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Ray Martin Toe
Zamakolo
Not many men in southeastern Liberia are very tall, but there are hardly any kafadugbe* among the Krus, Greboes, Bassas, Krahns or Sarpos. In other words, southeastern men are generally rather sturdy of medium height. Standing less than four feet tall, Webbi Zama, a Weadabo man, was therefore a sensation.
Zama was a muscular fellow with a baby face. At 28-years old, he virtually looked like an 18-month old toddler. Born into the Weadabo Clan in what used to be Kru Coast Territory, the little man frequented Barclayville and other neighboring towns among which he rotated residency. Wherever he went, Zama attracted curious stares and giggles from unruly young people, as well as the polite but condescending courtesy of adults.
Notwithstanding, Zama maintained his sanity, and people soon realized that he was a regular bloke with a unique personality. He was a humorist, a subsistence farmer, a caring companion, an errand boy, a surrogate father – and it was all of these roles he took on that made him the enigmatic figure that he essentially was. In effect, a combination of qualities in his character sustained his manhood and afforded him the attention and sympathy of widows, divorcees and spinsters alike.
Webbi Zama was indeed popular with single women. The women especially appreciated his childlike humility, generous spirit and many consummate abilities. He was usually seen around the fire hearth running errands and helping women with domestic chores. In some households, the little man actually served as a sort of proxy breadwinner – filling their barns in abundance. Zama also got on well with teenage girls: he would dance and sing pop songs with them. Yet, no woman would openly consider Zama her intimate companion; not even the single women who ordered him around would admit intimacy.
Amidst the ambivalence, it was widely rumored that some single women actually ‘pampered’ Zama at home. One woman, who was notably conservative toward Zama in the day, was liberal with him at night, and nine months later ended up in labor. When it became clear that the child was Zama’s, she made no secret of her continued hunt for another man of her choice, even as she basked in the generosity of the benevolent Zama. During feasts in the village, she would leave the child with Zama, who made sure she dressed and ate well. Zama was good at home, but not presentable for marriage or the kind of man she would go outing with.
Meanwhile, Webbi Zama proved to be both a loving father and a caring partner. Not only did the little man baby-sit his only child; he continued to provide for his nonconformist partner. In spite of his loyalty, Zama was considered more a provider, a shadow partner, than a public companion. In an act of stunning cynicism, his beneficiary partner subsequently dubbed him Zamakolo behind his back, to the giggles of her friends.
Zamakolo, a satirized form of Webbi Zama’s name, soon became the vogue term on the Kru Coast for a certain kind of man. Not only did the designation become a household name, but it as well assumed a new meaning in the 1970s. Young women and teenaged girls came to use it as a pejorative description, variously referring to an older man of means who stalked and seduced them into having illicit sexual relationships. The name Zamakolo traveled throughout the Cavalla basin: the vast lands expropriated by the Firestone Company in Maryland County, to which young people flocked to improve their lives.
Young girls and women used the term to describe marriages of convenience between them and the emaciated rubber tappers who had expended their youth and physical energies doing semi-slave work. Uprooted from the neighboring villages, these men worked without returning home for most of their adult lives. Illiterate and impoverished, they remained on the rundown camps. With nothing to show after decades of labor, they preferred the ramshackle dwellings of the camps to the huts of the villages. With neither the skills to work nor the capital to hawk, the vulnerable young women stayed with the tappers in order to survive. They had no alternative but to avail themselves to the tappers, who at least earned wages, however meager, and could afford to buy food, soap and clothes for them. They also had to send soap, maggi cubes, and other provisions back to their mothers in the villages. To complicate matters, young men in the Firestone area did not work but went to school. Generally from the same background and of the same ages as the young women, they obviously got on well, the young women preferring to hang out with the younger men while at the same time live with the worn-out, old tappers who provided for them.
In the village, a Zamakolo was the much older man who kept young women and teenage girls as concubines, or to whom they were conveniently married. He was the old man who, through intimidation, cajolery, charm, and false promises, made them totally dependent on him. Isolated and illiterate, with no skills for survival, their mothers advised them to stay close to these older men of means who occasionally provided kerosene, soap, footwear, underwear, etc., and helped to pay the hut tax. Yet these men neither matched the young women in age nor in appearance. For teenage girls, Zamakolo was the unattractive, potbellied big man who, with the acquiescent complicity of their mothers, stalked and harassed them with lurid attention. He was the suitor who promised to underwrite their school expenses, but instead turned them into suckling mothers. Despite their gratefulness, they perceived this local man of status and income to be a sexual predator. He was the provoking ‘papay’ who exploited their vulnerabilities. Acting on his sexual fantasies, this so-called kwi man lured them with material things for sexual favors. Incidentally, he was the local government official, supervisor of schools, schoolteacher, local clergyman, physician’s assistant – a man in a position of power. Zamakolo was the Liberian version of a sugar daddy.
Zamakolo is the powerful detribalized man who, while professing Christianity and monogamy, molests the ‘heathen girls’ who wait on him at home. He impregnates his ‘house girls’ while his daughters attend elite schools abroad. He is the educated man who, in his protracted search for an educated girl, makes repeated promises to marry high school girls of his tribal background, but only gets them pregnant and then abandons them. He is the well-to-do man who rapes young girls with impunity. He occupies a position of trust and privilege. He is the legislator, cabinet minister, educator, clergyman, judge or the university professor; paradoxically, the custodian of law and order, but in fact a sexual predator. Because of his social, economic and political influence, Zamakolo has always gotten away with rape and the molestation of the female child.
Zamakolo, a name coined by a cynical woman to degrade a tender-hearted man who asserted his humanity, underscores the flaws of our national consciousness: cynicism, false impressions, and outright apathy amidst pervasive moral degradation. Yet, in its evolution, the term Zamakolo inadvertently evinces the pervasive menace of sexual exploitation. By extension, Zamakolo is a chief exploiter, analogously, the multinational giant whose lurking shadow is today spreading all over Liberia to continue the rapacious cycle of our national debasement.
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* Translated into English as a little person or people of extremely short stature, or, for lack of a better word, a dwarf or dwarfs.
Copyright © Ray Martin Toe
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