Liberia

Being in Liberia is a very sobering experience, and the collective sadness is palpable even to outsiders. After a few moments casual conversations seem to peter off, the other person falling into an absent silence highly uncharacteristic of most Africans I've met. If I wanted to be melodramatic about it, I could have a field day - how people will gaze past you into space distractedly, how they seem to carry a weight, how they lack that easy, playful humor you find so often in Africa. I did not hear very much laughter in Liberia, and everyone assumed I was with the UN.

The food's really good, though.

Food: See above.
Best eaten: I had a chocolate ice cream milkshake in a Monrovia restaurant that made me see the face of god.
Also, litchis!! Sold on the street for nickels each, delicious, only these ones you can't eat (tried), you just suck on them like candies.

Worst eaten: I guess I've been pretty spoiled in mango territory, 'cos I found the Liberian mangos to be seriously disappointing.
There, that's the worst I can come up with for Liberia. Monrovia has some good eatin'.

Numbers you should call Right Now: This should have gone with Côte d'Ivoire, but I forgot. The youngish aviator-sunglassed rebel soldier who mans the last military checkpoint before the Liberian border will demand money from you unless you give him your number. (And people say the good men of the Forces Nouvelles aren't professional... such slander!) But please, call KEVIN for a good time - 03-38-07-56, country code 225.

(somebody should TOTALLY do this on skype or something. and then tell me about it.)

Quote: The morning after crossing over from what may have become Satan's Province In Africa, in which strange men with extremely large guns will scream obscenities at you, David and I found ourselves on a share-taxi ride that began for all five passengers with the driver's suggestion, "Let us pray."

We all bowed our heads and I thought, dang, not in CI anymore...

New Hygienic Lows: I know everyone talks about how gross money is, and yeah, American bills may have the dubious distinction of containing more crack residue than any other nation's, but they ain't got squat on Liberia for stench.

Taking a few folded bills out of my pocket after a cloudburst, I was overwhelmed by the same smell I use to identify where the public outhouses are. Just like when you see a horrible accident and can't stop yourself from getting a better look at the carnage, I actually brought the bills to my nose for a closer sniff. And choked a little.

Trouble was, we'd just crossed the border into Sierra Leone, making the bills unspendable and (if you're me) unthrow-away-able. Faced with the extremely unsavory prospect of tucking this obviously used toilet paper back into my suitcase, I decided to wash them - bringing a whole new soapy-clean dimension to the term 'money laundering.'

They smell much better now, and I think I've got some extras.. anyone want one? ;)

Worst Experience: Witnessing the public justice of the music sellers wasn't necessarily so awful, but it was very sad in a profound way. I'm glad I had the experience because I hope it will enable me to have a better understanding of the social climate, but it was probably the most negative one I had in Liberia.

Best Experience: Getting clean. After the joy that is overland travel in the rainy season, we both seriously needed a breather. The shower I took upon arrival in Monrovia was, like above-mentioned milkshake, a religious experience.

Could I live here? It's not chaotically unstable, it's musically well-connected, and the people are polite and honorable, but I don't think I could wake up happy and bound out of bed like an eager squirrel to chirp HULLO! to my PTSD-afflicted neighbors. I could not live here.. it's just too sad.

Micro-Democracy, and Micro-Justice

While the war in Côte d'Ivoire may have degenerated into a convenient excuse for everything from pregnant goats to my untied shoelace, it's a different story across the border in Liberia. Liberia feels, literally, traumatized. I saw more UN forces here, more rubble, more lingering sadness here than in any other country.

And people are desperate. In downtown Monrovia, I became a witness to a small helping of public justice, a highly educating and highly saddening extension of the micro-democracy pervading popular levels of African society.

Talking with some music-sellers around their sidewalk stand about Nigerian versus Ghanian artists, I briefly felt a man brush past behind me, subtly fingering a pocket. I instantly half turned to see him already walking away, and breathed a relief that I don't keep things in my back pockets.

Turning back around, and probably still chattering away, I caught the alarmed glance of one of the seated young men around the stall - who suddenly leapt up to chase down the man and retrieve the CD he had spotted in his hand. The culprit had only gotten a few paces away, and within seconds an ugly scene developed involving most of the young music-sellers and an umbrella seized from a nearby cart. I was unwilling to watch, but thankfully the actual violence was brief and perfunctory - the CD was retrieved before a big and swiftly gathering crowd, and the owner of the stall stomped back up to his cart. Sure enough, the real punishment was to be the awful public shaming.

From where I stood, I saw him sitting glumly on the sidewalk with his elbows on his knees, blood coursing down his ear from a cut on his head, unable to raise his eyes to meet the faces of the massive crowd gathered around him on all sides, but never closer than ten feet away. Someone was yelling, a member of the crowd - I looked forward and saw a dignified middle-aged woman wholly unconnected with the actual crime, but who had assumed the responsibility of dealing with the incident. Speaking for the crowd, she scolded and shamed him while he sat, bleeding and utterly despondent, surrounded by several dozen of his peers. The returning music-sellers shook their heads sadly at the situation, no longer angry, and said something about, Look at what our country has come to. My pity for the man must have shown on my face, for they asked me if I was going to give him money or something along those lines. I told them no, that I would rather support the hard-working honest, but that I appreciated what was happening to the man - that honor is the most important thing, and to lose it publicly like that, though deemed fair punishment, must have been awful.

Before long it was over, and the woman - a true Arbiter - brought some water and poured it gently over the man's head in front of the crowd while he washed off most of the blood. Then he stood up, and limped away, head down; the crowd dispersed.

A just punishment fitting the crime? As judged by witnesses and impartial peers, yes. Does it deter theft? I'm not sure. Probably it does just as well as two weeks' jail time, or whatever the Western top-down court decree would have been for a single cd theft attempt. Will the man steal again? Well.. sometimes you get a situation where people are so desperate, where life has been so unstable, that a job is anything you can find to keep body and soul together. Sometimes people just have nothing left to lose - except honor.

Meet the Scammers

If scamming is indeed an art (which I would argue it truly is) and the masters of its trade thus artists, then Africans may hold their heads high as possessing as much ingenuity, creativity, charm, and persistence as the best that America has to offer. (And that's a high standard.)

There is the friendly self-appointed Guide, who follows you to wherever you're headed, maintaining an amiable banter until the destination and leave-taking, at which point you are informed that you were actually led there by his guiding services and kindly pay the proper fee for his time and effort. (And no, not an accidentally gendered word choice.)

There is the Yes! Taxi, in which arrival at the agreed destination is considerably complicated by the driver only pretending to know the way. Subsequent loss of gas and time while wandering aimlessly around a city must naturally be reimbursed by you, the passenger (just punishment for your foolishness in believing the driver when he said, "Yes! I know it! Get in!").

There is the Baggage Scam, most infuriating of all scams to David, produced by the shock of a passenger arriving at a long-distance bus station with - are you sitting down for this? - luggage. While no one else is paying for the ten chickens, bale of yams, children, or possibly goats that they are transporting, the two white people who just showed up with a suitcase apiece are sure to be hit with high fees for their passengerish extravagance.

And let us of course not forget the trusty Bait'n'Switch, when the original offer assumes new and exciting forms with astronomical proportions after services have been rendered - due of course to a misunderstanding on our part, or unforeseeable problems that were unforeseeably created by the party to be paid.

***ALLOW ME TO QUICKLY INTERJECT that by no means are all, or even most, Africans enterprising scam-artists. I would not even call it an appreciable minority. But if only one out of fifty people in your average African street are unscrupulous (a figure severely below that which you might estimate in any country), another honorable two hope to make legitimate clients out of tourists, and a final two are curious/bold/bored enough to come chat for kicks, then roughly one in five people approaching us of their own volition has a great NGO you've never heard of, and we will get the artificial impression that 20% of Africans are pseudo-criminals every time. In poor countries frequented by foolish and apparently high-rolling UN types and tourists, expect the above estimate to rocket skyward. It's simply an unfortunate fact of travel that we probably meet and talk to 2% of the inhabitants of a place we visit, and 90% of its scam-artists. (The other 10% were probably on the toilet at the time - they cursed their ill-luck later.) We're just too good, and sometimes too rare, for idle criminals to pass up.

So, we have (or more honestly, David has) developed a few tricks to protect ourselves from Les Trompeurs, while hopefully not shutting out opportunities for those casual exchanges with locals that make being in Africa so sincerely pleasant. We never reveal our hotel to strangers; we wait out followers or confuse them by diverging paths; we establish clear prices beforehand so no one gets peeved later. Of course we still get caught occasionally. Sometimes we can talk our way out of it, and sometimes we can't. But by and large we deflect the vast majority of flack that flies our way, sometimes in astonishing swarms, with a system of our own that can honestly only be called a scam itself... Please, meet the scammers.

The first part of it was formulated in Yaounde, Cameroon, in response to our difficulty getting rooms with two beds. Church missions had such rooms for low prices, but refused to hostel them to unmarried pairs; while they weren't about to demand a marriage license, it was an uncomfortable falsehood we were both unwilling to play, and failed anyway to explain why in the world we would insist on two separate beds.

David deserves all credit for the stroke of brilliance that has made hotelling a thousand times easier since - "What if you're my niece?" We worked out the details. He's my mom's younger brother, thus the surname difference, and no need to mention my older sisters who would seriously call into question my mom's age or his (almost 15 years apart). Finally, a simple explanation for why we travel together, inoffensive to this most religious of continents, and readily believed by everyone from hoteliers to market sellers to commanders of the rebel forces in northern Cote d'Ivoire. Even better, it has the added advantage of actually fitting our relationship rather well - David is definitely the senior partner on our team and deals with the everyday finances, and our rapport is one of obvious high familiarity and friendliness - yet lacking the romantic element that would normally be present in a co-ed pair on vacation.

Such has been the success of this 'scam' that we've expanded it from its original hotel-room dimensions to the marketplace and motorpark, enabling David to help me lower prices by 'refusing' to pay for a niece's frivolous excesses. I can show my willingness to buy to keep a negotiation going, normally risky because it screams Charge me ANYTHING!, yet with Uncle David, I also demonstrate a financially restricting force more tangible and immediate to the seller's eye than a vague, incomprehensible reluctance to pay ten times an item's value. For his prices, David plays the act of an interested but wafflingly indecisive customer, wholly dependent on the hip opinion of his highly skeptical niece. It's a fabulous scam, and I only wish we had thought of it earlier.

(Pardon the second interjection, but I would like to pre-empt any criticism that the above behavior is unfair to local business, that my post-colonial duty as a white tourist in Africa is to distribute as much money as possible among the locals. I suspect that such behavior is hardly likely to engender mutual respect and genuine cultural exchange, and doesn't provide a fair or sustainable source of aid anyway. Besides, may I assure the audience that Africans are *just* as intelligent as anyone else and generally more canny than most cultures I've met, and no seller is going to part with something at a price not worth their while. They don't want handouts, they want business - and hopefully a lively haggle.)

Part Two of our scam, formulated exclusively for francophone countries, is even better. The inspiration for this dates back to purchasing our Dem Rep of Congo visas at their consulate in Kigoma, Tanzania. I was interpreter, but once visas were obtained I skedaddled gleefully to the sunshine outside, stamped passport in hand, leaving David to shake hands goodbye with an official keen to extract a bribe. "Ah, j'ai beaucoup travaillé pour faire ces visas..." I heard him falter behind me to a blankly smiling David, who quickly exclaimed a heavily accented "Merrcee! Mercee!" over the diplomat's delicate attempts to suggest that we could peut-être offer something de petit for his travail exceptionel. His travail exceptionel (which, considering the current demand for DRC tourist visas, it probably was) would unhappily for him be recompensed only by the visa fees and his salary, for without an interpreter present, he had no access to the party identified as Mr. Pocketbook. Though we hadn't planned it that way (or foreseen the bribe attempt), it was the perfect devise for sidestepping a scam. "Merrcee!" David cried with naively broad grins as he waved goodbye, confiding later that he had indeed understood. (But why give that away?)

In francophone West Africa, we've combined David-the-French-buffoon with Uncle-David to produce the ideal situation - one in which we understand that which goes on around us and communicate what we need to, while conveniently 'not' understanding scam attempts. At many Côte d'Ivoirian motorparks/military barriers/random spots by the roadside where we stopped to play what I came to call Musical Vans, random herders or pseudo-soldiers would occasionally demand immediate payment of extra 'fees'. In the face of their fierce demands, the interpreter inexplicably sat silent as a stone, chatty just a moment earlier but apparently moneyless, while Mr. Pocketbook fumbled back a classic je-ne-parler-francais-pas that would make any good Français cringe. A few frustrated scammers were ultimately driven to screaming "Give money! Money!" at David in English in an attempt to break through our joint incompetence, but that was decidedly less eloquent, persusasive, and crowd-convincing than whatever they had to say in French, and soon after they generally gave up.

It's a rollicking good scam.

Yet we're still only amateurs among the best that NGO- and tourist-experienced West Africa has to offer, and trying to foresee the traps that will materialize out of thin air with snaky ropes already around our ankles occupies a considerable amount of my time in motorparks, that most fertile of scam-havens. Herder fees, union fees, baggage scams, van-switches, false destinations - it's definitely enough to keep you busy (and also probably entertained).

"They're gonna try to scam us," I complained out loud of the sketchy herders in a recent motorpark, plotting out some possible escape route. "Oh well," David shrugged, unconcerned: "If they scam us, we'll scam them right back."