Blood & Bondage

Dusty boots time means the business of leaving the familiar and exploring close up what’s even more familiar – bits of Africa that we’ve known through headlines and as every Africa watcher will tell you the headlines never do the place justice. But it's one big story pool and even the stories you don't set out to get are there in great numbers the characters so familiar the landscape so visual might as well see it while we have eyes to see and the kids go where is this place is it near Ouagadougou yes same part which is west when you back? Soon. Maybe there’ll come a time when I get bored of it all, but it never fails to fascinate and for now the dusty boots need replenishing with more dust and whatever it is Liberia has to offer and even the overpriced sandwiches at what must be the world’s worst airport for its eurodullness and the row upon row of crap duty free shops all over Brussels airport at some ungodly hour fail to dent the swelling excitement of getting out of one place and onto another.The travellers are from America and Liberian from France and Ivorian travelling on to Abidjan because as patriotic as one might be there is no Liberian Airways to get you to Monrovia and in the mid-morning Belgian ennui I do the Guardian crossword twice and check in only to be told the plane has a technical problem and we are delayed by another three hours and that's fine by us because technical hitches ignored have already downed two aeroplanes this summer and I'm not going that way no thank you so fix the fucking plane.

The brief has been simple enough, to head to Monrovia and bag a Presidential interview with the first female African head of state, to talk to an audaciously talented young man who at the age of 14 was asking rebel commanders to disarm child soldiers. And to interview an artist stroke painter stroke genius whose paintings are an explosion of colour and sensitivity about the world around him and such a brief is not work it’s a working holiday and my shooter is my friend we get drunk together off the Tottenham court road and just like we did once in Gabon we’re going to shoot the hell out of this place but this time with three cameras and try out different ways of telling the stories and in a way this is not news but fluffy documentary all good news all positive and the war has been over for some five years or so although the memory of war is still fresh in everyone’s heads.

What can be said about this place? There must be an alternative history and it goes something like this early in the nineteenth century America bought up land on this west African strip and caught up with France Britain Portugal Belgium and Spain in the scramble to own a part of the African continent. And, given America’s aversion to racial unity in those dark old days the story was just not that simple. Picture it, thousands of freed slaves are running around free and frightening the hell out of southern gentlemen concerned about their ladies’ honour with their slave freedom. As one slave trader – John Randolph - put it, the freed slaves were ‘promoters of mischief.’ Where on earth can they be placed - for they are free but not American, their colour saw to that definition, or, as one slave sympathiser believed – “because of unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, the freed negroes never could amalgamate with the free whites of America.” It was not until 1847 that a freed slave called JJ Roberts became the first President of an independent Liberia but a great deal of water had passed under the proverbial bridge and it was bitter stuff. A group of powerful and influential white Americans created the American Colonisation Society and lobbied their government for the right to settle former Africans back in Africa. But there was to be yet another twist. Around the time Spielberg set his Amistad, that epic about a ship carrying slaves, the slave trade was in its dying decades and as the American Colonisation Society started settling people in Liberia, ships full of slaves captured from elsewhere – The Congo, for example, were being intercepted in the Atlantic and the passengers were being offloaded on Liberian soil.

So, the Freed Slaves needed a home that wasn’t the united states because despite their freedom they will be called freed slaves and that’s the thing with the English language you can see their freedom but you remember what they were – slaves - and back they went those freed from their bondage but it was not like returning to a land they remembered because for several generations they fought and died in civil wars picked tea and coffee and became to all understanding Americans and when they landed on these African shores facing the Atlantic they called the place Liberia because, they said, “the love of liberty brought us here.” But Liberty gained for some is liberty denied to others for the interior of those shores was awake with indigenous Africans in many tribes and traditions and the next century and a half was one of blood and deep distrust and we can say with all historical perspective that the wars of Charles Taylor and Roosevelt Johnson and Samuel Doe and Prince Johnson and General Butt Naked and the anarchy of the 20th century stemmed from the American Colonisation Society’s well-intentioned but short sighted decisions but how were they to know that the Americo-Liberians, once in charge, would subjugate the local Africans into the very life of slavery and bondage from which they had been freed?

I'm reading stuff on the plane as we near Monrovia and the pilot reminds us that Liberia is in the grip of its rainy season but ofcourse it will be hot when it's not raining and my cameraman says he's glad he asked for two camera covers and we land to the sultry heat and just as we descend it's clear this is a coast line of lagoons and stunning Atlantic waves.

Fast forward to 2009 one evening in the now and here we are being greeted by porters who could be Kru or Khrahn or some other of the many tribes that have steadfastly held on to their beliefs their animism their spectacular rituals long lost by us in Southern Africa but paid a heavy price to do so and the wars and blood letting are over but take a look at that car park by the sea waves upon waves of UN vehicles here to keep the peace and this should be like my last trip to neighbouring Sierra Leone with the UN everywhere keeping the peace together and making millions for their respective national coffers and soldiers and police from Uganda Malawi Bangladesh Jordan Ukraine Russia you name it they are here because the alternative is some new rebel or warlord with a comic book name.


So for now the General Mosquitoes and General Butt Nakeds are not around and the city is pleasant enough the hotel a little too steep and the beaches filthy but there is a functioning normality as policemen and women patrol the streets and every charity and donor agency in the world has set up an office here to deal with the fallout of two decades of war. We blag our way to the best rooms in the house and get a balcony and pop open the duty free single malt after a first day of filming general views and wonder what the next couple of weeks will hold because first impressions have been magnificent and the Lebanese cuisine alright but a little fattening but there's a gym to work things off and all the equipment is here minus a couple of boxes full of lights mysteriously left behind in Brussels and my impression of the Belgian capital is sinking by the hour and no I didn't take the malaria tablets so this could be the mosquito kisses speaking already.What time are we starting tomorrow? I don't know, we need to get our local accreditation touch base with our contact and there's a bunch of humanitarian folk arriving in the morning you can go and shoot some more hilly roads and yellow taxis and kids playing football by the sewage ridden beaches I may stay in and produce from bed and try and finish le Carré’s slow boiled but gripping A Most Wanted Man. Really? No ofcourse not, we go when our Guinean driver comes and that's at the crack of dawn. Damn nice change from the crossword this.