American Warlord (3 page)

Taylor decided that he had to go to America to take his next step in life. He later attributed the decision to a superficial event—his girlfriend at the time dropped him for someone with a master’s degree who had just returned from the United States. The degree reflected not just attainment but also heightened status in Liberian society as a “been-to”—someone who had traveled to and received education outside the country.

Each month Taylor quietly saved his accountant’s salary, eventually mailing an application to Chamberlayne Junior College, outside Boston. He did not have the means to travel abroad but wasn’t dissuaded from pursuing the opportunity. Soon afterward he received an acceptance from Chamberlayne and stitched together enough support from a mentor at the ministry to raise funds for airfare. He would become a been-to.

By the time Taylor arrived at Chamberlayne’s leafy campus in Newton, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1972, he had burned through his meager savings. When he showed up at orientation with empty pockets, the administration gave him a job washing dishes and mopping floors. That alone would not cover his tuition and board; Chamberlayne applied his earnings to cover his coursework but asked Taylor to move off campus. Forced to find a place to live, he turned to the loose network of Liberians along the East Coast. A cousin, Edwin Holder, found him a Liberian roommate, Edwin Lewis.

Taylor soon grew restless with school. Accounting guaranteed a solid, vocational career path, but he had a thirst for politics and wanted to participate in the changes occurring in Africa and Liberia specifically. Liberia was no longer just an exodus point for freed African-American slaves; it was a country with a diverse native population. During this era Ellen Johnson Sirleaf attended a graduation ceremony at the University of Liberia, she later recalled, and witnessed “a moving moment when the university choir had sung one of its songs in a local language. Everyone in the audience had applauded with great warmth and pride. But lost on no one, at least not upon me, was the fact that it was French that was stressed in the university curriculum, not [native languages] Kpelle, Vai, or Bassa.”
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In 1959, when Taylor was eleven years old, Kwame Nkrumah, the hero of Ghana’s independence movement and its first president, had traveled to Liberia to meet with President William Tubman and Guinea’s Sékou Touré. The three African leaders met in the decidedly humble but symbolic setting of a thatched-hut village of Saniquellie, in northern Liberia. What became known as the Saniquellie Summit was a portrait of statesmanship that reflected the times in Africa; as seventeen nations stood poised to claim independence in the coming months, these three countries were standard-bearers of sovereignty.

Nkrumah stood out from his revolutionary peers: not content to define himself solely in opposition to colonialism, he held a larger vision for a unified Africa that he hoped could elevate the continent’s geopolitical strength. But even as a young man, Taylor could see that Nkrumah’s Pan-African ideology was not attractive to the political establishment in Liberia, which drew its strength from the United States.
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If Nkrumah—a fierce, independent African thinker—represented to Taylor the new face of Africa in a postcolonial world, he also represented something unique to Liberians grappling with their nation’s identity crisis. Indeed, Liberia faced unique obstacles to “independence.” For one, the country was not a colony—at least officially—of any other country. Unlike neighboring Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone, no Western ruling power stood in the way of complete enfranchisement for its citizens.
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(In fact, Liberia had a sort of reverse apartheid that did not permit Caucasians to become citizens.) It had no colonial military or police force on which to focus rage against the injustices of society. Instead it had something more amorphous but equally pernicious: the division between the descendants of settlers and indigenous Liberians. The corrupt political culture that had taken hold in the society served only to reinforce this division. The weak, poor, and powerless were not only the majority; they were also those who worked the rubber plantations in Harbel and mined the iron ore in Yekepa. The powerful families in Monrovia passed position and privilege from one generation to the next. In the harsh dawn of postcolonial Africa, the greatest obstacle to progress for Liberia was clearly the type of “independent” nation it had become.

There was little chance that Taylor could participate in the sort of continental change that Nkrumah advocated simply by moving numbers across the page within a government ministry. He wanted a hand in making policy. He was influenced, he later recalled, by the views of the development economist Walt Rostow, a Kennedy and Johnson administration official and advocate of the Vietnam War, as well as by Stephen Tolbert’s efforts to develop the Liberian economy.
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His ability to study economics was limited in Liberia. Despite having little money, Taylor chose to enroll in Chamberlayne.

To raise the $3,025 tuition, Taylor needed to work full-time while studying. He found a job in nearby Somerville at Sweetheart Plastics, owned by a Jewish man named Max Greenbaum, who did not let the prejudices and racial anxieties of the moment color his relationship with the young African student. “He was a very generous man,” Taylor would say. “He permitted me to do my university and put in time to fill in the lost hours.”

Politics, though, quickly supplanted Taylor’s academic interests.
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Within the increasingly active diaspora of Liberians living along the East Coast, he found a forum. He began making the circuit of parties held by local groups in Boston, Rhode Island, New York, and Philadelphia. Taylor met several other eagerly political Liberians, Tom Woewiyu, a Cornell graduate based in New Jersey, and Blamoh Nelson, whom Taylor soon came to respect for his skill and dedication as a paper pusher.
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As active as the local groups were, they very much resembled society back home: inherently defined by divisions of tribe and background. The activist politics embraced by this group provided an opportunity for an ambitious young man like Taylor.

In 1974 the Union of Liberian Associations in the Americas (ULAA) was founded to bring together diaspora groups along the East Coast and provide a single voice for these Liberians in their nation’s domestic politics.
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But it also established a hierarchy in the expat community. (Taylor would claim to be among the group’s founders, but he would not serve on the board until 1979.) For Taylor, the ULAA was a starting point—the first of several pivotal organizations with which he would be associated.

Although this group was far removed from the domestic politics of Liberia, it had real leverage with President Tolbert. His predecessor, Tubman, the son of a freed slave from Atlanta, was credited with opening Liberia to foreign investment and modern development, but he represented the interests of the Americo-Liberian establishment. President Tolbert entered office determined to open Liberian politics and culture, declaring “war on disease, ignorance and poverty.”
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Some of the efforts that followed were true reforms: Tolbert ordered bureaucrats to be at their desks on time every morning, and he eliminated the requirement that government workers pay a month’s salary to Liberia’s only political party, the True Whig Party.
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Other efforts were more symbolic. Tolbert took his oath of office in an open-necked safari suit, rather than the top hat and coattails traditional to the elite, and he addressed the audience in Kpelle, one of the indigenous tongues. He even reached out to Monrovia’s poorest, promising that his administration would work to improve their standard of living.

Many Liberians thus viewed Tolbert as a leader in tune with the currents of history, but in fact he held fast to many of the fundamentals of elitism. He was a thirty-third-degree Freemason; membership in the group remained a prerequisite of political power. (When Tolbert met with President Gerald Ford, the Liberian president learned that his counterpart also held this distinction.
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) His personal life left little to admire. One U.S. official, Edward Perkins, took a very harsh view of the president: When Perkins met the Liberian president and first lady, he said, “She was recovering from the effects of a beating he had given her.”
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Tolbert was a Baptist minister who, aside from viewing himself as a reformer, had passed a law lowering the age of consent to twelve. He was “nothing short of a psychopath,” Perkins said.

In the late 1970s, as Tolbert settled into power, the future of the nation could be seen in the diaspora. This supraclass of Liberians included both the offspring of the traditional elite and a new generation of indigenous students and professionals, drawn to universities and institutions in the United States. Western education, along with the cultural literacy and connections that came with living abroad, was nearly as beneficial as familial connections and ethnic background. The diaspora organized and spoke with an—at times—unified voice that demanded the attention of leaders in Monrovia. It was easy to ignore the complaints of university students and marginalized activists in Liberia but less so among this new class of Liberians, who had a broader reach in the political and business communities outside of West Africa. For young, educated indigenous Liberians, the barriers to leadership positions in business and government, while still very real, appeared to be weakening. That was how the future looked for Liberia in the mid-1970s.

Charles Taylor was just one face in the crowd of young Liberians coming up in the diaspora. He belonged to both worlds, the traditional Americos (who inherited privilege and position) and the indigenous (who clamored for mobility in the new Liberia). His familial connections and experience all but guaranteed him a comfortable ministerial position if he chose to return to Liberia with an MBA.

As he became increasingly engaged in Liberian politics, Taylor also encountered political tensions in Boston. He moved into a flat in Roxbury, a predominantly African-American neighborhood that abutted the largely white Irish-American South Boston.
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After a 1974 Massachusetts federal court ruling, communities around the country were navigating the school desegregation issue. It took a particularly ugly face in these two neighborhoods in South Boston, where both white and black students were shuttled into their respective communities for high school. Riots and violent clashes between blacks and whites were common. In August 1975 black youths shut down Roxbury for four days, blocking street traffic to anyone other than black motorists. The crisis appeared entirely separate from the divisions Taylor was familiar with within his own society, but it gave him a glimpse of what political change looked like when taken to the street.

Soon after their encounter in the lobby, Bernice and Charles began dating. His pedigree set him apart from other young men in her heavily Caribbean neighborhood: he was an African, the son of a prominent family, and on a career path in government. When the two began to spend time together, she discovered that Taylor could also be shy and intelligent. Bernice had little interest in the diaspora activism that preoccupied her boyfriend outside work and school. His political life wasn’t a problem in their burgeoning relationship.

Indeed, despite their different backgrounds, the two had much in common. Both had children from previous relationships: Taylor’s child and her mother lived in Liberia, and Emmanuel’s daughter, Maisha, lived with her. Both were driven: Taylor’s interest in playing a larger role in the politics in his homeland was matched by Emmanuel’s desire to leave the ranks of the immigrant working class and provide a life of relative comfort for Maisha.

The couple soon moved into a Queen Anne shingled apartment building on Monadnock Street in the Upham’s Corner section of Dorchester. Taylor saw the arrangement as “French co-habitation,” but for Emmanuel, who was the sole breadwinner while her boyfriend remained in school, the relationship took on all the features of a common-law marriage including—nearly a year after they met—a child.
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On that February morning in 1977, Chucky Taylor was born between several worlds. Boston was almost incidental to the family history; it was simply where his parents’ lives collided. Chucky’s mother’s family had migrated to Boston decades earlier to find work, while his father had sought his education there. Underlying the family history were other, more significant migrations. On Taylor’s side, there were the journeys back and forth across the Atlantic, into bondage and back to freedom in Liberia. On Emmanuel’s side, there was the voyage from Trinidad, a polyglot island in the Caribbean—once believed to be the mystical El Dorado—that had been settled, in part, by African slaves brought in to work on the sugar plantations.

These two worlds shared cultural and spiritual links. Christianity, particularly the Baptist Church, was the dominant faith in both cultures, but traditional beliefs also held significant sway. In Liberia, the secret belief-systems of the bush—Poro and Sande, where the natural world of the forest was imbued with spiritual powers—were still part of Christian men and women’s initiation into adulthood.
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Trinidad, for its part, had the spiritual practice of Obeah, a type of folk magic believed to have migrated from Africa’s Gold Coast, or what is now Ghana, in the seventeenth century.
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In Liberia, the outward face of Poro is the “bush devil,” a stilted figure wearing a mask of shells. A similar figure can be seen in Trinidad: the Mocko Jumbie, a figure who walks on stilts, wears a mask, and represents a link to Obeah. The Jumbie, whose name means “ghost,” is associated with the spirit of a child who died before baptism and is cursed to eternally roam the earth.

Chucky was the firstborn son to both Taylor and Emmanuel. In Liberia, that role came with the inherent privileges and responsibilities of tribal societies; even among Christian Americo-Liberians, it carried symbolic importance within a family. In Trinidad, meanwhile, if the father of a child committed any wrongs during his life, his first son would be born with “a light on him,” meaning he would bear a curse for his lifetime.
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