It was on this long, distant afternoon that I found myself on a two-way call with a friend via WhatsApp, someone who often dialogues with me on a range of issues, personal, political, and existential. Usually, our conversations are intense, ranging from the serious to the playful and often pivoting to the intimately personal. Yet lurking in those conversations, there is always a recurring concern about the trajectory of our country.
After diving into the personal, the conversation moved to big-picture issues like a sudden jolt: the evolving political developments on the home front. It is about the rising ethnic trend holding our politics hostage, with key political figures orbiting their ethnic identities and building political alliances bordering on such a reactionary brand of politics.
He argued that the growing ethnic crisis vindicated his pre-election analysis that the democratic transition from Weah to Boakai would reproduce the same old wine in new bottles and the same discredited governing logic, as elections in Liberia have become a meaningless ritual.
My friend and I hold radically opposed views about the last presidential election. While his take that without consequential, fundamental transformation, a change of government is both a futile spectacle and a game of musical chairs is analytically sharp, it obscures complexities and offers a romantic view of social change and history.
But, true to my nature, I refused to dabble in idealistic puritanism. I take as my point of departure the dialectical understanding of contradictions and the identification of the principal contradiction at a particular historical juncture.
Arguably, in 2023, the Weah regime was it. Consequently, consigning the regime to the ash heap became a revolutionary and ethical exigency. When a contradiction poses an urgent and existential risk to the Liberian polity, addressing it becomes the immediate task. For me, this is the hallmark of dialectical thinking.
However, it was his lament about the growing ethnic turn in Liberian politics that prompted me to push back more forcefully, fearing that we risk misdiagnosing the phenomenon. Like someone aware of historical stakes, the gentleman waxed lyrical about how this new turn has the potential to undermine national progress. The immediate negative impact, he identified, is that this reactionary politics has turned ministries and agencies into miniaturized ethnic cocoons.
The consequence, we agreed, is legion and also normalizes a dangerous trend in society, where ethnic identities are weaponized against the ethnic Other and instrumentalized for both a piece of the national pie and a seat at the table. Here, politics is reduced to a narrow lens: sowing division and fomenting hatred, where the tribal Other becomes the imagined enemy.
Despite our agreement on the adverse impact, I reckoned there was an air of presentism hovering around his passionate rage. Like someone possessed by epiphany, I posed the question: if you remove the tribe or the ethnic identities of these politicians, what vision of social change could they possibly offer, and what paradigm of development would they utilize to make that change possible?
Our collective answer was nothing, and that nothing brought me to the conclusion that the hegemonic political force in Liberia is the figure of the shallow, a vacuous political subject whose rise is due to the ethnic turn in Liberian politics and years of national decline.
The Tribal Turn
But the tribal turn in Liberian politics is neither a novel phenomenon nor a recent pathology. Its backdrop can be traced to the 1980 post-coup era with the emergence of Samuel K. Doe as head of state of the republic. During this period, this reactionary form of politics became the method of politics of the two groups, who were fixated on extraction and primitive accumulation.
The first group, the indigenous fringe of the erstwhile Americo-Liberian ruling group, exploited their tribal connections to save their skin, feather their nests, and dislodge progressive forces from the military junta. The progressive radicals had visionary aspirations for a new society built on the ideals of egalitarianism, non-domination, and redistributionist economic policies.
This group, which included old guards such as Kekurah Kpoto, Byron Tarr, John Rancy, Edward Massaquoi, Edward Beyan Kesselley, and Jackson F. Doe, to name a few, weaponized their indigenous identities to curry favor from the junta and dissociate themselves from the excesses of the past. Arguing rather cynically, they contended that although they were officials in the deposed regime of the True Whig Party (TWP), they held no real power and could barely influence any public policy decisions, implying an insider-outsider dynamic rooted in exclusionary politics.
Alongside this group, a far more rabid band of tribal chauvinists emerged from the bowels of the military junta, largely making up ethnic elements of Doe’s Krahn tribal group, in figures such as Bai Gbala, Harry Nayou, Harrison Pennoh, etc..
These forces leveraged their tribal background to get a seat at the table and also constantly resisted the radical economic and social policies promoted by radical civilians in the regime. While the politics of the two counterrevolutionary tendencies were uncannily similar, it was Doe’s tribal folks who took such a dangerous form of politics to despicable heights, using tribal affiliation as the anchor for loyalty and protection.
This set the stage for Liberia’s march to the tribal “dark ages.” Ethnic arithmetic and tribal calculations also gave rise to the cynical politics of survival and proximity. While this form of politics was encouraged by Doe and performed by the two groups— not only did it not augur well for the country, but it also laid the groundwork for the emergence of shallow elements and the politics of physical liquidation of bodies.
The consequence of this was not just theoretical; it was also human and material, reflected in the razing of villages of supposed political rivals and the butchering of a section of tribal groups. This became the logical endpoint of a dangerous politics that turned the ethnic Other into the becoming-animal.
By 1983, these forces succeeded in purging the likes of Baccus Matthews, Chea Cheapoo, and Oscar Quiah (all from the Progressive Alliance of Liberia, PAL) from the government based on political gossip and trumped-up charges. Others, like Dr. H. Boima Fahnbulleh, Jr., and Dr. Togba Nah Tipoteh (all from the Movement for Justice in Africa, MOJA), had resigned based on policy disagreements.
Dew Mayson was pushed out of the National Investment Commission (NIC) and sent as ambassador to Paris, while Marcus Gbobeh was humiliated and relegated to some insignificant job at the Capitol Building. The chaos that ensued was not accidental but a byproduct of politics that lacked vision and became devoid of radical transformation.
Thus, with the removal and marginalization of key progressive politicos from the military junta, the aspirational principles of the regime were abandoned and replaced with more contemptible ideas about governance. The two anti-people groups—Doe’s Krahn tribal cabal and the indigenous fringe of the erstwhile Americo-Liberian ruling group— argued that Liberia’s problems were not rooted in historical socio-economic imbalances. Instead, it was simply that a fingerful of minoritized Americo-Liberian elite presided over the country for 135 years.
That was the orientation of the social forces that consolidated power post-1980, dictating the national itinerary. What followed was neither a revolutionary reorganization nor a root-and-branch transformation of society but a mindless speeding into the cul-de-sac: the coup thus became a counterrevolutionary moment.
But what historical conditions led to the flowering of that brand of reactionary politics, and why did it spectacularly fail, leaving ruins, carnage, and decadence in its wake?
History has proven time and again that politics devoid of radical imagination and progressive ideas always plunges a society into the cauldron of political and economic sclerosis, leading most times to crises that end in armed violence and perhaps even Balkanisationtion of the state in some instances. While tribal politics became prevalent during the Doe era, the Liberian state was on the verge of national collapse.
This is because history has shown that social forces that lack historical vision and progressive ideas have never taken hold of a rotten state and advanced it into an epoch of modernity and enlightenment. This failure is due to the lack of a genuine historical understanding and a progressive vision.
The Rise of the Figure of the Shallow
Indeed, the combination of the defeat of the vision of liberation and radical politics, the expulsion of progressive forces, and the murdering of junta members with progressive sympathies such as Nelson Toe, Thomas Weh Sen, Henry Zuo, Robert Sumo, and Harry Johnson allowed for the two counterrevolutionary camps to gain and consolidate power in their hands.
As history does not tolerate a vacuum, it also paved the way for the rise of a dominant political subject: the figure of the shallow. For it is such that no matter which dominant party one votes for, this figure governs. This political being is neither mythical, metaphorical, nor accidental. This dominant political subjectivity originates from years of national decline and decay propelled onto the historical stage due to the tragic-comic twist of Liberia’s postcolonial realities.
This mode of being, with its venality, lack of radical imagination, inadequacy, and insatiable cravings for wealth and prestige, is a product of our prevailing postcolonial condition. It is not unique to a particular party or tribe but cuts across parties as well as trans-tribal. This subject engages in pilfering and plunder, frustrating both radical imaginations and the people’s democratic aspirations.
Its mode of politics is grotesque and obscene, as it relies on political performativity. This type of politics is deceptive and is devoid of substance. But this shallow being masks its emptiness in the cloak of national power.
It is a grotesque creature that pretends to be an ally of the people—staging eating, kissing babies, establishing fake foundations, embarking on quick-impact projects, and scripting petitioning programs. During electoral campaigns, it dons modest apparel and revolutionary fatigues and chants national and continental freedom songs.
However, when occupying public office, it is clad in gaudy costumes and drives a blue-light convoy complete with sirens. It may mumble words about development, albeit in broad and generic terms, but without any genuine concern for the postcolonial masses.
It couches its relationship with them in deceit and in theatrics. The veil is pierced and removed when it exhibits its phony concerns about youth unemployment, the conditions of roads and hospitals, and living standards; yet, it works to keep the masses in the stasis of necropolitical conditions.
The figure of the shallow could have been Swift’s Lilliputian, Fanon’s false bourgeoisie, or Fahnbulleh’s psychologically unstable political being. It is none of them. But even with these figures, there is an internal logic and historical grounding, albeit perverse, that governs their actions.
There is always an explanation for their method of historical betrayal. The reason could be coloniality, structural constraints, or unequal integration into the international division of labor. Or the tension between the subject and agent.
However, this figure is formless, depthless, and devoid of any real substance. Tragic comedy, not in its literary iteration but in its philosophical mode, makes this figure hegemonic in the Liberian polity. Ethnicization, which involves resorting to primal irrationalities and regressing to the most reactionary imaginings, creates the groundwork for its emergence. Its shelf life is not due to deft maneuvers but as a result of the dual crisis of ethnicity and tragic comedy in the Liberian body politic.
