CHASING THE DEVIL
The Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit
TIM BUTCHER
Chatto & Windus
LONDON
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Copyright © Tim Butcher 2010
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Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
By The Same Author
Map
Prologue
Chapter 1 A Stone in my Shoe
Chapter 2 Province of Freedom
Chapter 3 Looking for Bruno
Chapter 4 No Provocation to Anger
Chapter 5 Peace Garden
Chapter 6 Falloe’s Stick
Chapter 7 Message in a Bottle
Chapter 8 Screams in the Jungle
Chapter 9 Guinea Worm
Chapter 10 The Cry of the Bull-Roarer
Chapter 11 Daventry Calling
Chapter 12 The Devil’s Last Dance
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
In memoriam Silk
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart
Prologue
The jungle was getting thicker and the path fainter but I could still make out the figure of the young guide up ahead. He was moving quickly and surely, making steady progress along a track my tired eyes could barely pick out from the confusion of trees and undergrowth. Every so often he would slip out of sight, swallowed by the African bush, but then the blade of his machete would ting as he hacked his way clear of the thicket, surfacing once again just a little further ahead.
It was a battle to keep up. Clubbed by the heat and humidity of West Africa, I struggled to keep my footing on the uneven ground, my boots snagging on exposed roots and fallen branches laced with ivy. After sleepless nights in huts alive with rats, my limbs felt leaden as I wrestled through curtains of thorny creeper that tugged at my filthy clothes and left my face a fretwork of gritty grazes. White rings bloomed on the buckled brim of my sunhat, tidemarks for each of the sweaty days of trekking it had taken to bring me this far, and every footfall brought fresh pain from my blisters. Even my swinging arms hurt, chafed raw on their underside as they faithfully kept the staccato rhythm of my march.
But slowly a change took place. Nervousness started to take hold of me, weak to begin with but welling so forcefully it overwhelmed all sense of physical discomfort.
I was walking across Liberia, one of the most lawless and unstable countries in Africa, a nation left in ruins by a cycle of coup and counter-coup, rebellion and invasion, that had festered for decades. Its conflict helped spawn many of modern Africa’s most troubling icons – child soldiers, blood diamonds, fetishistic killers – and although the war had officially ended, its jungle hinterland was still regarded by many as off limits.
The crisis came four days into the trek when my local guide and trusted friend, Johnson Boie, could walk no further. Hobbled by blisters, he reluctantly agreed to take a lift on a motorbike to the village of Duogomai where I was determined to spend the night. The bike trail would take Johnson the long way round but I wanted to keep going on foot along a more direct path through the jungle. This meant trusting someone new, a stranger, to help find the way.
Using the rather prosaic English he had learned at a mission school before it was closed by war, Johnson begged me to reconsider. ‘Please, Mr Butcher, sir,’ he whispered, looking askance at the man I had chosen as a temporary guide. ‘Do not become separated from me. I do not know this man or his village. It is a major concern for me if I cannot be with you to guarantee your safety.’
At first I shrugged off his warning, said I would see him in Duogomai by nightfall and got ready to set off. But there was something in Johnson’s nervous tone and worried eyes that troubled me, stirring a sense of unease that gnawed away at my confidence as, for the first time, I entered the Liberian forest without him.
Suddenly the new guide began to look suspicious. I recalled he had taken a little longer than he should collecting his gear from his hut and, when he had finally emerged, the long blade swinging in his hand looked more like a weapon than a tool. Then he had seemed to dawdle unnecessarily, whispering to a group of young men at the edge of the village, each of them also carrying a machete. The gang then greeted me a little too effusively and made as if they were going to follow us. I convinced myself a plot had been hatched to lead me round in circles before delivering me to an ambush.
When I had set about preparing my trip through Liberia I was warned repeatedly it was too risky. This had always been a remote enough region but years of warfare had left only a vestigial system of law and order. While the country was officially now at peace, stories of murder and violence continued to leak out of the heavily forested interior. And what gave the warnings added menace was that much of the lawlessness was framed by darkly magical phenomena derived from the very powerful but secret local tradition of spirit worship. Ritual murder remains common in West Africa, nowhere more so than in Liberia, and among the various risks I had been warned of were trophy-hunting killers known as ‘heartmen’. They stalk human prey before attacking and removing the heart or another body part, taken specially for use by members of secret societies to imbue potions with magical powers. Heartmen are not imaginary bogeymen whipped up to keep unruly children in check. In rural Liberia they are very real.
In my increasingly jumpy state, thoughts of ambushes and heartmen began to mug my common sense as I set off without Johnson. The date was Friday the thirteenth, a fact that suddenly began to feel significan
t. With the guide charging ahead, fresh and on familiar ground, I blundered along behind, looking over my shoulder to see if we were being followed by the blade-wielding gang from the village.
I took out my compass and, through eyes smarting with sweat, watched in confusion as the needle span. To reach Duogomai we should have been tracking south-east, but the haphazard jungle route the guide was using swung due south, then west, then north, back in the direction from where we had come. A cock suddenly crowed. That made no sense since domestic fowl are only found where people are found. I began to convince myself the guide was leading me straight back to his village.
Wired through adrenalin, I had failed to notice a group of farmers who had set up a temporary settlement, complete with chicken coop, in the forest. My mind was playing tricks, fitting what it actually saw or heard into a matrix of fear and prejudice. Convinced an ambush was coming, I tried to calculate what I should do.
Did I have time to run into the forest and make my way back to the motorbike trail where I might somehow get a message to Johnson? No, that plan would not work because untracked bush in Liberia is so impenetrable I would soon get exhausted and disorientated. Maybe I could slip away, hide through the night, and then try to find my way back along the footpath to the bike track near the village at daybreak. But we were passing junctions where numerous bush trails star-burst in different directions and to find the way back would be almost impossible. The only idea I could come up with was to surreptitiously mark our way by breaking branches next to the trail, hoping they would be my ‘ball of string through the maze’ if I had to make a run for it.
I spent two panicky hours following the guide, looking over my shoulder for demons given life by my prejudices. But the more I peered into the jungle looking for heartmen, the more it became obvious there was nothing there and the fear was entirely of my making. When the guide eventually delivered me safely to the end of the trail I shook his hand firmly, paid the agreed fee and nodded a silent apology that I had ever doubted him.
After nightfall, I caught up with Johnson among the unlit hovels of Duogomai. He looked relieved to see me but not entirely at ease. I was about to mumble something about how safe the trek had been and how we must not let our fear of the unknown play tricks with our minds when he said a few words that silenced me. He was standing outside a mud hut with pale painted walls bearing a large, crude picture of a strange un-human creature. I asked him to repeat himself so there could be no misunderstanding.
‘This village has some interesting traditions,’ he said quietly, his eyes scanning the gathering darkness. ‘You see, this is the house where the devil lives.’
CHAPTER 1
A Stone in my Shoe
Sceptical Foreign Office assessment of Graham Greene’s plan to cross Liberia
I can clearly remember receiving my first death threat. In thirteen years as a journalist covering foreign crises I had had plenty of brushes with unsavoury regimes. The Angolan government had taken against me for reporting on presidential corruption and told me I would never again receive a visa to enter the country. The official government newspaper in Zimbabwe had denounced me by name on its front page. And the daughter of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb warlord, had once sought to have my press credentials cancelled when I described her as over-promoted.
But the phone call I received one morning at my home in South Africa was much more serious than any of these previous spats. On the line was a diplomat friend from the British High Commission in Pretoria with word from Liberia, the small, troubled West African country then ruled by one of Africa’s more unpleasant warlords, Charles Taylor. It was July 2003 and Taylor’s regime was in its death throes, with hostile rebels occupying much of the country and attacking the capital, Monrovia. In spite of all this, his regime still made time to pursue vendettas with foreign correspondents.
‘Tim, I have to let you know that our representative in Monrovia has picked up a threat against you from the authorities there,’ my friend explained.
‘What sort of threat?’ I asked.
‘The most serious type,’ came the diplomatically understated but unequivocally clear reply. We talked a little more and it became clear that, for the time being at least, it was too dangerous for me to go back to Liberia.
A few weeks earlier I had flown into Monrovia to report for the Daily Telegraph on the rebel advance. I was then the paper’s Africa Correspondent and was aware that, although Taylor’s regime had suffered many serious setbacks since fighting its way to power in the 1990s, the attack in the rainy season of 2003 was the beginning of its end.
Reaching Monrovia had not been easy. West Africa’s notoriously unreliable airlines routinely refused to land in Liberia during periods of unrest so, with rebels menacing Monrovia city centre, flights had become rare. When I turned up for the scheduled flight from Ghana, I was hardly surprised to be told that day’s Ghana Airways service had been cancelled. I spent the afternoon killing time and spotted a story in a local newspaper describing how all Ghana Airways staff had recently taken part in a three-hour-long prayer session asking for God’s help to keep the airline afloat.
I was not sure if prayer had made the difference but during a lull in the rebel advance, Ghana Airways did eventually get me to Liberia’s main international airport at Roberts Field, once one of Africa’s busiest and most strategically important transport hubs. Back in the 1960s and 1970s the stability of Liberia’s then fiercely pro-America government and its position underneath the equatorial flight path used by spacecraft meant NASA planners had ordered the runway at Roberts Field to be made ready as a possible emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle. Liberia and its main international airport had briefly played a supporting role in one of the great technological projects of the twentieth century.
The NASA connection was part of a long-standing link between the United States and Liberia, a parent–stepchild relationship that was close but not without occasional tension. A bilateral treaty had allowed American military aircrew to run Roberts Field during the Second World War, an agreement that led to a local town being given a most peculiar name. Smell-No-Taste, located next to the airstrip, was created to house Liberian labourers who migrated there in the 1940s to develop the facilities in support of the American war effort. American airmen did not want to eat local food so they flew in everything they needed, including vast steaks for the barbecue. The resulting aroma and the fact that the Americans refused to share their food with the local workers gave rise to the town’s name.
The dominant smell I found when I finally got to Liberia was one of decay. It came from the corpses rotting among the spent bullet casings on Bushrod Island, the closest point then reached by the rebels to the centre of Monrovia. And it came from raw sewage clogging the streets from broken drains overwhelmed by Liberia’s notoriously intense rainy season. But most of all it came from Taylor’s regime whose last months in power resembled the gore-stained finale of a gangster movie.
After so many years paralysed through conflict, Monrovia was a zombie city, a living-dead sort of place. Cars were a rarity and commerce barely functioned so its population was condemned to plod around the damp, dilapidated streets on a treadmill of survival. Some sifted through rubbish in search of anything of value, some collected rainwater in old bottles and others lived among the dead in shanty towns built between headstones in a city-centre graveyard. There was no mains electricity so during daylight hours government secretaries moved their manual typewriters from dingy rooms out on to potholed pavements where officials would queue to dictate letters. Cloudbursts led to a flurry of typewriter ribbon and carbon paper as the alfresco typing pools fled for cover. The wet season meant dark clouds dominated a sombre city skyline etched in green and russet – green from tropical undergrowth enveloping abandoned buildings and russet from rusting ironwork.
A visit to the looted national museum in a three-storey barn-like building, where Liberia’s first parliament sat in the nineteenth century, t
urned perilous when I ventured upstairs. Years of decay, caused by rain flooding through holes in the roof, meant the floor-boards flaked to nothing under my footfall, just a few puny crossbeams saved me from plummeting to the ground. I turned on tiptoes, held my breath, as if that would somehow make me lighter, and scurried back downstairs. War had cursed Monrovia for years but its impact spiked in the wet season of 2003 with every schoolyard mobbed by terrified refugees fleeing the rebel advance, checkpoints manned – if that can be the right word – by jittery child soldiers not yet in their teens, and occasional detonations from mortars fired across a frontline just a short walk from the city centre.
Amid all the mess, two buildings stood out because they were so conspicuously clean. Outside the first there were bulky American pick-up trucks, sinisterly pimped with tinted windows and gloss black paintjobs. In a city of arthritic-looking cars burning dirty petrol hawked in plastic bottles at the roadside, these muscle-bound gas-guzzlers stood out, as did the swagger of the pro-Taylor paramilitaries who used them. They were murderous, unaccountable thugs whose cruelty worsened the closer the anti-Taylor forces got to the city. A few years later Taylor’s son, Chuckie, would earn a small place in American legal history when, as an American passport-holder, he became the first US citizen successfully tried for committing the offence of torture outside American territorial jurisdiction. The offences were committed in Monrovia as his father clung to power and Chuckie led one of several paramilitary groups.
The other smart building, freshly painted and with its own generator guaranteeing electrical power, was the headquarters of LoneStar – the only mobile phone company then functioning in Liberia. For reasons that I never quite understood, LoneStar numbers routed through Monaco so you had to dial a number in Monte Carlo to get a mobile phone to ring in Monrovia. The company, profitable and cash-rich, was owned and run by the Taylor family and its cronies. With rebels choking off Taylor’s traditional sources of illicit income from diamond smuggling and illegal logging, the phone company had become his last surviving cash cow.