American Warlord (6 page)

Despite their disparate ideologies and beliefs, the group converged on the same idea: that the best solution to the “problem” of emancipation was a program of African emigration. The idea also found support in black communities in free states but was not universally embraced. When the society’s first ship sailed from New York Harbor in 1820, members envisioned the occasion as the departure of an African
Mayflower.
But within the manumitted communities, it stirred debate as to whether the path toward true freedom was in Africa or in the United States.

A half-century later, several years into emancipation and well into the Liberian experiment, when the
Edith Rose
arrived, the notion of a sovereign black nation on a black continent still had appeal for many African-Americans. The settlers aboard the
Edith
had set sail from Hampton Roads, Virginia, more than a month earlier, carrying with them little more than blankets, shoes, tools, and farming implements. The ship followed the Gulf Stream for several weeks, braving winter gales until it crossed the equator. Conditions were cramped but livable. Below deck, children attended to their studies in a makeshift classroom, while all the passengers congregated each night to pray and—when the weather allowed—to celebrate the Sabbath.

The settlers belonged to two companies: the Clay Hill Company from South Carolina and the smaller Georgia Company from Valdosta, the seat of Lowndes County, Georgia. The Valdosta émigrés were led by Jefferson Bracewell, the head of his sixteen-person family, who had left at a moment of extreme tension between blacks and whites, Republicans and defeated Confederates, the civilians and military. Despite—or perhaps because of—the presence of a garrison of the 103rd Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops in Valdosta, the area saw violence—including bombings, looting, and murders—long after the Confederacy capitulated. Political violence was an experience that had been shared by the South Carolinians.
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Reverend Elias Hill, who led them, had testified before Congress on the abuse he had suffered after the war at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, which had pushed him to seek a new home in Liberia.
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Over the weekend of their arrival in Monrovia, the passengers were carried to shore along with their belongings. The women and children of the
Edith Rose
remained in the capital, while the men boarded eight small boats and made their way up the St. Paul River into the bush toward a settlement called Arthington.

Arthington was just the type of place the society’s founders had envisioned as a starting point for this program. The settlement lay several dozen miles inland from Monrovia along the St. Paul River; it had been established only two years before the arrival of the
Edith Rose.
A party from North Carolina had pioneered it on a forested and hilly bank offset from the river.
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The town took its name from its sponsor, Robert Arthington, the hermetic heir to a British industrialist family who had donated one thousand pounds sterling to start the encampment.
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With his gift, the North Carolina company, led by a deacon named Alonzo Haggard, cut a town from the forest, constructing a school, a handful of homes, and, most important, a church.

The surrounding territory had already been “pacified” over five decades by settlers in a series of armed contests with the local tribes. The first emigrants in 1822 had established settlements on land where the indigenous tribes had lived for generations; within a few years, two of the dominant indigenous tribes, the Dei and Gola, set aside their traditional enmity to form an alliance against the newly arrived Americans.
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The tribes had a shared economic interest that was threatened by the new arrivals: the slave trade, carried on with French and Spanish traders like Theodore Canot and Pedro Blanco. Attacks and kidnappings soon became a hazard of life in the bush for the settlers. Eventually they decided the assaults required a response, and marching into the bush, they overtook a tribal fortress manned by fighters from the alliance. The victory stunned the tribesmen, and their alliance soon broke apart. While the Dei would lose strength over time, the Gola would remain antagonists of the settlers for decades.

In the 1830s and 1840s the government in Monrovia eventually came to support the settlers along the St. Paul River, sending a militia force to suppress the Golas’ slave trade. The conflict had further entrenched the hostility between settlers and the indigenous population, which would persist for generations. Two classes of Liberians emerged: the indigenous tribal Liberians and the settlers, called Americo-Liberians or, more pejoratively, Congo people. With each wave of settlers, the division became more entrenched.

By the time the
Edith Rose
landed in 1871, that split was fundamental to Liberian society. Émigrés like Jefferson Bracewell, the elder of the group, first faced the challenge of survival, before confronting the local politics. Bracewell, forty-seven, and his wife, Rhoda, forty, had a family of fourteen children and grandchildren, the youngest a six-month-old girl, Phillis. He was a carpenter by trade and immediately began working just under forty acres of land with his sons, cultivating coffee, cotton, sugarcane, potatoes, and rice. Some of the crop was for their subsistence; the remainder—in particular, the sugar and coffee—was for sale. The Bracewell women tanned leather and assembled clothing, spinning and weaving their own fabric.

One visitor to Arthington in 1877 traveled through the bush to the settlement.
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After five days, he came upon a two-story wood-frame home, built in an American style, neatly bounded by a fence—a jarring contrast to the thatched native dwellings he had passed on his journey through the interior. The village, now populated with four hundred settlers, sat on a plateau overlooking the forested banks of the St. Paul River. A vast coffee orchard surrounded the town, the hue of the leaves changing from green to yellow. “The view was delightful,” the visitor wrote, “not a blade of grass or slightest appearance of weeds among the trees.” The town had grown to house two schools and three churches, a Baptist, a Methodist Episcopal, and an African Methodist Episcopal congregation, and in that year, twelve new houses had been built. By 1888 the settlers were farming produce for local markets and as much as 100,000 pounds of coffee for export. One uncomfortable fact, not highlighted in the society’s publications, was the settlers’ reliance on coerced tribal labor to maintain their existence.

Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, Americo-Liberian society had become a grotesque mirror of the one the settlers had left behind in the American South. This was particularly apparent in Monrovia, where plantation dress and lifestyles had become the norm among the nation’s elite. “Nowhere else have I seen so large a number, proportionally, of dress-suits, frock-coats, and stovepipe hats as in Monrovia on Sundays or days of celebration.… Town, houses, dress, life—were all reproductions of what was considered elegant in the days before removal,” wrote Frederick Starr, a University of Chicago anthropologist, in 1913.
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As early as 1858, the new Liberian government was accused of selling tribesmen into bondage to the French as “apprentices.” Even the topography of early-twentieth-century Monrovia reflected this stark distinction between the classes: the Americo-Liberians lived on a peak—literally looking down on the rest of the city’s inhabitants.

The elite held fast to the vestiges of the American establishment and, in particular, to secret societies, which took root and flourished more quickly than political institutions: the Freemasons, the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, the United Brothers of Friendship, and the Sisters of the Mysterious Ten all had active local chapters.
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In fact, the first request to start a Grand Lodge of Masons in Liberia was sent in 1824, nearly twenty-three years before the government was founded. (The nation would become a constitutional republic only in 1847, after the American Colonization Society severed financial ties with the territory.)

The indigenous culture had its own secret rites. The traditional belief systems of Poro (for men) and Sande (for women) had long relied on secret initiation rites. In the case of Poro, a “bush devil”—a masked figure serving in the role of a priest—presided over rituals, almost completely undocumented, that were said to include cannibalism and human sacrifice. Similar reports of ritual violence would follow the Freemasons in Liberia, who erected a temple atop Monrovia’s Mamba Point. Both societies preserved their secrecy but eventually opened to one another. “It’s a pity you are not a Mason,” one Liberian told a Western researcher investigating Poro. “For then I could tell you more. The Poro is just like Freemasonry.”
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As the notion of political power and influence developed in the young republic, these societies would be instrumental in the lives of the nation’s leaders.

Liberia’s political culture also inherited unique contradictions from the United States. In
Bitter Canaan
, the definitive history of the creation of Liberia, Charles S. Johnson points out that Liberia’s “constitution was a quickly drawn instrument,” embodying the ACS’s idealistic intentions rather than the realities the settlers faced.
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It was crafted to echo the U.S. Constitution, lauding democratic notions that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The author of the constitution was Simon Greenleaf, a Harvard professor who had never set foot on the African continent. He lacked any direct knowledge of the indigenous people who would be “governed” by the constitution, let alone the complex political systems they had developed. Moreover, there was little precedent in Africa for the establishment of a democracy by a foreign power: the typical structures imposed on indigenous peoples were colonial governments that “made no pretense of democratic principles.”

At its founding, the government in Liberia professed to be a representative democracy, while it was in fact a one-party semifeudal state. It would take a century before indigenous Liberians would be granted suffrage. Even then the political elite remained entirely Americo-Liberian for 132 years, a ruling minority of 2 percent that was attached to the mainline Christian churches and Masonic societies, unwilling to yield their political power.

Yet the exchange between cultures wasn’t entirely one-sided. Tribal societies, traditionally governed by powerful chiefs who distributed power and wealth within the community, provided an example for the settlers. Monrovia’s top-down style of governance was more reflective of the society of the indigenous people.

The society’s division manifested within the settlers’ households, even just a generation removed from the Valdosta settlers. Serena Anne Bracewell and Philip Andrew Taylor, both first-generation Americo-Liberians, married in March 1918.
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As had become customary among settler families, the couple took in a teenage indigenous girl as a house servant, a practice that hearkened back to white slave masters who brought young black women into the home to perform domestic duties (and also to field sexual advances). Her name was Yassa Zoe, from the Gola tribe. Family members recalled her as a strikingly gorgeous young girl; yet as was common for her tribal background, she spoke limited English and had received only a third-grade education.

Serena Taylor ran a strict Baptist home, but her son, Neilson, in his early twenties, became romantic with Yassa Zoe, who became pregnant. Faced with the impending birth of a child, the family’s religious leanings ran headlong into the prejudice against indigenous Liberians. One side of the family saw intermarriage between the two communities as a greater taboo than allowing the child to be born outside marriage; the other disagreed. Ultimately, Neilson Taylor married Yassa Zoe, who took on the Anglo name Louise.

In the early twentieth century, the marriage of Neilson and Louise, if ahead of its own time, reflected the inevitable intermingling of cultures. With each generation the settlers became less American and more Americo-Liberian, a unique culture synonymous with power. In 1948, nearly seventy-five years after the Bracewells departed Valdosta, Neilson Taylor and Louise brought their third child into the world. They did not choose for him a Gola name like Jahmale. They chose Charles, a name descended from his father’s American line. The child’s place of birth, Arthington, made clear that he was a son of this new nation, Liberia, but his name—Charles Taylor—left no doubt as to which tribe he belonged.

When Chucky first heard from his father in late 1991, the call was not entirely unexpected.
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Many Americans caught their first glimpse of Charles Taylor on ABC’s
Nightline
in June 1990. He presented himself not as the military leader of a revolution but as a clearheaded civilian leader, dressed in a blue-and-white tracksuit with a single gold chain around his neck, speaking forcefully but persuasively into the camera about his ambitions to remove the peacekeepers from his country. His accent was not American, but the manner in which he spoke was.

“We want … for the American people to understand that this is not a bunch of headhunters out here in West Africa trying to shoot up a country for power. I’m not interested in that,” Taylor said.
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The statement was typical: a bit of truth balanced by a lie. Taylor’s army—really a coalition of ethnic militias—served little purpose other than to seize control of Liberia. For American audiences, it was a faraway conflict with little connection to U.S. national security. The interest for the U.S. government was to try to minimize the damage done to the intelligence and communications facilities it operated in Liberia.