By Sherman C. Seequeh (A Liberian Journalist and Writer)
I did not plan to write this. It came to me in a dream, in the small hours of the morning, and I have lived long enough to know you do not argue with a thing that comes to you that way. I am only writing it down. Take it however you wish. I take it as a warning.
In the dream I was standing in an empty council hall, in a country that was mine and yet not quite mine — a land shaped just like ours, with the same river and the same old wounds, though the dream never once called its name. At the far end, in a corner the lamps could not reach, sat an old man. He was one of those elders our country used to produce and no longer does: a voice like dry-season thunder, eyes that had watched every government come in looking like a saviour and go out looking like a thief, and the patience of a man who has buried most of the things he warned about.
He did not greet me. He only said that the men now in power in that country were about to open the oldest book in Liberian politics, and that I should watch closely, because one day I would be asked whether I had seen it.
The Oldest Book
“When a ruler is cornered,” the old man said, “he does not answer the charge against him. He cannot, because the charge is true. So he does something else. He stages a drama. He starts a rumour. He builds a fake plot out of nothing and sets it on fire, and while the whole nation turns to look at the smoke, his hand quietly reaches out and grabs whoever he is afraid of. That is the book. In this dream-country they name it after their eighteenth president, the one who sat the longest and mastered the trick. The Tubman playbook, they call it. And they are about to open it again.”
He told me that the government of that dream-country, its own clothes stained beyond washing in a big scandal of white powder and dirty money, had decided to take its oldest rival’s clothes and dip them in the same oil — so that, with both now stained, no one could say anymore who spilled the oil. Soon, he said, they would start calling the big men of the rival party to their security offices to sit and make statements. Some they would release, and some they would keep, and who was kept and who was freed would be decided not by guilt but by whichever choice told the better story.
I Doubted the Old Man
And in the dream, I doubted him. I told him he had grown bitter sitting there in the dark. Surely, I said, no government would be so shameless — to stage a lie and feed real men into it just to cover its own shame. Surely a party that came to power singing of a new day would not do such a thing. Show me, old man, I said. Show me that these particular men can even do it.
He did not raise his voice. Instead, he began to list them out — and as he spoke, the hall grew colder around me, the way a room turns cold when someone opens a door onto the night.
“They ignored not one but two rulings of their own highest court,” he said, “just to pull a sitting Speaker out of his chair — even after the court had said, twice and clearly, that pulling him out was against the law. And they carried on as if the court had never spoken. You saw it. The whole country saw it. Tell me you did not see it.”
“They drove a sitting lawmaker out of the people’s house for words he spoke about the quarrel on the Guinea border — and even people who could not stand the man called it what it was: justice measured with a crooked cup, poured heavy or light depending on whose side was bleeding. You saw that too.”
“They went after men the law itself had protected with tenure — a protection created for one reason, to keep a public servant safe from an angry ruler — and they tore it off as if the law were theirs to remove. A government that will do these three things,” the old man said, leaning forward now into the little light there was, “will not wait even one breath before staging a drama and grabbing its rivals to save its own face. You asked me if they can do it. My child, the proof is already written — in broad daylight, in public acts, in the record all of you walked past on your way to forgetting. I am not telling you what they might do. I am telling you what they have already shown they will do and pointing to the next door they will walk through.”
Whose Hands Held the Powder
Then, as if to leave me no corner to hide my doubt in, the old man turned the lamp — there was a lamp now, though I had not seen anyone light it — onto the government’s own house.
“Look where the powder was actually found,” he said, “and whose hands were on it. Not the rival’s hands. Their own. The very chief in charge of the division that hunts crime — removed from his post for taking ten thousand American dollars from the people closest to the biggest drug seizure this dream-country has ever seen. Two men from their secret service, sitting behind bars right now. And the rumour that will not die — that the government’s own vehicles escorted the cargo to the very place it was caught, the way you escort a bride. These are the men the nation was told to trust to fight the trade. These are the men the trade appears to have bought. That stain carries no rival’s fingerprint. It belongs, fully and completely, to the party in power.”
“So, ask yourself,” he went on, quieter now, “why a government whose own hands are already dirty would bother to dirty someone else’s. A clean house does not need to stain its neighbour. Only the guilty reach across the road for company in the dock. If they drag the rival in, it will not be for justice. It will be for company — because no one wants to be condemned alone, and to a frightened man, a shared disgrace feels lighter.”
What He Told Me to Do
I stood there a long time and found nothing to say back to him. Every point he laid down was one I had watched them build. And seeing that I had gone quiet, the old man gave me the task that has driven me, shaking, to this page.
“The whole trick of the book,” he said, “is to make the ordinary citizen stare at the smoke and forget the fire — to see a plot where there is only a cornered man, and to look away from the man while the drama plays out. There is one way to beat it, and only one. Call the play out loud before the curtain goes up. Tell the people, while the cards are still under the table, exactly what hand is coming. A trick that is announced has lost the darkness it needed to work.
“So when you wake — and you are about to wake — do not keep this behind your teeth just to save yourself trouble. Say it plainly. Say that if the rival’s big men are soon paraded in front of the cameras as the real authors of this ruin, the people should remember where they first heard the script. Say that they were warned.”
I Woke, and Could Not Rest
I woke before I could promise him anything. The cocks were crowing by then, and an ordinary grey morning was rising over an ordinary city, and for a moment I was glad it had only been a dream.
But the old man’s words would not leave the room. They stayed with me through the washing and the first cup of tea, and they stay with me even now as I write, because not one part of it was made up — every act he named in the dark is a matter of public record in the country we actually live in, and any reader who has followed these three years knows the door he pointed to as well as I do. That is what will not let me rest. I would give anything to have simply dreamed a lie. Nothing would make me happier than to be proven wrong by these men doing the right thing — prosecuting their own, naming the financier, and leaving the rival out of a crime the rival did not commit.
I do not think I will be proven wrong, and that is what troubles me. So, I have done the one thing the old man asked. I have called the play while the curtain is still down. If the summonses come, if the parade begins, you will know it did not come from evidence but from a government’s fear of falling alone — and you will know because you were warned, in a dream, by an old man who had seen it all before and could not bear to watch it happen again.
He has gone back now into whatever shadow lends us such men for a single night. But the warning he left behind is awake. It is no longer his, and no longer only mine. It belongs to all of us — to blow away the smoke, together, before it is ever lit.
