It is hardly surprising that in such a situation the country awaits the slightest opportunity to rid itself of Doe and his people. A certain Charles Taylor comes to its aid, a former Doe associate who, as the president claimed, stole a milllion dollars from him before decamping for the United States, where he got into some business trouble, went to prison, escaped, and surfaced suddenly on the shores of the Ivory Coast. From here, with a group of sixty fighters, he begins a war against Doe in December of 1989. Doe could have easily destroyed Taylor, but he sent out against him an army of barefoot Krahn, who, the minute they left Monrovia, instead of fighting Taylor, fell to plundering and stealing whatever and wherever they could. News of this army of robbers spread quickly through the jungle, and the terrified populace, hoping for refuge and protection, started to flee to Taylor. Taylor’s army grew at lightning speed, and in a mere six months arrived at the outskirts of Monrovia. A quarrel erupts in the Taylor camp: who will get to actually take the city and seize the spoils? Taylor’s chief of staff, Prince Johnson, also a former associate of Doe, breaks with Taylor and forms his own army. Now three forces — Doe’s, Taylor’s, and Johnson’s — are fighting in the city for its possession. Monrovia lies in ruins, entire neighborhoods go up in flames, corpses line the streets.
Finally, the countries of West Africa intervene. Nigeria sends a landing party by sea, which reaches the port in Monrovia in the summer. Doe hears of this and decides to pay the Nigerians a visit. On September 9, 1990, he gathers his entourage and sets out for the port in a Mercedes. The president drives through an exhausted, devastated, plundered, and deserted town. He reaches the port, but Johnson’s people are already waiting for him there. They open fire. Doe’s entire security detail is killed. He himself takes several bullets in the legs and is unable to escape. He is captured, his hands are tied behind his back, and he is dragged off to be tortured.
Johnson, hungry for publicity, orders the torture scene to be carefully recorded on film. We see Johnson sitting and drinking beer. A woman stands next to him, fanning him and wiping the sweat from his brow. On the floor sits a bound Doe, dripping with blood. His face is so battered you can barely see his eyes. Johnson’s men crowd around, mesmerized by the sight of the dictator’s agony. For six months now this regiment has been crossing the country robbing and killing, yet the sight of blood can still work them up into a state of ecstasy, a frenzy. Young boys push closer; each wants to see, to sate his eyes. Doe, his head swollen from blows, is sitting naked in a pool of blood, wet from the blood, sweat, and the water they pour over him to keep him from fainting. “Prince!” Doe mutters to Johnson (he addresses him by his first name, because these men who are fighting one another and devastating the country are all friends — Doe, Taylor, and Johnson are friends). “Just have them loosen the ropes on my hands. I will tell you everything, just loosen the ropes!” Clearly, his hands have been tied so tightly that this hurts him more than his bullet-riddled legs. But Johnson just yells at Doe in a local creole dialect. It is impossible to understand most of what he says, except for one thing: he demands that Doe tell him his bank account number. Whenever a dictator is seized in Africa, the entire ensuing inquisition, the beatings, the tortures, will inevitably revolve around one thing: the number of his private bank account. In local opinion, the politician is synonymous with the leader of a criminal gang, who does business trading arms and narcotics and stashes away money in foreign accounts, knowing that his career will not be long, that eventually he will have to flee and will need the wherewithal to live.
“Cut off his ears!” Johnson shouts, furious that Doe will not talk (although Doe says that he is willing to!). Soldiers throw the president down on the floor, hold him down with their boots, and one of them cuts off his ear with a bayonet. An inhuman roar of pain resounds.
“The second ear!” Johnson yells. There is pandemonium; everyone is excited, quarreling, each would like to cut off the president’s ear. The same screams again.
They raise the president. Doe sits propped by a soldier’s boots, swaying, his earless head flowing with blood. Johnson simply doesn’t know what to do next. Order that his nose be cut off? His hand? Leg? He has clearly run out of good ideas. The whole thing is beginning to bore him. “Take him away!” he commands the soldiers, who carry him off for further tortures (also filmed). Doe lived for several hours more, and died from loss of blood. When I was in Monrovia, the video showing him being tortured was the hottest ticket in town. However, there were few video cassette players in the city, and, furthermore, there were frequent power outages. To see Doe’s torment (the entire film lasted two hours), people had to invite themselves to the homes of their more well-to-do neighbors or go to those bars where the tape was running nonstop.
Those who write about Europe have a comfortable life. For example, the writer can stop for a while in Florence (or place his hero there). And that’s it — history does the rest for him. Endless subject matter is provided to him by the works of architects who erected Florentine churches; of sculptors, who created the extraordinary statues; of wealthy citizens, who could afford the ornamental Renaissance houses. All this he can describe without moving from one place, or by taking a short walk through the city. “I stood in the Piazza del Duomo,” writes an author who found himself in Florence. He can follow this up with many pages of description of the richness of objects, of the miracles of art, the creations of human genius and taste that surround him on all sides, which he sees everywhere, in which he is immersed. “And now I am walking through Il Corso and Borgo degli Albizi toward the Michelangelo Museum, since I must see the bas relief of the Madonna della Scala,” our author writes. How pleasant for him! It is enough that he walk and look. What is all around him practically writes itself. He can create an entire chapter out of this short walk. There is such a diversity of everything here, such profusion, such inexhaustibility! Take Balzac. Take Proust. Pages upon pages listing, recording, cataloguing objects and articles invented and executed by thousands of cabinetmakers, carvers, fullers of cloth, and stonecutters, by countless skilled, sensitive, and solicitous hands, which built streets and cities in Europe, erected houses and appointed their interiors.
Monrovia puts the newcomer in an entirely different situation. Identical cheap and unkempt houses stretch on for kilometers, streets changing into streets and neighborhoods into neighborhoods so imperceptibly that only fatigue, which you will feel quickly in this climate, will inform you that you have passed from one part of the city into another. The interiors of the houses (with the exception of a few villas belonging to the eminent and the rich) are also uniformly poor and monotonous. A table, chairs or stools, a metal conjugal bed, mats out of raffia or plastic for the children, nails on the wall for hanging clothes, some pictures, most often torn out of glossy magazines. A large pot for cooking rice, a smaller one for preparing the sauce, cups for drinking water and tea. A plastic washbowl, which in the event of flight (lately a frequent occurrence here, as battles kept on erupting) serves as a handy suitcase women can carry on their heads.