Shedding A Tear For Tyrants

By Azore Opio

I am not much of a crier. Not that my eyes don't get misty occasionally when an emotion pricks me. Of course, there are a few things that can water my eyes. Thinking about my old mother, for example, can sometimes cause me to well up a bit, but that is almost it. But today, I am one inch away from sobbing like a little schoolboy.

It must be tough to imagine life without a royal stool, attendants, slaves and pretty maids all hovering around you like flies on a dunghill. I am talking about Fon Doh Gwanyin of Balikumbat. Of course, Fon Simon Vugah ended in the fiery grasp of Satan in the flames of hell. He is out of the way, anyway.

But Doh, reminds me of the old nursery rhyme -
Baa, Baa, Black sheep,
Have you any wool?

Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full
One for the Master and one for the Dame
But none for the Little Boy that cries down the lane.

Doh has been cast into a dark hole and for good reason too. He had supped more than his fill of arrogance including his active involvement in the murder of a cripple. This second paved his way to the gaol.

It is even tougher to imagine that a man who once considered himself a lord, a ruler of men, discovers that Providence has deserted him; that he has been deprived of his assumed grandeur and cast without help, comfort or sympathy upon a world new and strange, inhabited by hardened criminals.

His despair, it may be said, can easily find expression in suicide. I guess that is what tyranny is all about though I am not hoping or wishing that Doh hangs himself. That would be denying Kohtem justice.

I must say here that the judges who pronounced the guilty verdict on Doh couldn't have walked out alive from the Ndop court. Not in Ndop. Not with incensed villagers singing, "today, today might be your last day oooh, you no know…"

The wicked cause their own downfall and are trapped by their own greed, so the saying goes. And that goes for Charles Taylor too, from prison to president, back to prison. Perhaps you know the story already.

It runs like a 1950's gangster movie. One fine day on January 28, 1948 a son was born in Arthington, a city near Monrovia, to a Gola woman. The son was Charles Ghankay Taylor. According to most reports, his father was an Americo-Liberian, although other sources claim he was actually an Afro-Trinidadian immigrant.

The young Taylor attended Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts from 1972 to 1977, earning a degree in economics. According to a report, he would be briefly arrested "in 1979 after threatening to take over the Liberian diplomatic mission in New York.

"On May 24, 1984, two US Deputy Marshals arrested Taylor in Somerville, Massachusetts, on a warrant for extradition to face charges of embezzling $922,000 of government funds, intended for machinery parts, into a New York bank account.

Citing a fear of assassination by Liberian agents, Taylor's lawyer former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, announced that Taylor would fight extradition from the safety of jail."

Taylor was then detained in a House of Corrections in Plymouth, Massachusetts. But on Sunday, September 15, 1985, sometime around 8:30 pm, Taylor and four other inmates sawed through a bar covering a window and dropped 12 feet (4 metres) to the ground using a knotted sheet, and climbed over a fence.

Shortly thereafter, Taylor's wife, Enid Taylor, and Taylor's sister-in-law, Lucia Holmes Toweh, sped Taylor away with two other escapees in a getaway car to Staten Island, where Taylor disappeared.

Fleeing the fires of prison life in the US, Taylor ended up in Muammar Qaddafi's guerrilla training camp. He would later find a boomtown called Monrovia and rise to the top of Liberia's rough and treacherous political world. Then he rode a trail of intrigue and smuggling and blood.

In a country brimming with opportunities and exploding with danger and vicious warriors, Taylor was the perfect gangster, prominent warlord, smuggler and mafia don. It is wonderful that America, the giant, the omnipotent world police, would 'fail' to track down a thief and jail breaker like Taylor. They would allow him to ravage Liberia and her neighbours for six good years.

The end of the road came swiftly for Taylor in a remote border town of Nigeria called Gamburu after sneaking out of a gilded cage in Calabar where he had spent his exile years. Taylor's arrest was every bit as fast-paced and captivating as his escape from the US prison. For him a quick leap into a getaway car and a short ride with an obvious desire to flee to freedom was frustrated by Nigerian security.

Taylor, he who strutted so arrogantly across West African states, hoping to get back there "God willing" came to the end of his rope. When he did return it was in handcuffs and prison yard overalls. So fell, ignominiously, the modern tyrant, a bellicose man who profited from the confusion and despair of a people.

When the bell began to toll for him, Taylor heard it. This led him to his fatal mistake. He began fleeing. But there was nothing he could do to escape his fate. No gun was fired to capture him, not even by the commandos to save him, nor did his sorcerer wave a magic wand. Now he is a prisoner.

Few people seemed to mind the humiliating nature of his capture - a broken man; the old fires in him turning to ashes.

Like all dictators, Taylor, Fon Vugah and Fon Doh were carried away by power. Many other power-drunk tyrants will follow soon.

Comments

[chiefmboe]

Just Thinking Aloud

The words that caught my attention were "dictators" and "power-drunk tyrants". To tell you the truth they remind me of some of our politicians back home.

Chief Mboe

[R_Pio]

The title would have been the story of Taylor.....much of Fon doh's tyranic and dictative stories would have made it better. Taylor's story would have been liken to it and not told in details.

Goodluck!

[Ernest Chi]

I think the important item in the story relates how tyrants crumble out of their own making-be it Fon Doh, Taylor or Habre who might soon be handed over to Belgium to stand for crimes against humanity he committed during his reign as Chadian President.

Fundamentally, i see a new Africa in the next 20 years. People are beginning to understand their rights and the power of justice.

The above message by scaling it up for small Fon Doh to almighty Taylor is shrouded with ominous warnings to all that hold power in Africa today!

Highlighting Taylor's escape from prison and America's passiveness in bringing Taylor to justice is a pure exhibition of how America in general is lukewarm about the fate of the African people.

I am disgusted!

[fen]

Beautiful article. when will tyrant BIYA and his cronies crumble???