Flag Day

Kids dressed up for Flag Day in Gardnersville, Monrovia, Liberia.

The Young Intellectuals of Grassfield were holding a fundraising football tournament in the neighborhood across the St. Charles River from downtown -- Gardnersville -- at the Oscar J. Quiah Sports Pitch. The Young Intellectuals had assembled four 8-player squads and there was a decent crowd. The tournament, pushed into the afternoon, was proceeded by three hours of remarks from local politicians and the awarding of certificates to various honorees.

One of those was Oscar J. Quiah, for whom the field was named. Quiah, 74, wore a flowery short-sleeved shirt and short gray hair. His eyes glittered when he spoke. In his day he fought for a multiparty system, the end of one-party rule. It was 1979. The True Whig Party had ruled unabated for more than 100 years. The party was guilty in 1930 of selling human labour to Spanish colonialists on Equatorial Guinea. The U.S. and England boycotted Liberia for five years. It was the ruling party when its president, William Tolbert, was killed in an April 1980 coup.

The previous year, Quiah was thrown in jail for the first time. (He's been to prison "countless" times.) He was the executive general of the Progressive Alliance of Liberia and argued against increasing the price of rice from $22 for a 100 lb. bag to $35 for a 100 lb. bag. Florence Chenoweth, presently the agriculture minister, assumed that role in 1979 under Tolbert's regime. The PAC, led by Quiah and Barcus Matthews, who later served as foreign minister under Samuel Doe, offered the government $15,000 to subsidize the cost from when it was offloaded at the port. The government refused. About 2,000 activists began on April 14 a peaceful protest that led to 12 hours of mob violence and looting, Liberia's infamous Rice Riots. Tolbert ordered the PAC organizers arrested on charges of treason.

The following year a group of 17 non-commissioned officers of the Armed Forces of Liberia led by Samuel Doe issued a bloody coup d'etat, summarily executing Tolbert and most of his cabinet on a beach behind the Barclay Training Center. Tolbert's body was tossed in a mass grave. When Quiah was finished talking, I looked into his glittery eyes. His body convulsed slightly from a stroke. It was Flag Day. Liberians were decked out in red, white and blue, waving the lone star. The war seemed far away. But its actors are still here.