Market Mob

This past week, I received a new roommate at the IRC guest house named Isabelle and also made friends with a few other recently arrived expats in Voinjama. Since they all arrived after me, I decided to invite them to meet Aissata, the Peulh woman I befriended, and walk around town. Since Aissata’s husband is a tailor, we decided to go shopping for lapas (aka pagnes or sarongs). After wandering around the market for an hour or so, Aissata and I noticed a small crowd around our friend Yoko, a Japanese girl who just started working for the UN here in Voinjama. We walked up to find a man demanding to see Yoko’s identification documents, which she had forgotten in her house. Though the man had an ID card saying he worked for Liberian immigration, he was in plain clothes and extremely belligerent. Thinking he was just a crazy guy, Aissata and I told Yoko just to ignore him and keep walking. Yet the man kept blocking our way, getting angrier and angrier with each moment. Before we knew it, there was a crowd of twenty and then perhaps fifty people around us (most of them women sellers from the market), yelling at the man to leave us alone and trying to help us get away from him. As I slowly pulled Aissata along, he tried to hold her back, eventually shoving her out of the way (she was carrying her four month old daughter on her back at the time). This made me lose my temper, and I started yelling at him to leave my friend alone. In response, he started lashing out incoherently and calling all the women around us “a bunch of African bitches.” All the while, the crowd kept getting larger, with half the people yelling at the man and the other half trying to calm him down so that we could resolve the situation.

In the end, the crowd was able to help us get to Yoko’s car, blocking the man from following us. At this same moment, the UN and Liberian police showed up. They ended up having to give the man who was harassing us safe haven in the police car in order to prevent the mob from beating him. Luckily, we were able to drive away, and the crowd dispersed with the arrival of the police.

Looking back on the afternoon’s events, on the one hand, it was unsettling to see how quickly the mob formed and the situation escalated. On the other hand, however, what struck me most about the incident was how the men and women in the market immediately came to Yoko’s defense and tried their best to help her escape the man’s harassment. Throughout my travels, I have found this willingness to protect and help out strangers characteristic of West African culture, and it is one of the things I appreciate most about living here.