The following article may not be readily understood until you have read Dr. H. Boima Fahnbulleh's earlier work which he titled "Liberia and Democracy: An Analysis of the Restoration of the Old Order and the Betrayal of the People's Democratic Aspirations."  Mr. Tarty Teh wrote "The Absent General" as an analysis of Dr. Fahnbulleh's "Liberia and Democracy."  Things heated up a bit from that point because it was then apparent that Dr. H. Boima Fahnbulleh Jr. was unhappy with Mr. Teh's analysis of his work.  Mr. Teh has since written "The Progressives' Power Play," "Missing in Action," "Platitude by Example," "Geared for Trouble,"  "Questions Awaiting Answers," "A True Whigger," and "Sobriety Check."  Who's Afriaid of Dr. Fahnbulleh," is by Renford E. Walsh.  Teh's comment on Dr. Fahnbulleh's claim of being a member of the Liberian elite class ("I am of this elite -- the grandson of Nete-Sie Brownell and the son of Du Fahnbulleh -- I also understand it better") brought out Counselor Mohamedu F. Jones, with his scholastic definition of "elite" to show that Dr. Fahnbulleh was an "elite" without being an "elitist."  One of Dr. Fahnbulleh's readers in the Liberia Forum had inferred from Dr. Fahnbulleh's attitude that he was also an "elitist."  Counselor Jones' argument in this regard is worth noting.   But until we can secure his permission to publish it, there is only Teh's response to it in "The Best of the Elites."   Until then, here is Dr. H. Boima Fahnbulleh in his own words:

Of Lies and Pretenses
By H. Boima Fahnbulleh, Jr.

I have never had a problem with individuals expressing their opinions, no matter how trifling and paltry these are. As one trained in the formulation, appreciation and dispensation of ideas, I always relish the interplay of words and their arrangements in the formulation of concepts and postulates. But what I find difficult to tolerate is the purveyance of lies on a regular basis and the presumptuous arrogance of political pygmies who, not conscious of their limitations, seek to play the role of historical giants. [See "One Elephant and a Rabbit"] It is this folly of the human character that has been responsible for many of the societal defects which have undermined the spirit of rationality in the process of humanity’s collective advancement.

The article by Mr. Tarty Teh entitled "The Absent General" which seeks to comment on a polemical political essay I wrote in 1986 falls within the category of such deliberate lies and distortions, that I am forced to take time off and deal with this calculated falsehood. I must start off by saying that Mr. Teh and I have never spoken for more than two minutes anywhere in this life. He has never visited me at home or at my office in Monrovia at anytime, and neither have I contacted him for anything. I know about this individual and have exchanged greetings with him perfunctorily in Washington, D.C. and Monrovia; but I have never, ever sat to discuss politics or ideas with him. His claim that he spoke to me about Ambassador Francis Dennis and gave me a copy of a report he had written on the Ambassador is a blatant lie. Mr. Teh and I have never discussed anything regarding Ambassador Dennis, a career diplomat for whom I have the highest respect.

When I took over as Minister of Foreign Affairs on December 1, 1981, Ambassador Francis Dennis was no more in the Liberian Foreign Service. Our Ambassador to the Court of St. James in London was Dr. Harry Moniba, and he had been in that position for one year prior to my transfer to the Foreign Ministry. I know this because his congratulatory telex to me mentioned the fact that he had been in London as Ambassador for a year without a car. I immediately took care of this by asking Finance Minister, G. Alvin Jones, to send USD 100,000 to Ambassador Moniba for a car and renovation of the embassy.

I remember all the key Ambassadors and had very good working relationship with all of them, although they had been appointed when I was still at the Ministry of Education. Dr. Joseph Guannu was in Washington, D.C; Dr. Abeodu Jones was at the UN; Ambassador James Freeman was in Rome; Ambassador Prince Brown was in Paris; Dr. C.E. Zamba Liberty was in Bonn; Ambassador Rudolph Johnson was in Brussels; Ambassador George Toe Washington was in Beijing; Ambassador Cyrenius Forh was in Lagos; Dr. Joseph Morris was in Freeman, etc.

All of the above named Ambassadors were at their respective stations when I took over as Foreign Minister. I never encountered Ambassador Francis Dennis, neither was he an envoy under me at any time. Why Mr. Teh would come out with such a patent lie at this time is beyond my understanding! Probably, this fellow suffers from sporadic amnesia. The Liberians in the United States who are interested can find Ambassador Francis Dennis and ascertain the truth. Finally on this point: I have never discussed Ambassador Francis Dennis with Mr. Tarty Teh.

I must now deal briefly with some of the issues raised by Mr. Teh in his article. Suffice it to say that Mr. Teh can assume that he knows. This is his prerogative (as our people back home would say). But a piece of advice from someone he knows only from a distance: "At times it is better to shut one’s mouth and let people assume that you are ignorant, than to open your mouth and let them know that you are indeed ignorant." You can take this piece of advice or reject it. Your decision has nothing to do with me. You are old enough to understand the consequences of your ridiculous flippancy.

There was no need to deal with the "Rice Riot" in my polemical piece. The idea at the time was to forge a united front of all democratic and progressive forces in the light of the orchestration of members of the True Whig Party in the Interim National Assembly. In politics, we refer to this as a tactical measure as opposed to strategic. The idea then was to galvanize the forces which had stood in opposition to the TWP and to confront the backward alliance of Sergeant Doe and those, who like Mr. Teh, had the mind-set of opportunists, sycophants and wheeler-dealers.

With reference to our position on the United States and its relations with Liberia in the era of the cold war, I must say Mr. Teh demonstrates that shallowness which is the hallmark of all wiseacres. I was a Minister in the PRC regime and interacted with U.S. officials at different levels. I remember very well the panic which seized the embassy in Mamba Point when Sergeant Doe visited Ethiopia, at the time when Addis Ababa had categorically cast its lot with Moscow, and there was a visible threat to the oil lanes through the Red Sea.

This was at a time when Washington had desperate need for the use of Liberian territory to checkmate Moscow’s advances in Southern Africa (I will leave this at the level of superficiality for now). In Addis Ababa, we were accorded all the pomp and pageantry reserved for great revolutionaries. This was a few months after Sergeant Doe had been persuaded by Washington to cancel a trip to Libya.

On our return to Monrovia, a stunningly beautiful lady from the U.S. Embassy in Mamba Point came to see me. She invited me to have dinner at her apartment. I obliged, as it is not in my nature to turn down unsolicited invitations from beautiful women, but rejected her apartment and we settled for the restaurant behind the Bowling Alley at Coconut Plantation. Before dinner started, I told her point-blank that I knew who she was (meaning an agent of the CIA), and that she knew my politics and therefore we should not play games with each other. I said I knew they were terrified by the visit to Ethiopia and asked her what it was she wanted from me.

The lady asked if Doe had been impressed with the visit to Addis Ababa and what he saw there. I looked into her charming eyes and told her how naive the Americans could be. I asked her: "Do you people really believe that an illiterate peasant like Doe is capable of understanding anything about the ideological struggle in the world?" She relaxed and told me about the agitation in the embassy over the trip. I said to her there and then that Sergeant Doe was only interested in money and women, and that the Ethiopian leadership had drawn the appropriate conclusion about Doe after the first two days as he was more interested in the prostitutes from the brothels of Addis Ababa than in visiting literacy centres where peasant women were being taught to read and write. This must have calmed them down at the embassy; but it must have also given them a character profile of Sergeant Doe and led to the policy of throwing money at him.

The American lady later on reciprocated by warning me after Weh-Syen was arrested that Sergeant Doe had informed the new U.S. Ambassador, William Swing, that Togba Nah Tipoteh would be arrested on arrival in the country. I informed Dr. Sawyer and used my contacts in the African diplomatic community to warn Tipoteh. I am convinced that had he returned to Liberia, Sergeant Doe would have executed him, not because he was involved in any coup attempt, but because Sergeant Doe had been advised by some of his tribesmen that the two men who stood in his way of hijacking the presidency were Tipoteh and Matthews (more on Matthews and Mr.Teh’s claims later).

My move to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs frightened the Mamba Point Embassy even further. I was informed of some remarks made about me by some embassy officials and their spouses. When my appointment was announced, the wife of one of these officials remarked: "that lousy communist!" Obviously, this was the sentiment in the embassy and thus John Rancy and Yancy Peter Flah were correct in their letter (The Rancy Letter) that the Americans were uncomfortable with me. But I was serving Liberia and not the United States! Thus I took Sergeant Doe to Tanzania, Algeria, the People’s Republic of China, etc., countries where I felt Liberia could derive some benefits from South-South co-operation and thus break its servile dependence on Washington.

An episode that irritated me was the attempt by the Mamba Point embassy to use Sergeant Doe as an agent in the Western Saharan issue. At a meeting of the Council of Ministers in Addis Ababa, the Moroccan delegation threatened to walk out of the conference if the Polisario Front was admitted. Most of Africa supported the Front and I felt Liberia should support the position of the majority. Two hours later, I was handed a telex by the U.S embassy in Addis Ababa from Sergeant Doe instructing me to walk out with the Moroccan delegation.

I rejected the suggestion because I felt it was inappropriate for the Sergeant to contact me through the U.S. embassy, and that he was being used to rupture the unity of the OAU. I sat in the hall, voted for the sitting of the Polisario Front and left Addis Ababa in disgust at the antics of those who would use an illiterate Sergeant to undermine the unity of an African Organization. Thus, when I write on this issue of U.S.-Liberian relations and the perceived threat from the progressive camp, I write with some authority. Unlike Mr. Teh, I had my sources and contacts! I do not fear any power. I have always placed my trust in a conscious and organized people!!!

Mr. Teh has an antipathy towards Baccus Matthews. This is obvious from his tirades. But this is for the two of them to handle. What concerns me here is Mr. Teh’s exaggerated opinion of his role in the dismissal of Baccus Matthews. For the records, I know more about Matthews and his activities than Mr. Teh will ever know. I remember asking Oscar Quiah in prison in 1979, after Matthews wrote to Tolbert, how could he follow such a fickle character who had no political foresight.

I argued then that instead of an obsequious disclaimer, we should use the courtroom to indict the Tolbert government and mobilize an outraged people with our defiance and courage. I was convinced that the Tolbert government could not execute us in light of the blunders of that government and the anger of the people. Some friends then joked that my defiance was because my maternal grandfather—Nete-Sie Brownell—was head of the Commission appointed to look into the causes of the "Rice Riot."

The senior followers of Mr. Matthews know what I think of him. I remember an exchange I had with him in the plane on our way to Addis Ababa. He mentioned that MOJA was only theorizing and that power was waiting to be taken. My retort then was that any fool was capable of taking power in Africa; the question was what to do with it! He then said that I did not know how to talk to a colleague. I answered that he was not a colleague of mine and that I regarded him as a demagogue, confusing the lumpen-proletariat with ideas he himself did not understand. I have always had this resentment for men like Matthews who were so indolent that even with a Liberian government scholarship, they could not finish undergraduate college.

I know it was Matthews who tried to set me up for censure or possible elimination by the PRC over the sending of students to Ethiopia for literacy training. This was after he tried to take fifty of the scholarships for what he termed Mobilization by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He wanted Oscar Quiah to reward their PPP supporters with the trip. I refused and there were heated exchanges in letters. What Matthews did not know was that all the letters he received from the Ethiopian Ambassador in Monrovia, Debebe Hurisse, were drafted by me. Thus, I knew he was lying when he said the Ethiopian Ambassador had informed him that fifty of the scholarships were meant for the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

After my refusal to accept his lies, he decided to set me up. My letter to him with the names of the students who were scheduled to travel was given to his supporters at the University of Liberia. They wrote and circulated two leaflets insinuating that I had sent MOJA militants for training in guerrilla warfare. I knew the letter came from Matthews’ office because the names on the leaflets were in the same order as I had placed them in my letter to him. The fact of the matter was that of the 67 people who left, only 17 were MOJA militants.

Matthews traveled to Addis Ababa and asked to see the Liberians. On his return to Monrovia, he asked Sergeant Doe to explain to the PRC and the Liberian people what Liberian literacy teachers were doing in a military camp. I learned from the Ethiopians that this was a disused military camp where they usually accommodated large number of people. I received letters from members of the PRC querying my decision, and finally Sergeant Doe instructed that all scholarships from socialist countries were to be rejected. This was at a time when we had students waiting to go and study medicine, geology, agriculture, engineering, etc.

I want Mr. Teh to understand that I know Baccus Matthews very well. But this is not the issue. He claimed that what I do not know I "tossed...under" my "True Whig Party blanket," referring to the dismissal of Matthews. Mr. Teh should understand one thing: I am a student of history and am very scrupulous about documents and records. I know the circumstances surrounding his letter to the PRC concerning Matthews’ visit to Washington, D.C. He mentioned me in that letter, contrasting my performance in Washington, D.C. with that of Matthews. I saw the letter at the Executive Mansion. I thought this was very low and despicable. Mr. Teh was a press officer and not a security agent. Why would one be so scurvy as to send such a report that could have led to the death of an individual? A man has to be devious, treacherous and of such mean character to do such a thing! This was the culture left in place by Tubman where the State became a totalitarian behemoth tearing families apart and making friendship a rarity because people spied and informed on each other.

Matthews had spoken as Foreign Minister, advising Liberians of the pitfalls of the new regime. What he said was true. I was a witness to that. Mr. Teh, as a low-level functionary in the Information Office in Washington, D.C. should have written of the minister’s frank exchanges with Liberians in the United States and how there were difficulties in the process as should be expected. But to send a letter to the military regime denouncing a young man—irrespective of his ambition—is such an insensitive and irresponsible act of perfidy that one has to search for an answer to this kind of mindset in the realm of pathology.

I was not pleased then that Mr. Teh mentioned me in flattering terms; for I have always despised men and women who are so unconscionable that they would betray the trust of unsuspecting people. My father was a victim of this kind of treachery and my aversion is deep towards all creatures who engage in such!

Mr. Teh missed my point about the True Whig Party. I have always considered him and all those who worked in the TWP as agents of that Party. I make no distinction between people when dealing with the TWP. As one who worked in the Propaganda Department of the Party, Mr. Teh was as much a True Whig Party flunky as was Mr. Emmett Harmon. It was because of this realization that I scrupulously avoided Mr. Teh and his ilk even when as a student in Washington, D.C. I glanced at him on several occasions in the cubicle adjacent to the office of T-Kla Williams.  [Read "Who's Afraid of Dr. Fahnbulleh," by Renford E. Walsh.]

I regarded Mr. Teh then as a servile puppet of the masters he was serving. The True Whig Party for me was a scandalous joke! I never accepted any favour from that moribund organization with its pervasive ideological fuzziness and therefore I could criticize and indict it. Throughout my studies, not once did I accept a scholarship or grant from the TWP government. I would have never accepted a job from that party, so great was my contempt for it. My mission was to destroy that Party—a parasitic imposition on the Liberian people—and open up possibilities for the advancement of the masses.

Mr. Teh is mistaken if he feels that his shoddy letter led to the dismissal of Baccus Matthews. It was only the pretext Doe needed to do what he was contemplating, once he convinced himself that the presidency could be occupied by any idiot—even without guns and tanks. Sergeant Doe and others had accepted Matthews and Tipoteh at the inception of the coup, because they were convinced that these men had connections with the Americans and other powerful forces in the international community. When Cecil Dennis was refused shelter in the U.S. embassy, this confirmed the belief of the soldiers of the powerful connections of PPP and MOJA.  [See Teh's "The Progressives' Power Play"]But this was a chimera and as soon as the Sergeant and his cronies found out, these men were endangered political species.

On a trip to Grand Gedeh, I saw the hatred in Doe’s eyes for Matthews when, during the course of eating together in a pan with our hands because the decent and hospitable peasants did not have enough spoons, the Sergeant noticed that Matthews was eating with his left hand. The poor chap is left-handed, but for Doe this was a sign of witchcraft. He stared at Matthews with that look, which I came to understand later meant cold-blooded death, and asked him why he was using his left hand. Matthews stood dumbfounded because he thought it was obvious. Sergeant Doe hurriedly dropped the piece of meat he was holding and scurried from under the hut.

I found him leaning on one of the jeeps, smoking nervously. From then on, he avoided Matthews. On several occasions, I went up to the Mansion and met Baccus Matthews waiting to see Doe. What was interesting about this was that Doe deliberately kept Matthews waiting outside with the security guards. Whenever Willie Givens informed him that the Minister of Education had arrived, he would ask Givens to usher me in. After my discussion, I would mention that the Foreign Minister was waiting outside and he would look at me with that blank stare of his, which was an indication that he was not interested. The same went for Togba Nah Tipoteh. There is so much to this sad episode in the history of our country which Mr. Teh could never have known.

On the Quiwonkpa situation, Mr. Teh is devious but not clever. He hopes to set me against Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. This is the method of a professional agent provocateur. My polemical essay was written in 1986. The Quiwonkpa invasion was on November 12, 1985, thus, my essay could not be "the blueprint of the 1986 coup attempt...." For one who claims to know so much about political developments in Liberia, it is interesting that Mr. Teh does not remember the date of the Quiwonkpa invasion!

I have never hidden the fact that I helped the martyred General. In a statement to the Liberian people in 1991 that was carried in all the news organs in Monrovia, I averred: "We have heard the rhetorical question—where were they? -- many times, and we have laughed at this hypocrisy. I will now say where we were. When Taylor was languishing in a U.S. prison awaiting extradition for fleecing the public treasury of one million dollars (and begging us to appear in court in the U.S. to testify on his behalf), we were organizing heroic men to confront the tyranny. We failed in our attempt but that was the beginning of a new consciousness.

Eternal glory to the martyrs who fell in 1985! From 1986 to 1989, we did not rest. While Taylor was again languishing in prison in Ghana and Sierra Leone, we were still organising but found time to plead with the Ghanaian and Sierra Leoneon authorities to release the rascal and not send him back to Liberia to face the wrath of the regime. Then we met in the country where he trained his people and I called him a racketeer and an impostor. I still think so. He knows we did not go up there to rest.

The difference between our position and his centered around objectives. We wanted a national war of liberation which would usher in a new consciousness. He wanted a war for wealth and the glamour that goes with power. We felt that fighters must not only have military training; it was necessary for them to have political education also. Only in this way would they be able to protect the people and together with them build new structures in the liberated zones. Thus, after our fighters were trained, we began the process of political education. Taylor and his hordes decided that all this was not necessary, ignorant of the fact that fighters without political education are potential bandits—to paraphrase the martyr—Thomas Sankara. Our people have felt and seen the consequences of Taylor’s rashness.

I have nothing to hide when it comes to liberating Liberia from tyranny. I resented Sergeant Doe not because he was an illiterate peasant, but because he was a congenital liar and a corrupt and neurotic mass murderer. Mr. Teh must know that I was at the border with the martyred General, dressed in my military gear and with my kalasnikov, ready to ride into Monrovia with the martyred General, Harry Greaves, Jr. Robert Phillips and Jim Holder to flush the mendacious tyrant down the sewage of history. I was stopped from going in because of a minor misunderstanding. But this is another history! I knew the martyred General was a born-again Christian and had his limitations, and so I wanted to go in and help with operations. We will never know whether my presence would have altered things. We had enough rockets and ammunition to tear that Mansion down and this is what I suggested at the time. Let me say here that I believe that tyranny must be opposed "by any means necessary" and I do act according to my beliefs.

Mr. Teh averred that "Fahnbulleh...must have fled Liberia after the coup failed, because his principled separation from the Doe government doesn’t seem sufficient as reason for ‘exile’." If this demonstration of ignorance was coming from someone I respected, I would have felt a sense of betrayal; but coming from Mr. Teh whose vocation is treachery, I consider it a tasteless joke. I left Liberia in September 1983 after I was informed by an Ambassador from an Arab country based in Monrovia that Sergeant Doe had sent Gray Allison, Henry Dubar and John Rancy to Israel to find out if Israeli intelligence had any evidence of my involvement with Libya.

The Israelis, being professionals and not liars, told them they had no such evidence, and asked if this was not the former Foreign Minister who led the walkout at the OAU Council of ministers meeting in Tripoli over the Libyans refusal to allow the delegation from Chad to be seated. At this time, my passport was being held by Edwin Taye at the Bureau of Immigration on Sergeant Doe’s instruction, awaiting the return of his emissaries. After their arrival in Monrovia, Allison and Rancy could not lie because Dubar was with them (he was married to Dew Mayson’s sister). It was he who told Sergeant Doe that since there was nothing on me, I should be allowed to travel. Sergeant Doe did not accept the argument. He went to stage two.

For four days consecutively, ELBC carried Sergeant Doe’s warning that any one found guilty of ritualistic killing (a primitive pastime of reactionary politicians in Liberia during the Tubman era) would go the way of the victim. I never paid any attention to this warning because I did not believe in such primitive practices. On the fifth day, my contact at the National Security Agency (NSA) came to see me at two in the morning. He said that there was a conspiracy by Sergeant Doe, Gray Allison and others to kill a man, remove some parts from his body and dump the carcass in my yard. They would then coax some people to testify against me. He warned me to leave because he said Liberians were so gullible that they would believe such an allegation (Allison fell victim to this ploy a few years later).

I left the country three days later, after Henry Dubar convinced Sergeant Doe to give me my passport. The Sergeant lied that the passport was confiscated because it was a diplomatic passport. Earnest Eastman, who had replaced me at the Foreign Ministry, knew that I was entitled to a diplomatic passport as former Foreign Minister. He tried to convince Doe to allow me to have a diplomatic passport. The Sergeant refused. I took an ordinary passport and left the "valley of the shadow of death." In 1984, I returned to Liberia to see my father who had suffered a stroke. During my stay, Dr. Amos Sawyer was arrested and the students demanded his release. Sergeant Doe sent troops to the university campus. While driving home, I was stopped by some soldiers who recognized me and said that I had left the Doe government, and was therefore an enemy. I was hit on the head with a gun and kicked by the goons. One of them said that I should be taken behind the university and shot. Luckily for me, Podier and Gbartu were standing at the gate of the Capitol Building, and when they saw me without my glasses and with a torn shirt, they told the soldiers to release me. Three weeks after this incident, I left Liberia and did not return until March 15, 1991, when I went for the National Conference.

On the question of the students, Mr. Teh did not understand the language. What I said was "the students had provided the ideological justification for the confrontation with the Tolbert regime." Mr. Teh replied: "But where is it written that national presidents have to list students as major sources for national direction?" I do not know whether I should laugh or frown in disgust at this level of ignorance. What the sentence says is that the students provided the political reasons for opposing the Tolbert government. One only has to read the "University Spokesman" and "The Vanguard" of the period to get an idea of the militant defiance of the students. It was at "The Intellectual Discourse" that Tolbert’s ministers were exposed as charlatans and patriots like Albert Porte, Dr. Amos Sawyer, Clifford Flemister, etc. were praised for their incisive analyses of the bankruptcy of the True Whig Party—to which Mr. Teh and so many others belonged.

In closing, I will say a few things for the benefit of Mr. Teh and those who think like him. While in government (April 1980 to July 1983), I never dismissed anyone because of his/her name or where the individual came from. If anyone was dismissed it was because of incompetence. I do not like lazybones. Again, I was never intimidated by Sergeant Doe and his goons. I remember after the execution of the thirteen former officials of the Tolbert government (execution I only found out about after my cousin Hardinia Smythe called my office and told me what the BBC had announced), Sergeant Doe instructed me to remove the name of the son of Estrada Bernard Sr., former Minister of Labor, Youths and Sports for the Tolbert regime, from the scholarship list. I refused and told him that the boy was a Liberian citizen and doing exceptionally well at Morehouse College, and I could not remove his name and live with my conscience.

He never brought this issue up again. I learned later that Estrada Bernard, Jr. finished medical school and is practicing as a neurosurgeon in the United States. Then there was the case of a relative of the Sergeant by the name of Harold Tarr Freeman. I had removed his name from the scholarship list because he was out of school in the U.S. and working full time. He reported the matter to Sergeant Doe . I was instructed to put his name back on the scholarship list but I refused.

Sergeant Doe did not bring up the subject until the day after the execution of Thomas Weh-Syen and the other four members of the PRC. He called me to the Mansion and behind dark glasses he asked why I had not carried out his instruction relative to Harold Tarr Freeman. I restated my position. I told him it was wrong for any body—no matter his/her connections—to use taxpayers’ money for an unintended purpose. There was an icy silence that lasted for about two minutes and then Sergeant Doe said he understood. Harold Tarr Freeman never got back on the scholarship list during my tenure at the Ministry of Education.

I do not bend my knees to men, only to God. No matter whether it was Tubman (who imprisoned me at the age of nineteen for warning Willington Campbell about insulting my sister Miatta at the Temple of Justice during my father’s trial) or Tolbert (who imprisoned me at the age of twenty-nine for what he claimed was my indoctrination of students at the University), or Corporal Podier (the confrontation over his attempt to impose one of his cronies as principal of BWI and my threat to resign), or Sergeant Doe (on many occasions ending with his receipt of half a million dollars from Rosenblum to establish ties with Israel and my defense of the OAU’s position), or Charles Taylor and his Libyan friends (whom I condemned in Tripoli and was then asked to leave Libya within three days), I have never been cowed!

I believe in progressive changes where humanity advances from the lower stage of ignorance, bigotry, conflicts and irrationality to that of cultural, scientific and technological advancement which then underpins the conquest of nature and the direction and control of the community by rational men and women. This stance has informed my politics. I am on the Left because that is where the heart is and so I feel for the people. I do not feel for Boima Fahnbulleh because I grew up privileged in a society where people were treated like animals because they were poor and illiterate. At an early age, I saw my privilege as a badge of shame in the midst of a parasitic social elite. I am of this elite—the grandson of Nete-Sie Brownell and the son of Du Fahnbulleh—and so I understand it better. Unlike others, I have no complexes. My name means nothing as I have never been faced with an identity crisis. I speak no indigenous language and have never lived in a village. But I empathize with the sufferings and thralldom of peasants, poor people and the neglected of society.

I am a black man, an African, in an age when my race must come to the rendezvous of history with its own contribution in the realms of science, philosophy and technology. To survive, we must leapfrog over decades of backwardness and stampede into the future of progress where science has opened up vistas of possibilities. Thus we are eager; for as our late leader Mwalimu Julius Nyerere argued: "We must run while others walk."