Authors: Johnny Dwyer
The meeting was by necessity secret, for more than military purposes—it shielded Taylor from the severe political fallout that would follow from launching an incursion into another nation. The NPFL had developed a reputation as a barbaric, undisciplined, and unstable fighting force, but it was intent on replacing the government of Liberia. Any public recognition that Taylor had ambitions beyond Liberia would threaten not only his internal popularity but also the clandestine support he was receiving from Burkina Faso and Libya.
In November 1990, in an interview with the BBC, Taylor issued a warning of his intentions.
11
He told African correspondent Robin White, “I have had enough of the Sierra Leonean government permitting Nigerian aircraft to come out and kill my people. I’m saying that planes are taking off from bases at the international airport in Freetown at the end of the runway, that leave and they come and blow Liberian babies, women, and old people away, and my patience has run out in Momoh permitting this to happen from his territory.”
“But how exactly do you propose to stop [it]?” White asked.
“It’s anybody’s guess,” Taylor responded. “Maybe Momoh doesn’t know, but he’ll soon find out.”
“Are you suggesting that you will go and attack Sierra Leone yourself?” White asked.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Taylor said. “But it’s for Momoh to determine.”
The fighting had been going in Sierra Leone for nearly three years when Chucky arrived in Ghana in 1994. He was the definition of a misfit: an American, a fugitive, son to a father he barely knew. He also inherited some of the aura surrounding his father’s reputation as a political fire starter. His mother had accompanied him to Ghana and stayed, but Orlando was now firmly in his past.
His arrival in Ghana came at a crucial moment between his father and President Jerry Rawlings. Taylor and Rawlings’s relationship had grown complicated since Ghana intervened in the Liberian civil war as part of the peacekeeping force in 1991. Despite their personal relationship, Taylor’s forces had attacked peacekeepers that Rawlings had sent to Liberia. The Ghanaian president was nevertheless determined to work with Taylor, recognizing that peace in Liberia would require the warlord’s cooperation. Indeed, in meetings with U.S. officials, Rawlings privately insisted to them that Taylor was not Liberia’s central problem.
12
U.S. policy makers had adopted a hands-off approach to the conflict, leaving it to West African leaders to broker a peace, but Rawlings feared that the United States would pursue its interests covertly. He warned Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott in late 1994 that any efforts to “take Taylor out” would only lead to more violence.
The larger politics surrounding his father had little impact on Chucky’s behavior. In his short time in Ghana, he’d been able to acquire a gun and access to drugs—which likely led to the tip-off to Ghanaian authorities. The officers arriving at his apartment quickly located the contraband among his belongings. Bernice had been through all this before with him. But he was in Africa now, and the stakes were different. This time Bernice couldn’t simply post bail and move him elsewhere. The officers placed him under arrest and continued sifting through the apartment, finding items that didn’t fit with his past life: a military uniform and radio handset.
13
The incident forced Charles Taylor to bring his son to Liberia despite the dangers. There was no functioning government in place, only an interim group of leaders cobbled together by the regional powers. By June 1994, peace talks among the three major rebels groups had broken down, devolving into skirmishes around the countryside as the factions regrouped and rearmed.
14
The humanitarian situation grew bleaker as more than one million residents crowded into Monrovia, which had been a city of 300,000 just four years earlier. The U.S. government had given more than $326 million in relief, attempting to stave off disaster, while West African nations, including Nigeria, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, poured in military support, from ground troops to fighter-bombers, to prevent the conflict from breaching the borders and destabilizing surrounding countries.
15
The armed intervention did little to stem Taylor’s ambitions. The rebel leader often found himself outgunned and politically isolated, but he defended the territory he had gained in Liberia’s hinterland by striking alliances and sponsoring rebel groups in his neighbors’ countries.
16
Taylor was developing a strategy that acknowledged the limitations of his military strength. The ill-disciplined and perpetual attenuation of his forces meant he could not muster a reliable border defense force. Instead he found that if he could bedevil his regional rivals with shadowy guerrilla attacks and campaigns of terror, they would be less capable of putting pressure on him.
Chucky was receiving an on-the-ground education in West African politics simply by watching his father. He appeared at events and conferences alongside Taylor, looking sheepish and uncomfortable in a suit and tie. He opened a window into this world to Lynn, in a letter drafted on four sheets ripped from a legal pad.
17
He had disappeared from Orlando without telling anyone, including her. It had been a silent, jarring conclusion to her first real romance. Her parents saw Chucky’s departure as a positive development, but Lynn couldn’t help but feel a small measure of heartbreak. As quickly as he had appeared, he was gone, and she had no way to reach him.
“Surprise,” Chucky’s letter began, “it’s me the one you forgot about Chucky.” He offered no apology for disappearing, only a convoluted explanation:
if somebody could stand all the bullshit i dished out, then i think i will try my hardest to stay with that person.
Lynn, you have to realize it will be a long time before we see each other, he wrote.
I’m in a place called Gbarnga, Bong County Liberia on the West African side of the continent. It’s hard to explain the situation over here.
Chucky embellished on his experience in Accra, placing himself at the center of the political situation:
I was in Ghana, not no more yea muthafuckers for no reason arrested me a locked my ass up for 5 days not knowing it was a plot to kill me for political reasons. When they set me free I bounced by the time I got to my father it was all over the world, B.B.C.… V.O.A.… I guess they thought I wanted to over through [
sic
] the country.
The letter can be read as the swagger typical of a teenage boy trying to impress a girl. But it also reflects Chucky’s new view of himself as a central figure in the events around him. The letter went on to describe the civil war, the convoluted set of factions, and where he fit within all of it: “N.P.F.L. is our organization they brought the revolution 1989 December 25th … it’s a complex issue that needs a lot of research.… Look up L.I.B.E.R.I.A., and N.P.F.L leader Charles Ghankay Taylor my father,” Chucky continued. “It will shed light on what the fuck I’m going through.”
“Everybody is scared of my father,” Chucky wrote. “They say he wants to de-stabilize the whole of West Africa.”
West Africa was already destabilized. The region had evolved from early-twentieth-century colonialism to authoritarianism in the 1960s and 1970s and then to the revolutions of the 1980s. The groundwork had been laid for the 1990s, as Ghanaian political scientist Eboe Hutchful put it, to become “a decade of subaltern revolt.”
18
It was the politically dispossessed—in particular, the youth—in nations like Liberia and Sierra Leone who gave force to revolutionary politics that found little traction in other African nations like Ghana.
The violence was also unique to the era. Though regional conflicts had raged throughout the decade, there was a glaring paradox to the fighting in West Africa: the near complete absence of international war coupled with the fundamental lack of domestic peace.
19
Arie M. Kacowicz, an international relations scholar, referred to this condition as “negative peace.” Cross-border conflict did occur, but it was not easily distinguished from indigenous conflicts. What dominated was a brand of civil war and “subaltern revolt” that did not take hold throughout the region and had limited geopolitical relevance. As horrifying as the fighting driven by leaders like Charles Taylor and Sierra Leone’s Foday Sankoh was, it was spurred only by domestic ambitions.
While the war in Liberia had placed his father on the political map of West Africa, Chucky began to receive attention of his own. Soon after his arrest in Accra, the U.S. embassy began reporting on him, but with few details. “Taylor has a son, ‘Chucky, Junior,’ who is 19–20 years old we believe by an American citizen who is now resident in Florida,” a June 1995 cable from the U.S. embassy in Monrovia to Ouagadougou explained.
20
This was the first mention of Chucky by the State Department, a single reference tucked at the end of a three-page cable entitled “Taylor’s Domestic Affairs,” which detailed the status and background of the NPFL leader’s wives, children, and grandchildren.
On Chucky, the U.S. embassy had little to report other than the Accra incident, elaborating slightly on the political backdrop: “The story here is that he was subsequently released after the intervention of Rawling’s associate.… Chuckie [
sic
] Junior then apparently saw the attraction of a month’s sojourn in Gbarnga.”
That “sojourn” lasted much longer than the month the embassy reported. Once Chucky arrived in West Africa, his father struggled to not only control his son’s behavior but also to mitigate the embarrassment he could cause. In the fraught political environment, Chucky’s behavior threatened to complicate Charles’s already tenuous relationships between leaders—in Ghana, his activities had drawn the attention not only of local authorities but also of the country’s leadership. Taylor had dealt with disobedient soldiers, traitorous commanders, and double-crossing foreign governments, but the insouciance of his teenage son was a new challenge for him.
Despite the chaos in Liberia, Chucky’s father was intent on his completing high school. Taylor placed his son in Cuttington University, an Episcopal college founded in 1889 that was not far from the NPFL headquarters.
21
The school had educated members of the political class for more than a century, but the campus became a battlefield that year. A joint attack in September 1994 conducted by ECOMOG, the peacekeeping force, and two rival factions flushed Taylor and his forces from his stronghold, temporarily pushing the NPFL into disarray; rebels took over the school’s campus.
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Charles Taylor’s militias eventually retook Gbarnga, and while fighting persisted throughout Liberia, Taylor maintained reliable control over the center of the country.
But that control was fiercely contested, and it wasn’t long before Chucky was again caught in the crossfire. On November 6, 1995, forces from Alhaji Kromah’s largely Mandingo and Krahn militia attacked Gbarnga while Chucky was staying with his father. The assault came in three waves, the last hitting Taylor’s stronghold at two a.m.
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If the compound was overrun and Chucky was captured, he could expect no mercy from his father’s enemies. As the fighting raged, Chucky snapped a photograph of one of his guards crouching in olive fatigues and a ballistic vest, clutching an AK-47, a cigarette dangling from his lips, wearing a sly smile.
The attack illustrated the paradox of Bernice’s choice. She had traded the dangers of life on the streets of Orlando—and potentially in prison—for those of Liberia’s civil war. Chucky, for his part, had not completely abandoned his Americanness. When he wasn’t appearing publicly with his father, he dressed like a gangsta, twisting his hair into cornrows, carrying a red bandanna, and wearing sparkling Nikes. Before long he found access to guns, sporting body armor and a pistol. He nonetheless made some effort to fit in by learning to affect Liberian English, the distinct English creole spoken in the country, often in addition to one or more tribal languages. Like Trinidadian English, which Chucky grew up hearing, the Liberian vernacular shared much vocabulary with American English, but the grammar, syntax, and pronunciation were fundamentally different: syllables dropped off of the end of words; the phrase
a little bit
became
small-small
, and
bribe
or
payment
became
white heart
or
cold water.
There were also highly formal remnants of late-nineteenth-century American English: things were not
weird
or
strange
, they were
peculiar;
people were not
beaten
or
assaulted
—they were
flogged
or
abused.
Mastering the language was important, not just to blend in but also to be intelligible to Liberians who had little exposure to the dialect of American English that Chucky spoke.
But Chucky also began to adopt another, more select vernacular: his father’s distinct brand of warlordese. Charles Taylor had a gift for oration that few warlords in Liberia shared. His chief adversaries, Alhaji Kromah and George Boley, rivaled his intellect and education but not his charm or self-awareness. Kromah was a former journalist and professor with a power base in the predominantly Muslim Mandingo community; Boley, a member of the Krahn tribe, like Taylor had been educated in the United States and returned to Liberia as a bureaucrat. Each man had emerged as the leader of a faction that competed against Taylor for power: Kromah with United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy, and Boley with the Liberia Peace Council. Taylor could harangue these enemies over radio broadcasts throughout his territory, then shift to the coded language of peace and stability at negotiations with emissaries and diplomats.
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He considered himself a revolutionary, but publicly he held himself accountable to the law—reminding interlocutors when necessary that his struggle was for elections and the sanctity of the Liberian constitution. He promised that if the people voted against him in an election, “we will surrender to their will.”
25
It was an unbelievable statement from a man who had overtaken much of the nation by force. Taylor had grown enormously wealthy and powerful in the absence of elections. Like the man he had launched his revolution to depose, he wanted only an election he would win.