By: Henry Mamulu
Whenever a famous person was assassinated, someone almost immediately took responsibility for the act. History, in its own strange way, demands a witness, even if that witness is a liar. However, in the case of Liberia’s President William R. Tolbert, no one, up till now, has claimed responsibility for his death—and for the subsequent genocide of an entire, one-of-a-kind culture.
What made that culture unique was the journey it carried. Their ancestors were Africans who had their own languages, traditions, and ways of life, then were captured, enslaved, and forced into a completely different world in America. There, they were made to take on new names, new religions, and new ways of thinking and living. And then, after all of that, they were sent back to Africa to build a nation.
So, what emerged in Liberia was not purely African in the old or current sense, and not fully American either. It was something in between, something layered and complex, a people carrying memories from the village, discipline from survival, and structure from what they had learned abroad.
To lose that culture is to lose a rare story in human history and existence, a people torn away and then returned, trying to make sense of both worlds at once. For Africa, it meant losing a part of its own story that had gone out into the world and come back changed: the part that demonstrated adoptability and resilience
And for the world, it meant losing a living example of what happens when history breaks people apart and then, against all odds, brings them back together again.
This was the culture created by the Freed Men of Color who established Africa’s first republic. And when it was dismantled, its demise was met with an indifferent silence the world over. There was no outrage. Not even the kind that flickers and fades. Just silence.
Subsequently, it would seem that the ghosts of the Pioneers of Liberia left their unmarked graves and wandered from Bensonville back to Monrovia, crying every night to a nation founded on “justice for all.” Like market dogs, they were killed and thrown into unmarked graves. Not until President Boakai, a scholarship student of President Tolbert’s brother, Steven Allen, who owned the Mesurado Group of Companies, did anyone take pity on their memory.
Paradoxically, this multi-million-dollar company, the likes of which Liberia has never seen again, went under the very same year his brother, the President, was assassinated. And it was his scholarship recipient, Joseph N. Boakai, who, as current President, took pity on their memory and gave a proper burial to perhaps the harbingers of Africa’s post-colonial independence. How ironic. History, sometimes, writes its own obscure apologies.
I lived through the events that culminated in the military coup d’état of 1980, the backdrop to the disappearance of a way of life, of an entire culture, and of the rule of the Pioneers who founded Liberia.
The Rice Riots of 1979, and the assassination and overthrow of the government, the rape and pillage of those who came back from slavery in America to find the first Black and independent democratic multi-party country in Africa, remained a cold case. Nearly all those with familiarity with that period lived in exile.
Every so often, especially around Christmas, you would see one of them, old, worn, and a bit decrepit looking, visiting Liberia. And as soon as the cash started running low, they were out again, back to the hole they crawled out of, just long enough to flex and catch a little fresh air before disappearing again.
The President who was caught in this maelstrom of unfortunate events was a Baptist minister, a farmer, and a politician named William R. Tolbert, Jr.
I met then Vice President Tolbert in 1964–1965. He lived at the top of an exclusive stretch of Payne Avenue in the suburbs of Sinkor, 10th and Payne Avenue, while I was on 16th and Payne.
I had gone to play with his son, Billy Jr. Vice President Tolbert came out of his room in boxers and a wife-beater undershirt; what we in Monrovia called a “singlet”, to see who was in his living room playing with Junior Tolbert. His wife, Victoria, introduced me as Ora Dennis’ son. He said, “the one married to the Mandingo man?” It was not said with sarcasm or malice. Just a matter-of-fact statement, plain and unadorned.
President Tolbert was the opposite of his predecessor, President William V.S. Tubman. Where Tubman was charismatic; wearing a wide-brimmed Fedora and sporting a handmade Cuban cigar, Tolbert seemed to prefer a Bible in one hand and an ivory cane in the other.
Where Tubman loved to lavish the people of Liberia with sumptuous celebrations on July 26th, Independence Day, Tolbert preached prayer and austerity. Where Tubman embraced imported goods; parboiled rice, Busck butter, imported schnapps, Boar’s Head corned beef, Tolbert sought self-sufficiency.
Where Tubman preferred Western tailored suits, Tolbert adopted an Eastern-oriented style of dress. Where Tubman was a Bible-believing supporter of Israel as the inheritor of Canaan, Tolbert preached “Free Palestine.” And all of this was unfolding in the middle of the Cold War.
Now that we have something that resembles a plot, or at least a set of extenuating circumstances, let’s move forward to 1978–1979. But just a minute.
Mrs. Tolbert, who introduced me to her husband a decade and a half earlier, described in Lifted Up, a book she wrote, the day the Country Devil came to the Executive Mansion on Capitol Hill, Monrovia. In it, she described the loneliness that engulfed her husband, the President, in the weeks preceding his death.
I read Lifted Up at my best friend Terrance Brown’s house one weekend. I believe it was sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s.
When Mrs. Tolbert described President Tolbert’s loneliness during his final days, I saw a man dressed in a seersucker blue-and-white suit, head bowed, soaking wet in the rain, as loneliness clung to him like what the Bassa people called “su gar vlahn”, clothes that do not suit, fit, or represent the wearer. He was not only abandoned by all who called him friend, but they left their departure with him as “puteh.”
Puteh was a game we played. We would walk a friend halfway home, tap their shoulder, and say “puteh,” leaving the burdens of the day with them. The friend then had to puteh us in return, so as not to carry those troubles home. But in this case, all the friends of the President had given him puteh, and no one came back to take the weight. And so, what settled on him was not just loneliness, but the accumulation of everyone else’s unfinished burdens. The result was depression.
Today is 04.21.26. The time is 8:00 AM, and I have been writing since 4:00 AM. I asked Google for the name of Mrs. Victoria Tolbert’s book. It told me Lifted Up. I asked Google if she described who killed her husband, the President. Google said what I have long suspected and perhaps known: “the book dispels foreign intervention.”
This means no more talk of masked invaders with blue eyes and gloves that exposed pale skin. We will come back to this.
But before we do, let me take you back; back to Monrovia, yes, Liberia, in the months leading up to the moment just before “the Country Devil came to town.”
You first met or heard about the Country Devil when you visited the interior, not in the city. Before the Devil arrived in a village, it was announced that women and children should not be out late that night. We all went inside early.
And by around 2:00 AM, with a loud, piercing cry, you heard the Devil as he passed. It chilled you to the bone because it sounded as if it was inside the room with you. I first heard that cry in the late 1950s. For days, it stayed with me. Fear has a way of settling in the body and making a home there.
Now, fast forward to Monrovia, April 1980.
The sun, bright and golden, strained to break through thick, dark, grey skies that cast a jaundiced, sickly glow over the city. Monrovia, once filled with life and laughter, now dragged her weight along the concrete walkways, too heavy to carry.
For nearly a decade, too much muckraking and political backstabbing had seeped into everything. It had become part of the air itself. “Ah yah,” the national phrase that once drew sympathy from even the hardest hearts, was nearly dead. Monrovia was gravely wounded. And she was not going to be spared. Her enemies smelled blood. They were coming for their share.
Nightlife at the watering holes on Broad and Gurley Streets had all but dried up. Only, it seemed, Henry Mamulu and Nukunu (Taweh Anderson) dared to move through the near-deserted streets at night. Because by then, the Country Devil, the one we feared as children, was already in town.
“My Father’s Moustache,” a French-motif-style bar at the top of Gurley and Carey Streets, stood empty most weeknights from July 1979 until the coup on April 12, 1980. After that, every bar and watering hole was packed from 10:00 AM until 3:30 PM—because everyone had to get home before the 6:00 PM dusk-to-dawn curfew.
April 11th was a Friday. Not just the eve of the coup, but the mother of All Weddings.
The marriage of Renee Van Eee to a guy from Martinique named Robert Groffier was scheduled for the 12th of April 1980. the day of the Coup d’etat.
Renee was the daughter of Cousin Corina Hilton Van Eee and a Swiss national I guess whose first name was Daniel. Corina was cousin to Lady Antoinette Tubman, wife of President Tubman.
Antoinette was niece to President Edwin Barclay and grandniece to President Arthur Barclay and supposedly so was Corina. These girls I guess were born in Monrovia, but the family had emigrated from Barbados as opposed to Tubman and Tolbert who could trace their roots to Africa, USA and back to Africa.
Kabasa, a band owned by Doughba Caranda was hired to serenade the festivities and I was going to sing “Close the Door” by Teddy Pendergrass. We gathered at the Executive Pavilion between Broad and Ashmun Street by 9:30pm for dress rehearsal as the creme de la creme, like dinosaurs on the eve of their destruction, began to gather at the Pavilion to dress it up for the wedding of the Century.
Cousin Corina had hosted the July 26th Independence ceremony, decorating Monrovia, sprucing up the city, preparing Monrovia for the Christmas Season for a decade plus and Monrovia was going to reward her by decking the halls for her daughter’s wedding. Every Americo-Liberian, Congo and invited Indigenous was at the Pavilion by 10:30 pm Friday April 11th, 1980.
I saw Old Natty B. Davies Sr polished sterling silverware as Jennie King, wife of President C. D. B. King now in her 80s set a table nearby Uncle Frank Emmanuel Tolbert, President Pro Tempore of the Liberian Senate had left his busy schedule after attending The Baptist World Convention where his brother The President of Liberal was also President. He was on his way to a watering hole on “The Lane” in the Red-Light District.
By 11.45 pm we heard the first staccato of gun fire. I ran outside and for the first time in our lifetime, bullets streaked in bloody hues across Monrovia’s night sky. And then the stampede began. Reminiscent of the Plot that Failed in 1955, it was deja vu and only “foot could help the body”. People ran for their lives and wealth which was already lost because the Country Devil had come.
At the mansion meanwhile Mrs. Tolbert wrote that they heard commotion in the hallway outside of their safe room. The President wanted to see what was going on. She told him no she would go and see. Outside she saw a “Gbetu”, the shorter Country Devil leading men, some carrying eddo leaves and she ran back.
There was a knock on the door, and it was President Tolbert who opened the door and confronted the now owners “Of Papa’s Land” in case anyone wanted to know who owned the land. A shot rang out hitting the President in the stomach. The men entered and Harrison Pennue bayoneted the President, spilling his guts like a gutted hog. The Country Devil was in town.
Who is really the Country Devil? Many of you will still never believe that a group of “Nokos” (derisive term or uneducated soldiers) could pull off a sophisticated coup like this.
I say yes. The mansion and President were abandoned from since the April 14th, 1979, rice riots. Was the Country Devil the Progressives or were there certain members amongst them hell bent on revenge and destruction. Or was the Country Devil whom you want it to be “Tang Tango” this is Sunshine. Over and out.
And so we are left, not with a clean ending, but with a mirror. If the Country Devil moved among us, it did not need to force its way in, it was let in, it was with us all along, fed, and perhaps even dressed in our own ambitions, our own grudges, our own silences.
The truth that refuses to disappear is this: the fall of Liberia was not only engineered by hands outside the gate, but by minds and hearts within it. Until we find the courage to name that, to confront it without disguise or nostalgia, the Country Devil will never truly leave us, because it will remain exactly where it has always been, waiting in the shadows of our own making.
