Still Waters Run Deep

It’s a Tuesday morning and I’m making the nine-hour drive to Monrovia to meet up with my boss and have some R&R time after two months in the field. As I stare out the window and contemplate the lives of the people around me, I am optimistic. With the rains over and the heat increasing by the day, new houses and buildings are being erected everywhere. Construction, I think to myself, is a sign of progress—a sign that Liberians feel safe and hopeful enough to invest themselves again in their country.

Three days later, my town was in flames. Several people were killed in the violence—their bodies still not swept from the streets some 24 hours later—and more are injured. Most of my Liberian friends fled to the bush, to Monrovia, or to Guinea. Only the arrival of UN riot police was able to stop the violence—a sign that does not bode well for the country given that it will have to take over responsibility for the country’s security when the UN pulls out next year.

Nobody seems sure exactly how things started, but the following trajectory seems to be generally accepted: A young woman in a nearby town was killed, and the predominantly Loma community (Lomas are Christian) blamed the murder on the local Mandingo population (Mandingos are Muslim). They set fire to the local mosque in anger. In retaliation, the Mandingos in my town (the county capital) decided to set fire to the churches, market and houses of government officials in Voinjama.

When I first began to hear reports of the violence yesterday morning, I imagined that people were exaggerating. But when I called my friend Siya, I could hear the panic in her voice as she and her children made their way out of town. “The war has come back,” she cried before we got cut off. As for my Muslim friends, their phones were all off. I assume that they fled to nearby Guinea, but I have no way of knowing.

How could this have happened, I find myself wondering? How did the landscape of my town change so quickly? Over the past six months, I have never felt unsafe in Voinjama, largely because I am friendly and as a result well-liked and looked out for by the Liberians I interact with on my daily escapades into town. On many occasions, I have found myself wondering whether it’s possible that I am friends with anyone that took part in the war, which lasted from 1989 to 2003 and left the country almost entirely destroyed. Realistically speaking, I knew this must be the case; and yet, I still found it nearly impossible to imagine anyone I chatted and joked with in town to be capable of real violence. Following yesterday’s events, everything feels all the more surreal. Was I always too gullible and naïve to see the tensions lying below the surface in Voinjama, or is it just too easy for a small number of angry people to wreak havoc on the peaceful majority?

Safely closeted away in Monrovia and relying on the accounts of others to help me put together an understanding of yesterday’s violence, too much remains unknown and unexplained for me to have any answers. Only once I am able to return to Voinjama and see for myself the destruction and hear from my friends firsthand what happened will I be able to begin to understand how this all came about. I am hopeful that even then, I will still be able to hold on to some of the optimism I felt leaving town on Tuesday. But I am rattled and not without doubt.