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29 August 2002
A South African musician who made a popular hit denigrating Indians in his country, charging them with racism and exploitation, was asked to apologise, since he was “dividing” the nation.
Nelson Mandela joined the chorus demanding an apology. The artist refused, saying the work of an artist is to spark debate on issues and that he was proud to have achieved that in his music, even if a sector of society found it offensive.
To some extent, in a modest way, I am proud to be slowly achieving that, too. But a greater source of inspiration is my gradual but firm liberation from political casts and cliques. True, there are inherent sympathies with the past as the nostalgia gradually evaporates. However, the single-minded determination is that those sympathies should never determine on influence what I write or how I think. Those sympathies should not lead me to deny others the forum to say what they wish to say, how they it, however offensive to me, or to bitter “comrades” of yesterday.
I am striving for liberation through repentance, repentance because the biblical belief was that social change was possible only and only if one was at the head of marching band for change political parties and groups. This is a dangerous lie that even those who are the chest-beating captains of “revolutionary” this or that know but are dishonest to admit.
Members of a given political party or cast are members because they share common beliefs about the kind of society to construct in victory. Once you disagree with the cast’s fundamental premise, you are not a member. Under Stalin, Lenin, and Mao, you were shot for not believing. In the America of McCarthyism, you went to prison, lost a job and family for not believing. Thus if one wants remain in the balance, not coerced to believe the cast’s beliefs, the dangerous thing to do is to become a member , particularly if you want to be a journalist. Your objectivity is swallowed in the collective’s objectivity, and this is often the objectivity of the loudest mouth or the most scheming Machiavellian within the collective.
Worst of all, unlike traditional political parties in enlightened societies, the political party in Liberia is the individual. There is no party, only the individual, and to belong to a political party is to carry the image of that individual, often paying the high and unjust price in terms of collective blame. You lose your identity to assume the identity of the “leader”” This is why the nonsense was deliberately circulated in Liberia that this paper was Amos Sawyer’s property. Denial was futile. The critics had made up their minds. Sawyer’s friend even if yesterday’s friend and today’s foe, was Sawyer’s. It was “Sawyer’s paper” because Sawyer was interim president, and in the psyche of many Liberians, only in such a position is one capable to own a newspaper. But the number of new owners never end.
Some of the charges against this writer and this paper are true, except that there are no apologies. Yes, I am “selective” in my “objectivity”, but this is the rule, isn’t it? The Cuban Communist Party organ, Granna, will certainly not print an article from The New Republic or verse versa. There are conservative, fascist, rightwing papers and sites, just as there are conservative and rightwing judges expected to uphold the law no matter the status of the accused. The yardstick, always, should be truth. How I interpret the truth is my business and business only. Others with different interpretations must circulate theirs. This is democracy in which the individual reigns supreme and the collective interest is protected through due process. And gain, in the case of newspapers, one has the choice not to read a particular paper.
On the other hand, the insults one must endure in all this is the constant prescriptions from self-acclaimed bastions of indisputable knowledge who have ascribed unto themselves the right to determine good and bad, with the arrogance that everyone must enter their self-conceited heads before thinking and writing. For example, my friend Tarty Teh had a classic answer for those pounding on him to write the “positive things” about Charles Taylor. “You write your positive things…, not me. I see none” Or they could set-up their own newspapers and sites to preach the gospel according to their heroes instead of perfecting the circus of insults against those they hate to hear.
During the 1997 presidential campaign as a proud member of Ellen Johnson’s Sirleaf’s team, I announced my repentance and departure from ideological politics of the cast and cult. Sorry if I disappointed “comrades,” but this is a personal decision without the need for a party politburo’s approval. I quit! I made it clear that as far as I am concerned, we have reached the end of ideology in Liberian politics. It was now time for results—schools, clinics, and rural rejuvenation in general. Marx and Mao were dead, and in any case, take a look at China today. It is a booming capitalist economy with 80 per cent of the population in abject poverty and US$700 per capita income. It is cutthroat society. Gone are the days of the romantic Cultural Revolution, when people were herded, executed, and punished because they did not share ideas of collective fate. The Soviet Union, the cradle of Marx’s world, has collapsed to become a Third World, third rate country depending on aid. Life expectancy is below that of some African countries. It is plagued with unemployment and alcoholism. The West has become Paradise for today’s Russians. The dream of collective fate is dead, buried in man’s innate yearning for the self. Today, the few surviving torchbearers of Marxism, such as the legendary Fidel Castro, have rebuilt their societies against odds not necessarily because they searched Das Kapital for all answers, but because they are decent, patriotic and nationalistic men. Were it no so, Fidel would have done far better than thieving Liberian politicians past and present in looting his country to further enrich Florida, since he is only 90 miles away.
One has to admit, without shame, that the little egalitarian dream of society has been buried by the inner instinct of man for the self, and there is no greater example in our midst that the mansions bought by the our ideologues “of the people” while the country was collapsing in 1990s. The dream has failed. Let us admit it and design result-yielding concepts along with the rural population that make sense, since we are incapable of resurrecting Marx and Mao back to life for answers that may not work, and have not worked because we are all greedy. We can do this with a level of modesty, with mutual respect of one another’s views, with no one claming high moral standing because there is no one with high moral standing. We have all, collectively, failed. The shinning example of that abysmal and tragic failure is clear. With all that we learned from Lenin (“What is to be Done”, his dos and don’ts in making a revolution no matter where) and Mao, flimsy playboys hijacked the “revolution”. That is partly because we are spineless, petty, suspicious of one another and disrespecting one another. We cannot claim to have a collective objective or collective dream. (There are political “allies” who, as means of denigrating you as an opponent, go the extent of questioning one’s nationality, as if Liberia is such an admired and supreme state whose citizenship is a source pride and rewarding. A friend told me how one of the “revolutionary” political leaders actually asked him learn Kru as a precondition for acceptance. This writer was once told to swear allegiance to a particular leader of the cult. )
What is true is the pre-eminence of the self over the general, and we should admit this instead of parading the same prescriptions that have failed. Mr Sawyer, as interim president, proved this beyond all reasonable doubts. So the ‘revolution” went to the Taylors, Goordiges, and the Ureys. They have become the people’s grave diggers while we quote a dead German with elusions the people are still ours. They are not! They are in the SBU (Small Boys Unit) and the ATU (Anti-terrorist Unit), prepared to shoot, as was the case with Sawyer who narrowly escaped, at Taylor’s command. We have lost them! We failed them, failed them because of inner greed and hypocrisy, and the faster we all admit this without insults and shame, the finer we cleanse our polluted souls.
We condemned True Whig Party oligarchy and its bastardisation of politics only for a man like Dr. Amos Claudius Sawyer, the proclaimed Ghandi, to declare that Taylor, who is the most brutish antithesis of decent politics, “won the thing fairly.” So where is the sense of unconditional njustice as proclaimed at the University of Liberia, now unfit for the children of its ideologues?
Hence, lacking answers, personal, unconditional repentance, to seek forgiveness for a cleaner soul, is my objective. And in terms of political alliances as a vehicle for fundamental social change, the Liberian experience is instructive in its ineptitude. There were many young people, amongst them Wee Wee Debah, Wuo Tappia, Momolu Lavala, all executed during the war because of their political affiliation, who died believing the social justice and egalitarianism they walked the streets and went to prison for were real and achievable. The agony is that they did not live to see the folly, the opposite—their untainted political ideologues lobbying for Lebanese, selling out to pathetic Europeans, becoming pr to wipe out the rainforest , all for bread. What happened to all the enticing and seductive ideas of nationalism? What happened to the war against “monkey works baboon draws”? What happened to the imaginary broom that should have swept corruption once and for call into the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean? There are hardly answers except to say sorry, we lied. Repentance is honourable and self-redeeming, both psychologically and for the soul. So I quit, and say sorry my people.
The sorrow which shows our collective obsession with the self while pretending to care “for the people” is that no one remembers these young, university students, tireless foot soldiers of the “revolution,” anymore, not even their children or parents who must endure the pains of their death. Not even their graves are located and there is no need to. They are expandable in our quest for the self, relying on lofty language that means nothing except to satisfy the insatiable ego. The moral responsibility of those who shared their elusions of a dreamy better society, those who cherished their memories and the innocence and lucky to be alive is to keep drumming against the deceptions fed to them. They believed that their politics was not politics per se, but social activism for fundamental change. They were wrong, and the luck of those of us who survived this bandwagon of clever deception is that we have the opportunity to repent and prepare others not to be fooled.
Excuses will not work, for the people are no longer stupid. Their eyes are open. Their time will come. It is fruitless to paint the cunning as saints for they are not, can never be. Thus signing a death warrant takes many forms. By knowingly refusing to act in the face of clear danger while in power, for whatever reason, personal or otherwise, leading more than 250,000 people to die and continue to die needlessly, is far greater crime than signing a death warrant for one pathetic criminal. Refusal to sign is not a show of moral strength. To the contrary, it is a manifestation of deep inner weakness in performing a job one admits its beyond his skills and yet opts to take it only to cause more sorrows. No, the beautiful ones in Liberia are not yet born. So let the deception end to begin a process of repentance
It is repentance time until we, individually and collectively, face the Truth Commission that must come into being if justice is to come. Hence. Until then, in striving to be a good journalist, hard lessons are learned, particularly on the African scene. The first lesson to grasp is to stay away from politics in the conventional sense of the word. One cannot be a journalist while attending party meetings and exchanging greetings with “comrades” because if professional standards are upheld, a “comrade” today will be an enemy tomorrow. In Liberia, or clearly in Africa, you do not criticise a friend and remain a friend. Criticism is violently resented on the plane of self-righteousness. And, of course, being a party propagandist means you must simply swallow the demagogic nonsense that comes from politicians. It is an unchallenging, insulting job that any half intelligent person should reject. Drafting press releases or statements for crooked politicians is the most demeaning occupation.
Time can be a greater teacher. As Editor of the state-owned New Liberian under Samuel Doe, the job was more challenging. In those early months of the coup, there was an air of high expectations for freedom denied for so many over a century, and one could write what one liked until local and international advisors of the military began seeing Communism in every line. But it was a far more respectable job than following charlatans at party congresses. Were one to rewind the hand of time, I would have done this for William Tolbert, not because he was a perfect man, but because, in my book, he was a far superior nationalist than the fire-chewing, self-styled revolutionaries who preached one set of jargon and practised another.
Here is my test of a true nationalist: Houphouet Boigny, I am told, once advised Tolbert to buy a house in Abidjan. Tolbert looked at the man in disbelief, laughed and asked: “Why don’t you buy one in Monrovia?” If honesty was not so scarce and replaced by mundane rhetoric of the 17th or 18th century, how would one compare such a man with the self-proclaimed revolutionaries who bought homes in America when their societies were crumbling, or those who became bag boys for sorry Europeans like Gus Kouwenhoven? How can one really imagine Steve Tolbert carrying Gus Kouwenhoven or George Haddas’s bag as a servant? James T. Philips was a successful farmer, a determined agriculturist who would have never carried the bags of Lebanese or Europeans for bread, something our khaki wearing “revolutionaries” are shameless to do and yet defend in the name “of the people”. When one betrays a concept, betrays the foundations of a new society built in university classrooms with credulous students imbibing the heavy doses of that destructive opium of lies and deception, that person is more dangerous than men like Charles Taylor or Samuel Doe, who never spread deception of their honesty. It is one thing condemning Charles Taylor as a thief. But the truth is that Taylor never pretended to be a revolutionary or an honest man. The military liked him because he showed them how to steal and he was flamboyant. They didn’t like him because he wore Mao suits and quoted Vladimir Lenin or the dead German Karl Marx. This is the difference. He is what he is, what he has been all along, and you cannot totally blame the man if Liberians saw these qualities and said, “yes, this is one man for national redemption”.
Therefore, since we all now admit that Liberian officials cannot be stopped from stealing, I take my chances with those who steal, create local employment, and build their mansions in the country, never the crooked ones who milk their country on behalf of the people, the masses. These are my nationalists, my heroes and my revolutionaries.
There are certain mistakes that carry indelible stigmas. Alliance with professional politicians while striving for independence as a journalist is one of them. It is like marriage. It carries its burdens, particularly if one partner has a value system that is at odds with the others’. This is why I am not running a party organ with the Central Committee as my editorial board. It is independent, accountable to no ideological guide who must decide which articles are in “national interest”, good for “the great leader” or party principles.
Surviving a past image is difficult, but the process of liberation can begin. Once every one, from Charles Taylor’s paid mudslingers to the booths-wearing bearded “comrades” of yesterday begin to point fingers and bring your pants down for not seeing events through their eyes, redemption is near.
I must admit that the awakening to see the futility of political alliance, the dangers of believing that politics as we know it in Liberia is meant for fundamental change, came to me during my brief association with Sawyer’s interim government. It was a vision. Never have I been near the corridors of powers. It is here that you get the inner baptism of the chicanery, double crossing, and classic betrayers. Unless one is a politician in the true Liberian sense of the word, survival is impossible. It is more honourable, more rewarding doing what was trained to do. Being a journalist, independent, with no one buying your bread, is a feeling no politician can imagine. So throw your canons. They are needed for liberation and total redemption of the soul.
“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God, free at last!”
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