Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays

There is no real road network in Liberia. During the late-summer rainy season much of the country is inaccessible. Tonight the torrential rain is unseasonable (it is March), but the road is the best in the country, properly surfaced: one long, straight line from the airport to the Mamba Point Hotel in Monrovia. Lysbeth Holdaway, Oxfam’s press officer, sits in the back of an all-weather 4x4 outlining Liberia’s present situation. She has long chestnut hair, is in youthful middle age and dresses in loose linen; she looks like the actress Penelope Wilton. She “loves gardening and most of Radio 4” and worked for many years at the BBC. Four or five times a year she visits some of the more benighted countries of the world. Even by the standards with which she is familiar, Liberia is exceptional. “Three quarters of the population live below the poverty line-that’s one U.S. dollar a day-half are on less than fifty cents a day. What infrastructure there was has been destroyed-roads, ports, municipal electricity, water, sanitation, schools, hospitals-all desperately lacking or nonexistent; eighty-six-percent unemployment, no street lights…” Through the car window dead street lamps can be seen, stripped of their components during the war. Lightning continues to reveal the scene: small huts made of mud bricks; sheets of corrugated iron and refuse; more bored young men, sitting in groups, dully watching the cars go by. The cars are of two types: huge Toyota Land Cruiser pickups like this one, usually with “UN” stamped on their hoods, or taxis, dilapidated yellow Nissans, the back windows of which reveal six people squeezed into the backseats, four in the front. Our driver, John Flomo, is asked whether the essentials-a water and sanitation system, electricity, schools-existed prior to the war. “Some, yes. In towns. Less in the country.” Even the electricity that lights the airport is not municipal. It comes from a hydro plant belonging to Firestone, the American rubber company famous for its tires. Firestone purchased one million acres of this country in 1926, a ninety-nine-year lease at the bargain rate of six cents an acre. It uses its hydro plant to power its operation. The airport electricity is a “gift” to the nation, although Firestone’s business could not function without an airport. “All this is Firestone,” says Flomo, pointing at the darkness.

The Mamba Point Hotel is an unusual Liberian building. It is air-conditioned, with toilets and clean drinking water. In the parking lot a dozen UN trucks are parked. In the breakfast room the guests are uniform: button-down collars, light khakis, MacBooks. “Here’s the crazy thing,” one man tells another over croissants. “Malaria isn’t even a hard problem to solve.” At a corner table, an older woman reels off blunt statistics to a newcomer, who notes them down: “Population, three point five million. Over a hundred thousand with HIV; male life expectancy, thirty-eight; female, forty-two. Sixty-five Liberian dollars to one U.S. Officially literacy is fifty-seven percent, but that figure is really prewar-there’s this whole missing generation…” In the corner bar, a dozen male Liberian waiters rest against the counter, devotedly following Baywatch .

All trips by foreigners, however brief, are done in the NGO Land Cruisers. The two-minute journey to Oxfam headquarters passes an open rubbish dump through which people scavenge alongside skinny pigs. The NGO buildings are lined up on “UN Drive.” Each has a thick boundary wall, stamped with its own logo, patrolled by Liberian security. The American embassy goes further, annexing an entire street. Oxfam shares its compound with UNICEF. These offices resemble an English sixth-form college, a white concrete block with swinging doors and stone stairwells. On each door there is a sticker: NO FIREARMS. Here Phil Samways, the country program manager, heads a small development team. He is fifty-four, sandy-haired, lanky, wearing the short-sleeved white shirt accountants favor in the summer months. Unusually, his is not a development background: for twenty years he worked at Anglian Water. He has an unsentimental, practical manner, speaking precisely and quickly: “We are moving out of the humanitarian disaster stage now-water and sanitation and so on. Now we’re interested in long-term development. We choose schemes that concentrate on education and livelihoods, and the rehabilitation of ex-combatants, of which there are thousands, many of them children. We hope you’ll talk to some of them. You’ll see a few of our school projects while you’re here, and our rural projects in Bong County, and also West Point, which is really our flagship project. West Point is a slum-half the population of Monrovia live in slums. And as you’ve seen, we have extreme weather-for eight months it rains like this and the country turns into a quagmire. Cholera is a massive problem. But you have to choose the area you’re going to concentrate on, and we’ve chosen education. We found when we asked people what they needed most, people often said education first, over toilets, basic sanitation. Which should tell you something.”

The atmosphere in the hallways is jovial and enthusiastic, like a school newspaper. The staff are mostly young Liberians, educated in the early eighties, before the school system collapsed, or schooled elsewhere in Africa. They are positive about the future, with much optimism focused upon Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the Harvard-educated economist and first female head of state in Africa. Johnson-Sirleaf won the presidency in 2005, narrowly defeating the Liberian footballer George Weah. At present she is abroad promoting foreign investment in her country. Liberia’s expectations are on hold until her return. “We hope and pray,” people say when her name comes up. For the moment, her real impact is conceptual rather than actual: Liberia is having its female moment. Everywhere the talk is of a new generation of girls who will “take Liberia into the future.” The popular phrase among the NGO- ers is “gender strategy.” The first visit of the day is to one of the “girls’ clubs” Oxfam funds.

Abraham Paye Conneh, a thirty-seven-year-old Liberian who looks fifteen years younger, will accompany the visitors. He speaks a flamboyant, expressive English, peppered with the acronym-heavy language of NGOs. Prior to becoming Oxfam’s education project officer, he held down three jobs simultaneously: lecturer at the University of Zion, teacher at the Liberia Baptist Theological Seminary and director of education at the West African Training Institute, a feat that netted him ten American dollars a day. He is the team’s “character.” He writes poetry. He is evangelical about Oxfam’s work: “It’s time for the women! We’re understanding gender now in Liberia. We never educated our Liberian women before; we did not see their glorious potential! But we want the women of Liberia to rise up now! Oh, yes! Like Ellen rose up! We’re saying, anything a man can do, a woman can do in the same superior fashion!”

Phil Samways, who enjoys Abraham’s impromptu speeches but does not tend to encourage them, returns to practicalities. “Now, security is still an issue. There’s a midnight curfew for everybody here-we ask that you comply with it. We get the odd riot-small, spontaneous riots. But you’ll be fine with Abraham-you might even get a poem if you’re lucky.”

To Lysbeth and Abraham we now add the photographer, Aubrey Wade, a thirty-one-year-old Anglo-Dutchman. He is thin, dark blond. He wears a floppy sun hat beneath which a pert nose white with sunblock peeks. He rests his lens on the car window. Hand-painted billboards line the road. HAVE YOU BEEN RAPED? Also STOP RAPE IN LIBERIA. Lysbeth asks Abraham what other “particular problems women in Liberia face.” The list is long: female circumcision, marriage from the age of eleven, polygamy, spousal ownership. Girls have “traditionally been discouraged from school.” In some tribes, husbands covertly push their wives into sexual affairs so they may charge the offending man an “infidelity tax,” paid in the form of unwaged labor. A culture of sexual favors predates the war. Further billboards warn girls not to offer their bodies in return for school grades, a common practice. The moral of Liberia might be “Where there is weakness, exploit it.” This moral is not especially Liberian in character. In May 2006 a BBC investigation uncovered “systematic sexual abuse” in Liberia: UN peacekeepers offering food to teenage refugees in return for sex. In November of the same year a local anonymous NGO worker in Liberia told the corporation: “Peacekeepers are still taking advantage of the situation to sexually exploit young girls. The acts are still rampant despite pronouncements that they have been curbed.”