Fortunately, one can take care of many things in the hotel’s close vicinity. First — exchange money. Only one banknote is in circulation, one bilclass="underline" five Liberian dollars. It is worth approximately five cents U.S. Stacks of these five-dollar bills lie on tables set up in the streets — for exchange. To buy almost anything, you must carry a large bag of money. But our transaction is simple: we exchange money at one table, and buy fuel at the next. Gasoline is sold in one-liter bottles; gas stations are closed, there is only a black market. I look at how much people are buying: one liter, two liters; they have no money. John is rich, so he buys ten liters.
We set off. I am curious about what John and Zado will want to show me. First, I must see the impressive things. Everything impressive is American. Several kilometers beyond Monrovia a great metal forest begins. Masts upon masts. Tall, massive, and sprouting ever higher branches, spurs, webs of antennas, poles, wires. These structures go on for kilometers, and we have the impression of being in a science fiction world, hermetic, incomprehensible, not of this earth. It is a Voice of America relay station for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, built in the presatellite era, during World War II, and now inactive, abandoned, consumed by rust.
Next, we drive to the other side of the city, where we see before us an enormous, flat stretch of land, an endless plain bi-sected by a concrete landing strip. This is the Robertsfield airport, the largest in Africa and one of the largest in the world. Now deserted, ruined, closed (the only airport open is the small one in town, at which I landed). The airport building: bombed out. The landing strip: riddled with craters from shells and bombs.
Finally, the largest object, the state within the state: the Firestone rubber plantation. Getting to it is difficult. We are constantly encountering military guardposts. There is a roadblock in front of each, and one must stop. Stop and wait. After a while, a soldier emerges from the booth. From a booth, from behind sandbags — this varies. He begins to interrogate — who? what? The slowness of gestures, the sparse words (syllables, really), the flat, enigmatic expression, the deliberation and solemnity evident in his face, are meant to imbue his person and function with seriousness and authority. “Can we drive farther?” Before he answers, he will wipe the sweat from his brow, adjust his weapons, inspect the car from various angles, and so on. Finally, John decides to turn around; we will not be able to reach our destination before evening, and from dusk on all the roads are closed — we risk being stranded somewhere.
We are back in the city again. They take me to a square to see the remnants of the statue of President Tubman, overgrown with vegetation. It was ordered blown up by Doe, to show that the rule of the ex-slaves from America had come to an end and that power was now in the hands of the oppressed Liberian people. Here, if anything is destroyed, broken, ruined, it will simply be left that way. Along the road we notice rusted scraps of metal imbedded in a tree trunk: years ago a car collided with the tree, and what’s left of it is there to this day. If a tree trunk falls across the road, it will not be removed; people will go around it, onto the adjoining field, and eventually beat out a new road. An unfinished house will stay unfinished, a ruined one will stay ruined. Similarly with this statue. They have no intention of ever rebuilding it, but they will also not cart away the debris. The act of destruction itself ends the matter: if some material trace remains, it has no meaning anymore, no weight, and therefore is not worth paying attention to.
A bit further, closer to the harbor and the sea, we stopped in an empty area, before an atrociously foul mountain of garbage. I saw rats scurrying everywhere. Vultures circled above. John jumped out of the car and vanished amid the tumbledown shacks scattered nearby. After a moment he reemerged with an old man. We followed him. I could not keep from shuddering, because the rats were walking between our feet, fearlessly. I squeezed my nose between my thumb and fingers, I was suffocating. Finally, the old man stopped and pointed at a slope of rotting garbage. He said something. “He said,” Zado translated for me, “that they threw Doe’s corpse here. Somewhere here, somewhere in this place.”
To breathe cleaner air, we drove on to the St. Paul River. The river constituted the border between Monrovia and the territory of the warlords. It was spanned by a bridge. On the Monrovia side, shacks and the huts of a refugee camp stretched almost as far as the eye could see. There was also a large market — a colorful kingdom of impassioned, zealous women vendors. Those from the other side of the river, from the warlords’ inferno, a realm governed by terror, hunger, and death, could cross over to our side to shop, but before stepping onto the bridge they had to leave their weapons behind. I observed them as they crossed and, once on this side, how they stopped, distrustful and uncertain, surprised that a normal world exists. How they stretched out their hands, as if this normalcy were something material, something that could be touched.
I also saw a naked man, walking about with a Kalashnikov over his shoulder. People stepped out of his way, avoided him. He was probably a madman. A madman with a Kalashnikov.
The Lazy River
I am met in Yaoundé by a young Dominican missionary named Stanislaw Gurgul. He will take me into the forests of Cameroon. “But first,” he says, “we will go to Bertoua.” Bertoua? I have no idea where this is. Until now, I had no idea it even existed! Our world consists of thousands — no, millions — of places with their own distinct names (names, moreover, that are written or pronounced differently in different languages, creating the impression of even greater multiplicity), and their numbers are so overwhelming that traveling around the globe we cannot commit to memory even a small percentage of them. Or — which also often happens — our minds are awash with the names of towns, regions, and countries that we are no longer able to connect meaningfully with any image, view, or landscape, with any event or human face. Everything becomes confused, twisted, blurred. We place the Sodori oases in Libya instead of in Sudan, the town of Tefé in Laos instead of in Brazil, the small fishing port of Galle in Portugal instead of where it actually lies — in Sri Lanka. The oneness of the world, so unachievable in the realm of empirical reality, lives in our minds, in the superimposed layers of tangled and confused memories.
It is 350 kilometers from Yaoundé to Bertoua, along a road that runs east, toward the Central African Republic and Chad, over gentle, green hills, through plantations of coffee, cacao, bananas, and pineapples. Along the way, as is usual in Africa, we encounter police guardposts. Stanislaw stops the car, leans his head out the window, and says: “Évêché Bertoua!” (the bishopric of Bertoua!). This has an instantaneous and magical effect. Anything to do with religion — with the supernatural, with the world of ceremony and spirits, with that which one cannot see or touch but which exists, and exists more profoundly than anything in the material world — is treated with great seriousness here, and immediately elicits reverence, respect, and a little bit of fear. Everyone knows how toying with something higher and mysterious, powerful and incomprehensible, ends: it ends badly, always. But there is more to it. It is about the way in which the origins and nature of existence are perceived. Africans, at least those I’ve encountered over the years, are deeply religious. “Croyez-vous en Dieu, monsieur?” I would always wait for this question, because I knew that it would be posed, having been asked it so many times already. And I knew that the one questioning me would at the same time be observing me carefully, registering every twitch of my face. I realized the seriousness of this moment, the meaning with which it was imbued. And I sensed that the way in which I answered would determine our relationship. And so when I said, “Oui, je suis croyant” (yes, I believe), I would see in his face the relief this brought him, see the tension and fear attending this scene dissipate, see how close it brought us, how it allowed us to overcome the barriers of skin color, status, age. Africans valued and liked to make contact on this higher, spiritual plane, to which often they could not give verbal definition, but whose existence and importance each one sensed instinctively and spontaneously.