Introduction
On 30 March 2018, the United Nations (UN) Mission in Liberia ended nearly fifteen years of peacekeeping operations in Liberia, undoubtedly one of the longest international peacekeeping efforts in recent history. In retrospect, the UN peacekeeping efforts have amounted to something of a success story, from managing the transition from war to peace, to supervising and facilitating three democratic elections in Liberia, including the elections of Africa's first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, in 2006, and George Weah, Africa's legendary soccer icon, in 2018. However, this success story is not unblemished: it is soiled by the failure to facilitate acceptable levels of national healing and reconciliation after the Liberian Civil War, which fragmented society and in which an estimated 250,000 people were killed.
In the country's search to address the unprecedented scale of violence, efforts to uncover the truth culminated in the release of Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Final Report.Footnote 1 The TRC Final Report determined that the violence was pervasive and that all Liberians, whether directly or indirectly, were victimized by the conflict.Footnote 2 It holds Liberia's political elites (past and present) responsible for planning and orchestrating the violence.Footnote 3 Since its release, the Final Report has been perceived as stigmatizing the elites through naming and shaming and seeking to prosecute those most responsible for organizing the violence and providing financial support.Footnote 4 In the ranks of Liberia's elite and their sympathizers, the TRC Final Report is rejected and considered a forbidden text that should be purged.Footnote 5
Historically, silence and collective amnesia has followed abuses and unspeakable horrors.Footnote 6 Express public support of the TRC is frowned upon, and the narrative that suggests perpetrators should be judged not by their past but by their present, and by their promise to do better, is preferred.Footnote 7 The appropriation of this narrative in a country where the government is the biggest employer has brought about a new form of patronage. Some civil servants, including senior officials of government who support implementation of the TRC but are aware of the political elites’ hostility towards it, have since learned to avoid the subject, especially in government circles. Yet, in instances where some are pushed to offer a pro-government opinion about the Report, the TRC is criticized or vague ideas about reconciliation are advanced.Footnote 8 Conversely, those who express public support for the TRC are often scorned and referred to as vindictive, lazy people who are incapable of “reconciling”.Footnote 9 The undercurrent to this discourse is a form of post-TRC revisionism in which political elites and their sympathizers favour a script of collective amnesia that carries the capability of dismantling the official narrative.Footnote 10 In a context where the TRC Final Report stands as the official narrative to which there is no other accepted version of history that is embraced by the majority of Liberians, the legitimacy of the report is contested by a powerful minority.Footnote 11 Memoirs and books providing alternative viewpoints have been written,Footnote 12 and unstructured oral accounts of the conflict are being purveyed as alternative truth.
The TRC Final Report provides a framework for remembering the Liberian Civil War – a strategy that enables those who lived through the war, and successive generations, to remember the violence in a context that is controlled, constructive and pedagogical. The failure to implement the report is allowing other tendencies to manifest, robbing the nation of an opportunity for collective remembrance. Unless the State directs the process of post-war memorialization advanced by the TRC, unfiltered memories of the war will be passed down to successive generations and consequently, residual ethnic cleavages will be ignited, thereby creating reduced levels of cooperation across ethnic groups.
The 2016 Social Cohesion and Reconciliation Index (SCORE) nationwide survey, conducted by Search for Common Ground and the Centre for Sustainable Peace and Democratic Development (SeeD), reveals negative inter-group attitudes which tend to challenge the perception of social cohesion by sizable proportions of the population.Footnote 13 For example, the study revealed that ethnic Krahns in Grand Gedeh, Mandingos (a dispersed ethnic group located in several counties), and Gios in Nimba County are thought to be violent. In terms of acceptance of intermarriage among different groups, the study showed that intermarriage is rejected in most cases when it comes to Muslims (39%), Mandingos (45%) and Gios (30%).Footnote 14 The survey also demonstrates that civil society organizations and non-State institutions receive the highest level of trust from people, whereas local authorities and governmental bodies such as the Legislature, the Supreme Court, Magisterial Courts and police are mistrusted to some degree by over 50% of the population. The organs of the State are perceived to be comprised of political elites and their sympathizers.Footnote 15 The sample size interviewed for this study was 2,213 people (against an estimated 4 million total population), and the percentages cited above reflect the views of Liberians nationwide.
The attitudes captured in this study are inextricably linked to how the conflict is being remembered and affects inter-group relations. Ethnonationalists manipulate the truth about the Civil War to enable them to exact political power,Footnote 16 while ethnic-based households with insecurities from the war and residual ethnic cleavages are engaged in a daily transmission of the same wartime memories. Studies reveal that transmission of violent memories carries the “lived experience of parents which becomes the existential reality of the succeeding generation”.Footnote 17 Therefore, unresolved trauma and the weight of the moral burden to act are passed along in the transmission of these memories.Footnote 18 The rise of ethnonationalist moods in post-war Liberia has happened at the expense of improving inter-group cooperation, repairing damaged ethnic relations and engendering the long-term process of nation-building.
This article draws on the author's fourteen-year-long research activities on transitional justice in Liberia and the truth and reconciliation process more specifically. The results presented below were obtained through research conducted during the author's work with victims’ communities while at Search for Common Ground, as well as interactions with victims’ groups and two years’ work at the Governance Commission developing the Strategic Roadmap for National Healing, Peacebuilding and Reconciliation. The author has also made systematic observations of victims’ response to wartime memories. Key informant interviews were conducted and were followed by communication with a number of community members. The author endeavoured to observe national attitudes and responses to transitional justice and to the TRC Final Report more specifically.
Memory discourse: A comparative review
Studies of memory and violent conflict tend to discuss victimization in the ideological context.Footnote 19 The ways in which memory is constructed in such a context reveal a struggle over the past and show how memory is represented in the present.Footnote 20 In Mozambique, for example, the struggle over the ideological and political legitimacy of the “short-lived” socialist revolution remains a continued battle between the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique and the Mozambican National Resistance, even long after the armed conflict.Footnote 21 Even though there is an official silence about the past, memory is used as a weapon to deny the ideological legitimacy of the armed struggle, and in parliament both sides have accused one another of committing atrocities – therefore, neither of them seems to have a moral claim to legitimacy.Footnote 22 In Rwanda, the Rwandan Patriotic Front-backed government maintains a strong grip on how memories of the genocide are interpreted. This has led to the construction of a new ethnic identity, and only this single identity is permitted. While there are other nuances to remembering the genocide, the popular account acknowledges that ethnic Hutus organized and perpetrated the genocide against ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus, while ethnic Tutsis won the war. Nonetheless, the memorials in Rwanda have been criticized for oversimplifying the narrative through the dynamics of manipulated and enforced memories.Footnote 23 A reconstructed single ethnic identity, Banyarwanda, as the new post-genocidal identity of Rwanda suggests a predominant role of the State in how the violence is being remembered.Footnote 24 Despite the complicated process of memory formation, the State's actions have led to a process of remembering, ensuring that the preventative value of “never again” is not lost.
In Sierra Leone, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) – a class of lumpen proletariats who started a peasant revolution – lost its unity of purpose to a barbarous reign of maiming, torture and extra-judicial killings. In the standard academic texts on Sierra Leone, there are mixed views about the RUF. On the one hand, its armed struggle is viewed as a “rational rebellion against a failed and bankrupt patrimonial state by a group of ‘embittered pedagogues’ … who aimed to replace that state with a ‘revolutionary egalitarian’ one”.Footnote 25 On the other hand, it is also viewed as “a case of organised mass delinquency … mainly aimed at criminal appropriation, not social protest”.Footnote 26 In contrast to the RUF, the Civil Defence Forces (CDF) resistance is viewed as the “militarization of a social network”Footnote 27 appropriated to defend local communities against the RUF. In the collective memory of Sierra Leoneans, the CDF enjoys greater ideological legitimacy than the RUF. While the government has yet to advance an official memorial policy, the conflict is remembered through the outcomes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Special Court for Sierra Leone. In 2013, the Court successfully completed its mandate and was able to bring to trial ten persons, nine of which were sentenced to 15–52 years in prison.Footnote 28 Today, a Peace Museum stands outside the Special Court. The Museum serves as a repository of the Special Court files as well as materials from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Unlike the three cases above, the Liberian conflict was not ideological and does not enjoy any level of political legitimacy. Prior to the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement, Liberia had thirteen peace agreements. All of these agreements were committed to a power-sharing arrangement in which warlords granted themselves amnesty. The notion that the war's aim was to restore democracy and prevent atrocities based on ethnic origin was a pretext to acquiring power and wealth. The fact that the war was organized by the elites and not the lumpen class renders the resolution of the conflict problematic because the TRC identified the elites in power as those responsible, but they happen to be the same fraction of society that is supposed to implement the TRC Final Report.
The scale of violence during the Liberian Civil War
The TRC Final Report documented an estimated 203 sites of massacres and mass graves across the country.Footnote 29 This number revealed an unprecedented level of staggering and widespread violence touching every single county or region of the country. The Final Report demonstrates that on average there are thirteen sites of massacres or mass graves in each county of Liberia, though the impact is much higher in some regions or counties than others.Footnote 30 In Lofa County (northern Liberia), for example, there are thirty-two sites of massacres; in Rivercess (southeastern Liberia), thirty; in Grand Cape Mount (western Liberia), twenty-four; in Gbarpolu (western Liberia), eighteen; in Maryland (southeastern Liberia), eleven; and in Grand Gedeh (southeastern Liberia), twelve. Sites of massacres and mass graves are scattered across the country in such proximity that every village or town is either a host of a massacre site or is located close to one. In this context, proximity looms large, as it becomes virtually impossible for a child born many years after the conflict to be raised outside of such violent memory. This geography of violence suggests that every child is naturally subjected to a form of everyday storytelling while growing up. What is more important is how the memory is passed down and what is being learned or taught.
Flirting with the present: The life of younger generations after the conflict
According to Liberia's Housing and Population Census, in 2008 65% of the population was comprised of those aged 35 or below.Footnote 31 Further disaggregation of this figure reveals that more than 50% of those were born between 1990 and 2003. This faction of the population does not have an independent view of the conflict, for they were too young to understand and process what was happening around them. Also, the unprocessed narrative and unresolved trauma that is being bequeathed to them is not only placing a moral burden on them, but also imposing a sense of dual reality. A young motorbike rider helped this author to see the destructive pattern of the transmission of violent memory on the younger generation. In August 2017, the author had an encounter with Boima, a 22-year-old motorbike taxi driver. The author had known Boima for some time prior to this encounter, and he always seemed to be cheerful and energetic. On this occasion, however, after the author had hired Boima for a ride home, for the first few minutes he was quiet and appeared to be distressed. It turned out that Boima's father had been killed, and that the man who killed him had been relocated to Boima's community.
Boima's story is not unique. Nearly every Liberian of his generation is likely to be living proof of the country's post-war contradiction: both young and old pretend to be living in the present, but they only flirt with the present because much of their existential being is domiciled in the past. Flirtation with the present is constantly disrupted by the memoryscape and what it invokes. Boima's daily routine was disrupted when he learned about the sudden reappearance of his father's murderer, but had that not happened, he would have appeared to be the same lively lad the author has always known. The ability of the past to resurface tends to subject people to a duality that is perhaps not so much like schizophrenia, but a dichotomy that allows the existence of two realities, the past and the present, simultaneously.Footnote 32 On some occasions, the past can be demonstrably more dominant and can hold sway over the present. Locked in such conflict between present and past, Boima will be thinking constantly about where his life would have been had his father still been alive, and whether there is any course of action he should take to “put things right”. Boima's story provides a critical insight into the reality of children born during the Civil War and memories that are being passed down to them. This situation draws attention to two critical developments. Firstly, the history of the conflict is not taught in primary schools, but the transmission of violent memories of the war has become a ritual in Liberian households. Secondly, the silence and failure of the State to direct what to learn, and how to learn it, is enabling destructive memories to thrive.
Memorialization in Liberia
Recommendations of the TRC
The TRC Final Report on memorialization is detailed and comprehensive. It is prescriptive in so far as what the role of the State in memorialization ought to be. The recommendations cover national measures to account for individual and collective memory, but there is also space for the State to remember West African nationals, as well as other “foreign nations”, that came to Liberia's aid during the war.Footnote 33 The TRC recommends public apologies to foreign governments who lost their citizens in the conflict as the appropriate form of action.Footnote 34
The Final Report recommends that death certificates “adorned with national colors” be issued to the surviving heirs of all those who lost their lives during the violence in Liberia from 1979 to 2003.Footnote 35 Regarding missing persons, it is recommended that those who have not maintained contact with relatives or friends for seven years should be declared dead and issued a death certificate. The Report maintains that wartime memorials should be erected in the capital city of each county and on the site of each mass grave or massacre. For atonement and cleansing, the Report recommends cultural ceremonies in order to lay the spirit of the dead to rest. It also recommends that government provide direct assistance to rebuild sacred places that were desecrated. In addition, the Report suggests having a national holiday to commemorate victims of hostilities by changing National Unification Day to National Unification and Memorial Day. It is also maintained that the State should issue public apologies to the nation and that befitting graves be erected to honour the memory and tragic deaths of two of Liberia's presidents, William Tolbert and Samuel Doe. Both Tolbert and Doe were not properly buried as there are no markers over where their remains are interred.
There have been some attempts to erect memorials on sites of massacres and mass graves, but these leave much to be desired. None of the recommendations outlined above have been implemented to date. The recommendations have, however, raised huge expectations among victims and survivors across ethnic regions of the country.
Alternative influential narratives
Some unofficial narratives of the war were written prior to the release of the TRC Final Report, and more have been written since. These accounts, whether complementary or contradictory, coexist with the official narrative of the TRC Final Report. In a context where the past is being subjected to new forms of story-telling and reinterpretation of the violence, the views expressed in these accounts should not be seen as passive, but as ones that could appeal to ethnic stereotypes or sensibilities, and invoke emotions, anger or memories of the war. Some of the notable books reflecting such narratives are The House at Sugar Beach by Helen Cooper, The Land of My Father's Birth by Nvasekie Konneh, Scary Dreams by Lekpele Nyamalon, and This Child Will Be Great by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.Footnote 36
In Cooper's book, the author retraces her steps as a privileged child born of Americo-Liberian ancestry. While her memoirs present an innocent picture of a teenager, her privileged life serves as a grim reminder of some of the underlying causes that led to political violence and ultimately to the war.
Konneh's book asserts that the persecution of Mandingos happened as a result of national conspiracy.Footnote 37 In retaliation, ethnic Mandingo elites organized a warring faction that committed systematic violations across the country.Footnote 38 Konneh's work leans more on victims’ memory of Mandingos rather than examining both perpetrators’ and victims’ memories.
Nyamalon's book is an anthology of poems. Though the author was only six years old when the war started, the book provides a vivid recollection of memories in poetry. The author's work captures the trauma endured by a six-year-old boy, and represents a victim's account of the Civil War.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's work deals extensively with her childhood and victimization as a woman during Samuel Doe's administration. She provides deep insight into her experience as a public servant; in particular, she recalls her role in the Commission on National Reconstruction (CNR) that was headed by Nete Sie Brownell. The CNR was organized to investigate the mass killings of Liberians that resulted from a protest over the price of rice, dubbed the Rice Riot, in 1979. Sirleaf served as one of the thirty-one commissioners appointed by former president Tolbert. In her memoir, she reflects:
What is tragic, I believe, is that had Tolbert instead implemented the major report recommendations of the Commission on National Reconstruction, things might well have turned out different. Had the Government seized the opportunity to make major changes, it could have turned the whole thing around and avoided all the bloodshed to come.Footnote 39
For a moment, Sirleaf's reflection on the CNR renewed hope that the TRC's recommendations would be implemented. Her failure to follow through on the TRC Final Report reinforced the perception that social amnesia is a deeply entrenched tradition among Liberia's elites.
For the most part, the narratives portrayed in these books have come to shape the attitudes of many groups in society, especially the intelligentsia.Footnote 40
Use of destructive patterns of remembering: Division along ethnic lines
The formation of Liberia over the years has predominantly followed the path of State-building alone, rather than both State- and nation-building, where the establishment of legitimacy would play an important role. The social glue that holds countries together in terms of national identity is far less cohesive in Liberia.Footnote 41 Hence, Liberia's sense of nationhood is fragmented, and ethnic identity appears to be much stronger than any cohesive national identity. In the Civil War and immediate post-war years, group memories became more prominent and had the capacity to undermine the collective search for justice and accountability. Hence, there is a correlation between the scale of violence that occurred and the influential narratives existing today. The proximity of mass graves and casual exposure to fresh memory makes it impossible to forget the past. It also makes conditions of trauma and transmission of such memory a particularly vicious circle. Individual victims and survivors are left with a strong feeling of neglect and abandonment, while reality reflects a constant mood swing which essentially condemns them to living a life that is locked in the past.Footnote 42 In 2005, during Liberia's first post-war elections, politicians used the memory of war in their campaigns. Prior to the successful 2003 Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement,Footnote 43 all thirteen peace agreements had failed to maintain peace or bring stability to Liberia. Several alleged perpetrators, many of whom are mentioned in the TRC Final Report, declared their intention to run in the elections.Footnote 44 To strengthen their chances, candidates exploited sensitivities around the widespread awareness of the failed peace agreements in Liberia, and announced that unless they won the elections, they could not guarantee the protection of their respective ethnic populations in the event of a return to violent conflict.Footnote 45 Nearly every alleged perpetrator who campaigned with this message of war and insecurity consequently won in the elections.Footnote 46 In the 2011 election campaign, though the TRC had released its Final Report two years earlier, the politicians again exploited the ethnic biases of their compatriots. Some indicated that the TRC itself was biased and was only targeting certain individuals because of their ethnic status. In an environment where group identity is much stronger than national identity, this rhetoric held sway, and perpetrators were once again elected through the exploitation of ethnonationalist sentiment. The dynamics between ethnic groups and the ways in which the memory of conflicts is used for political gain are explored below through the example of the Kru and Sarpo groups.
Dynamics between the Kru and Sarpo ethnic groups
“The Kru take all the positions and during the elections, they elect their sons.”Footnote 47 So said one member of the Sarpo ethnic group in a focus group held in January 2018. The Sarpo and the Grebo have the overall perception that the Kru have all the privileges when it comes to the election of representatives and senators (in the Legislature), given their large number.Footnote 48 People vote along ethnic lines, and as the Kru represent the majority, they have a stronger chance of winning elections. The Kru then appoint members of their families or their ethnic group to hold offices.Footnote 49
The Kru, Sarpo and Grebo are three ethnic groups based in Sinoe County, located in southeastern Liberia. The Krus and Sarpos have a long history of disputes. While the actual origin of the conflict is difficult to trace, much of it appears to stem from the State-building process that led to the formation of the county.Footnote 50 Internal dynamics put the Krus and their settler compatriots at the centre of the county's formation. In the county's popular history, the Krus and settlers are regarded as the moral guarantors of the county.Footnote 51 In return, Sarpos have regarded ethnic Krus as being arrogant and as pretending to be more civilized and educated.Footnote 52 For much of the county's existence, the perception that Sarpos are less important to the well-being and strategic development of the county and that Krus pretend to be more civilized has promoted negative stereotypes on both sides, deepening inter-tribal feuds and further undermining the potential for cooperation. The fragility of this inter-group relationship fully displayed itself during the Liberian Civil War when the Pratt Farm Massacre occurred. According to the TRC Final Report, Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia committed the massacreFootnote 53 and forty-two persons believed to be ethnic Sarpos were slaughtered. The massacre is believed by some to have been aided and abetted by Krus, who took the opportunity to retaliate against their old tribal rival.Footnote 54 The story of this massacre and other acts of aggression forms a significant part of the Sarpos’ collective memory about the Liberian conflict.Footnote 55
Due to the lack of trust on both sides, every election year, ethnic Krus vote systematically for Kru representatives and senators while the Sarpos vote for representatives of their own ethnic group. In the 2014 mid-term senatorial elections, ethnic Sarpos lost to their Kru compatriots. For the Sarpos, this defeat meant a lack of representation in the Legislature.Footnote 56 In response, some prominent members of the Sarpo community initiated calls for the division of the county. The ethnic feuds between the two groups are reinforced by the establishment of a distinct ethnic Kru Association and Sarpo Association. Due to feuds between Krus and Sarpos, today the identity of both groups is grounded in violent memories and negative stereotypes against each other. Both the Sarpos and Krus have tribal associations whose survival is based on the mutual stereotyping of the other. Demolition of these tribal associations is critical to repairing the damaged relations. As noted by one “prominent citizen” of Sinoe,Footnote 57 the county should move away from loyalty to tribal hierarchies and the traditional way of life and instead espouse democratic governance structure and values.Footnote 58 Also, Sinoe needs to envision a more inclusive culture that celebrates the diversity of the country. Otherwise, as one focus group member put it, “when elections come, division comes”.Footnote 59 The dynamics between ethnic Sarpos and Krus are not unique and resemble those between Gios and Manos, and between ethnic Mandingos and Krahn.
Building “never again”? Liberia's memorials
The TRC has recommended that a memorial be erected at each site of a massacre or mass grave. While the recommendation may be ambitious, the intention is to promote learning and reflection over what happened. The primary objective of learning about violent conflict is to deter future acts of aggression. It is also intended to put distance between future generations and the generation of victims by knowing what happened, the underlying causes and why it is important to avoid recurrence. This learning process carries a preventative value of “never again”. In Liberia, there are few such places that provide the opportunity to reflect on the war and learn from the mistakes of the past. This section will endeavour to analyze both controversial and constructive memorialization efforts in Liberia.
Controversial memorialization? The example of Prince Johnson's monument
In Nimba County, Prince Yormie Johnson's towering monument in the town of Granta, on the stretch of road to Sacleapea (see Fig. 1), looms large in everyday life as it does in the country's post-war ethnic politics. The monument, entitled “Touch of Freedom”, has the following engraved on a marble stone:
Here stands the lasting memory of the Revolutionary Hero of Nimba County, General Prince Yormie Johnson, a statesman, politician and evangelist of the Gospel of Jesus Christ who freed the people of Nimba County and Liberia.
The monument stands in defiance of the TRC Final Report, which declared Johnson one of the most notorious perpetrators of the Civil War. According to the TRC, the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL) created by Johnson accounts for 2% of all violations, which amounts to 2,588 violations in total.Footnote 60 The story of Prince Johnson and how he rose to prominence began after the 1980 military takeover. Sharing a brief history of the evolution of ethnic groups is critical for understanding the background of ethnic relations in Nimba and the controversy of the monument.
The monument to Prince Yormie Johnson. Photograph © Allen Kollie.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Gios and Manos that formed part of the Mande ethno-linguistic group migrated to Liberia after the collapse of the Sudan empire. The Mandingos, who are also a part of Mande group, are believed to have migrated to Liberia about the same time as the Gios and Manos, but their life of trade and commerce rendered them economic nomads. In the nineteenth century the Mandingos are reported to have migrated to Nimba in pursuit of commercial opportunities.Footnote 61
Mandingo, Gio and Mano integration flourished primarily around trade and commerce. Mandingos tended to demonstrate acumen for business, while Gios and Manos were agriculturalists tilling the land. Naturally, the connections between Gios and Mano on the one hand and Mandingos on the other transformed into a symbiotic relationship.
Socially, Mandingo men married into Gio and Mano households. However, Gio and Mano men were not permitted to marry into Mandingo households because of a restriction posed by Islam: non-Muslims could not marry into Islamic households. Children born unto Gio and Mano women in Mandingo households would be raised primarily in the Mandingo patrilineal system, in which the Gio and Mano culture was often not acknowledged except in a few isolated cases. This has often been the cause of friction in the social interactions between these ethnic groups.Footnote 62
In light of the history of integration and intermarriage, the Gios and Manos felt betrayed by the Mandingos: there was a feeling that they were not only bystanders in the ethnic purge against Gios and Manos but were part of the system. However, like ethnic Krahns, Mandingos were at the same time targeted and eliminated by INPFL forces. Samuel Doe, an ethnic Krahn who favoured Mandingos, was captured, tortured and executed by the INPFL (led by Prince Johnson) in 1990, and ethnic Mandingos were hunted down and killed in Nimba and elsewhere.Footnote 63
It's on the violent memories between these ethnic groups that Prince Johnson has built his political career. His rhetoric has maintained that Mandingos are foreigners and should not own land, and that Gios and Manos are free today because his forces executed Samuel Doe.Footnote 64
In stark contrast to the memorials described below, Prince Johnson's monument is an example of memorialization which does not necessarily have the aim of reconciling society over contentious issues. One can therefore sense a thin line between the variety of aims underlying memorialization efforts in a given context.
Some constructive patterns of memorialization
The Liberian National Museum
The Liberian National Museum (see Fig. 2) was established by an act of the Legislature in 1958 during the administration of President William Tubman. Beyond the National Museum, located in central Monrovia, there is no other museum in the country. The primary goal of the National Museum was to obtain, collect and preserve cultural artefacts and other historical elements which depict the country's heritage. During the Civil War, the National Museum was deeply affected and some artefacts were looted and sold. Despite this, the Museum was recovered and is now operational again. Unlike other war museums, especially in countries emerging from violent conflict or authoritarian regimes, the Liberian National Museum's collection on the war is limited and doesn't devote much space to discussion of the past; instead, the collection is mixed and focuses on a variety of themes. Importantly, it provides a space for viewing, reflection and learning. Nonetheless, some observers have placed the Museum's collection in a context of subtle revisionism which tends to avoid controversial materials that could raise questions and trigger debates about the past. Its focus on the past is selective: it determines what specifically needs to be remembered, with some details of political significance being left out.Footnote 65
The Liberian National Museum. Photograph © Theresa Rodriguez.
The Lutheran Church
On 29 and 30 July 1990, about 600 Liberians were massacred at St Peter's Lutheran Church in Sinkor, Monrovia.Footnote 66 All victims of the massacre were quickly buried in two mass graves in the church compound. In commemoration of this tragedy, the Lutheran Church observes a one-day annual requiem mass for the victims and survivors. This has become one of the few moments of mourning and reflection in Liberia.
The Duport Road memorial
The Duport Road community was among the worst affected during the Liberian conflict. It was the scene of two horrific massacres and is the site of several mass graves. In 1990, the Charles Taylor-led National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) allegedly arrested, tortured and summarily executed many people who were perceived to belong to the Krahn and Mandingo ethnic groups.Footnote 67 Most of the killings were carried out at the end of Duport Road known as the Waterside; some of those killed were first arrested at the notorious checkpoint known as the God Bless You Gate. Four years later, the community was attacked again.Footnote 68 In December 1994, more than forty-four people were massacred, allegedly by forces of the NPFL, on the part of Duport Road known as the Cow FieldFootnote 69. The victims included men, women, children and the elderly. At the edge of the Waterside area, a signpost was erected in memory of those killed in the first of these massacres. The signpost was made out of a corrugated metal barrel. It featured a plain flat surface, approximately two feet high, painted with a white background. Printed in black against the white background in bold letters were these commemorative words: “Innocent victims of the Liberian Civil War, 1990, killed because of the tribe they belong to.” Due to neglect, the signpost fell into disrepair in 2009.
In 2017, the Independent National Human Rights Commission of Liberia erected a new memorial on Duport Road (see Fig. 3). In 2008, the local community had engaged in an extensive consultative memorial process and fundraising exercise; on the question of what type of memorial to erect, the community decided on a memorial with a particular architectural designFootnote 70 and features.Footnote 71 The Commission's work ignored the suggestions of the community. As a result, the efforts to build a memorial were poorly received, as the community was not fully involved in the decision-making process; community engagement in erecting memorials is considered standard practice to ensure inclusive participation and engagement.Footnote 72 Nonetheless, the monument serves as a powerful reminder of the atrocities committed on Duport Road, and its erection should be seen as part of a wider campaign to remember the conflict in ways that prevent relapse.
The Duport Road memorial. Photograph © Aaron Weah.
The Samay memorial
Samay is a remote village in central Liberia that lost about thirty-seven members of its community to violence in 1993 and later organized and erected a memorial. Today the memorial is used as an important site for learning about war and violence more broadly. The site is managed by a school teacher who typically takes his students there, quizzes them about key events in the Liberian conflict, and discusses why it is important to learn about it. The villagers also gather around the memorial during Decoration Day, Liberia's day of the dead.Footnote 73 A few years after the memorial was built, the community acquired further resources to expand the existing structure. For example, a library was built to collect materials about the Liberian war and the Samay memorial more specifically. Reverend William R. Tolbert, Liberia's peace ambassador, makes regular visits there.
There are few opportunities to learn about the war and violence in Liberia from an objective perspective. Though memorial sites like Duport Road are examples of constructive patterns of remembering, Samay village demonstrates a much stronger and more innovative approach toward teaching the younger generation and transmitting positive memories.
The pattern of memorials demonstrated above does not reveal much in terms of systematic community learning. Instead, it tries to treat individual memories of the war as collective ones. In communities with a strong sense of ethnonationalism such as Nimba, the Samay memorial, located in Bong County, Central Liberia, provides a blueprint for how to move away from destructive remembering as it tends to open up a space for broader and more inclusive debate about the past and those who are listed as perpetrators in the TRC Final Report.
Conclusion
Liberia has been locked in a vortex of deadly conflicts for much of its existence, and attempts to systematically address them have yielded little or no results.Footnote 74 The Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which called for the establishment of the TRC, emerged as the latest strategy to address the underlying causes of Liberia's perennial conflict.Footnote 75 Earlier events such as the Fernando Po slave labour scandal of the 1930s and the Rice Riot of 1979 were investigated, as a result of which a report was released to Liberia's governing elite but was never implemented. In turn, the State has been responding with either official silence or rhetoric of “reconciliation”. The recommendations of the 1930 League of Nations reportFootnote 76 demonstrating Liberia's complicity in conditions analogous to slavery and forced labour, which essentially focused on reorganizing the State and addressing deep ethnic cleavages between native and settler Liberians, were never implemented. Consequently, violent memories of that period festered and impacted ethnic Krus and Grebos, the groups that were affected the most. Charles Johnson, an academic and one of the three commissioners appointed by the League of Nations, wrote a compelling account which was a repudiation of that era, outlining the settlers’ failed mission of establishing a black republic. In particular, Johnson accused the settlers of “crushing the native spirit” of creativity and entrepreneurship. In his book, Bitter Canaan, he published the lyrics of a victim's song: “Allen Yancy, where are our sons, husbands and fathers?” He lamented that the sad song was a “fresh and pertinent legend”.Footnote 77 Johnson's work highlights the fact that grievances prior to the Civil War were never addressed and that the transmission of violent memories has become more complicated due to layers of memories across different temporalities.
The TRC Final Report was released a decade ago. The commemoration of this date will once again reveal many missed opportunities and serve as another reminder that the Final Report's recommendations have not been implemented. Even though the Report proffered more than 200 recommendations, its implementation has been overshadowed by measures of criminal accountability. In addition to the recommendations regarding criminal accountability or establishing a war crimes court, there are other measures designed to support community rehabilitation, improve inter-group relations and restore victims’ dignity. For example, recommendations on the issuance of public apologies are designed to enable the government to acknowledge the complicity of the Liberian State in the destruction of lives and properties. Commemorating an official holiday is another critical recommendation advanced by the TRC. This recommendation is intended to undo Decoration Day's public holiday, which is observed every second Wednesday of March. The tradition around Decoration Day allows every Liberian to visit the grave site of loved ones, mourn, share a meal or drink with the dead, and clean up the site. But the majority of Liberians killed during the conflict don't have grave sites. Since the end of the war, Liberians from different walks of life have complained that the holiday is insensitive to those who were summarily executed and dumped in mass graves. From the list of 203 sites of massacres and mass graves, one can imagine that nearly everyone killed was not properly buried. Hence, establishing an official public commemoration holiday and erecting country-wide memorials will undoubtedly provide an inclusive space for mourning, as it would raise important existential questions about what happened, who committed the atrocities and how the government facilitates closure. If implemented, such country-wide memorial activity is likely to counter opportunistic ethnonationalist manipulations of collective memory.
Recent efforts to rewrite a general and comprehensive history of Liberia by some of Liberia's leading academics have failed to materialize. The Organizing Conference of May 2013 was aimed at discussing issues of periodization, themes and scholars to undertake the writing assignment.Footnote 78 There was one central question that delegates to the conference had to grapple with: what kind of history would Liberia need? In a two-sided debate, one side, largely comprising Liberian academics and historians, maintained that it is critical to have a history-writing process that focuses on the evidence.Footnote 79 The other side argued that a revisionist history was more desirable because evidence-based history is likely to uncover new truths which would challenge people's notions about reconciliation.Footnote 80 Finally, it was agreed that a five-volume history would be written over a period of five years. This author has later learned why the productive outcome of the Conference was never taken forward. Augustine Konneh, one of Liberia's foremost historians and the head of the Expert Panel of Historians, informed the author that the administration at the time was more interested in a revisionist history-writing exercise than an evidence-based approach.Footnote 81 Konneh's assessment of the failed history-writing process is consistent with the desire of Liberia's elites for reinvention rather than a deliberate and substantive process of reconciliation and accountability.
