Charles Taylor, the Liberian guerrilla leader, was recently voted in as president. The little-known truth is that his father was born and grew up in Point Fortin, Trinidad.
So many times over the last seven years Everest St. Louis would tease his wife, Jane, about her family.
"Maisie," he'd call, using her nickname, whenever the news came on TV about the wars in Africa, "Maisie, look your cousin." It was a family joke and she would smile.
The joke is that Maisie, a kind-looking, sprightly old lady living in San Juan, is first cousin to Charles Taylor, the Liberian guerrilla leader who was recently voted in as president, after having plunged the country into seven years of bloody civil war.
Taylor, born in January 1948, is described in the western press as descended from a Liberian mother and an "Americo-Liberian" father. The little-known truth is, however, that his father, also named Charles Frederick Taylor, was born and grew up in Point Fortin, Trinidad. And he was Maisie's uncle.
Charles Frederick Taylor Senior and Alberta Taylor, Maisie's mother, were brother and sister and were both born in the first decade of this century. Charles Frederick Taylor became a teacher like his father, but he soon left Point for Port of Spain, whereas his sister remained down south, where she married George Warner and bore his five children, starting in 1923 with Maisie.
Growing up in the deep south, Maisie only dimly recalls her Uncle Charles. She was but a child when he left Point for the bright lights and she never saw him again. He didn't visit Point, although Maisie remembers his sending pamphlets for his mother to sell.
"In Port of Spain," explains Maisie, "he became a journalist."
Actually, he earned a comfortable living as a real estate agent, working out of a small office at 114 Piccadilly Street. But Taylor's passion was Africa. It doesn't seem that he joined any of the local branches of Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), but there were pictures of Garvey on the walls, of his St Vincent Street house. He imported books on Africa and he wrote and published a small newsletter called The African Nationalist.
In his office, with its files of rooms for rent and books and newsletters on Africa, he organized a small discussion group. Mortimer Landeau from Belmont was there and Clifford Crawford from Arouca. Typing Taylor's newsletters in those cramped quarters was a secretary, Elvina Bernard.
It was Bernard's first job. Born in 1910, she was only slightly younger than Taylor was, and growing up in Mayo, she was a country girl. Perhaps that is why, when she came asking for a job, around 1923, he gave it to her. She remained there until he left Trinidad and the business closed down.
"He was tall and very strict," reminisces Bernard. "I and another girl worked there but you cyar be giggling when you have his work to do. And you have to reach to work on time."
Bernard also dimly recalls Taylor's precept that if Africans had to do something they had to do it well. "Always aim at the top," he'd advise his employees. "Don't sit at the bottom."
By the time Taylor started publishing The African Nationalist in Trinidad, he'd already had four daughters with a woman from Curepe. His last daughter, Eastlyn Taylor - the half-sister of Liberia's president - was born in 1923.
Taylor provided for them financially. Sometimes the girls visited him at home. With them too, however, he was strict and inflexible. Once Eastlyn, who was given to fighting in school, broke her bookbag handle in a tussle with another schoolgirl. Taylor thereafter refused to buy another bookbag for the child.
"I thought you were a lady," he remonstrated. "Now I've discovered you are not one."
Then, in the late Thirties, when Eastlyn was still a teenager at St. Rose's Intermediate School, Taylor arranged for his friend Chris Le Maitre to visit the girls and he sneaked out of Trinidad, bound for Africa, from whence he'd never return.
"I try not to remember that, to block it out of my mind," snaps Eastlyn, a wary, sharp-eyed harridan who lives in London but winters back in Curepe. Perhaps the family's fortunes slid after Taylor left Trinidad, because Eastlyn complains of having to take a job as a ticket clerk for the railway, before she graduated from school.
It's not surprising that Charles Frederick Taylor turned up in Liberia. Like its neighbour, Sierra Leone, Liberia was founded by African remigrants from the New World, and both countries retained a close relationship with the diaspora.
At first, Taylor kept in touch with his people back home. He sent articles on Africa. He wrote them that land was to be had in Africa for a cent an acre. He had his former secretary, Bernard, contact his family. Then he fell silent.
"My grandmother wanted to know if he was dead or not," says Maisie. That was in the early Sixties, when nothing had been heard of him for several years. She sent Maisie to Port of Spain to discover what had happened to Taylor.
In her quest for news of her uncle, Maisie tried the Public Library on Belmont Circular Road, and then she asked Audrey Jeffers. "Then we heard he was in jail and got let out when Eric Williams went to Africa," says Maisie.
The Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago had led a delegation on what was called his "African safari" in 1964, visiting ten African States, including Liberia, where they stayed in President Tubman's palace.
"I don't know anything about any release of prisoners, it wasn't on the agenda, but it's possible," says Sir Ellis Clarke, a member of the delegation.
"We were very well received in Liberia and they held a big banquet for us, so it's possible that Dr. Williams had a word with President Tubman."
Taylor's daughter, Eastlyn Taylor, tells a different story, though.
Around then, or perhaps before, she'd been studying architecture in London for few years when Chris Le Maitre found her. He told Eastlyn that her father had been badly beaten and jailed, and Le Maitre encouraged her to demonstrate against Tubman's visit to the Queen. Stand in front of the carriage, Le Maitre instructed Eastlyn.
A Scotland Yard officer stopped her and she explained the situation. "There's an easier way," said the officer. "Buy some flowers and take them with a letter for her."
It worked. Eastlyn got an audience with President Tubman's wife, gave her the letter and pleaded that Taylor's mother was dying.
President Tubman's wife had once promised that Taylor would never be freed as long as she was alive, but somehow, concludes Eastlyn; "she released him".
Maisie St. Louis doesn't know, and Eastlyn won't say precisely why Taylor had been jailed, what he'd done to so irritate the Tubman regime. The Trinidadian was a natural member of Tubman's Americo-Liberian ruling class, just as he had been a natural member of the upwardly mobile middle class back home.
He might have simply done there what he did back home: picked up his pen to write about the injustices done to Africans.
The answer is no doubt contained in his autobiographical manuscript, but that's in Eastlyn's hands and she refuses to release it.
Some years later Eastlyn discovered her father's other family. She made contact with her half-brother Charles, who had been born on January 29, 1948, to a Liberian mother and Charles Frederick Taylor. They never met, though. Eastlyn and Charles Jr. only corresponded, and even that soon stopped because they fell out.
"He asked me for money - I didn't have it and my mother didn't want me to gibe him," says Eastlyn, who was by then a qualified architect working in England.
Around then Charles Frederick Taylor posted his manuscript to his daughter and in 1980 he died in Liberia of natural causes.
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On New Year's Day, 1990, a few days after Charles Taylor invaded Liberia, he phoned the BBC to declare he'd started a rebellion to overthrow the Samuel Doe government, that his National Patriotic Front of Liberia had penetrated Monrovia. He had no wish to be appointed president, he said, he wanted to hand power over to the people.
People thought it was a hoax. "Two people were killed. One soldier and one customs officer. But everything is under control," announced Doe. "There is no need to panic. Everybody should go out and celebrate the New Year."
"Bossy?" exclaimed one Liberian to an American journalist. "I've known Bossy since he was seven. He was a bully at school, someone who always knew better than anyone else."
Born in Liberia in 1948, Charles Taylor studied economics in the US in the Seventies. He was active in the US-based student movement critical of Tolbert. When rioting broke out in Monrovia in 1979, Taylor stormed Liberia's UN office in New York with other dissident students. He demanded the ambassador cable Tolbert ordering his resignation.
Tolbert was murdered in 1980 and Taylor returned home to a high job in the Doe government. In 1983, however, he was back in the US, fleeing from embezzlement charges. The Liberian government sought to have him extradited, but Taylor escaped from the US jail. He hacksawed through the bars and climbed down the wall with his bedsheets.
The next time he was heard from was when his ragtag army breached the Ivory Coast border on Christmas Eve, 1989.
Within six months Taylor's forces had hacked their way to the capital, sparking off a genocidal war between the various ethnic groups of Liberia. A June 5, 1990 dispatch from Agence France-Presse, stated, for instance: "Rebels of the National Patriotic Front fighting to unseat the Liberian president, Samuel Doe, have summarily executed hundreds of ethnic rivals near this key iron ore port. The witnesses said the victims were primarily members of Mr. Doe's native Krahn tribe and Mandingos, a group of Muslim traders accused of supporting the government."
In response Doe's besieged soldiers rampaged in the city, killing and looting at will.
Another rebel faction, led by former soldier Prince Johnson, attacked Monrovia from the north - a breakaway army that was smaller but more disciplined than Taylor's thousands of untrained Gios and Manos camped to the west of the city.
By August 1990 the two rebel factions were bitterly fighting one another as well as a peacekeeping force sent by the Economic Community of West African States. In September Johnson signed a cease-fire agreement with Doe and used it to capture the president and torture him to death before TV cameras.
It took seven years of carnage, from 1990 to 1997, a dozen scuttled cease-fire agreements, the murder of tens of thousands of Liberians and starvation of even more, the flight of a million of the population of two and a half million and the devastation of Monrovia, before elections were held and Charles Taylor won by 75 per cent of a cowed electorate.
"If Liberians are looking for a weak leader they are not going to find one in Charles Taylor," he declared. And on August 2, the day after our Emancipation Day, he was inaugurated as the President of Liberia.
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A COUNTRY FOUNDED IN FREEDOM
Liberia began as a settlement of freed US slaves in 1822, the American equivalent of Sierra Leone, which had been earlier founded by Britain. The repatriation of Africans to Liberia was sponsored by the American colonization Society, whose members included US President James Monroe, Daniel Webster and General Andrew Jackson.
In 1819 Congress had voted $100,000 to start the colony. In 1821 the Society bought a 50-mile stretch of malaria-ridden land from six Bassa chieftains, and although for years both Britain and the US refused to recognize the new colony, in 1847 the settlers ratified a constitution drawn up by a Harvard professor and issued the Liberian Declaration of Independence.
Thus was founded Liberia, whose name was derived from the word "liberty". The ex-slaves adopted a red, white and blue flag with 11 stripes and one star and named their capital Monrovia after President Monroe, who'd championed a "little America destined to shine gem-like in the darkness of vast Africa".
And the first independent African Republic, whose name is a cognate of liberty, immediately disenfranchised its 16 indigenous tribes, restricting them to rural "homelands" similar to those created much later in South Africa. "The Love of Liberty brought us here" was the national motto.
The Liberian elite comprised light-skinned migrants from the US and the West Indies who lived in the coastal towns and shunned agriculture. Known as "Americo-Liberians", they formed the True Whig Party that ruled the country for over a century.
During the administration of William Tubman, however, which began in 1944, the indigenous people began to be integrated into the Republic. Tubman's Unification Policy granted the tribes representation in congress, gave jobs to educated youths from the interior, and even traveled upcountry to explain the policy to the chiefs.
Schools and health clinics were built in the interior. Foreign investment entered to mine iron and harvest rubber. Roads were built. Nevertheless, when Tubman was replaced by President William Tolbert, four per cent of the population still controlled 60 per cent of the country's wealth. And the indigenous people were still considered "primitive".
Tolbert's years in office were turbulent with strikes and demonstrations and in April 1979 hundreds of youths rioted in Monrovia. A year later 28-year-old Sgt. Samuel Doe and 16 other soldiers burst into the presidential palace, hacked Tolbert to death in his bed, and became the new rulers.
Thirteen members of the Cabinet were beaten and dragged in their underpants to the beach where they were lashed to poles and there before the international media they were executed, slowly, because the executioners were drunk.
Doe, the son of an illiterate private in the army, and a member of the Krahn tribe, one of the most isolated and uneducated in Liberia, ended 140 years of Americo-Liberian rule. In 1958 he was elected president. And on Christmas Eve of 1989, Charles Taylor entered the country from the Ivory Coast border at the head of a group of soldiers from the Gio and Mano tribes - the traditional rivals of the Krahns.