Monrovia: Guided Tour of War

I arrived Wednesday at night aroung 10pm from Air Senegal.
I departed Friday morning around 9am.
So I am hardly an expert on Liberia or its capital city - though I saw quite a lot I can't make grand pronouncements about the future of Liberia and where it is today.

But I can say that it is plain to see that Monrovia used to be a happening spot.
My Liberian friend [let's call him Jim] was a great guide.

We began our adventures 6:30 am Thursday morning with a quick breakfast and reading the morning papers. The main news of the week was that of people editorializing about the unarmed police force. I'm not sure why, but while the Liberian military and UN peacekeepers are armed, the Liberian National Police are not. Pundits were mad about the Minister of Justice suggesting that communities for local protection groups to keep their towns safe.

The second news of the week was a potential rice supply shortage (with accusations that the rice supplies were being manipulated by Lebanese minority businesses).

Then began Jim's guided walking & driving tour of Monrovia, which could be described as a war-zone history tour. We began by walking up the steep hill by the grand old Masonic temple which had been destroyed back in the 80s. Across from there was the huge compound where people fleeing the LURD rebels fighting Charles Taylor were gunned down by the LURD rebels. At the time, Liberians were begging President Bush to intervene in the civil war. Bodies from the massacre at the compound were placed at the foot of the US Embassy as Liberians gathered waving American flags.

The war tour continued with a walk across a bridge that was pretty strategic to all parties to the conflict. Across the water were two towers: buildings with their sides completely blown off. From that perch - buildings from which one can view the whole of Liberia - Taylor's gunners fired on the rebels (and anyone else moving about) and upon the bridge Jim and I were standing on.

Followed by the standard capital city fare (looking at monuments, UN headquarters, Executive Mansion, Parliament, etc)...We walked to an island in the center of the city - the place where Liberia began with a settlement of freed slaves from the USA and whites from the American Colonization Society (ACS). Those black settlers would go on to institute an apartheid-like system seperating the upper caste Americ0-Liberians from the super-majority of the population of other tribes of west Africans. There was even a scandal in the early 1900s where slavery was found in the plantations of the upper-caste descendants of American slaves - oppressed becoming oppressors.

The next early morn I toured one economic instrument of that plantation slavery - the rubber plantations of Firestone (now Bridgestone). The size of this place is amazing - endless rows of rubber trees with hundreds engaged in the rubber tapping work. The families live on site. There are markets, a fire station, schools - a whole town. The history of the rather shady century-long lease deal that the Liberian government engaged last century is something that I - ironically - read about at Princeton University, in the basement floor of the Firestone Library - the main library on campus.

Other observations:
-Ghanaian music is popular in Monrovia bars and clubs, as is US music. Most heard songs were "Cinderella Serious" (Ghana) and "Hips Don't Lie" (Shakir & Wyclef, USA).
- Electricity is back on in the business areas of the capital - in the papers it seems that this has made President Johnson-Sirleaf quite popular
- The problem of mob-violence, rape and HIV/AIDS is reflected in some bizarre billboards. I have pictures
- Never leave a cell phone in your bag when it is being hand-searched at Monrovia's airport. Yes, my ghana mobile was definitely taken as I checked in for my return flight to Accra. I was mad as you-know-where.
-The handshake-with-snap is not just a Ghanaian thing, and not just a black american male thing...it is also a Liberian thing.
- "Red beans" at Beatrice's restaurant on Broad Street Monrovia....wow that was good. Its meat in a bean soup that is so good: the spiciness of jambalaya though beware.