The Rice And Rights Riot: Social Struggle And The Quest For An Alternative Society In Liberia
Part II
By Alfred P. B. Kiadii
Contributing Writer
The Perspective
Atlanta, Georgia
May 7, 2019
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| April 14, 1979 - Monrovia, Liberia |
- The Hut Tax—alienated from the people the backward elites instituted something called the hut tax system, where the masses of the people in the countryside eking out the soil for survival and living on the margins of the society were compelled to pay hut tax in the amount of 20 dollars. Although it was the draconian law that each hut should pay 20 dollars, the overzealous tax collectors and elements of the instruments of repressions shifted the goal post from each hut paying 20 dollars to each person. Natives who couldn’t afford were severally brutalized and mercilessly beaten.
This was a regressive tax regime which sustained itself over the tribal majority through repression. It can be likened to the Liberian variant of the contradiction of no taxation without representation and a case of servitude and suppression. Taxes were squeezed out of the dominated masses in exchange for nothing and nothing they got. The funds collected from them lined the pockets and supported the profligate extravagance of the ruling clique.
- Fernando Po Crisis—the enslavement of the masses of the tribal group on the island of Fernando Po and French Gabon to waste in plantation and do hard labor. While the people were exploited and repressed in the country, their slave-trading by elements of the ruling clique brought to light yet another egregious form of exploitation not in the homeland but overseas to work on plantations and serve the interests of the French and Spaniard in Africa. When some of the captives put up resistance, they were visited with the worst form of violence by the Liberia Frontier Force. However, to maintain this sordid enterprise, elements of the ruling clique bought certain tribal chiefs who aided and abetted them in rounding up the masses of the tribal stock for export to French Gabon and Fernando Po.
- Rally time — another form of illegal taxation imposed on the people. A hoax under the cover of raising money from the wretched masses to fund development projects. According to the Tolbert government, the tax was meant to be voluntary, tax collectors pressurized the urban poor and the rural dwellers to pay the tax, at least ten dollars a person. Just as a similar tactic used by the regime to collect due to the True Whig Party from civil servants and the government without their consent. The rally time tax was forced out of the people. Resistance was countered with state violence.
- Fake treason trial, murder, and imprisonment for time indefinite of political prisoners — in 1968, true to his grand wizardry, the reactionary William V.S. Tubman recalled Liberia’s Ambassador to Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania in Du Fahnbulleh. When he came home, a frivolous charge of sedition was labeled against him, among other documents put out by the government to the public was that the devoted Muslim had written three documents with the expressed objectives of wanting to overthrow the government: that he allegedly wrote a letter to the Israeli ambassador describing the Liberian government as “a feudal, fascist regime, Americo-Liberian ruled state, persecuting her aborigines to abject serfdom under cow-dung unification policy’’; the second document was another copy of the same letter sent to the then American Ambassador in Ben Hill Brown, and that “secret memorandum, allegedly written by Mr. Fahnbulleh, outlining a plan to organize an underground movement for “educating the 'sons of the soil' of the exploitation being skilfully practiced against them by the Chief of State through the scheming Open Door Policy…This secret memorandum, it was claimed, provided for the introduction of at least ten Communist Chinese experts into Liberia to start the underground movement, as well as a plan for finding jobs in the country for several other foreigners of purported leftist sympathies who would promote the movement.’’
- S. David Coleman and his son were slaughtered in cold blood in Klay. Didwho Twe was expelled from the House of Representatives for sedition simply because he agitated for the dignity and rights of the tribal majority. He contested the election against Tubman in 1952 and was forced to flee into exile prior to the election when it was established that William V. S. Tubman wanted to bump him off. S. Raymond Horace, Sr. met a terrible fate as well. Nete Sie Brownell was stripped naked and paraded on the streets in his underclothes.
- Prof. Dew Mayson was kicked out of the then Cuttington College on frivolities claims simply because his method and style of critical scholarship that related theories to the social realities of the students, which made them start interrogating their environment, irritated the establishment. In the same vein, Dr. Togba Nah Tipoteh was also dismissed from the faculty of the University simply because the regime felt he was a “dangerous radical” who was teaching foreign ideology to the students.
Popular mobilization and the pressure from below
- Citizens of Liberia in Defence of Albert Porte (COLIDAP)—The very venerable and luminary Albert Porte, a voice of defiance and resistance, was harassed, intimated and abused for exercising his right to speak freely against historical injustices and patent plunder of the people’s resources. He was wrongfully sued for “vicious libel” for exposing the malfeasance and duplicity of the then finance minister in Stephen A Tolbert. Against the charge of the government against the pamphleteer, the masses of the people organized themselves under the banner of COLIDAP to ensure that Porte’s rights were protected and they went a step further by raising funds to pay his legal fees.
While the elites condemned Porte, ordinary masses and honest Liberians rallied in his defense. A slew of popular mobilization was done to corral the support of the people and raise funds for his legal fees to be paid. When the people were called upon, ordinary marketers, peasant farmers, taxi drivers, students, progressive teachers rallied support in cash and solidarity for him. One of such popular fundraising efforts was done in Gbarnga City, where market women brought their last nickel and dime. Some, in their broken English, confirmed the injustices Porte had been writing about.
There is this very appalling elitist view that the people are an illiterate mob unable to think simply because they don’t have the blessing of formal education. This view holds that because they don’t have such education it is difficult for the people to struggle against social inequality and injustice. While events in countries around the world such as the Mexican Revolution of 1910, which was essentially a peasant revolution, and even the Mau Mau uprising defeated such bankrupt narrative. The COLIDAP popular organizing placed a monkey wrench into the whole diabolical lie. Ordinary Liberians commended Porte and others for standing up to historical injustices and the criminal machinations of the Monrovia power structure. Some in tears, others in broken English, others in their languages, came out and said to Porte and others you are us and we are you. You represent us so we support you. We will spend our last dime to ensure you get a legal team to represent you. This was a novelty. It was a sign of the end, but hubris is short-sighted so the moribund regime could not see beyond.
- Sawyer for Mayor (1979) (although it happened after the rice riot, it is instructive for analyzing the mood in the society) — in 1979, Dr. Amos C. Sawyer decided to contest for the position of city mayor of Monrovia. Two key reasons he sought to take the challenge: to expose the farce of election as the True Whig Party had no mechanism for free and fair elections, but only a system for massive vote rigging; and secondly, it was an effort geared at popular mobilization of the mass of the masses of the people against the property clause and educating them about their rights as citizens and their obligations to the republic.
Fearing defeat and seeing mass resistance and popular support from below for Sawyer, the regime canceled the election. In fact, even Stephen Horton, the brother of Chuchu Horton who was contesting against Sawyer, saw through the scheme and landed support to the progressive teacher.
Protest literature and liberating stanzas
As it is known, when people are oppressed, new terrains of agitation will be sought by the masses to expose their hatred for an order which dominates them—its crude policies and its lack of scruples and interests in building an inclusive polity. As university campuses became liberated zones, so did emancipatory literature and stanzas start to flourish and proliferate. While some students communicated in prose, few acted dramas, and while others took to poetry to expose their disgust. All was done in an effort to put up an intensified resistance and show total resentment for the regime and its hangers-on.
It would be instructive to point out that protest literature became a formidable trend in the global South during the heydays of the anti-colonial struggles and fight against national exploitation, and minority rule. Progressive writers in the homeland rode on the crest of that popular resistance in the global South. For instance, if it were not David Diop with his poem Freedom, Wole Soyinka came forward with his very penetrating poem “A Dance of the Forest and with his The Man Died; Camara Laye came shouting with his book The African Child; so did Chinua Achebe with Things for Apart; Sembene Ousmane came forward with God’s Bits of Wood; Peter Abraham submitted Tell Freedom; and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o put forward Petals of Blood. Aimé Césaire and Leopold Sedhar Senghor formed Negritude to appreciate and promote blackness. The former produced Discourse on Colonialism while the later wrote many poems with the most prominent being Black Woman.
Under such tradition in the 1970s, the students of the University of Liberia and the then Cuttington College organized their news outlets to deal with the contradictions in the society, proffering brilliant analyses against societal menaces, and offering solutions to the complex task of national transformation. The former with the Revelation and the latter had the Cuttington Echo. This was the trend in Africa. Progressive students came out with news organs to speak against the vices of colonialism, exploitation, and domination. For instance, the University Students African Revolutionary Front (USARF) at the University of Dar es Salaam organized its new organ called Cheche (Kiswahili for the Spark), coming out with very interesting analyses about struggles and resistance. So this ferment struck a chord with students at the University of Liberia and the then Cuttington College.
In the 1970s, the University of Liberia and Cuttington College were in revolutionary and political ferment, thus becoming the citadels of revolutionary activities and energies. From sites of packaging, reproducing and spitting out hegemonic ideas, the two terrains of academia became centers of anti-hegemonic ideas. Student leaders began to question, debunk, and demystify hegemonic ideas and proffered viable alternatives. It was at this moment that students started to produce articles on very interesting subjects, categories, and formations about happenings in the global South and homeland. This intellectual current emboldened the students, thus inspiring them to produce devastating polemics as well as interesting pieces.
Following this trend, the so-called slaves were prepared to explore new openings of resistance to break their chains, to defiantly fight against domination, to dismantle the system which kept them in servitude and backwardness. Songs of freedom were sung. So did yearning for an egalitarian society. The questioning of their despicable conditions was the new normal. They shouted out the pangs of pain of a brutalized people but defiantly fighting. It was an era of revolutionary ferment for a new social order. Here the masses were expressing themselves through their representatives and among their vanguard stratum. They were rejecting the false labels and slanders. Obscurantism, mystifications, and lies were debunked and discarded. Critiques, criticisms, and condemnations of the status quo took center stage.
Under this ferment, Joe Wylie emerged with his combat poems and the frank rebuke of the system of domination and exploitation. To paraphrase Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere, the era in Liberia was not just one of dispossession, exploitation, and deprivation, but a period of struggle and resistance. So Wylie was pushed forward on the historical stage by the ferment of the period. Inspired by this trend, he wrote two poems debunking Tolbert’s myth of the Liberian children being precious jewels. So Wylie asked: I am I a precious Jewel? Tolbert and the system he represented refused to respond to him. Still not satisfied with the apparent reticence of Tolbert, Wylie came back with another query, connecting the sufferings of the Liberian masses with the oppressed Africans of South Africa under the vicious apartheid system, and with all dominated peoples in the world, drawing a nexus between Liberia and South Africa, but heralding a broad theme. He shouted to high heavens with another protest poem in Like My brothers in Soweto! Yet the system ignored him.
Under this liberating current, other students came with very fascinating prose. If it were not G. Marcus Gbobeh opening up with Black Renascence, H. Jaimwoina Stewart whispered Hard Time, Wiwi Davies Debbah blasted If We have to Struggle, and Abraham Mitchell pondered In Search of an Ideology: ‘Humanistic’ Capitalism or Socialism. So the students themselves started to question their society.
Those were expressions of defiance from a new society which was shaking itself off from the decadence of the old society. It was students engaging in the battle of ideas calling for a new national order. The students spoke, but the system didn’t listen. They condemned, but the system played indifference. They presented blueprints for the new Liberia, arrogance and pride consumed the ruling elite. As the battle of ideas precedes the battle at the barricades. So after writing and speaking without redress, April 14, 1979, occurred.
About the Author: Alfred P. B. Kiadii writes from Accra, Ghana, and can be reached through bokaidii@gmail.com