Dirty Looking Pebbles

by Yemisi Aribisala

As it happened, Charlie lived in our backyard during our Calabar years. He didn’t live, as one might reasonably expect, in some inaccessible enclave guarded by parading armed officers, but in a somnolent, beautiful residential area on the edge of Diamond Hill. 

Going farther up from there, you’ll get to Government Hill, where the Old Residency Building—home to the colonial consul, Edward Hewett—still sits rather majestically. 

Old Residency is now a museum, but the consul reigned from there in the days when Calabar was Britain’s busiest trading post, whence palm oil and slaves were shipped to the United Kingdom. From the consul’s exclusive view, you can see the Atlantic pretending to be a quiet platform of steel-blue in the distance. Calabar was a fantastic commercial hub a hundred years ago. Now it is an outlet for the champagne-coloured Calabar River, frothed up by ski boats from the Marina resort.

By Charlie I mean Charles Taylor, 22nd Liberian president, a legendarily ruthless warlord and war criminal. Under his command, the Liberian State Council murdered hospital workers, doctors, and nurses—in his own country—for the crime of treating ill and injured people regardless of their allegiance or otherwise to the Liberian government. He didn’t discriminate at-all at-all. He democratically brutalised his own people as well as people in the neighbouring country of Sierra Leone. In the presidential election in Liberia in 1997 he ran on a slogan that went, “He killed my Ma, he killed my Pa, but I will vote for him.”