Monrovia Mon Amour: A Visit to Liberia by Theodore Dalrymple

Author:Theodore Dalrymple
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Specific Topics, Business & Money, Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government, Travel, Economics, Africa, International & World Politics, General, Political Economy, African, Economic Conditions, Coastal West Africa
Publisher: Monday Books
Published: 2012-05-29T22:00:00+00:00

THE CAPTURE OF SAMUEL DOE

BY

PRINCE Y. JOHNSON

AND

THE GALLANT MEN AND WOMEN OF THE I.N.P.L.F.

SUNDAY SEPT. 9, 1990

The video opens with a shot of Johnson. He is in his headquarters, sitting in triumph at a table with a couple of cans of Budweiser on it. Above his head is a picture of a very Aryan Christ. There is an excited hubbub in the room: the camera switches to the floor in front of Johnson’s table. There is the cause of the triumph and excitement: the captured President Samuel Doe, sitting on the ground with his arms tied behind his back, his bare legs tied in front of him. He has been shot through both shins.

Both sound and picture quality are poor: there is a constant fuzz on the screen, and all speech sounds as if it has been uttered through a mouthful of hot potatoes. In addition, the English is of the West African variety, and though I have been several times to Nigeria, I am not yet fully attuned to it.

The first words I understand are those of Doe, plaintively directed both at the generality and at the man who holds his fate in his hands:

‘Gentlemen, we are all one, Prince.’

It is too late for that kind of sentiment now. The vice-Field Marshal pats Doe on the head, and others follow, first to reassure themselves that the man they captured is really Doe, the man who held the country in his grip for a decade, and then condescendingly. Amidst all the hubbub it is difficult to believe that this frightened and friendless man on the floor was only recently at the pinnacle of power, whose glance caused men to tremble, whose whim was law, whose utterances were the cynosure of a hundred flatterers.

Doe wears a bullet-proof vest, but this is soon ripped off his back. Now he sits naked on the ground, or nearly so: the folds of his fat cover his groin, so that it is impossible to see whether he still wears underpants.

His body is soft, like that of the fat boy at school or, less charitably, like that of a queen termite; his smooth skin glistens with years of good living. Power has not only gone to his head: it has gone to his stomach. When he led the coup, he was almost a starveling; now he looks like a man who eats five meals a day, all saturated in red palm oil. The disconcertingly messianic stare of his early days in power, when he finished his addresses to the nation with the mindlessly demagogic words, ‘In the Cause of the People the Struggle Continues!’ was soon replaced by a facial expression of adipose complacency. His years in power did not age him, but they changed him, from an incipient zealot to an accomplished glutton.

From time to time, one of the crowd in Johnson’s room pours water, or even beer, over Doe’s almost perfectly round head, little glistening droplets momentarily shining like diamanté in his thick black hair.

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