Black Man’s Wish

A few weeks ago, Saypah was telling a story about a woman who got raped by a chimpanzee. I know, incredibly random. But also striking – was this a story that she heard growing up, or something that was told during/after the war? Rape was so common here during the war, and is still a huge problem – we’ve heard a really wide range of estimates on the number of women who have experience sexual abuse, ranging from 33% to 75%, but the fact remains: a large number of women in Liberia have been the victim of some sort of sexual abuse. It seems logical that stories like this are the result of the years and years of conflict. They have to be. It was interesting because she told this story with all the kids listening, the idea of “rape” wasn’t something she hid from them. Basically, a woman has a pet chimpanzee, but as it grows up it gets tooooo strong and toooo big. One day, the chimp rapes her and she gets pregnant. Her husband has been dead for a long time, so many people in the village are whispering and there are many rumors. The woman is scared that the baby will be deformed but it’s a nice little boy and he grows up happy and healthy, but never knows who his father is.

He takes a wife and she gets pregnant. When she has the baby, it’s a chimpanzee. The nurses at the hospital are scared, so they kill it and tell the couple the baby just died. The same thing happens a second time. Then a third. On the fourth baby the nurse decides she has to say something, so she calls the man in and tells him, “Look. Your baby is a chimpanzee. All the others were too but I killed them.” And the man was veeeery angry, so he went to his mother and demanded to know who his father was, and the mother tried to lie and lie, but she knew that she had to tell him. So she told him what the chimpanzee did to her and the son grew very angry, very very angry. He went to the chimpanzee and he killed it. Then he killed his mother. Then he killed himself.

Seriously, that’s how the bedtime story ended. I was like, “Ummmm, well, wow.” What do you say to an ending like that?!? I mean, that has to be a remnant of war: a horrible story with a theme of rape and murder? I just listened, I don’t want to butt in and say, “No, that’s impossible. This is biologically impossible.” Maybe I should have – the kids are listening and “learning” . . .but I don’t know, she was so emphatic, and she believed it so much. She’s quite a good storyteller actually, it’s just that this story was so jarring.

After a little reflective silence, Saypa continued, “You see, the black man is always destroying. That is his wish. But white man’s wish put ship on the water. White man’s wish put plane in the sky. White man’s wish made the radio talk. White man’s wish put submarine under the sea. Black man’s wish is to destroy. Black man’s wish is to kill small children. Black man’s wish is bad.”

Wow, wow, wow. What do you say to that? No! Not all Africans want to destroy! Not all Africans want to kill! Most don’t! At all! But what do I know? She was the one who lived through war, who witnessed the murder and rape of her family and friends. I can tell her she’s wrong, I can tell her that human-chimp babies are biologically impossible, I can tell her that the “black man’s wish” is not to destroy, I can tell her there are many “white man’s wish”-es that are bad and wrong and destructive, I can tell her these things but I really don’t know what it will accomplish.

It’s hard to imagine what this country was like without war, before war. It comes up suddenly, in simple conversations, sometimes in matter of fact tones, sometimes tones of sadness, sometimes tones of pride: I survived. Matthew, who works in the Peace Building Unit with Thorodd, my classmate from Georgetown, drove us to work a couple times. One day, we were simply driving, chatting about mundane things one minute and then suddenly the conversation shifts to the day he had to flee to Cote d’Ivoire and almost died on the way: “When we crossed the border, we were so happy. Covered in mud. No clothes. But it was the happiest feeling ever.”

At the soccer game last week (more on that at some point. . .), my friend Javi met and talked with some ex-combatants. Javi can certainly tell the story better and in much more detail (my roommate Jenny and I are hoping he’ll write something to put up as a guest post, though it might be in Spanish….). Basically the boys were 24 years old – making them about 18 when the war ended. Making them incredibly young when the war started. They told him about doing/being forced to do cocaine, heroin, and pot as seven-year-olds and then going out to kill people. Javi talked about their scars – bullet wounds, large cuts, needle marks – which they showed him. The one guy was in Chucky Taylor’s Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU). Chucky is insane – he grew up in Orlando but later joined his infamous father, Charles Taylor, in Liberia. If you want a better idea of what this young 24-year-old probably witnessed/participated in, and how Chucky Taylor went from Orlando to his father’s stronghold in Gbarnga (the town I’ve visited a few times…) to being the commander of a security unit known for its utter brutality, and just to get a better sense of what child soldier/ex-combatants went through, and what Liberia was like during the civil war – read this article:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/22828415/american_warlord/2

Hearing Javi tell the story – the point he made that was most intense was the fact that this 24-year-old kept saying, kept wishing, with anger rising in his voice, “But that life is over! I want a happy life! I want a happy life!” He’s 24. He can’t go back to his village because the people know what he did. The police know him. He’s marked as a killer. As Javi put it: “They not only stole his childhood away from him. They stole his entire life.” Parts of everyone’s life were stolen – from the victims, from the ex-combatants, from the people that fled to Guinea, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, and the US. And it always comes up. It didn’t go away when Ellen got elected: all the underlying tensions are still in place and hearing Javi talk about his encounter with that 24-year-old, it just highlights how tenuous the peace actually is. There is a whole population of fighters here (who were often victims as well), and there’s a whole population of straight-forward victims – and there aren’t jobs, and there aren’t strong local governments….but the commanding structures of these militias are still in place. Yet on the surface, it’s a peaceful country, it’s moving forward, there’s hope. But there can’t be any of those things if you’re not addressing the needs of people who wish for happy lives but who have been branded as life-long killers.

There are definitely programs and initiatives going on – Thorodd just visited an agricultural center in Nimba County that works extensively with ex-combatants. They go out in to communities and talk to them about whether or not they will accept reformed soldiers back. Meanwhile, they are training these former soldiers in a 4-month agricultural skills training program. If they successfully complete the program, they’re given some capital to start their projects and then sensitively reintegrated into the host communities. I’m really not sure how “sensitive reintegration” works on a practical level. . . but I’m hoping to get up there and visit the center at some point.

So, the black man’s wish vs. the white man’s wish. I should have told Saypah she was wrong. When Charles Taylor and Chucky were around, people just needed to survive, a lot of the killers were children! A seven-year-old forced to do drugs and shoot family members isn’t making a choice. And once you’re forced to do that: what else is left to do but keep killing? Charles Taylor’s Presidential campaign slogan speaks volumes: “He killed my Ma. He killed my Pa. But I will vote for him.” In a country where this mentality has been instilled in a large portion of the population, there’s no capacity to wish. The actions Saypah witnessed weren’t the “black man’s wish” in Liberia. Everyone just wanted to survive, the wish is now – to move on, to have a happy life. The challenges are so vast though, it’s hard to imagine the wish coming true for so many in a generation of victims and fighters.