Leaving Liberia
Musings on the back of a motorbike
On the quiet, pre-dawn road, walking along with our backpacks, Mike and I review the day’s strategy. Like every day we’ve spent in Liberia, it helps to have a transport plan thought out first thing in the morning.
Plan A is to see if any taxis are parked at the crossroads. If one is available and they offer two seats rather than asking us to charter the whole vehicle, we will negotiate a price. Chartering a whole taxi would be too expensive.
Plan B is to contract two moto-taxis. Based on the expected time it will take, I don’t want to agree to more than 2000 Liberian dollars per bike. We don’t want to take motorcycle taxis at all because they are inherently dangerous (we don’t have helmets) and torturous on dusty, unsurfaced roads. But in upcountry Liberia, there is often little choice.
We reach the crossroads in the center of Ganta. It is now light enough to see everything up and down the highway, though the sun is only a weak glow through the trees. Women bustle by with bundles and tubs on their heads, and a few children, dressed in school uniforms, chat and shuffle along. A few motorbikes pass by, laden with passengers. I’ve seen up to six people crammed onto a single bike.
There is no taxi in sight. Plan A isn’t going to happen today. Instead, we see the expected cluster of motorcycles and drivers down the street next to the petrol station. All the cycles are the same brand, TVS, a cheap brand imported from India that has edged out the similar models from China. Nearly every motorcycle I’ve ridden in Liberia is a TVS.
The drivers see us and begin gesticulating. They are already guessing where we are headed. There must be over twenty of them. They want our business because we are foreigners and likely going a long distance, hence a bigger payout.
We approach the mob, and the shouting begins.
“Où vas-tu? Dieke?” A young man touches my arm to get my attention. He speaks French and is hopeful we are going north into Guinea, less than 10 km away.
“Banga! Going to Banga!” shouts another, slapping the seat of his TVS. ‘Banga’ is the nickname of the largest town in the west, Gbarnga.
They are all crowded around now, all teenagers and young men, probably none older than 24. Everyone is noisy and excited, trying to catch our attention, pulling at our arms.
I focus on one young man at random. “We go to Danané,” I put my finger out and bring my other hand down on it like an axe. “But we just go the border. Côte d’Ivoire.”
“Yaa, I take you!” he dismounts.
“We need two bikes,” I continue, holding up two fingers. “How much each bike?”
“One five!” he says immediately, meaning 1500 Liberian dollars. I was expecting them to ask a lot more. “All the way to the border?” I confirm.
“Yaa!” he gestures to another driver, who brightens and steps forward. I do not know the etiquette for choosing the second driver, but unless we have a preference, it seems the first person I negotiate with gets to decide.
“You also agree one five?” I ask the other man, who nods, grins, and is already unwinding a long rubber cord to tie down one of our backpacks to the rear of his bike.
The other drivers step back a bit. The mood relaxes now. We have our two drivers, and the rest, having lost the chance, go back to talking and joking with each other. We watch as three of them grab a fourth and yank his pants up, giving him a wedgie. Everyone laughs and talks in Liberian Creole, a language of which I can only ever identify a few words in English here and there.
Mike looks at me and says nothing, but I know by his expression that he is also surprised at how cheap we got the rides. My large backpack is now tied down to the bike with a long rubber cord, and I will wear my day pack. On go the sunglasses, not for sunlight, but to keep dust and insects out of my eyes. I pull the cord of my hat tight so as not to get blown off my head. After over twenty rides like this in the last few weeks, the preparation is down to a science.
We all saddle up and head off to the east.
We pass the United Methodist Church of Ganta, a place just east of town we visited the day before, founded in 1922 and the first of its kind in the Liberian interior. It stands dark behind the mango trees. By unhappy coincidence, days before our visit, two pastors had come to physical blows inside this house of worship. The argument was about the Methodist Church’s stance on same-sex marriage. Though the European and US Methodist Church councils have condoned it, such acceptance is almost unknown in Africa, and any attempt by a pastor to bring the local churches more in line with their European or US affiliates usually ends in confrontation and failure.
The town disappears behind us, and the land turns rural. This northeastern corner of Liberia is beautiful, almost pristine. Long stretches of jungle pass by, dark green and silent. The air is still bracingly cold, a welcome respite from the heat that will soon set in. Kapok trees, enormous with white trunks, stand above the verdant wall, tendrils of mist rendering some of them disembodied.
The hills loom out in the foggy distance, all of them encrusted with forest. I feel that elation of movement, going forward into yet another place unfamiliar to me, prying open the unknown. At this hour of the day, it is all peace here, the road empty of vehicles, only the drone of the TVS engine and the roar of heavy, humid air past my head. I get whiffs of wood smoke and stale moisture.
We startle a group of cattle egrets, pure white in the brown grass, and they fly up, gliding along the side of the road. A group of schoolchildren watches us go by, suddenly shouting out when they see we are foreigners. They alert other kids further along, and by the time we pass a second group, they are ready, smiling, yelling, and waving madly.
Mike and I haven’t seen many foreigners either. None, in fact, for the past three days. Liberia is not a tourist destination. A decade of horrific civil war and Ebola destroyed its reputation, and it has yet to recover.
We stop at a police barrier. There are many in the country, halting all traffic and asking for papers. I dismount the bike, hand over my passport to the officer standing in the road, and remove my sunglasses.
He idly thumbs through the document. “What is your mission?”
It is a question we get asked every day. A white face in Liberia almost always means a missionary if they are on cheap transport or an NGO official if they are in their own vehicle.
“No mission, Sir. We are just tourists.”
“Humble travelers, here to see your beautiful country,” adds Mike, interjecting the twin elements of humor and praise that often help move us along through these tedious checkpoints.
“No mission, no mission,” the officer repeats to himself, then smiles. “Welcome!” he says, shaking our hands and swinging the barrier open.
The road is much better than I anticipated. We expected gravel, but there are long, recently paved sections over which we can fly like the wind. A railroad track parallels the road for much of the distance between Ganta and Sanniquellie. I suspect that the iron mines of this region are behind all of this. Big money somewhere has incentivized the construction of good roads and a railway in an otherwise underdeveloped part of the country. Now I understand why our moto-taxis were so cheap. The time to get to the border will be much shorter than our estimate, which was based on rough dirt roads. We pass a parked pickup truck with ArcelorMittal written on the side. This is a Luxembourg-based steel company, undoubtedly involved with mining somewhere around here.
A man I spoke to in Ganta the day before told me about Mt. Nimba, a mountain peak to the north of where we are now. He told me that a spirit, named Gena, lives inside it. Once, a white man came to take the iron from the mountain’s base, and the spirit became enraged. He appeared as an old man, casting evil spells to bring him great misfortune and early death to the intruding foreigner.
“So it is like an old man?” I asked, writing down the spirit’s name on the back of my hand so I wouldn’t forget it.
“It can appear as a woman.”
“So is the spirit man or woman?”
“It can be both!” he said triumphantly. As always in Africa, I never know how seriously people take such stories about evil spirits. But I never try to contradict any of it. I just listen and remember.
The sun gets higher and brighter. The roadcuts, slicing through thick tropical soil, glow a deep red in the light. We pass through more villages, and the wood smoke lies thick between the huts. Children pump water from a nearby well, the liquid spurting into battered yellow plastic containers. The world is waking up, and we are speeding through it. I am trying to take more photos with my phone, but it puts me off balance, so I tuck it away.
I feel my first moment of regret about leaving the country. Liberia surprised me at every turn. People were so much friendlier than I had been led to believe by other travelers’ reports. The pressure for bribery at checkpoints, the constant fighting over getting a fair price for food and transport, were all easily manageable, or not even an issue. All the months we had spent worrying about getting from one end of the country to the other on our own were a waste of time. But in a good way.
The hills around get steeper and closer in. I can smell the jungle now, that rich odor of growing vegetation. Some day, people will move into this area, strip away the forest, and populate the roadsides. It happens everywhere in the developing world where road access suddenly improves. For now, I can enjoy seeing it raw and untrammeled.
Somewhere past Kahnple, an odd statue appears on the top of a hill to the side of the road. It looks like the figure of a man in army fatigues, holding one fist high, a machine gun hanging from his front. I catch only a portion of the inscription below that says PRINCE JOHNSON ……………….. SENATOR ……..
It’s a jarring historical reveal that shatters my sense of peace with the morning. Prince Johnson was a warlord during the civil war (1991–2003) and a senator from Nimba County, where we are currently traveling. He fought against both President Samuel Doe and, later, President Charles Taylor (the former he mutilated and killed in 1990 while videotaping it all). While Taylor himself was convicted of war crimes by a UN-backed court, Prince Johnson, who himself committed a litany of heinous crimes, was never brought to trial after the war ended. He died of natural causes in 2024, and many people in Liberia still see him as a hero.
While those horrific days of senseless civil conflict are gone, the statue reminds me that political memory, anywhere in the world, is complex and doesn’t always reach the same conclusions that are logical to me. One does not need to be slapped in the face with genocide to see it.
Within twenty minutes, we slow down at a cluster of buildings. This is the border. We pay off our moto-taxis and go into a small office where our passports are stamped, and we are asked the usual routine questions. The officials are friendly, curious, and undoubtedly bored, as this border crossing is remote, visited by only a minuscule fraction of travelers, even among those who’ve made it to West Africa. Details are written down by hand in a huge ledger, and I imagine this ledger, once it is full, being tossed into some back room, growing thick with mold, and eventually rotting away like everything eventually does in tropical climates.
I spontaneously express my feelings about Liberia to the officer sitting beside me in the customs office. I’m a bit emotional. Intense travel produces intense feelings. I am well aware I am living a moment that can never be repeated. He nods in sympathy, asks where I am from, and grins at my reply.
“So I can say you were welcome to our country!” He reaches out to shake my hand.
“Thank you. So you mean our country, not just your country?”
“Yes! It is your country too!”
“Same flag!”
“Almost!” he laughs, “Just one star, not many!”
On this note, our passports are returned to us, and we walk out. The border itself is a rocky stream with an old metal bridge over it. There is a sense of quiet finality. We walk across it and leave Liberia.
Beautifully written as ever Brad. Loved this: “But I never try to contradict any of it. I just listen and remember.”
“No mission, no mission.” I am curious about how Liberians perceive missionaries today? And whether it played into how friendly people were towards you? In my travels, people seem to relax when they find out my only mission is curiosity.