By Abdoulaye W. Dukulé, Ph.D.
The Perspective
Atlanta, Georgia
April 8, 2022
A review of A Liberian Life, Memoir of an Academic and Former Minister of State for Presidential Affairs, (2022) Koninklijke Brill NV
303 Pages
ISSN 1570-9310
“My motive for research and writing was a desire to better understand my country with a view to enhancing its development and hopefully contribute to the broader advancement of knowledge” (Dunn) page 162.
How does one review an encyclopedia? This is the challenge I faced when I read the latest book by Dr. Elwood Dunn, titled A Liberia Life, Memoir of An Academic and former Minister of State for Presidential Affair” (2022). Every page of an encyclopedia is filled with essential information, that cannot be set aside. And if ever there was a book that got closer to such, qualitatively and quantitatively, it is this memoir. Dunn’s autobiography covers the life of a man who was in a front-row seat as Liberia, the once tranquil nation created by black American colonists started its descent into the abyss, an unavoidable route to emancipation.
The density of the story is displayed on many layers. The narration is straightforward, almost journalistic, detailing events, describing people, and engaging in reflections on everything that went on, around him, both on the personal and the national levels. His work both in academia and in politics always focused on this search for self.
One central and recurring theme catches the attention, and that is the search for identity, again, both personal and national. Dunn, the author was born out of wedlock, to a father who belonged to the Settler-Liberian class and a mother, a descendant of ethnic Bassa, growing up in Buchanan. This duality of heritage in his personal life applies also to the nation Liberia, with essentially a binary culture, one from America and the other, indigenous to Africa. Dunn strives to find overlapping values that shaped both himself and the nation. He strives to make sense of this existential duality, a simplistic binary vision of a complex political and social process.
The book starts as any biography, describing in detail the family setting, the school, and the church, all somehow interwoven to make a nurturing atmosphere. Between the grandparents who lived in an ethnic Bassa neighborhood and his father’s house, he learned life from both a “Settler” and a Bassa perspective. However, somewhere down the line, in Paris, as a student, he will discover that he had lost the ability to speak Bassa.
On the professional level, Dunn was on a perfect political trajectory. He was part of that generation of young Liberians who went to school under Tubman and returned home in the early 1970s and changed the Liberian political discourse. Dunn found a path in the government while others engaged in political advocacy.
From the ministry of foreign affairs where he worked closely with Minister Cecil Dennis who was executed on April 22, 1980, along with 12 other ministers on a sunny public beach in Monrovia, Dunn became the right-hand man to President William R. Tolbert, assassinated on April 12, 1980, by Samuel Doe, ending a 133-year reign of settler rule.
The author recounts in great detail many life-altering events. His insider view of the Tolbert administration, confronted with hard choices to make, how to keep maintaining the status quo or follow his revolutionary instincts and make changes. He saw the fault lines and the frailty of the last settler regime. Rather than make hard decisions, Tolbert seemed to govern by “commissions and committees.” Every crisis was sent to a special commission or a committee that submitted a report only to be shelved.
In April 1980, the author went to Zimbabwe as a special envoy of President Tolbert to meet newly elected Prime Minister Robert Mugabe. Tolbert was Chairman of the Organization of African Unity. While in transit in Nairobi, on his way back, he learns that President Tolbert had been assassinated. He proceeds to Freetown from where he establishes contact with the man who had taken his job in the new government, Dr. George Boley, who walked from a prison cell to the Executive Mansion. He is told not to worry. He returns to Monrovia on April 22, 1980. He is met at the airport with a limousine and taken to meet his successor in what had been his office a week earlier. They exchange notes and he gets back in the car to go home to his wife. Halfway to his destination, in a car, surrounded by armed soldiers, he learned from BBC that 13 ministers of the past government, his colleagues, were executed on the beach that same afternoon.
Such scenes are abundantly described in the book. Far from fleeting memories, the author kept notes of his meetings and had a chance to fact-check himself by speaking to some of the actors who survived.
The author was a member of a Commission to investigate the 1979 Rice Riot. The Commission gave an insight into Tolbert’s futile attempt to play both sides of the political terrain. He appointed a well-known opposition person to lead the investigations but turned around to allow the hardliners in his entourage to water down the findings and the reports.
During the years of turmoil, the author was also linked to people of his generation, who were demanding political change. The book is a real “Who is Who” of Liberian politics, not only in those years but still active on the political scene. Amos Sawyer, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Charles Taylor, and Gabriel Matthews, all make more than cameo appearances in the book. Incidentally, he will serve as the last national orator for President William Tolbert and the first for Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s second term in office. Their fathers had joined the legislature the same year and both served as deputy ministers under President Tolbert.
Although he sat next door to the President, he never received high-level security briefs because he was thought to be a member of MOJA – Movement for justice in Africa – created by Togba Nah Tipoteh and Amos Sawyer. This perception of his sympathy for the opposition may have saved his life after the coup. However, after making frantic calls one night while hiding under their bed, he and his wife Matilda decided that time had come to go into exile. And rushing to the airport, he runs into Charles Taylor, riding a Mercedes and asking him to come to see him.
While in exile in the US, he remained engaged in Liberian politics, but mostly in the academic field. He attended the peace conferences that led to the creation of the interim arrangement in the 1990s. After the return of peace, he was called upon by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to work on several major issues, such as a corruption case, a constitutional review committee, and a national committee to review national symbols. And, as under Tolbert, the reports, and recommendations of all such committees were largely shelved.
The 300-page book, with some 40 pictures of personal and political vintage is a must-read for anyone interested in Liberia, its multilayered culture, its unique history, and its great potential. As is in the watercolor background, the perennial questions of Who are we? What are we? Where are we headed? are asked page after page.
There is much more to write about this book. There is a lot of Liberia in there. Dunn was not just a bystander; he was an active participant in history. He was not only a keen observer of his time in politics, in academia, and in family, he made his contribution whenever asked to do so. He penned it all so well.
It is a must-read.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/d-elwood-dunn/
https://brill.com/view/title/61699?language=en
What is your take? Please post your comments below: