totally absorbed in the story. The next morning when I saw him, I told him that it was an interesting story and that I would like to use it in my French class. I wanted the students to translate parts of the story into French for homework that day. I told him that I would like to translate the entire book into French if he allowed. He agreed readily and said he would sign a contract any time I wanted. A week later, I wrote to a publisher in Canada and told him that I had found an excellent Liberian novelist and was working on a translation of his novel into French.

Two months later, while I was in the middle of reviewing the draft of the third chapter, I suddenly found myself loaded with new responsibilities. Dr. Sawyer decided to appoint me chairman of the French department. Dr. James T. Tarpeh, Vice President for Academic Affairs, was skeptical. He asked to see all of my official documents, including my birth certificate, copies of my transcript and the phone number of my advisors at Binghamton.

The University President, Dr. Marie Antoinette Brown Sherman, asked Dr. Sawyer to bring me to meet her before she signed on to my appointment. I went to her office and sat in the waiting area. She walked by and Dr. Sawyer came in a few minutes later. He entered her office and I overheard her asking Dr. Sawyer where her new chairman was. He said something to the effect that I was sitting in the waiting room. She responded, “That little boy?”

Dr. Sherman signed on to my appointment, but I had to prove myself to a lot of people.  I was 23 years old. I put Wilton’s book aside, although the students in my class had enjoyed working on it. It was something novel to them, to use a Liberian text to discover their familiar environment in French.

A week after I was appointed chair, Monrovia was upside down. My roommate woke me up around 9:00 AM, yelling: “You are sleeping and the country is going to hell! Get up! They killed the president!”

One afternoon, Dr. Sawyer called me into his office to ask me if it was true what he heard, that I wanted to leave. Dr. Sawyer was then chairing a commission to write a new constitution, supposedly to ensure civil rights for all. Joyce Mends-Cole, who was there in his office, laughed and said: “How can you leave just when we put you way up there with the big boys?” I thought to myself, without responding, “Only those who are up there can fall . . .”,  but I told Dr. Sawyer that I didn’t feel secure with how things stood: “You know, this country does not need a new constitution, just a few amendments, and by the time you get through with this, you may be running for your life.” Dr. Sawyer took me to Dr. Sherman, who tried to convince me to stay another year, with the promise that the university would put me on staff training with a full scholarship. I declined the offer and left for America - without finishing the translation of Wilton’s book.

I promised Wilton that I would complete the translation while at the University of Illinois. I told him that I would take a few independent study courses and use the translation as a project. On my way to the U.S., I traveled on the same flight as President Doe and his delegation. Doe was going in response to an invitation from Ronald Reagan, the American President. Reagan referred to him as Chairman Moe during a reception.

In 1985, after completing my course work, I decided to return home, take a breather, and also watch the elections that were scheduled for October that year. Laura, my live-in girlfriend, decided to travel with me. We flew through Paris and stopped in Abidjan to see my family. We arrived in mid-August and I went back to teach at the university. I met Wilton on my second day and he hugged me. He had gained lot of weight in three years. I told him where I lived and he promised to come and visit so we could talk about the book and other things.

One morning as Laura and I were having breakfast, there was heavy knocking on the door. Laura went to look and came back nervous: “There is a big guy at the door with a soldier with a gun behind him.” I knew right away it was Wilton. I invited him in. He told the soldier to wait for him in the car. We offered him some coffee but he asked for a cold, soft drink. It was early morning but he was sweating. Laura was nervous even after the introductions.

Wilton asked me how the translation was going, and whether my publisher had accepted it. I told him that I had not finished the translation because I had decided to do a second Master while completing my PhD course work. He said he had been expecting to hear from me. I then asked him, why was he, a college professor, walking around Monrovia with an armed soldier as his bodyguard? He told me he was working at the Executive Mansion with President Doe. I must have reacted visibly because he went on to say: “We can work with him, advise him, so he can do better, or we can call him names and our country will be in trouble. It is not about him alone.”

Wilton told me about the academic program tailored for President Samuel Doe that he and other university faculty members were working on, including Dr. Tarpeh, Asiedu Ofei and Momolu Getaway. They were teaching classes at the Executive Mansion for the President and other government officials. Doe had dropped out of high school and wanted to start at college level. I asked Wilton if the President was a good student. He responded that like every adult who goes back to school, he had his moments, but in general he was good. Before Wilton left with his driver and armed bodyguard, we agreed to meet for lunch and discuss the translation of his book and its publication. He was confident that friends would lend him money to distribute it in French-speaking West African countries. We would not meet again for many years.

A few days after that visit, General Thomas Quiwonkpa, a former colleague of Samuel K. Doe, attempted to overthrow the government. We woke up to gunshots and radio announcements by Quiwonpka that morning. Laura and I joined the celebrations on Tubman Boulevard at 13^th Street, where we had moved just a day earlier. We took pictures and headed to the beach. When we returned from the beach two hours later, we learned that Quiwonpka’s coup had failed and the security forces were rounding people up.

A group of police officers came to find Laura and me and demanded the film we had in the camera. As we talked, I opened the camera and exposed the film to the sunlight, destroying all the photos. We were taken to the police headquarters and the police insisted on transferring us to the Post Stockade. They accused me of being a rebel or a spy. One of them said I had come for “reconnaissance.” They asked me if I voted and when I said no, they said it meant that I knew about the coup. Luckily for us, the Peace Corps Director lived next door. He had followed us to the police station and called the US Embassy because Laura refused to leave me there. Someone at the police station asked me if I knew anyone in the government. I said that I knew Wilton Sankawulo. We waited while they made phone calls. We were released, but I never found out if they had contacted Wilton because he never mentioned it. He was the kind of person who help without expecting thanks,

When we returned home, we learned that the soldiers had not only killed Quiwonkpa, but they had also “eaten” his remains. Laura got sick. She said that if I wanted to stay in a country where they ate human beings, that was my business, but she was leaving. A week after she left, I boarded Pan Am for New York.

In 1989, I returned home and met Wilton at the Fendell Campus in the parking lot. We greeted each other with a hug. He said he was happy to see me and that it was good that not everybody was running away. A few years earlier, Doe and the university administration had run into serious differences.  Dr. Mary Antoinette Brown Sherman, the legendary president, had refused to confer on President Doe an honorary doctorate. She told him to go back to school if he wanted a degree. Students started to agitate as they had in the late 1970s. Finally, there was an explosion on the campus and every one fled. Those who left included Dr. Patrick Seyon, Vice President for Academic Affairs, and many others. My return therefore was not lost on Wilton. He gave me a ride, still with a soldier in the car. When we reached the Old Road, I got off on VP Road. We parted with plans to have lunch over the weekend.

The political atmosphere was very tense. On more than one occasion, I caught sentences here and there that sounded like open threats against “those who think they can come here and disturb the peace.” One day after class, Dexter Tahyor, a student I used to chat with, told me that he had heard my name mentioned someplace where somebody had asked, “What Is Abdul Dukulé doing here in town when all of his friends have gone?” Dexter Tahyor was connected to some of the security people. He told me to be careful. Ten years later, he would represent ULIMO on the Council of State of the first transitional government formed by the Sawyer government and the warring factions.

I had lunch with Wilton at the Dragon, a Chinese restaurant on Broad Street. We talked about the book and I promised to finish it before the end of the semester. He suggested that I come to the Mansion to pay my respect to the Chief, Samuel Doe. “The young man,” he said, “has evolved a lot.” I promised that I would go with him at the end of our classes on Wednesday. “Nothing official,” he said, “you just come in and I will introduce you and you can talk. I think you should consider teaching one or two courses there.”

On Wednesday after my class, I hitched a ride with the sculpturer Vanjah Richards, who was one of our greatest artists. Vanjah Richards would soon become one of the first casualties of the war in 1990. Suspected of being in contact with rebels, he was arrested with some family members and beheaded.

Vanjah dropped me off on Broad Street. I walked into Ethiopian Airlines office and bought a ticket for a flight that same day for Abidjan. Before taking off for the airport, I called Elsie Dossen and told her that I was leaving, and asked her to meet me at the airport. I did not have an exit visa, mandatory in those days. When Elsie arrived, she told me my name was on the “blacklist” - just for being a friend of Amos Sawyer.

I left Liberia and went to Abidjan with no real intention to return to the U.S. I found a job publishing a newsletter for the American Chamber of Commerce, and later worked with President Houphouët Boigny’s last campaign. I traveled through Cote d’Ivoire, hearing echoes about the war at home. Refugees were pouring in every day. One day, a dry-to-the-bone woman I did not recognize walked into my office. She looked like a ghost. It was my good friend Bloh Sayeh, a once plump woman who had walked from Monrovia to the Ivory Coast through the bush.

Bloh told me how she and her group had walked through checkpoints, sometimes going for days without food. She asked me if I knew what was happening in Liberia. I said no but she hardly believed me. When she left, I went inside a bathroom and cried. I thought about a day in September, just a week before I left. We had been watching television at Dr. Ofei’s house when Doe appeared on the screen, coming from the stadium where the Lone Star had defeated the Egyptian soccer team. Doe lay flat on his stomach in front of the Mansion and kissed the ground. Without thinking, I blurted out something that everyone in that room would remember for a long time, and was probably what Bloh was referring to when she said she didn’t believe I didn’t know what was happening. I had said, “This man is going to die soon and he will take lot of people with him and I don’t intend to be around . . .” Nobody said anything for a few long seconds. Then I got up and went to the restroom and sat there for a few minutes thinking, “How stupid . . .”

On September 9, 1990, I was in Yamoussoukro with Alpha Blondy, Nyanka Bell and Aicha Konneh. We were awaiting the arrival of Houphouët Boigny for a campaign speech. My company, Media Stars, had brought the musicians from Abidjan for a two-night concert. George Ouegnin, Boigny’s Chief of Protocol walked to me, and very casually said: “Your president is dead.” That is how I learned that Doe had been killed. I listened to the BBC later and heard the “official” story. I thought, very wrongly, that the war was finally over.

A few months later, I learned that an interim government had been formed and that my friend, Amos Sawyer, was interim president. He led a delegation to Yamoussoukro for the ECOWAS peace talks, chaired by President Houphouët Boigny. I called the Palace and Ouegnin connected me to Amos Sawyer. We spoke for a few minutes and he asked if I would consider going back to Monrovia to help with the negotiations process. He said nobody in the government spoke French

besides Ambassador Peter Johnson.

Under pressure from Joe Wylie, and after Bloh, who had almost died found the courage to return, I packed a valise and got on Air Guinea heading for Monrovia, leaving my small firm and walking out of a management contract with Alpha Blondy. We had just released his hit song, “Peace in Liberia”. I was supposed to be away for only a few weeks, just for the duration of the peace negotiations. Before departing for Monrovia, I saw John Tubman. He tried to convince me to go and work with Charles Taylor. I told him that I was on my way to Monrovia for a short trip. Nineteen years later, I am still on that trip.

When I arrived in Monrovia, I booked a room at the Ducor Hotel after spending three nights sleeping on a mat in Bloh’s room. I soon fell into the routine of politics, peace negotiations, speech writing, extensive travel and elbowing my way to find space in the entourage of the president. I learned many hard lessons about the trappings of powers and the dangers of working so close to the center of power, but I developed lifelong friendships with patriots such as Tiawan Gongloe and Brownie Samukai.

The country was divided between Greater Liberia, the ninety-nine percent of the country controlled by Charles Taylor, and Better Liberia, the one percent controlled by the Sawyer government under the tutelage of ECOWSAS peacekeeping force. Field Marshall Prince Johnson, who had captured and killed Samuel Doe, lived on a base in Caldwell surrounded by rebel fighters and a group of displaced people. Every now and then, Prince Johnson would drive his convoy in town and block traffic. He would harangue the crowd that formed around him everywhere he went: “The guns that free should not rule!” His words targeted President Sawyer and Charles Taylor.

One evening, as I walked down the hall from President Sawyer’s suite to mine, one of the security guards approached me and said someone wanted to talk to me. I followed him behind the staircase. To my surprise, in a dark corner stood Wilton Sankawulo, wearing oversized khaki shorts and a white t-shirt.

“Duke, I am so happy to see you. I need help . . . ”

“Wilton!” I said, in complete shock, “What are you doing here? Where are you coming from?”

“Long story and I will tell you later. It is very complicated. My wife Yata and I need safety,” he said, looking at the security guard. I turned to the guard and told him I would handle it from there.

Wilton and I walked to the rotunda and stood in the shadows overlooking the empty pool. He stood against the railing.  Behind him, I could see the beach at West Point and at the horizon, the Hotel Africa and its lights. Every weekend, people drove to the Bacardi Discotheque at Hotel Africa and danced the war away, drinking Club Beer and Stout as if there was no war. Throughout the war, the beer factory remained the only untouched factory in the country. Every warlord who occupied the area around it protected it.

“Wilton, I heard you are with Prince Johnson? What is happening to you?”

He looked at his sandals and shook his head. “It is not easy. My wife and I are running from Prince Johnson. I was in charge of publishing a book we worked on together and the printing was delayed. Someone told him I ate the money he gave me for the printing. He sent his commandoes to get me but news got to me in time. My wife and I left the house with the clothes on our back.  We need a place to stay for the night, and some food.”

“How did you know that I live here?” I asked, puzzled.

“Prince Johnson knows everyone who lives in the Ducor and he knows their room numbers. He has people among you,” he said.

I told him to wait. I went to look for Rufus Kennedy, head of the Special Security, but could not find him. I ran into Zado, a commander in the presidential guard. I told him about my unexpected guests. He said there was a room in the basement used for housing informants that came from the NPFL. There was a secret passage that allowed the guests who did not want to be seen to enter and exit Ducor behind El Salvatore.

The issue of lodging resolved, Wilton said he needed some food and some clothing for his wife. I went in and asked my wife Enid to give me two of her dresses and a lappa. I gave the clothes and two cooking pans, some rice, onions, tomato paste and sardines to Wilton, and then he followed Zado down the dark corridors, heading for a hiding place in the basement. I stood there for a few moments, looking at a literary giant fade into the shadows of war.

Charles Taylor launched his army of child soldiers against Monrovia. Prince Johnson, who had been at odds with our government for printing new currency while he was in possession of truck loads of looted money, made a deal with Charles Taylor. Just as he had tricked Samuel Doe by giving him looted rice from the port and later captured him after gaining his confidence, he tried to lure Taylor into Monrovia by providing safe passage for Taylor’s NPFL fighters in preparation for the attack on the city. Taylor was aware of the plan because Varney, Prince Johnson’s second in command, worked for Taylor. Prince Johnson fled to Nigeria, where he became a pastor and a born again Christian. Today he serves as Honorable Prince Johnson, representing the people of Nimba in the Liberian Senate.

After many peace meetings, Dr. Sawyer left power in favor of David Kpormakpor, whom I served as an assistant for one year.  The transitional government had representatives from the two main warring factions: the NPFL and ULIMO. Dexter Tahyor, my former student, became one of the Council members for ULIMO, and Isaac Mensah represented the NPFL. I developed a friendship with both men; Dexter for the memories of our past acquaintance, and Isaac Mensah because he spoke Bambara like me and knew my uncle Dramé who lived in Nimba. He used to consult me on every issue that was brought to the Council for discussion. I discovered that he could hardly read.

As time went by, it became clear that the two warlords-Alhaji Kromah and Charles Taylor-would soon come to Monrovia and take a seat on the Council of State. The other ULIMO warlord, Roosevelt Johnson, who had been fighting Alhaji Kromah in Bomi, was far from being totally defeated, while another Krahn man, George Boley and his Liberia Peace Council, were gaining prominence in the southeast. Liberia was still in deep trouble.

In the middle of September 1994, Charles Julu walked into the Executive Mansion and declared himself president before being shelled out by the West African peacekeeping force. It didn’t take a degree in political science to predict that Liberia was heading for a new bout of madness. After my wife Enid left and settled in the U.S., I used the opportunity of traveling with Chairman Kpormakpor to the UN in New York to defect. Then our press man at the embassy in Washington passed away, and Minister of Information Joe Mulbah asked me to hold the post for a few months until the government could appoint someone.

Liberia was entering deep lawlessness, spiraling toward utter chaos. After a few months, the warring factions decided to reform the governing body. Chairman Kpormakpor was replaced with Wilton Sankawulo. He had been proposed by Alhaji Kromah, and Taylor concurred. The government of warlords was headed by a non-politically aligned writer. I imagined Wilton squeezed between Kromah and Taylor, like Jesus between two thieves on the cross!

In late 1995, Chairman Sankawulo addressed the UN General Assembly in New York. He met Bill Clinton for a quick photo op and flew to Washington, DC. I went to his hotel to meet him along with the rest of the embassy staff. When I extended my hand to greet him, he pulled me into a warm hug.

“Duke, you are here!” he shouted and grabbed my hand. We walked into his suite. He sank into a chair and gestured to me to take a seat. He offered me a drink and then called out his wife Yata, who was in the bedroom. She came out and stood a distance from us.

“Come and meet Duke! You never met him? This is the man who gave us rice and a lappa that night when we were running away from Prince Johnson.” She walked to us and I stood up and shook her extended hand. She looked at me and said a timid “thank you” before returning to the bedroom.

Wilton inquired about my wife and what I was doing, and then asked me to send for my family so that he could see them. I got on the phone and asked Enid to bring Aisha and Yasmina to the hotel. He asked protocol to give us a suite next to his. Later, we attended a reception on Capitol Hill organized in his honor by Senator Nancy Kassebaum, from Kansas. After dinner, Wilton invited me to his suite. We never got a chance to talk because it seemed that the whole of Bong County had come to celebrate with him.

I went to bed and decided to sleep in while the delegation flew out early the next morning. Later that day, after I arrived at the embassy, the Charge D’affaires Konah Blackett said that Chairman Sankawulo had been looking for me at the airport before taking off.

“What is between the two of you?”  Konah asked, “He said he wanted to talk to you. You have something for him?”

“It’s about a book,” I answered. I had no clue of the whereabouts of the book I had started translating for him years before. We had been in a different world, far away from the predictable serenity of the academic world of the University of Liberia. Senator Kassebaum had said that peace was still elusive in Liberia, stating that “with Taylor, no one ever knows what he will do next! Whenever we say he is not that crazy, actually he goes ahead and proves just that!” I felt sorry for Wilton. He was not cut out for playing politics, especially among ruthless warlords who so far had not shown any respect for human life and decency.

In April 1996, Kromah and Taylor would attempt to arrest Roosevelt Johnson on murder charges. It was ironic. These men had caused the death of tens of thousands of people, brought the country to its knees and now were calling for the arrest and trial of one of them because he had killed one of his own men.  In the process, they tipped the country over into another bloodbath, sending scores of people running to refugee camps, burning down Monrovia. When the dust settled, new peace talks were organized by ECOWAS in Abuja, Nigeria. I flew in to attend my thirty-sixth peace negotiations summit.

Chairman Sankawulo arrived with his entourage. The regional authorities toyed with the idea of putting Liberia under total international supervision and the warlords under house arrest in Abuja. For three days, nobody had any clue as to how to start the negotiations. Kromah and Taylor were on one side of the divide, while George Boley, Oscar Quiah and Roosevelt Johnson kept to the other. In the middle, civilians were juggling for positions in whatever new government would emerge from the talks. After the opening ceremony, the meeting went into limbo, with consultations taking place in hotel rooms and corridors.

On the second night in Abuja, Ambassador Iroha, who represented Nigeria in Liberia, called Brownie Samukai and I and asked us to make suggestions that he could submit to Nigerian President Sani Abacha. That night, while everyone slept, Samukai and I convinced a receptionist at the Hilton to allow us into the computer room to type a document. She let us in around midnight. By 7:00 AM, we walked into Alhaji Kromah’s suite with a peace plan. At the end of the day, with minor adjustments, our document was adopted by ECOWAS as the new Abuja Peace Accord. I scrambled to collect the first draft on which Boley, Kromah and Taylor had made hand written corrections.

Before the official signing of the peace plan by ECOWAS leaders, Sankawulo was asked to address the conference of Heads of State. He took the microphone and said Taylor wanted nothing but peace but had been misunderstood. He asked that ECOWAS and the UN give the warlords a chance to work out their differences. After the speech, which brought a smile to the stern and perpetually dark-shaded face of Abacha, Sankawulo was removed from the leadership of the Council of State by midnight, replaced by Ruth Perry. It had been decided by all that Taylor was the villain.

In the corridor of the ECOWAS headquarters, I saw Wilton leaving the restroom surrounded by security guards. He waved and I walked toward him. He shook my hand and said he was ready to return to the University of Liberia and write novels. I would not see or hear about Wilton for many years after that Abuja conference where his political career crashed, with almost no sympathy from anyone.

In 2004, after the last outbreak of war that landed Charles Taylor exiled in Calabar, I returned to Monrovia and shot a documentary, A Day in Monrovia. I went to the Liberian Studies Association conference in North Carolina with copies of the documentary to sell. Wilton was there to deliver a paper. We chatted for a while, next to the table where my daughters Aisha and Yasmina were selling the videos. He told me that he lived in Texas and was working on a novel, and trying to raise money to buy a computer and have an eye operation because he was losing his sight. He never asked about the book translation and I did not raise the issue. We parted, promising to meet again, maybe at home, in Liberia, now that peace had returned. We exchanged phone numbers but never called.

In February 2009, in Monrovia, I was at the John F. Kennedy Hospital in the emergency room with Brownie Samukai, whose father had fallen ill and been brought to the hospital. We were chatting with a young doctor when A.B., Samukai’s brother, came up and said that Wilton Sankawulo had just been brought in and that he looked really sick. We went in to see Samukai’s father and I drove off, telling myself that I would visit Wilton another day. He died before I did.

On Wednesday, March 18, 2009, at the Centennial Pavilion, the Republic of Liberia, through its government headed by Vice President Joe Boakai and all the institutions that Wilton had worked for, paid him a tribute as he lay in state in a coffin draped in the national flag. When the Liberian Writers Association went on stage to read a statement, I was tempted to follow Elma Shaw, sitting in the seat next to mine. Elma had just entered into a contract with Wilton to publish his latest work.

That was my last meeting with Sankawulo. Neither of us spoke a word that day and we did not hug either, but I wish I had completed the translation. It was a crisp, bright and balmy day in Monrovia, far different from the rain and the night.

Copyright © 2009 Dukulé

“For like blood, griots were expected to circulate throughout the social body, with power to heal or sicken it, according as they used their words and songs to diminish social conflicts or to exacerbate them.” - Amadou Hampate Bậ, from, “The Living Tradition”, General History of Africa (1981)

“. . . the writer serves in a number of capacities. Firstly, he serves as the spokesman for his people; secondly, he serves as a recorder and an interpreter of their experience; and finally, he helps to chart for his people a reasonable direction or destiny. If we attach any meaning or value to the great writers of the past and the present, it is because they are saying what we would like to say, and because they throw light on our own experience, showing the connections in our activities. And this gives us the compelling desire to live with a purpose. I see no other role which the black and African writer can usefully play in our changing society apart from this.” - Sankawulo (1984)

The dead never did go away;
They are in the glimmering shadow
and the darkening shade.
The dead are not underground;
They are in the trembling tree,
the groaning wood;
in flowing water
as in still waters.
They are in the hut and in the crowd:
The dead are not extinct. - Birago Diop (1960)

Hungering for a good book to lose myself in one night, I was loaned a collection of stories written by Wilton Sankawulo called The Marriage of Wisdom, and Other Tales by one Matthew, a taciturn University of Liberia student. I never heard Matthew speak any language but English, and the Jewish apostle’s name was the only one he offered when he came to our family compound, sometime in the early seventies, to work for my uncle in exchange for tuition, food, small change and sleeping space.

Matthew was the keeper of the keys in my uncle’s frequent absences to the rooms in his apartment where the comic books, record albums and videos were. It paid to stay on Matthew’s good side, and I managed to do that, despite the fact that he never, ever smiled at me, and rarely spoke. The solution was meat.

I and my sister lived upstairs with our grandmother while my uncle lived downstairs in a separate, self-contained apartment where, under orders, Matthew ruled. And so I gave Matthew the thick, assorted chunks of chicken, pig, goat, cow, from my food each day before I ate, in exchange for his reciprocal cooperation. Not a great sacrifice for me as I only liked seafood, but that was how I crossed the monkey bridge to gain Matthew’s attention.

Through our interaction, I discovered that not only was Matthew studious, but like me, he also read stories and novels. And the reverence with which I touched his books if I found one left alone on a table or chair, irreverently trespassing boundaries and touching his belongings, somehow led us into an unspoken arrangement; so that once in a while, if I asked with enough humility or eagerness to touch his heart, Matthew loaned me books. His African Authors Only Collection, all males, mostly published by Heinemann (African Writers Series)-the famous publishing house I later learned habitually ripped off African writers, Sankawulo among them-was securely locked in his black iron trunk next to the camp bed (folded flat in the daytime) in the dim, narrow back hallway where he slept.

Until Matthew, the only other reading addict around was my grandmother, occupied with her academic and religious texts. I had gone through all the classic masterpieces of African American literature that my grandmother had in her library, from Phyllis Wheatley to Paul Lawrence Dunbar on to the Harlem Renaissance. I regularly read Time and Newsweek, that my father subscribed to, and his Playboy magazines, where I’d read an excerpt of Malcolm X’s autobiography, Huey Newton, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, and other famous Black American writers and personalities. And I had my own small library of American and European authored folktales, novels and stories that I read and reread; Jane Austen, Nancy Drew, Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, the Brothers Grimm . . . These books took me outside of myself soul traveling into a wide, vast world of wonders, marvels, strange cruelties. These were stories into which I disappeared, an understanding of human nature and alternate cultures and societies transposed on my consciousness. But I found myself seeing myself and my reality, my own environment and my world, starkly, sensitized, splintering and reforming thought, activating self knowledge, self awareness and self consciousness, through Matthew’s books: Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Steve Biko, Chinua Achebe, Camara Laye, Ousmane Sembene, Amilicar Cabral  . . . And from Sankawulo through Matthew I learned that Liberia had literature, a canon, an entire heterarchical corpus of stories beyond the Spider tales told in every home-though never at school, and though we desperately needed to analyze those Spider stories in the classroom for their philosophy that ridiculed and exposed selfishness, ego, and greed, predominant traits in our society.

I consumed Sankawulo’s book overnight, The Marriage of Wisdom, and Other Tales, feeling a heightened awareness, the first “real real” Liberian Liberian stories I’d ever read, and the next day returned it and was loaned another book, this one razor sharp dystopian realism by Ayi Kwei Armah. My heart leapt in expectation when I saw the slim Heinemann book with orange and black stripes in Matthew’s hand held out to me, the picture of that serious writer on the back cover.

“Where is Wilton Sankawulo?” I asked Matthew, stressing all the wrong syllables, horribly mispronouncing and mangling the author’s name. The Sankawulo book still pulsed in my bloodstream. The unknown and imagined had suddenly become known, and familiar places I had been and passed through upcountry took on a different dimension. A movie began in my mind that I could simply walk into. I thought Sankawulo had to live somewhere outside of Liberia. It simply did not occur to me that Liberians living inside Liberia wrote such stories about Liberia. I had never read any. Everything good to read came from “away”.

I was alienated within and from my own country, well versed in all things British and American, European, unable to properly pronounce Sankawulo’s name. Matthew’s low laugh was a derisive scoff at my ignorance. Scorn rearranged his features, half twisting his mouth. As usual, he didn’t bother responding with actual words. His only reaction was to hand me that Ayi Kwei Armah novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. He eyed me appraisingly, as if to gauge my ability to actually become a full-fleshed, thinking African being. But he had given me another book, which I meekly and gratefully accepted, nervous, bearing the full force of his sarcasm, intensely aware of his superiority now that I was reading his books, the similarity of his circumstances to those protagonists I sided with, seeing myself as he saw me: ignorant, unAfrican, culturally excised.

It was evident to me, Matthew despised us. In his sardonic sideway looks, I discerned resentment, judgment, condemnation, naked contempt. I intuited that he despised me for simply being who I was, a child of that family, a hopeless case in his eyes no matter how many books I read, born to dominate, a future changeling from child into arrogant woman with a selfish sense of entitlement, privilege, and a callous, unfeeling heart like the characters in his books whose counterparts I now recognized in my own world. I had had no words to describe them before plunging into books, but now I recognized their false and superficial pride, their spiritual emptiness. He despised the family for many reasons, one being that he slept on an uncomfortable camp bed in the hallway while we lived guarded by well fed dogs, and all around us in the sprawling ghetto on land we owned, people were trapped, compressed as if into one huge indistinguishable mass, sweating and malnourished inside tight, hot, dark spaces-eight or more people living in dank structures called houses smaller than the size of one room in our house-squeezed like prisoners in jail between mildewed zinc, wood or concrete block walls without lights, air, running water, kitchens or bathrooms. And I had friends who lived there among all those people that I visited often; and through Matthew’s scorching eyes, I became aware of other accusatory stares, stabbing glances, when I moved through that labyrinthine territory.

I began to dream of Matthew’s contemptuous eyes multiplied by a hundred thousand accusing eyes directed at me. Matthew’s books, Matthew’s eyes, pierced the veil behind which I lived apart from the squalor around me. I saw how I was a part of that squalor, and Matthew communicated without words that my individual soul was mine and of no consequence to him. But he did introduce me to continental African literature, though he left a brutal teacher’s imprint on my psyche - a true colonial initiation, a corruption and inversion of what should have been a deep kinship connection. And he also started me set on a lifelong journey, an immersion into literature that reflected my own internal and external landscape, my tangled emotional and psychological confusion, the contradictions of my personal history, my colonial socialization. And he prepared me as well to meet and somewhat understand a complicated man of tremendous talent and complex contradictions who himself lived multiple lives: the literary icon, Wilton Sankawulo, the same.

I am a griot . . . master in the art of eloquence . . . we are vessels of speech, we are repositories which harbour secrets many centuries old . . . we are the memory . . . I teach kings the history of their ancestors so that the lives of the ancients might serve them as an example. For the world is old, but the future springs from the past. . . . Listen then .  . . children of the black people . . . - D.T. Niane

Matthew was no griot, and then again perhaps he was, but Sankawulo definitely was. Matthew wore resentment on his face. Sankawulo often wore a mask. The griot’s way of knowledge was in his blood balancing memory, flattery, eloquence, wit, intelligence, strategy, survival. But Sankawulo wore his Kpelle Africanness unselfconsciously, like healthy skin. One does not have obsessive need to crow to others about familial skin inseparable from their being, if that sheath is fed with blood pumped from a sheltered heart. That skin has always been there, sun-warmed, night-rubbed by loving hands, even if sometimes those hands are one’s own. The soul within that skin that is aware of the magnificence from which it comes does not accept any external diminution of its own sense of self. Sankawulo had no inclination to prove his humanity or disprove another’s. He knew he belonged to eternity. He knew suffering was transient. He knew the poetry in the stories of his beginnings, the power, and he carried always that song.

He was in Texas teaching at a community college when I first reached him to ask that he send some of his stories to the journal. Any trepidation I felt before that first call (that the very idea of an electronic journal would seem absurd to him, given his emphasis on publishing books) immediately dissipated at the warmth in his voice. He was so appreciative that I had read and had interest in his work. I discovered that he was a 68 year old man unlike many his age who understood the power of computers and the Internet. He communicated by email almost daily. I found him to be humble, remarkable, witty, and incredibly ambitious to be known, understood and remembered as an African Liberian writer. I knew that he allowed me into his confidence to gain that end. And so our communion began.

He was writing, always writing, pleased to talk about his work, but in and out of hospital. He would soon relocate with his wife to join their daughter and her family in the southern Commonwealth where I lived then in self-indulgent mostly peaceful isolation. His novel, Sundown At Dawn: A Liberian Odyssey, had just been published. I finally met the iconic personality in person and we began talking on the phone, sometimes everyday for hours, he shaping our conversations, I an avid listener and student. He spoke of his regret at wasting time serving in government when he could have been writing. He talked about hoping to see his lifelong dream come to fruition: a Liberian owned publishing house that put out Liberian authored books of high quality. As he grew more comfortable with me, he set me to reading and commenting on his unpublished manuscripts, and I revisited his books and essays to sharpen the questions I felt compelling curiosity to pose to our most famous living literary writer.

Contextualizing Sankawulo was and is not easy. The subconsciousness of a colonized mind, a colonial education, is always present in the Liberian persona. Filtering through one’s own colonization experience to deconstruct another person’s is never easy. Sankawulo himself dealt with this only in literature, never in conversation. Through his upcountry missionary education, we see him in the 50s and 60s becoming a theologian, an evangelist, the open path to upward mobility, walking a tightrope between the life of a Poro member and the imposed Christian religion, endeavoring to mediate that divide. Ultimately, in his work, the Poro side proved to be a much more compelling subject. We see him in the 70s after receiving a terminal Master of Fine Arts degree become a reporter in Monrovia: never confrontational, careful, polite, safe. We see him become a government official and college professor in the 80s. In the 90s, we see him become interim Head of State. It is only in his writing that his deep-seated anger and intellectual criticism about the hierarchical establishment and white supremacy emerge. And because he was not taken seriously, neither by the emerging nationwide opposition movement nor the entrenched elites - the former because he was not a fiery spokesman “in the cause of the people”, the latter, because he was a well behaved Kpelle man who wrote harmless animal stories, he was left alone to express in writing thoughts and ideals that became more and more taut, detached, revelatory, deep and observant.

“Indeed, Liberians have come to believe that foreign aid is a substitute and not a supplement (as it should be) to their own efforts. And all this is because the founders of the nation never perceived Liberia as a homeland but rather as a farmland where they may gather produce for consumption in America and other countries . . . The pen is still mightier than the sword. We must tell the truth about our country in our works . . . We should, of course, maintain love and respect for our people so that we may remain focused on the issues rather than on personalities. Our people do the wrong thing because they never saw good examples to follow. Our duty is to convince them that the goodness within them can come to fruition without external factors.” - Sankawulo (2005)

Sankawulo’s public life of contradictions against the private road he set out to conquer as a writer revolutionized my ever evolving thinking about the perils of the Liberian literary terrain, the writer’s role and questions of vocation, craft, language, culture and identity - all overused terms that don’t quite hold the heavy weight behind them.  I had always gotten stuck articulating this complexity, my head filled with processed thoughts like a zombie victim of mind control, my emotions conflicted, my imagination stymied and arrested. What brought on this mental psychosis that I and other writers suffered was of course, (1) the simplistic, pre-packaged colonial ideation we are fed from the cradle on, reinforced by a self-alienating, anti-African educational system, and (2) the simplified answer to the Liberian experience; the rancor, conflicts and tensions of the Settler vs. Indigenous divide, itself another grand Liberian lie to my thinking, stoked and inflamed by coloniality, produced out of a holocaust no one ever publicly alludes to or examines in critical discourse.

It seemed to me that Sankawulo had found a way to circumvent all that nonsense without apparent fear or anguish, writing against the grain, departing from the script, presenting in his stories and novels an indigenous world cohesive, orderly, ancient as time, present as breath, steeped in traditional culture and spirituality. He upholds in his work that African consciousness, that social memory. Sankawulo’s novels and stories draw us back into our own Liberian world. He sought to redirect our consciousness by conscientizing/decolonizing all of us who were alienated-both city dwellers and rural dwellers educated to think with a Euroamerican consciousness, an either/or mentality, a divide and conquer reality-re-educating us to the wisdom, philosophy, traditions, beauty, humanity - and the human foibles and imperfections found not only in Monrovia but also in traditional society. And in this way Sankawulo launched a quiet cultural revolution.

I have heard 100% pure blooded indigenous writers reduce Sankawulo to a mere folklorist whose tales were not original but instead pilfered from the great epic oral tradition. I have heard him described as a sellout, an “Uncle Tom”, a weak man who squandered the opportunity to make revolution. In his widely published 1984 essay, “The Role of the Black and African Writer in the Changing African Society”, Sankawulo butts heads with Achebe-the unassailable Achebe-by praising Joyce Cary’s novel, Mister Johnson, referring to Cary as a “visionary analyst of the African situation”, and the novel as “an irony, portraying the impotence of western civilization and Christianity [in Africa] as a means of social redemption at their face value.” About Cary’s Mister Johnson, Chinua Achebe says, “I know around ‘51, ‘52, I was quite certain that I was going to try my hand at writing, and one of the things that set me thinking was Joyce Cary’s novel, set in Nigeria, Mister Johnson, which was praised so much, and it was clear to me that it was a most superficial picture of -not only of the country-but even of the Nigerian character, and so I thought if this was famous, then perhaps someone ought to look at this from the inside” ( Duerden Dennis, and Cosmo Pieterse, eds. African Writers Talking: A Collection of Radio Interviews. London: Heinemann, 1972).

The essay was commissioned by the Overseas Monograph Collection. This tells us something about Sankawulo, the consummate pleaser, who would “read” you and tell you what you wanted to hear, and then go about writing what he really wanted to say. It behooves us to look at western criticism and western education in the context of Sankawulo’s age and time, his lack of access to African scholarly material, his coming into the spotlight against that backstory as an isolated Liberian writer, an African writer, to understand the perceived contradictions. For it is in the power of his storytelling and his personal essays and private correspondence where we see the distillation of his ideals and ideas. He promoted an African identity. He promoted self sufficiency. He promoted egalitarianism. He promoted communal achievement over individual success. He promoted interethnic respect. He believed in himself. He decried hegemonic hierarchal structures. He had a perfect understanding of his role as a writer:

In discussing the role which the black and African writer should play in the changing African society, it is important to mention something about the writer’s responsibility to society. This is important because in Africa today, the writer is expected to be at once a social reformer, a politician, a defender of the black man’s cause, an entertainer, a teacher, and so forth. Many of our writers succumb to the temptation of assuming these roles, often at the expense of the aims of their profession. As a result, most of what they write turns out to be mere propaganda or an experiment with language.

Of course, the writing profession is most liberal -in that a writer has the freedom to choose his own subject matter, unless he is prevented from doing so by his own society; in which case he can still exercise his freedom by resorting to such literary forms that will carry the same message symbolically. But whatever subject matter the writer chooses, and whatever manner in which he treats that subject - these are by-products of his chief concern, which is to bear witness of human experience with the aim of adding meaning, freedom and dignity to that experience.

But again, we see the contradiction in that yes, for a time, he did exactly what he cautioned writers not to do. Here now perhaps the cautionary journey of an intellectual creative writer who steps outside of his element, passion, and calling. Sankawulo did become, for a season, “a social reformer” working with Tolbert, energized by the call to higher heights; “a politician”, used, manipulated, taken in during his tenure as Chairman of the Council of State, interim president; “a defender of the black man’s cause . . . a teacher” who accepted the uneducated Doe as president and sought to impact Doe’s leadership by taking him on as a student. Yet undeniably in his work, his novels, his stories, he bore “witness of human experience with the aim of adding meaning, freedom and dignity to that experience.” And one can see if one looks deeper than the surface of clouded judgment that he attempted to do this in each of his roles as politician, teacher, defender, government worker, professor, reformer. So are the contradictions really a contradiction? What he taught us was to write against and through our own imperfections, human weaknesses and errors; to find the beauty, the dignity, in everyday lives. He gave us permission to bear witness to our own experiences and to continuously try to make sense of and transform that reality if needs be, regardless of background, class, origin, educational achievement; free of guilt, shame, of circumstances and events we played no part in creating or stoking. He taught us to try and make a difference and be tolerant, clever, strategic: “Of course, the writing profession is most liberal -in that a writer has the freedom to choose his own subject matter, unless he is prevented from doing so by his own society; in which case he can still exercise his freedom by resorting to such literary forms that will carry the same message symbolically.”

Reading his 2005 novel Sundown At Dawn: A Liberian Odyssey, we see comparative echoes of the protagonist Dougba Senfenui’s hard push into the kwi world by his father, as in Sankawulo’s own life experience chronicled in his “LIFE IS ETERNAL: Essay in Memory of My Father”, as he writes about his father’s death: “I left him dying and went back to school because he wanted it that way. I should know book to be able to write it with my right hand and my left hand, know book so whenever anyone woke me in the middle of the night and said something in English, I would know what he meant. Book meant everything . . .”

Dougba Senfenui was lonely, feeling he belonged nowhere, that there was no place he could be completely at ease, totally unaware that his story was mirrored across the African continent in a million lives. His is a story of tragic self-sacrifice. Sankawulo, too, was lonely, aware that he was understood by few. This was a man who constantly walked perilous old roads, colonialist roads, clannish village roads, clearing new paths for us coming behind to pass through and more easily pave our own way. This was a man who ascended to the top of the hierarchy based on meekness of character, brainpower, that he was recognized in the first place and seen to be neutral, held on based on hope, publicly atoned for his human errors and weaknesses, seeking redemption in us, in the gifts of literature he offered, and each time he felt himself perched on the edge and about to descend precipitously, he wrote deeper still against the erasure, the decline and descent:

The greatest lesson life has taught me is that love betrays because it is often misplaced. I’m happy I know what to love, though this knowledge comes too late to do me any good. We often learn life’s lessons with empty hands . . . I’ve learned to love the solace and balm of the clean refreshing air of dark evergreen forests riddled with grunting animals and birds singing sweet melodies in flight and on treetops. I love clear brooks, creeks, and rivers teeming with carp rolling down granite slopes at noonday in woody mountains. I love the fallow soil and silver rain that make crops grow, and the heavy downpour of rain-times which quench the earth’s thirst after the telling heat of the year. I love the radiant blue of the dry-time sky. I love God the most! (2006)

Classic Sankawulo. His narrative of self telling all of us politely where to go when we failed him, misunderstood him; telling us where he’s coming from and what’s most important to him in old age, with such clean poetic imagery and strong sentiments.

I dream of Sankawulo’s vision multiplied in a hundred thousand hearts sharing his dream of a sociopolitical revolution that begins through cultural socialization on the individual level and enlivens the communal. Sankawulo’s books, Sankawulo’s life, pierce the veil behind which we live inseparable from the deafricanization around us. He communicates through his words that each individual Liberian soul is of consequence and has a duty to work toward cultural reeducation. I’m reminded of these lines from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, a poet Sankawulo would have studied and may have admired:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light . . .

But to rage was not Sankawulo’s way.

Hard was the struggle Sankawulo waged to be heard and understood as a literary Liberian voice, an African voice, until his very last breath. I know, for I was witness to that struggle during his last years on earth. All of his work must be collected and published in one complete volume for us to truly examine and understand the measure and worth of the life of the man and his work to our country. It must happen for generations of Liberians to study and know Gbakolo Sengbe Sankawulo. This writer unlike others must not disappear and be buried in western libraries, inaccessible to those he wrote for. Literary critics with the knowing sensitivity and Africanist consciousness to understand him will come forth, grounded in the knowledge of that African immanence and interconnectivity already retrieved by such scholars and writers as Cheikh Anta Diop, Théophile Obenga, Ayi Kwei Armah, who knew and know Africa as one great river of commutual exoteric narratives flowing backward into ancient social memory and progressing forward carrying that blood re-memory into the future. For as Sankawulo reminded us, and as we know all Africa believes of our venerable Ancestors, “life is eternal and death will never make it perishable.”

“  . . . we have many inspired writers, young and old, of the diverse literary genre . . . If we continue neglecting the development of the intellectual resources of our country in preference for that of the physical infrastructure alone, we will break down tomorrow what we build today.” - Wilton Gbakolo Sengbe Sankawulo (2007)

A Great One Has Passed On

By

Charlina Daitouah-Smith

(February 2009)

Like a raindrop
caught in midair;
scarcely out of heaven,
yet hastening to earth,

sentinel of culture,
custodian of ancient lore,
afore we could fully hail you,
you were summoned home.

When you did write,
Liberia sat enthralled.
Your beloved Haindi became ours
in your spellbinding tales
that held our hearts so rapt.

In your life’s works we discover
the bedrock of our culture,
in your lore we meet
our true Liberian history.

Haindi wail,
Fuama moan,
Bongese raise a lament,
Liberia lift up a dirge,
the nation is bereaved of a  precious son.

Oh! Let your tears run free,
restrain them not from their full course.
Let elegies speak of the deep loss sustained,
let requiems be sung, recounting the awesome feats.

Nature protests, “Long, long,
he was here quite long”,
yet I cry,  “too soon, too soon,
a national treasure is forever gone”!

2008 took William Lewis, our first “Minister of Culture”.  2009 brought more mourning into our home with the loss of another great. In this issue we remember and honor Professor Wilton G. S. Sankawulo, Liberia’s gentle, generous literary giant who transitioned in February 2009. Sankawulo was a regular contributor to the journal. He was our mentor. We sorely miss him, but we remember him with joy for his life of passion, purpose and accomplishment.

We begin our 6^th year of publication and invite you to sit down and talk with us, travel the imaginative roadways with us, but along this journey we ask you to pause, point your hearts to the warm ocean off the west coast of Africa and listen to a Liberia who appreciates her true history, arts, culture, essence.

The sound you feel shaking your gut like the full-bodied beat from the Sangba drum is the rhythm from Liberia-based visual artists and writers. Despite the caustic hangover of war, they continue to hear above the shuddering din of the generator coughing, above the restless cacophony of struggle, uneven relationships, greed and ignorance choking the streets and roaming halls of power.

The fresh and vibrant earth colors of David Wolobah, our featured artist, capture the grace and perseverance of our superwomen. In short stories, James Dwalu, Saah Millimono and Daniel Chukpadeh Gayedyu take us down different paths, but each guides his plot through a unique Liberian moment and its cultural context. And as you listen, the words of fiction will turn to supple song as the poetry of Watchen Johnson Babalola, Chrichtian Neal, M. Woryonwon Roberts, Charlina Daitouah Smith, Nathaniel Nah and Augustus Voahn course their own waterways. Reaching back, across the waters of the Diaspora, Ralph Geeplay, Ruby Harmon and Alexander Queh join our Liberia-based writers in a chorus that needs to be heard.

“Please tell Stephanie that you all have lost one of your good writers.” Mrs. Sankawulo said to Robtel Pailey and me, in the hallway of the intensive care unit at the JFK Hospital, when we went to visit the Professor on February 14, 2009. “He’s gone.”

Behind us, on the bed next to the window which led your eyes into the gray-blue of the Atlantic, Wilton Sankawulo, the man who wrote for our souls even when we chose to forsake ourselves, eyes rolled back, kept pushing the covers off his body. He left us exactly a week later. Mrs. Sankawulo knew that her husband of more than 40 years had crossed to the Ancestors before his body did.

Those who knew or know of the Professor paused in deference to the selflessness he embodied. Not fully aware of who we are, we, in our unfettered ignorance, allowed this keeper of our flame to drift into relative obscurity. As a country we did not serve the Professor all his sweet palm wine while he was alive to drink it. And so we put our hands on our heads, fingers interlocked, and cry dirges to show our appreciation for this man of letters.

Abdoulaye Dukule′, Robert H. Brown Sr., D. Elwood Dunn, Althea Romeo-Mark, Vamba Sherif and Patricia Jabbeh Wesley tell us about the texture of a mentor, friend and comrade. Stephanie Horton, the writer Mrs. Sankawulo informed of her husband’s death a week before his body followed, writes of her deep connection to Professor Sankawulo’s work.

In a fitting send-off, Althea Romeo-Mark reviews Sankawulo’s 2005 novel Sundown at Dawn - A Liberian Odyssey.  One can only hope that soon “collective positive efforts” in Liberia will compel the sun to rise at dawn and usher in a brand new day.

We all owe a special thanks to D. Elwood Dunn for re-exposing Sankawulo’s essay, “LIFE IS ETERNAL: Essay in Memory of My Father”, and to Robert H. Brown Sr. for sharing a personal letter from Professor Sankawulo. This correspondence allows the Professor to speak directly to us as we reflect on this genius of a man.  Roam our archives after you have exhausted this current issue and discover or rediscover Professor Sankawulo; his work is there in folktales, short stories, essays - some of his gifts to us.

“Where Have All the Years Gone?” Patricia Jabbeh Wesley asks in her engaging memoir of her return to her mother-soil after years of exile. Dr. Jestina Doe-Anderson juxtaposes optimism with caution in her critical review of Helene Cooper’s The House at Sugar Beach. Then, Robtel Pailey challenges our sensitivities with a post-colonial take on the same book. Jestina and Robtel, Liberian brainchildren, deconstruct from different prisms and provide viewing platforms for us to read over, inside, around and between the lines of the book.

Abraham Jomo Stubblefield, filmmaker, charts a course in swirling rapids for a way forward in Liberia. His essence is captured in this edition’s interview conducted by Sengbe Boakai K. Khasu.

Strap yourself down and experience our featured video, a trailer of a film that Jomo co-produced: Apocalypse Africa. Experience it and know why we’ll continue to be stepchildren, why we’ll continue to kill ourselves until we finally decide to know ourselves. And, importantly, why well-moneyed others will spur on the massacre. Guns. Greed. Genocide.

Before he became too ill to care, we were able to tell Professor Sankawulo about the writing prize named in his honor . . . He was supposed to be one of the judges . . .

The entire Sea Breeze board is proud to usher in the inaugural writing contests:

• The Sea Breeze / Albert Porte, Yahney King Sangarey Creative Non-fiction Prize
• The Sea Breeze / Joseph J. Walters, Wilton Sankawulo, Vamba Sherif Short Fiction Prize
• The Sea Breeze / Bai T. Moore, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Poetry Prize

I join the board and the contributors to this our inaugural contest and Sankawulo celebration issue to say thank you plenty for reading.

Yor please come back again nes tahn. We wey always have swee chew for yor.

Let the power of the purpose propel you.

For Liberia . . .

Doeba Bropleh

The House at Sugar Beach is the engaging memoir of Helene Cooper, a celebrated journalist and New York Times correspondent who was born in Liberia. A descendant of freed American slaves who settled Liberia in the early 1800s, Cooper traces her roots to the Johnson and Cooper dynasties - prominent members of the Liberian political elite.

Helene Cooper’s family was part of Liberia’s “Congo” class - the Americo-Liberians (descendants of freed American slaves) and recaptives (Africans who had been rescued by the US Navy while aboard US-bound slave ships and brought to Liberia) who collectively represented the upper stratum of the Liberian caste system. On the lower end of the caste system were the “Country” people - Liberians of indigenous African heritage.

The Coopers enjoyed a privileged life of access to political power and financial advantage. In The House at Sugar Beach, the transformation of Helene’s life begins with her family’s relocation from suburban Monrovia to the 11-mile removed Sugar Beach - where a custom-built 22-room beachfront mansion, fully loaded with marble floors, shag carpet, velvet furniture, servants galore, and all the accoutrements of the rich and famous awaited them. But Helene didn’t like being so far away from her friends and cousins who lived closer to Central Monrovia and, at age 8, her parents acquired 11-year-old Eunice Bull, a “not-so-privileged” Country girl, to be her playmate. Eunice’s destiny was to shed her indigenous culture and assimilate into the Americo-Liberian lifestyle as one of Mrs. Cooper’s girls. Over the ensuing six years, Helene and Eunice would develop a girlhood relationship that was to leave an indelible mark in Cooper’s mind - and conceivably, on Eunice’s life.

In 1980, a military coup brought an end to the protracted political dominance of the Congo minority. After members of her extended family were executed or imprisoned, her family home ransacked, and her mother gang-raped by Liberian soldiers, Helene joined her mother and younger sister to abandon Liberia - and Eunice - for a life of exile in the USA. Helene was fourteen.

For the next several years, Cooper will learn to exist as an average African-American, and she comes to terms with the loss of her family’s wealth and societal stature by severing her emotional links with Liberia and all things Liberian. She immerses herself into her new life with aspirations of becoming a journalist - and she becomes an eminent one.

One fateful day, while on assignment in Iraq, a near-death experience reminds her of the native land she expediently dismissed, and the Liberian friend she left behind. As the rest of the book unfolds, the reader is guided through Cooper’s quest to return to Liberia and find her long-lost friend.

The House at Sugar Beach is an easy read, delivered in a conversational style that showcases - and sometimes exaggerates - the Liberian English vernacular. In this poetic twist of fate, Cooper’s trajectory takes her from a life of luxury in an impoverished nation to one of subsistence in a land of plenty. The first part of the book that details Cooper’s family background and her early years is comprehensive and engaging, but the second part almost gives the impression that the book took on a different author.

In her middling but charming prose, Cooper conjures up sensations of Liberia while offering her personal perspective on the ethnic and social divide that plagued Liberia for some 150 years. She skillfully arouses some memories that invoke a smile - or even a chuckle - and some that many would prefer to discard. I found myself nostalgically nodding in acknowledgement at the mention of knock foot games, fufu and pepper soup, Saturday afternoons at Relda Cinema, ice cream at Sophie’s; and flinching in disapproval at her bigoted references to indigenous Liberians and other sub-Saharan Africans. Unfortunately, Cooper oversimplifies the power dynamic and the complexion and ethnicity-based status divisions that constituted the Liberian caste system - specifics that are critical to the understanding of Liberia, her history, and the current state of affairs.

Much of this book presents a flavor of the Liberian haute monde prior to the unceremonious end of the century-long hegemony of the Americo-Liberian minority; it also reveals Cooper’s arrogance and illustrates the contradictions in her self-perception. Throughout the book, Cooper blithely refers to the indigenous Liberians as Country people - a designation that has the same pejorative connotations as nigger in America and khafir in South Africa - and she promulgates negative stereotypes of post-colonial Africans and Black Americans. Cooper describes indigenous Liberians as a people beset with strange beliefs and customs while venerating Caucasian physical attributes, extolling such characteristics as light complexion, straight hair, and thin lips. At times, her personal and cultural prejudices tend to undermine the credibility of her story.

Many readers would consider this a brilliant piece of literary work. The author presents a family legacy interspersed with tidbits of Liberian history and politics, throws in some elements of nostalgia, a touch of romance, survival over personal struggles, and there you have it - the makings of a masterful memoir. It’s obvious also that Cooper has written primarily for an American audience who, in general, remains poorly informed about the history, culture and politics of Liberia, and who would be highly impressed by homes with marble floors and domestic servants as a sign of privilege and prominence. Those who are unfamiliar with Liberia would probably appreciate the exposure to those details that are presented as important aspects of Liberian history and culture, and linkages to America, that otherwise would remain unknown. However, Cooper virtually affirms the popular and often unsavory stereotypes of Liberia, and presents post-1980 Liberia as a country accursed with senseless brutality, disreputable politicians and rampant corruption; a hopeless tragedy rather than a lesson learned.

Despite her rather extensive research into Liberian history and politics, the accuracy of some her entries cannot be corroborated. It is worth noting that Cooper doesn’t appear to believe that the social inequities initiated and supervised by members of the elite settler class fueled much of the dissent between Liberians of settler and indigenous lineage, and essentially set the stage for the violence and carnage that were to erupt in 1980. ”In my sheltered existence, I had never dug deep enough to wonder how much native Liberians resented us.” From her writings, those unfamiliar with Liberia or her history would surmise that the 14-year civil war that started in 1989 was an extension of the 1980 military coup - and that Cooper had experienced both. And while she describes the coup as an atrocity that was engineered and executed exclusively by indigenous Liberians - Country people, she neglects to acknowledge that the more savage acts of the civil war were performed by Liberians of all ethnicities and social classes, with Congo and Country people as joint participants and stakeholders in Liberia’s decadent decline.

The acknowledgements at the end of the book suggest that much of its flavor is derived from the memories and input of her family and friends. In fact, this book is almost as much about Eunice as it is about Helene. However, Eunice has no voice in this deeply personal story that is so impregnated with her presence, and without whom the story might not be so interesting.

Whether or not it was her intention, Cooper shared the poignant and important lesson that in America, unlike the pre-1980 Liberia revered in her novel, one can achieve success by virtue of one’s abilities and achievements rather than by family lineage, ethnic background, or social standing.

I would encourage those who are not familiar with Liberian history and culture to read this book with caution, and those who are with objectivity.

Copyright © 2009 Jestina Doe-Anderson

Helene Cooper’s memoir, The House at Sugar Beach, is an account about dichotomies, race, class, and the African psyche in all its complexities. Cooper, a child of two “Congo” dynasties (descendants of repatriated American Blacks), dissects her unusual upbringing in Liberia, her exile to America’s deep South, and her reunion with a long lost adopted sister in her country of birth after years of professional training as a journalist in the United States.

The House at Sugar Beach traces a young girl’s journey to consciousness in a country of imported Nancy Drew books, American movies, phony British accents, blue jeans; essentially a country struggling to define itself. Cooper exposes with self-deprecating humor vices inherent in Liberian society, i.e. alcoholism, womanizing, kleptocracy, patronage, ethnocentrism, dependency, corruption, sloth, elitism, colonialism, colorism. Sugar Beach also reveals post-conflict schizophrenia, savagery, inhumanity, the ties that bind families, trans-nationalism, and hybridity, the theory of two-ness, tracing the apartheid-like disparities that separate the Coopers and their ilk from ordinary “Country” Liberians.

Separated into two distinct parts, based on Cooper’s sheltered existence in Liberia and her subsequent displacement in the United States after a coup topples Liberia’s one-party state, The House at Sugar Beach swings on a pendulum between the musings of a young girl through sing-song like lyricism and the firm cadence of an omniscient storyteller developing a critical consciousness. Nonetheless, the contradictions inherent in that consciousness are also apparent, as Cooper writes an editorial for her University of North Carolina student paper denigrating apartheid in South Africa when the apartheid system in Liberia is glaringly obvious. Cooper does a marvelous job, whether intentionally or unintentionally, of insinuating that most countries have apartheid systems-loosely based on affiliations of class, race, religion, socio-economic status, ability and sexuality-though they do not refer to it as such. Consequentially, Cooper seems to be wavering between defending the apartheid system in Liberia and satirizing it: “Everyone was still playing their assigned parts in the social structure of Liberia. The land barons, and Honorables who made up the Congo People were taking vacations abroad, visiting their many properties and farms around Liberia, and taking their families to the beach for day trips. The farm tenants, market women, and ‘gro-na’ boys who made up the Country People were tapping rubber trees for $40 a month, haggling with customers outside Abijioudi Supermarket and hanging out in front of Relda Cinema, looking for work.”

The first line of Sugar Beach, in fact, is about a self-perpetuating system of “pay-yourself” in which the rich get richer, and the poor suffer in silence or resort to stealing. “This is a story about rogues,” immediately contextualizes Liberia’s history, because it reveals the country’s very existence as imbedded in dishonesty and theft. Cooper exposes the white collar/blue-collar crime semantics when she says “Rogues broke into your house while you were sleeping and made off with the fine china. Thieves worked for the government and stole money from the public treasury.” What is interesting is that Cooper does not make the connection that members of her family could be placed in the category of rogues.

Cooper’s use of the pejorative term “Country” throughout the memoir must be deconstructed. This term is particularly jarring when she describes the inherent contradictions of celebrating Matilda Newport Day, as Newport was rumored to have led the defeat of native Liberians by lighting a cannon which annihilated native soldiers during the Battle of Crown Hill. This reminder of settler domination is enacted in the Battle of Crown Hill at Cooper’s elite school. The Battle of Crown Hill sounds almost like the machinations of a Civil War in Liberia, which determined, as in the United States, which forces would govern the state. It is clear, in this instance, that the history written by winners in Cooper’s account is a retelling of why the “Country” People were relegated to being ruled by the settlers, because they did not possess sophisticated weaponry such as cannons and guns. During Cooper’s retelling of the Battle, there emerges a critical consciousness that develops in hindsight: “It never occurred to me at the time that all across Liberia, native Liberians were getting more and more upset about the things that I took for granted: things that, for me, were as normal as the crow of the rooster every morning.”

Cooper seems to be re-writing history in her memoir, with revisionist flair. She delves into the history of Elijah Johnson, one of the first pioneers to make the trek to Liberia on the Elizabeth, the very first ship of free blacks to sail from New York Harbor in 1820. Her reconstruction of the lives of Elijah Johnson and company is an attempt to resuscitate the seamless web of voices of repatriated “freemen.” A child of the Liberian soil whose family can trace her ancestry to two different Liberian dynasties, the Coopers and Dennises, Cooper reveals to the reader that her grandfathers and their lineage benefited from their enterprising spirits in the midst of native naiveté. But her attempt at revisionist history is questionable and skewed, at best. The chapters that re-tell what may have happened to Elijah Johnson and the first settlers appear to be historical fiction, told through the lens of an 8-year-old. Cooper describes being a descendant of Elijah Johnson and Randolph Cooper as “birth into what passed for the landed gentry upper class of Africa’s first independent country, Liberia.” Her revisionist text is problematic because it portrays the colonists as humanitarians and the Africans as uncouth and barbaric: “Why were Africans still selling their brothers and sisters to European slave traders? The new settlers took this as another sign of their superiority to the native Africans, which would persist for decades to come.”

A post-colonial reading of The House at Sugar Beach would not be complete without an explication of how Cooper treats language. Throughout the text, Liberian vernacular and colloquial is interspersed with standard American English, bringing to bear the duality of language in Liberia. In the first few chapters of her memoir, Cooper goes through pains to explain to the reader who is not Liberian what certain phrases and aphorisms mean. Her explanations are satirical in that they are an over exaggerated appeal to an American consciousness, i.e. “Bolabo: ‘Aya Ma, na mind ya.’ Translation: ‘Gosh! How awful! Never you mind, Mrs. Cooper, please accept my apologies.” This is an attempt to make the memoir decidedly more accessible, yet it begs the question of audience.

The old debate about accessibility and universality becomes crucial at this juncture. So, too, is a discussion about how aesthetics comes across in the novel. Cooper says, “In Liberia, we cared far more about how we looked outside than who we were inside.” It is clear what aesthetic Liberians adopted based on their historical experience in the United States. According to Cooper, her mom was “tall and thin and light-skinned, and had the ultimate symbol of beauty in Liberia: long, silky, soft, white, people’s hair.” Anyone visiting Liberia today can see that this particular aesthetic still holds true, as the vast majority of women in Liberia can be seen donning any number of weaves, wigs, and hairpieces that resemble what the Coopers inherited.

In the same vein of the aesthetic, Cooper personifies the house at Sugar Beach as a place of solace from the occult forces of the neegee society, a place of quietude from the raucous Monrovia urban sprawl, and a refuge from the onslaught of impending war - a paradise. The “twenty-two-room behemoth my father had built overlooking the Atlantic Ocean” filled with servants and imported ivory also starkly contrasts what well-meaning foreigners only believe can exist in the so-called “developed” world:

This was our house at Sugar Beach: a futuristic, three-level verandahed 1970s era behemoth with a mammoth glass dome on top, visible as soon as you turned onto the dirt road junction a mile away. The house revealed itself slowly like a coquettish Parisian dancer from the 1920s. Emerging from the road’s first major pothole-big enough to swallow a small European car-your reward was a glimpse of the house’s sloping roof and glass dome, shining in the equatorial sun. Rounding the bend between the dense bush of plum trees and vines, you next got a glimpse of the house’s eastern wraparound second-floor porches, painted creamy butter, with a roasted red pepper trim hand selected for tropical contrast. Driving by the two huts that framed the outermost edge of the nearby Bassa village of Bubba Town, you then caught another tease: the sliding glass doors that formed the perimeter of the second-floor living room. But nothing could prepare you for the final disrobing as you crested the hill that opened up to the panoramic view of the house, back-lit by the thunderous waves and pounding surf from the Atlantic as far as the eye could see.

In many ways, the house at Sugar Beach is what Liberia represents for an elite few, opulence in the midst of filth and poverty. There is a smidgen of self-derision when Cooper says, “Shangri-la, Camelot, the Garden of Eden-the Cooper family’s perfect and perfectly grand paradise, where John and Calista Cooper could raise their perfect family, cosseted by well-paid servants, and protected from the ravages of West African squalor and poverty by central air-conditioning, strategically placed coconut trees, and a private water well.”

The house’s distance from ‘civilization’ on the outskirts of Monrovia is a testament of its iconoclasm. The violence that erupted during the April 12, 1980 coup and its subsequent aftermath does not spare that refuge, as soldiers enter Cooper’s safe haven of all women and rape her mother. This is the beginning of the end, of Liberia, of Cooper’s idyllic existence. When Cooper returns to Sugar Beach at the end of her account with her long-lost sister, Eunice, she finds it in the same state that she finds Liberia, gutted, ravaged, and spiritless. It is even rumored that President Samuel K. Doe used the house for capitol torture. The house once again transforms into a symbolic representation of something, yet this time it is more than the iconic lifestyle of the Cooper clan. At the end of Cooper’s memoir, the house represents all that was wrong with Liberia and all that needs to be deconstructed, gutted, and redesigned based on a new set of rules and principles.

Cooper evocatively juxtaposes the personal with the political.  One of the most gut-wrenching accounts in the book is universally painful, as Cooper tenderly describes her family on the brink of collapse and her parents’ inevitable divorce. This poignant account reveals the universal pain of parental separation, a separation that leaves only women at sugar beach. The divorce also exposes womanizing as a national Liberian epidemic, as the source of Cooper’s parents’ separation is her father’s philandering ways, ways that seem to be numbly tolerated, if not glumly expected in Liberian society.

In juxtaposing the personal with the political, Cooper, in the same chapter, exposes the ridiculous manner in which President Tolbert and the Liberian state prepare with pomp and circumstance the visit of Jimmy Carter, and the anticipation of Amy Carter, the blond-haired, blue-eyed American first child: “We had worked with other Liberian kids on a gigantic mural that had a picture of a blond girl with braces surrounded by a bunch of African kids.” During that visit, Monrovia traffic halts, and the city is transformed into an African haven, only for Carter to stay in Liberia for a mere four hours while visiting Nigeria for three days. This is a reminder of Liberia’s status as America’s stepchild, a term that has since gained traction with the production of Nancee Oku Bright’s documentary of the same name. A spunky Mama Grand, Cooper’s grandmother, expresses indignation at Carter’s impropriety during a short 60 Minutes cameo: “You see? The president passed through here, and went to Nigeria and stayed there for days, and came here for few hours. That’s your daughter? . . . You pass by your daughter and go to somebody else’s place and stay two, three days, and you don’t even lay your head on one pillow in your house? Tell her [America]! We don’t like it. And she [America] must change her ways.”

Cooper continues on a trajectory of juxtaposing the personal with the political when she describes the lopsided governance structure in Liberia, the True Whig Party hegemony which started in 1890, and finally the beginning of the end of her family’s dynastic rule.  She describes running smack dab in the midst of the cyclone that was Liberia’s rice riots in 1979, reflecting that “Liberia was like a pot of water that had been put on the stove at a slow boil and forgotten about.” That pot boils over on April 12, 1980, when a group of second-tiered soldiers led by an unknown Master Sergeant, Samuel Doe, storm the Executive Mansion, the seat of Liberia’s presidency, savagely kills President Tolbert, and rounds up all political affiliates of the True Whig Party.

Ten days later, on Cooper’s 14th birthday (April 22), thirteen of Tolbert’s Cabinet ministers are strapped to poles in the name of redemption and shot. Cooper’s description of her cousin [Foreign Affairs Minister] Cecil Dennis’ death is particularly stark: “We watched Uncle Cecil die, noting how he kept his head up until the end; how he didn’t look scared, but proud; how he didn’t beg, how the soldier kept missing him, and what that meant.” The phrase that Cooper hears over and over again following the assassination of some of her relatives, “Who born soldier? Country woman! Who born minister? Congo woman!,” is an echo of the peculiar manner in which Liberians rejoiced for the coming of a presumed messiah-turned-military monster. This phrase would precede the peculiar phrase “You kill my ma, you kill my pa, I will vote for you” that was chanted during Charles Taylor’s presidential bid and election in 1997.

According to Cooper’s account, the sequence of events that led to Liberia’s spiral into anarchy implicates the United States as a chess player arbitrarily and strategically knocking down board pieces at will. Copper reveals, through personal anecdotal evidence, that the whispered rumors about America’s support of Tolbert’s political downfall are true. One of the soldiers who gang rape her mother tells them: “You think the Americans are going to come and help you? Well, they back us.”

Cooper tells of returning to school and discovering that many of her classmates suffered similar fates during post-coup raids. This would mirror a fraction of the horrors many women in Liberia encountered during the civil war beginning a decade later. At this juncture in the memoir, Cooper questions the madness around her: “I had never dug deep enough to wonder how much native Liberians resented us. I had been shocked at the level of hatred expressed when those people started chanting, as Cousin Cecil was killed.” It is then, and only then, that Cooper questions what her adopted sister, Eunice, must be thinking or feeling: “Did Eunice feel that way too?” This eventually would be the catalyst for Cooper’s return to Liberia after a protracted exile in the United States.

In Part II of Cooper’s account, she discovers her niche not as the cherished heir to two Liberian dynasties, but rather the immigrant fleeing a nation in flames. It is here that the tale of migration and displacement is evoked. Like immigrant accounts that are post-colonial in nature, Sugar Beach expresses the painful alienation that most migrants feel, bordering on anxiety and depression. The act of straddling two worlds, not being wholly of one or the other, is certainly not a new literary trope here. Cooper spends her high school years being shuttled from one Southern enclave to another before the eventual demise of her father in Liberia-first to Knoxville, Tennessee, eventually settling on Greensboro, North Carolina, when her mother leaves her and her younger sister, Marlene, with their dad to return to Liberia. It is at this point that Cooper’s interest in journalism is piqued, with her eventually pursing this calling at the University of North Carolina.

Sugar Beach, part historical fiction, part memoir, part journalistic snapshot, eventually begs the question, as stipulated by post-colonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, “What is the subaltern saying?” A conscientious reader, though riveted by Cooper’s account of her family’s history in what could only be regarded as a colony of the U.S., is constantly bombarded by the nagging sensation that Eunice’s perspective is undeniably missing from a book whose very essence is about a reunion between the legitimate prodigal daughter and the adopted child who never left. Eunice’s missing voice and consciousness is symbolic of all the missing histories of Liberia’s native class. Settler hegemony sits starkly in binary opposition to native or indigene objectivity in Sugar Beach. What was Eunice really thinking when she entered the Cooper compound, so jarringly different from what she knew? How did she feel being left behind during the Coopers’ many trips abroad? How did she feel remaining in Liberia when the Cooper girls were hauled off to the United States after the 1980 coup? These questions are akin to what post-colonial theorist Gayatri Spivak explores in her essay, “What is the subaltern saying?” In other words, reading 20^th and 21^st century works from a post-colonial perspective forces one to record the moments of glaring silence. Eunice is a symbolic representation of the subaltern subject. The very act of trying to re-tell Eunice’s story is a clear falsehood on Cooper’s part because it is akin to the missionaries or colonists attempting to relay what their subjects were thinking and feeling.

Cooper unintentionally reveals that when a child is prematurely separated from his/her family/familiar surrounding, as so many native children were bequeathed to settler families (this system still operates, albeit in a transformed manner), as Eunice had been when she moved into the Cooper house, psychological turmoil is sure to ensue. Eunice runs away from the Cooper house on a number of occasions as a result of this trauma of separation. And just as Cooper is born a hybrid, Eunice too becomes a hybrid as a result of being indoctrinated into a family whose wealth and privilege means vacations to Spain and the United States for the younger Cooper girls, imported luxury cars, acres upon acres of land perhaps illegitimately owned, guaranteed government posts which equate to more wealth accumulation, a place at the American Cooperative School whose tuition is in the thousands per year, and much more. This ultimately becomes the source of her ‘otherness’ when the Cooper girls leave Liberia for good and she must return to her family. She eventually becomes alienated from her siblings and her Bassa mother, who constantly refers to her as “Mrs. Cooper’s Daughter,” further separating her from her counterparts.

Eventually, Cooper tells us that Eunice gets pregnant by a Guinean national, sends her child off to live with his better off father, marries a preacher, and settles in a respectable job after the war, while Cooper builds a career as a globe-trotting correspondent with the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, eventually renouncing her Liberian passport for something more wholesome, a claim to legitimacy as a bona fide American citizen. During this period, and throughout her exile years in America, Cooper’s communication with Eunice dwindles until she eventually does not think about Eunice at all, even as war is raging in Liberia.

Like many Liberians in the United States, Cooper assimilates into life in America, eventually becoming the poster child for a model immigrant. She travels to Iraq as an imbedded journalist to “liberate the besieged population of . . . Iraq.” The author’s blind faith in the American military machinery-as exemplified by her eagerness to recount Iraq’s ‘liberation’ from the annals of Saddam Hussein’s reign for a reputable and internationally referenced daily paper-stands in stark contrast to her earlier cynicism about America’s complicity in Liberia’s destruction. The severity of the situation in Iraq is described like an epic adventure rather than a war zone with innocent Iraqi civilians under siege: “I found myself actually praying for the war to hurry up and start.”

While Liberia is sinking into an endless pit of carnage, death and destruction, Cooper is ironically anticipating America’s illegitimate invasion of Iraq, and subsequent occupation. It is not until Cooper is catapulted in the battlefield and gets stuck in a tracked armored vehicle that she realizes that “I sure as hell didn’t belong in Iraq . . . I was in the wrong country fighting the wrong war . . . I shouldn’t die here . . . What a stupid place to die. What a stupid war to die in. If I’m going to die in a war, it should be in my own country.” So begins the needle prick that sends Cooper back to Liberia following Charles Taylor’s exile in 2003. She discovers that “I was home, and home was Hell.” And so begin a series of reunions, among them, a reunion with Cooper’s long lost sister, Eunice. In a frank conversation with Eunice, Cooper asks if the Bassa girl ever hated the well-to-do Coopers for abandoning her during the war. Eunice responds with “Ya’ll were a good Congo group. My Congo group was a different Congo group than my pa’s group.” In this particular account, Karl Marx’s theory of the dialectic being at work is glaringly true.

Even in the midst of all of its inherent, one-dimensional shortcomings, The House at Sugar Beach is an account of one woman’s history in the midst of many other histories. It goes to show that neutrality is a falsehood, and that subjectivity reigns supreme.

WRITE FOR HUMANITY
(dedicated to all writers)

The bombs had been falling for close to three days
He didn’t dare leave the house; told his wife to stay
He cursed all of those who had taken his sons
Had taught them to rape and had given them guns
He dejectedly hunched in the corner all night
Reduced to a child; made a pitiful sight
Controlled; not in charge; like a puppet on strings
Indignation arose like a bird on wings
Ten thousand miles away she lifted a prayer
Six hungry mouths to feed; Close to despair
She looked at the sky, not a raindrop in sight
Then her heart went to those going through the same plight
Famine had struck; a formidable foe
Endangering lives of uncountable scores
Men, women and children, with lives on the line
She vowed to do something, a race against time
From one day to another we’re showered with news
Of tension, armed conflict, disputes and abuse
Disaster, diseases and rumors of war
To combat this evil I humbly implore
Why not help each other, why not play our roles
In this fight for our children, our nations, our world
There’s much to be done; Let us all take a stance
The choice is now yours; you’ve been given the chance
Let’s write for stability; let’s write for peace
Let’s write for the weak ones with no voice to speak
Let’s write against racism, abuse and disease
That which hurts and demeans us; forces us to our knees
Let’s write for development, let’s write for health
Let’s write so our leaders will see US as wealth
Let’s write against illiteracy, misuse and lies
That harms and impairs us and causes us to die
Let’s write against poverty, let’s write to agree
To bring forth a world that is HIV free
Let’s write in accord and commit to a plan
That all will have dreams; both woman and man
Let’s write for a future of hope in this world
That one day brotherly love will boldly unfurl
Let’s write for a better world for you and me
Let’s write for humanity

THE DEEP END OF NIGHT

Dark and murky
No light in sight
Cruelly plunged through
The deep end of night
Utter confusion
Overruns the mind
Anxious to seek
Failing to find
Emotions tossed helter
By waves of despair
Feelings run skelter
Cloudy; unclear
No handhold, no foothold
Naught but regret
No substance; no essence
Hazy silhouette
Dark and murky
Acres of fright
Plummeting on through
The deep end of night

Ah Na Warh No
(I Did Not Know)

Ah na warh no my school books
Were my tools to life so grand
My parents worked and strived and sweat
To place hope in my hands
If ah warh no ah would have kept
That hope sacred and strong
Then ah would not be sitting here
My life totally wrong
Ah telling you . . . ah na warh no

Ah na warh no ah had to work
Real hard for life’s provisions
That laziness and poverty
Are very close relations
If ah warh no ah would have toiled
From morn all through the daylight
Then ah won’t have to sit here
Cold and hungry close to midnight
Ah telling you. . . ah na warh no

Ah na warh no ah should be brave
And stand up for my rights
Take courage and don’t fret
and don’t give up without a fight
If ah warh no, ah’d prove all wrong
Of they who said ‘not possible’
And show that faith plus work plus me
Combined is quite unstoppable
Ah telling you. . . ah na warh no

Ah na warh no that ah could
Draw or sing or write or dance
That each of us is gifted
And that each one gets a chance
If ah warh no ah would have tried;
Stirred up the gift within me
Then maybe on one lucky day
The ‘star’ that’s born would be me
Ah telling you. . . ah na warh no

Ah na warh no my body
Is so precious; not a toy
That ah should have some pride
And not just jump from boy to boy
If ah warh no ah wouldn’t have
Come down with HIV
And live without belief
That ah’ll fulfill my destiny
Ah telling you. . . ah na warh no

Ah na warh no that life could give
So many bitter lessons
That if I can’t perform
Life will just find another person
Ah na warh no that ah would reap
Exactly what I sow
Nah da me sitting heah wif one excuse…..
“Ah na warh no”

IT STARTS WITH YOU

When calamity raises its evil hand
When war and destruction invade our land
When good goes undone
And lies become true
Its time for real change
There’s so much you can do
Focus on humanity; it starts with you
When good healthcare  is a shattered dream
When promised development is yet to be seen
When poverty prowls
Like a thief in the night
And hunger bombards us
With all of its might
Focus on humanity; it starts with you
Illiteracy rate has yet to decrease
If fact should be known as a ‘common disease’
Global primary education
A hope against hope
With babies having babies
And youths addicted to dope?
Focus on humanity; it starts with you
Promote gender equity; empow’r our women
Reduce child mortality; protect our children
Safeguard the environment
Combat all diseases
Attainable targets
The fight never ceases
Focus on humanity; it starts with you

Copyright © 2009 Watchen Johnson Babalola

Duality
(For Sugar Baby Plum)

In the privacy of my mind
I give vent to rage, lies,
envy, and vices of every kind.

Taboos are enjoyed.
No one sees, no one knows.
I am safe inside, filled with empty joy.

My fantasies I fulfill
in the solitude of myself.
I am another, this is what I will.

Who knows that behind this beautiful face
murder sometimes lies in wait,
an insane desire to exterminate?

There is no way you can tell
just by looking at this gentle female
that she dreams of being wonderfully cruel.

Or, how could you ever discern
that yonder jolly gentleman
relishes thoughts of unleashing bloody mayhem?

Could you find a clear line of correlation,
between an innocent visage
and an insidious motive for abduction?

Even at your most lucid moment,
could you ever imagine
that I, I am capable of inflicting gruesome torment?

My mind is a wall
that shields me splendidly
and when you think you know me well, it turns out

you don’t know me at all.

Wasted

Her girl child turned out to be a break,
with pop eyes and a fine coca-cola shape.

Her mother said, Baby, learn how to roll that your pop eyes,
if you master it, one day this family will stop eating dry rice.

Baby was their ticket to the good life,
in her was their hope to finally thrive.

Uncle came while Baby was still a teen,
offering to pay school fees, rent, and everything in between.

Her mother said, my child, God na open your way,
help this man so he can help us to enjoy ay!

Baby protested, mama this man can be my pa.
Her mother hushed her, let people hear yah!

You think man and woman business go by age?
You better satisfy that man so we can stop living in this cage.

Uncle came regularly with goodies of every kind,
visited with Baby in her mother’s room and nobody paid them any mind.

Baby came home one day with a gold chain.
Mama, guess what? I na meet new uncle again!

New Uncle dashed money with a splash.
Baby and her kin soon despised Old Uncle’s petty cash.

Wasn’t too long when Baby started driving a Grand Cherokee,
her mother looked on with satisfaction, they had reached their peak.

Baby called her mother aside one sunny day.
Mama, something funny happening oh!, Ahn see my time yeh.

Oh! Then you geh belleh. So, who de belleh for?
Ahn even know. And mama, da nah all.

These few days I can be feverish and my mouth ain’t geh no taste,
but the one da making me scare,
strange things growing all over my secret place.

Death Visited Me

She passed away.
The herald of merciless pain. What wouldn’t I have
given to hear    she came this way
or   she is here to stay?
But no! They said, yes, they said . . . she passed away.
I am sure, because my heart gapes wide,
a chasm earth cannot fill.
I am certain, because our girls weep for
her. Inconsolably. Our pivot is gone.
She does not return, though her work is not yet done.
The children have needs I never knew existed.
How did she do it? I’ve tried, but I can’t fit in her
shoes.
They’ve grown since she left.
I know that she has passed on; everywhere
I go people murmur never mind yah.
Why shouldn’t I mind? I boldly challenged
last night. I return every day to a bereaved
house, a companionless bed. They all go home
to happiness. They looked at me speechless,
shocked. I do not care.
Grief smothers me. The sympathizers’ chatter
a welcome blast of fresh air, temporary reprieve.
My relatives whispered mouth to ear,
She did not make it.
I waste away.
They still whisper – now . . . He too might pass away.
I’m so far gone, they think, that I don’t notice.
I turn to tell her that the car broke down again
this morning. The mechanic had lied as usual. I
was late for work. I turn, but she’s not there.
She passed away.
They say she is in a better place. What place
can be better than here with me, here where our love is?
Her absence sits heavily. Tears bring no relief,
they flow painfully from the deep well that
my heart has become.  Kemah passed on.
The answer I give to friends who ask of her. I
break precious scabs and blood flows afresh out
of my hurting wounds.
She passed away.
Not mere news to pass on. They were talking about me,
about my Kemah. Death has no compassion.
I hate him.
Maybe they are right. I may go to Kemah soon.
At night, I hear her soft voice, her pretty silhouette
drifts across our lonely bed. I reach out to touch her
but she’s gone . . . my love, my woman.

Copyright © 2009 Charlina Daitouah-Smith

To Broad Street

Let’s head to where we have been once
Through this garbage filled town
From side to side
To the dark alleys
To Carey Street

Where pedestrians go down
And up looking for income
That was not there in the first place
Let’s go there to the teashops
There we drink ‘ataya’ where

Peasants envy power
Laced with thoughts
Their minds, mouth and hands amble
About today’s convolution you see the craze
That haunts their beings like ghost presence

Pestered with evil - they roar like lions
As they rant you see their faces
Brawny with emotion
They wish they had talismans
To gut solutions from thin air

And they all snivel life isn’t fair
I am telling I am not liar
This here alley
Is the nuts that is Monrovia
But let’s go anyway and

Even though times are rigid
If providence went away and we lost our last hand
Dealt by fate on the hill tops of Ducor
Where a wheelbarrow boy as husband

Strays the streets as famished mouths
Wait abroad to be fed reckon your chance
Let’s trek, drop worries aside
I am here for your side
Like I know you on mine

We walk from end to end
This African sun enjoying
Savoring every bit of bliss
That is our affliction
For the love we put

Is spiteful but it reverberates
Let’s move on to Broad Street
To the café shops
Where we kiss
And we miss the surrounding

Not because it is not there
We just don’t care - always
Fairy eye we hope to see the sun rise
We watch now the raindrops
Beat against the windowsills

While yellow caps crawled
The soaked streets
With no running red lights
Women drenched carry groceries
You and I only you

When the moment bereft stood still
And perpetual peace soothed the cerebral air till
We meant to capture it all
Embrace our warm eminence we fill
The space we hoot we blubber we love

Let’s go to where we have been before

A Refugee Cry

No respect
When you come to seek refuge
No aspect
Of your life seems main
Like a suspect I mean
In the eyes of those men
Who expect
You to be like them
Speaking Twi at Katnetshi
So that you discount their mother’s country
No.

No bread
When you wake in the morning
No tread
Of our lives seems useful now
Like the dead we mourn
Our fate lies not with us but those
Who dread
Our very company in this state
So we lose thrust when tomorrow
Still never dies
No.

No peace
When you watch the faces of your brood
No piece
Of their crushed lives seems entire
Like mice
They feed off the morsels left unwanted by those
Who price
War over quiet and here we are
Wandering stunned craze scruffy
Oh! How we longed for that sweet land sprawl
Athwart the Atlantic for we must crawl

If we must for no longer must we drown
And massage these forever miseries
The Dahoma tree so situates stands
And it must weather the weather
On the store front of the Cavalla
We must heave atoll apt and purple like lava mad
That roll in fury at the doom of heat that within flamed
Down slopes for it can no longer be contained
The fizz that binds it to hot rocks in frigid weather all told
Wistful home bound we are a boost of oomph high head
Readying westward no matter the cost is the read

Where we glimpse the superb knolls of Mount Tienpo
And hear the empty cries of skeletons grudgingly secreted
From the wreck which perforates my people and mortals do
I now park myself and fret about these dark
Scab Gold Coast men—with deep gashes to their cheeks
Red eye walking around this Katneshi market half draped

In their proud kinte robes speaking Twi then and now
Here and there like angels on clouds—Ah Charlie!
Me I go go home tomorrow - tomorrow!
From where I from the sweet palmbutter smell
Beckons soothing in kissme and spices arouses my brow
Peace go come done is the row

And when I pace and pace thinking nothing
But the kola nuts and sweet pepper offered when I finally reach Kalorken
The dusty tip of Cape Palmas when mothers dance and spread their lappas
On sacred earth for me to trample waiting welcome palm wine
Gaze the faces of elders stroking breads
Puffing tobacco smoke slipshod fused with kindness a father’s gawk

In infamy not today pal must I bow
No not today this Kwa head sets off for the Grain Coast
Squat morale I cast to this Buduburum and I know
To where I go to my eat rice in peace that’s that

Yes. To Monrovia where the sun still shine on Waterside

*Twi is a major language spoken in Ghana

*Katnetshi is a popular open marketplace in Accra

*The Cavalla River is a major waterway in the southeastern region of Liberia

*Mount Tienpo can be found in Tienpo District, River Gee County

*The Kwa are composed of the Belle, Grebo, Kru, Bassa and Khran peoples

*Buduburum is the wasteland of a Liberian refugee camp in Ghana

*Waterside is Liberia’s own popular open marketplace

Night falls In Kanweaken

As night falls the sun placates its far-flung self faded
Then wives having fought their day’s battle filed
Themselves fatigued like militia on the petite village road
Heavenwards look they hunt God

Their kinjas slightly poised on their heads
They march with regal posture
As wanting Young
Bend their backs
Like leaves to branches
Their inundated perturbed hearts
For yearning, for craving to do more–
But little else can they bid but breast milk
Husbands stroll behind meek
Speaking in the murmurs only men can lick

Wielding spiky cutlasses they whip
Their backs and legs to keep
The tsetse flies away steep
As night falls in the jungle deep

In the rain forest hush
Night falls hurriedly in Kanweaken
And now then only the chirp chirp of the pepper bird resonates
Wives matter little else but the new rice fields
They howl for cause to clouds
Offspring swathe their backs utter soft moans
Thunders knock the skies
The wrath of heaven roars
This was the new day
What was has vanished this now is famine

The locust came and razed the village lies in tatter
This after the wars all smiles gone
Behind them smoke rise to the
The heavens from the slash and burn

Kanweaken is a town located in River Gee County.

Copyright © 2009 Ralph Geeplay

SHARE

It bothers you to share
combs
clothes
food
space
lives, obviously
you have never lived
war.

- 2007

CONCH

You fit snugly in my palm.
Smooth and coarse, you embody
contradictions.
Your time is one of many
moons ago.
Placing you to my ear,
oceans breathe alive
Sound
Wandering in your hollowness.
My soul wishes to snake in,
explore your depths
slip off your ridges
marvel at your striations
tan, white, coral, slate.
Your simmering smooth core
defies the harsh crystals
flung in your direction.

- 2007

GREY STONE BLUES

for Liberian war survivors

Kissme . . . our lips had not forgotten
pursed around the black, coarse striations
the well of darkness
drawing in the minuscule, bittersweet meat—
lodged in creeks, strewn detritus
waste from war.
We laid our bodies distorted
on flat rocks. sod, patches of green
grass.
We sought life.
We let raucous laughter spring from our lips
even when tomorrow watched uncertain.
Aching for relief, our feet stepped
between bits of human
waste, seeking water nearby.
Bellies roared. Water imagined
abundant satiated us.
Dissonant rings, the metal shots flung from greedy
hands pierced the air, hearts, hope.
We, behind the fence, crept
as rockets riddled dilapidated buildings.
Breadfruit, plum trees wavered, their fruits
flung to the ground,
aiming practice for boy soldiers
flying high, weed rolled in paper
cutting the air.
Those of us behind the fence felt
protected. Crowded and enclosed, we were
our own comfort. Morning brought
bright rays of sweat, hope and hunger.
Some may have even lost their minds:
holding them agilely balanced. We knew
deep inside, the spirit sought,
“Did we want to endure, survive, overcome?”
We tasted tiny bites of chance
sprinkled like salt, flavoring our dry rice and palm oil.
Wide-mouthed, our bellies licked its lips
relished the pleasure, anticipating the change.
What would night bring?
with its blue-grey presence?
its wide embrace lending shelter?
Our bodies, distorted, grey stones on sod, patches of green grass
hands clasped, we took deep breaths.
Willingly our spirits acquiesced to morning.

*kissme is a spiral shaped snail cooked in Liberian foods, especially palmbutter

Copyright © 2007 - 2008 Ruby Harmon

TRIBUTE TO A FALLEN DAUGHTER

The cabbage that was all we had
Most often than not
Turned most children off;
Little Alice was one.
Then one night came
And like she was possessed
She tore at us . . .
“Papa, I want my own, papa.”
I woke up and combed
Corners of our room
No cabbage
No crumb in sight
And morning came
Neither I nor mother Alice
Could get little Alice
To take a swig of tomato paste . . .
Hope cracked on the rock . . .
Little Alice, age three
Swirled
Never more to call.

TAXI DRIVERS

Chameleons you too have become!
Your direction is now the passengers
Your order theirs
“Taxi, Seventeenth Street . . .”
“On the main road” you say
Left or right, rain or sun
Your correct fare is all that matters
And away you zoom
The passenger takes up the
Remaining road
Hissing and muttering
While you go laughing on
One should not be Johnny Just Come
Oh, that JJC heads for trouble . . .
You’d hike your fare
To pile up profits
Has the war been that bad?
Courtesy and honesty lost?
Perhaps taxis without passengers
Keep in business
Keep driving on

Am I Not Your Child?

When the school bell rings
I see my brothers and sisters going
While I remain at home
Doing the scrubbing,
Doing the washing,
Am I not your child?
Please tell me.
When the church bell rings
I see my brothers and sisters going
While I remain at home
Doing the cooking,
Doing the pressing
Am I not your child?
Please tell me.
When the month ends
I see my brothers and sisters going
For checks they do not work for
While I sit down looking
Without getting a piece
Am I not your child?
Please tell me.
When you return from work
You bring gifts for my brothers and sisters
While I sit down looking at them
Receiving their gifts
Without getting any
Am I not your child?
Please tell me.
Are you not the one who born me?
Please show me my father
To send me to school
To take me to church
To give check when the month ends
To bring me gift from work
Show me my father, please.

Copyright © 2009 Nathaniel N. P. Nah