A Dance LessonA Dance LessonVictory is not always a clear-cut achievement. Expectations for adherence to the terms of surrender are high or low depending on the attitudes of both the vanquished and the conquerors. But it is the conquerors who often can afford to be a bit more magnanimous, whereas requiring additional humility of the vanquished proves lack of appreciation for human dignity.
We have not had any dignity in Liberia since the transmogrifying forces Charles Taylor created began to consume everything we hold dear as a nation and as a people. We were defeated. We lost respect for ourselves and Charles Taylor had none for us to begin with. We hardly made sense. We danced and sang his praises in hope that we might live another day.
Resilience is also a part of human nature. And Taylor represents a very rare phenomenon that has made possible some consensus among the otherwise traumatized and confused people of Liberia. That phenomenon is Taylor’s ability to offend even those who were unwilling to grapple with an African problem, given our knack for creating problems for ourselves and being hopeless as a result.
In our current situation in West Africa, however, Taylor is the only one who has so far caused some Western cynics to say, ‘‘Wait a minute. Maybe you have a point here. This is a rare form of evil even if those effected by it are only Africans.’’ That may not be the most positive endorsement of our humanity, but it’s a start. And we are prepared to claim that we are human enough to demand fairness or to fight for it.
Of course fighting is not new to Africa. We fight a lot, but our fights are not choreographed toward some national, let alone continental, objectives. But Charles Taylor may help us change that. We are beginning to think regional in our assessment of the current wave of violence sweeping West Africa, with Charles Taylor as the common denominator. But the causes of our next problems may not be that obvious, and we may relapse into treating the symptoms without investigating the root causes.
What we still don’t know is what we should do when we win a fight. We always promise we will do things – good things. But then we do something else or nothing after victory. But before we do something or nothing, we always dance – again without choreography – when we win or when we think we have won.
For an example, when a group of junior army officers, headed by a semiliterate Sgt. Samuel Doe, ended Liberia’s pretense of acquired Western sophistication which was showcased only in Monrovia and other coastal metropolises, the result was mostly African Liberians dancing at the expense of the settlers whose 130-year grip on political power was believed to have been ended by the coup of 1980. While we danced, the Americo-Liberians (the freed American slaves who founded Liberia) watched with apprehension.
Ten years later, the Americos engineered the capture of, by then, an elected President Samuel Doe. He was tortured on videotape, and copies of the orgy were circulated among those who had a taste for violence of that sort. No dance was recorded of those who relished in President Samuel Doe’s gruesome death by vivisection. But with a few boasting that the recording of Doe’s death by torture was on their entertainment racks, very little was left to the imagination that there was an initial or occasional shuffle – albeit uncontrollable – accompanying the elation of some viewers.
President Samuel Doe himself had sought to punish dancers. During the first major coup against his reign as an elected president, Doe’s loyalists accused one of his rivals, Ms. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, of dancing when in 1985 it was announced that President Doe had lost the Executive Mansion to the invading forces headed by a popular General Thomas Quiwonkpa. There was no videotape of Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf’s alleged jig, but it was difficult to find a witness who didn’t dance or would not have danced on hearing that President Doe had been overthrown. So we pretty much took Doe’s word for it that Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf had, indeed, danced. And though dancing is not yet a crime, it remains a provocation.
What we need, though, as a big dance – an Americo with her Grebo partner, a Gio swinging with a Mandingo. But let the dance not be for the celebration of the fall of anyone, but for the rise of Liberia. – Tarty Teh [Washington, D.C., June 16, 2000]
Copyrighted © Tarty Teh 2000
