I’m surprised that Africa is so surprised that Darth Vader Jnr has failed to take action against the lethal chaos of Liberia, in spite of the (somewhat ill-considered) pleas of many of the people of that country that he should.
Why should the United States, stretched as it is in Afghanistan and Iraq, invade Liberia?
1) There is no oil in Liberia. 2) The country is full of nothing but niggers. 3) The Firestone Tyre Company is perfectly capable of taking care of its lucrative rubber plantations in that country with its own highly experienced security services anyway. Neither Charles Taylor nor the shady rebels who are trying to unseat him would dare to make an assault on the only significant American investment in the former slave colony.
So there is really no reason for the US to invade Liberia. Not even to save lives — which seems to be the logic that the hard-pressed Liberian on the street is trying to invoke.
Whatever one might feel about the US’s policies about invading other countries, saving foreign lives is not high on the list. And everyone out there who is not an American is a foreigner, let’s not forget. Even in America. American lives are not about to be sacrificed for foreigners.
One then has to ask what American lives are to be sacrificed for. The latest statistics out of Iraq indicate that, by last weekend, more than 100 US soldiers had been lost since the official ending of the war. Of these, 44 had been killed through enemy action (in other words, taken out by angry Iraqis).
What had happened to the remaining 60 or so US combatants?
No one was about to give us the details. It seems that, like Private Jessica Lynch, who had actually fallen victim to bad driving (rather than enemy fire) and landed up in an Iraqi hospital, only to be rescued by the gung-ho marines with the willing support of the Iraqi hospital personnel she was supposed to be escaping from, supported by US film crews, most of the US’s casualties are the victims of own goals. The conquering army is constantly shooting itself, literally, in its own foot.
But the continuously embedded media networks fail to show us the replays of how these own goals really work. Tot up the scores and work out your own conclusions is what we are basically being told.
Enough of all that. We were talking about Liberia.
Why should the US follow up its stated intention of policing the world and squashing dodgy dictatorships by intervening in Liberia? Having sidestepped the question of arms of mass destruction and claimed that its real intention, after all, was to liberate the people of Iraq from a vicious dictatorship (even though the people of Iraq had not actually asked it to intervene) why should the US not follow through with this policy by intervening where it was actually called upon to act?
Where is the cavalry when it is really needed — like in Monrovia, Liberia?
The subtext of the Liberians’ plea is: ‘We are your children. Why do you abandon us? Why do you abandon the children of America stranded here on the wild shores of Africa?”
The desperate citizens of Monrovia are asking the uncomprehending president of the United States of America: Where are you, my long lost Uncle Sam?
Ag, shame. Neither he nor they understand what the question is actually about.
It is hardly as if the minority of Liberia’s citizenry who can claim American ancestry came to the country as sedate immigrants, with constant links to their US homeland.
To hear George W Bush speak of them, you would think they just recently floated gently across the Atlantic in a latter-day equivalent of the Mayflower, bringing Christian civilisation to the barbaric African tribes who roamed the country’s forests.
The truth is that the American colonists who came to Liberia were forcibly repatriated from the US, just as their ancestors had been forcibly removed from various parts of Africa some centuries before.
When abolition became a real possibility, the spectre of freed slaves drove various sectors of white US society apoplectic with fear and loathing. Over the centuries white plantation owners had bought and bred millions of black slaves, to such a degree that in many parts of the Deep South the slaves out- numbered the slave owners. The idea of being forced to free them, and therefore treat them like regular human beings after all that time, planted seeds of horror — the idea of ‘enforced Negro rule”, and the unspeakable possibility that blacks would be ‘foisted into — white families” where they would inflict ‘a worse fate than death upon — innocent [white] women”, as one Republican senator put it at the time.
The solution was to ship as many of them out of the country as possible and, in the usual back-asswards fashion that characterised the whole colonial enterprise, grant them their dream of returning to Africa, which they had been moaning about for the previous 300 years.
A steady stream of former slaves was shipped across the Atlantic and dumped in Liberia and Sierra Leone from 1820. Naturally, their search for long-lost relatives was fruitless, since they could have originated anywhere from Angola to Senegal. The very idea of ‘repatriation” became a cruel farce.
But they were there to stay. And the chaotic politics of Liberia is part of the legacy of that violent, imposed migration.
To think of the white Southerner George W Bush as a potential liberator, given this background, is something of a joke.
The trouble is, for the people of Liberia sitting on the sharp end of the conflict, the whole thing has long gone way beyond the jokey stage.
John Matshikiza is a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
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