Emmanuel (Part 1)

At twenty-five years of age, Emmanuel was encountered in the parking lot of one of Johannesburg’s largest shopping centres in 2005. He was one of the most delightfully courteous chaps, but kept pretty much to himself and didn’t strike up friendships with fellow car guards. The customers, however, were taken in by his friendly and helpful manner and Emmanuel made a reasonable income after he had given the management of the centre their cut of tips received. Be there sunshine or rain, he was found to be on duty at his assigned location – assisting ladies with shopping bags, lugging boxes from trolleys into car boots and keeping a beady eye out for Johannesburg’s notorious car thieves.

As a regular customer, Emmanuel’s section of the parking lot was sought out largely because he was forthcoming and would strike up conversations with drivers willing to engage in small talk with him. One of these informal chats led to the unfolding of Emmanuel’s story of the previous fifteen years. Initially only a few snippets were extracted from this fellow who was reticent about sharing his personal experiences of a grueling journey through west and central Africa to what he viewed as the “Promised Land flowing with milk and honey” in South Africa. In reaching out to him and learning about “the person” Emmanuel, an odd friendship was struck between a middle class Randburg family and Emmanuel from Liberia. Initially the chats would take place in the parking lot. Later, as this family got to know the sincere young man and became intrigued by the odd bits of his experience he tentatively shared, the interaction progressed to the point at which Emmanuel was invited to dinner and eventually came to be regarded as extended family. 

It transpired that Emmanuel was born in rural Liberia to a peasant couple who already had a few older children. His father had three head of cattle and a few goats. His mother tended their small patch of land some miles from the capital, Monrovia. There they eked out a meagre living as subsistence farmers. Their hut was constructed by his father and the family’s ambition stretched little further than passing down pastoral skills to the children, marrying them off and repeating the cycle of a typical agrarian lifestyle. They did not aspire to huge wealth or even the acquisition of much education. The parents had been able to keep the family adequately fed and clothed without the need for literacy. What they were taught, however, was respect for elders and one another. The virtues of courtesy and kindness were indelibly inked into the DNA of all the siblings. No amount of hardship or exposure to the horrors of a civil war yet to come, would erase the lessons learned from innately good parents.

Liberia was founded by freed American slaves as well as free-born black people in the USA. A project of the American Colonization Society (since 1822) that sought to give American negroes the opportunity for a better life of freedom and prosperity in Africa, Liberia declared itself a “republic”, the first on the continent, in a unilateral declaration of independence on 26 July 1847. The constitution was modeled after that of the USA, and the capital (Monrovia) was named after President James Monroe (an early patron of the ACS). Only in the 1860s did the USA recognise Liberia’s independence. Americo-Liberians arrogated to themselves an elite status and political power above the indigenous tribes of the region. In these circumstances animosities took root which would sprout many years later and spawn a civil war ferocious even by the standards of internecine conflict in Africa.

Emmanuel’s family were from the minority indigenous Gbandi people of northern Liberia. In the land of their birth they were second class citizens, not being of Americo-Liberian stock. They were, by the time Emmanuel and his siblings showed up in the land of the living, quite accustomed to being relegated to inferior status. As long as they could feed, clothe and house themselves as well as tend their patch of turf, it meant little to them that they were not highly regarded in the societal strata of Liberia.

Things began to change drastically in the mid-twentieth century, though. By the time Emmanuel was seven years old, he had already witnessed his parents being manhandled by renegade self-styled paramilitary forces. The upshot of it was that the family lost their cattle and goats to theft by these renegades, their hut was razed to the ground by fire and the whole family had to flee for their lives to Monrovia. They ended up in West Point slum where his father managed to scrape together some corrugated iron sheets, a few offcut pieces of wood that had been discarded and a few nails and screws – with some elbow grease a ramshackle shack was erected. The city dump provided material for makeshift furniture. Thereafter both parents scraped a living on the refuse dump as recyclers. His father was entrepreneurial and soon transformed their little recycling outfit into a reasonably profitable little business. A donkey and cart was acquired, then a bicycle and trailer and soon some staff and additional transport. Before too long the business was sufficiently successful to sustain the family and provide a livelihood for a few other folk, too.

By this time the writing was on the wall for Liberia. The country would inexorably sink into a quagmire of bitter civil conflict.

In 1980 a fellow by the name of Samuel Doe (a Master Sergeant in the Liberian National Army) ousted the government and established himself as a totalitarian dictator –the first non-Americo Liberian leader of Liberia in 133 years. He ushered in a sustained period of greed and corruption that were the underpinnings of ethnic quarrels, predatory elites and economic disparities of the most extreme kind. Emmanuel was nine years old when Doe was overthrown by Charles Taylor who crossed into Liberia from Côte d’Ivoiré. Samuel Doe’s supporters lashed out viciously and a protracted civil war ensued in which War Lords began to proliferate, each with their own interests and targets. 

Residents of Monrovia were subjected to the most barbarous acts of brutality and thousands fled their shacks and other dwellings. From as far away as West Point in the northern part of the city, Emmanuel’s parents rounded the children up and fled south towards the St Peter’s Lutheran Mission Church that offered sanctuary. About 2000 of Monrovia’s people barricaded themselves in this building – in the vain belief that a church would be respected even by wicked warlords. Scattered throughout Monrovia’s nooks and crannies were thousands of refugees attempting to remain a step ahead of forces loyal to Doe.

Huddled between the pews of St Peter’s Lutheran Mission Church were Emmanuel and his family. At the church doors were Samuel Doe’s thugs, about to breach the threshold. Armed with assault rifles, pistols, machetes and clubs of various descriptions, this murderous lot were baying for blood. Mostly of the Krahn tribe, they cared little for life and limb of all but their own. On 29 July 1990 30 Krahn government soldiers loyal to Doe breached the entrance to the church and were poised to spread mayhem amongst the cowering minorities. In their wake they would leave a trail of blood and gore.

©Paul M Haupt

[Next week the slaughter in St Peter’s Church will be discussed, as well as the start of Emmanuel’s epic journey down the length of Africa to Johannesburg, where he found himself working as a car guard warding off thieves and assisting little old ladies with their shopping bags.]