The Spirits Are Angry

The Mask of Anarchy

The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War, by Stephen Ellis, New York University Press, 1999, 256 pp.; $36.50

In 1989, a civil war broke out in Liberia, Africa’s oldest republic. The ensuing conflict can be described in two very dissimilar ways, depending on which aspects of the war are highlighted. One perspective emphasizes that the war was launched by Christianized, American-educated, and Libyan-trained military commanders who quickly broke into numerous factions. Although the ultimate goal of each party was to secure the presidency of the country, the short-term goal was to take advantage of available resources by selling diamonds, iron ore, rubber, timber, and other products to world markets. In short, it was a typical late-twentieth-century “small war” influenced by numerous international players with rational men battling each other for resource control and access to the globalized world economy.

By contrast, the war could be de scribed in a completely different way. Ragtag armies of insurgents launched a civil war that quickly evolved into conflict between ethnic-based factions. The militants dressed in bizarre attire and protected themselves with various charms. Their leaders used all sorts of means—including alleged human sacrifice and cannibalism, which functioned as symbols of spiritual power—in order to capture political power over the nation’s people. To foreign observers, all the characteristics of “Darkest Africa” seemed to have returned to re claim a country that historically thought of it self as more American than African.

These two accounts do in fact describe the same war. The Liberian Civil War launched by the Charles Taylor-led National Patriotic Liberation Front (NPLF) in December 1989 plunged Liberia into a decade-long conflict, which became increasingly difficult to comprehend as the contending factions proliferated. To further complicate matters, many observers believe that ECOMOG[1], the Nigerian-led West African peacekeeping force, prolonged the war in order that Nigeria’s military leaders could maximize their strategic regional influence and bolster their profits from business dealings in Liberia. What ultimately emerged was a very different political landscape in West Africa, with Nigeria’s hegemony in the region boosted and with every country and leader realizing the precariousness of their own internal and external sovereignty.

How can one explain such a conflict? How can a war launched with such an apparently “modern” agenda—the search for political power and resource accumulation—be carried out in such a seemingly “primitive” fashion? Further more, why did religion and the spirit world become such an important aspect of a “modern” war?

In The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War, the Leiden-based scholar of African history Stephen Ellis tries to bring the two dimensions of the war together—the capitalist agenda and the spiritual one. Ellis draws on everything from “pavement radio” (rumors) to the sayings and writings of “book men” (intellectuals) to provide a well-researched and carefully told story of the war—a story in which the muddy politics, the dirty business deals, and the search for raw power are set in the context of spiritual conflict. While being honest about the brutality of what occurred in Liberia, Ellis nevertheless defends Liberians from the familiar accusation that barbaric wars are a common African occurrence—a predictable reversion to a primitive past. From Ellis’s vantage point, the “primitive” often looks very “modern” and the “modern” often very “primitive.”

According to Ellis, the war in Liberia occurred in the way that it did because there was anarchy in the spiritual world, which Liberians view as the truest reality, and the actual war itself was a reflection of the disruption of that spiritual order. It is important to note that Ellis is not, as it might first seem, thereby committing himself to a judgment about the truth claims of traditional African religion. He neither endorses nor debunks such beliefs; rather he is bracketing that question to give an account of the war as the Liberians experienced it.

Ellis’s argument is based on the contention that before the area of present-day Liberia was colonized by African American settlers in the 1800s, cultic violence was within the control of the traditional elders and was used only in prescribed ways for the benefit of the community (to appease the spirits). But, so Ellis’s account goes, when the African American settlers and their Americo-Liberian descendents who dominated the government instituted indirect rule in the early 1900s in order to control the “country” people, traditional authorities lost power; control of public life had shifted to officials appointed by the state. In turn, in order to boost their own power, those state-appointed officials used the powers and privileges of traditional secret society in new ways. Practices such as human sacrifice became privatized, and political elites hired free-lance “heartmen” (who removed the hearts from their victims, to be ritually eaten) to gain spiritual power and to intimidate enemies.

In short, Liberia’s Americo-Liberian rulers, who portrayed themselves as Western-oriented and far more “civilized” than “native” Liberians, co-opted elements of traditional society to enhance their own power. Similar ritual acts were carried out in the 1980s under the American-supported dictatorship of Samuel Doe, the first non-Americo-Liberian to rule the country.

When the civil war broke out in 1989 with the original aim of overthrowing Samuel Doe’s corrupt and repressive regime, such ritual acts were carried out on a greater scale. Ellis argues that the greatest crime of the war was the desecration of Sande and Poro places of worship (the Sande and the Poro are respectively female and male societies whose functions include the cultic) and the exposing of the secrets of the ritual masks. He says Liberians believe this outrage caused spirits to wage war on people. Indeed, the spiritual underpinning of the conflict was pervasive. Fighters from all factions had been brought up to believe that human sacrifice and eating hearts gave power. Because Doe’s re public had left many with economic and political frustrations, Liberians hungered for power to rectify their situation. Since power was represented by eating organs, some allegedly did so, including those with higher degrees from American universities.

Though Ellis is primarily concerned with understanding the social and religious change going on in Liberia and how the change affected the conflict, he recognizes that political and economic factors cannot be ignored when one is explaining the war. One of the strengths of the book, therefore, is the way he unravels the wider context of the conflict. Given the vested business interests of ECOMOG peacekeepers and the labyrinth of regional and international politics at work, the reasons for the prolonged war become less mysterious.

To perform such clarification regarding a war that in some capacity is said to have involved Gambia, Nigeria, Guinea, Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, Libya, the United States, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Lebanon, Japan, Britain, and France was no easy task, and many analysts would have been content to stop there. We applaud Ellis for going a step further to examine the spiritual factors involved and for taking seriously the impact of belief on behavior. Those who have lived in Liberia can attest that Ellis is not exaggerating the fear of heartmen, the rumors, and the participation in secret societies. All that is a part of life there.

However, Ellis’s argument that traditional religion in the hands of elders characterized a spiritual world of order is in need of further examination. The logical conclusion to his argument is that order can only return to Liberia if the traditional elders are again able to control ritual killings and cultic violence for the “good” of community, rather than political elites and frustrated soldiers using ritual killings to secure personal power and terrify their enemies. Is this in fact what Ellis intends to imply? He suggests that before Liberia can return to political, social and economic order, they must first find spiritual order. It almost seems that he is arguing for a return to “tradition,” though he does not explicitly state this.

Moreover, Ellis seems to argue that traditional religion is what African people really believe, and even when they convert to Christianity and Islam, what they really believe (the traditional ideology) is incorporated into the new beliefs. There certainly is a syncretistic element to Christianity in Liberia, but can it then be said that the traditional system of human sacrifice and secret societies under the authority of the elders provided order in the social world of Liberians? Can a traditional cosmology where control is kept through mystery and fear really offer hope of order? Was this not what so many throughout Africa were rejecting when they converted to Islam or Christianity?

Questioned about the role secret societies played in regulating the social life of Liberians in the past, Liberian refugees in Ghana made it clear that the secret societies functioned on the basis of fear, fear of the spiritual world. These Liberians have no desire to re turn to the past. Indeed, they believe that the war has exposed the evil of the “order” offered by such traditional structures. In attempting to make the horrors of the conflict understandable, is Ellis not simply providing an excuse for the inexcusable? Is he not re-exoticizing Africans by attempting to de-exoticize them?

Many of the Liberian refugees view the civil war through the lens of Christianity rather than traditional religion. Although Ellis is preoccupied with traditional religion in Liberia, he does acknowledge the growth and importance of Christianity. To buttress his argument, he observes that churches in Liberia hold the use of religious tradition responsible for causing the war. But many of the Liberian Christians interviewed in Ghana said that the war was caused not by the misuse of traditional religious practices but rather by people diluting the gospel with syncretistic practice.

Some of the Liberian Christian refugees believe that a curse fell on their country because Liberians departed from the Christian principles on which their nation was based. One Liberian commented,

God holds the whole nation responsible for its leaders. Throughout Liberia’s history our leaders have been members of secret societies yet they were also leaders in the church too. They pretended to be Christians but they had other things going on the side. All the presidents made human sacrifices before coming to power. The blood of those innocent lives cries out for revenge. God hates the hands that shed innocent blood. Liberians need to repent and turn back to God.

A crowd of bystanders readily agreed.

Such an explanation reinforces Ellis’s contention that for Liberians, the war was rooted in the spirit world. However, this Christian explanation is markedly different from the one Ellis puts forward. Indeed, the Christian view holds that anarchy would have been avoided if Liberians had abandoned traditional practices entirely in order to serve God.

Christian perspectives not only play a part in explaining the causes of the war, but they also have significance for the resolution of the war and the return to peace. Ellis describes the Christian faith as having great appeal for fighters wanting to make a clean break from their pasts. In an article in African Affairs, a journal Ellis edits, he wrote on the same topic:

the spirit world is the only domain in which constructive action is still de tectable and in this a leading role may fall to the churches. Unlike the Poro society or other traditional cults, they are universal in orientation, having the potential to incorporate all Liberians. In their own symbolic language, the Holy Spirit is pacific and universal in nature and can enter anybody. The Christian God can forgive any crime, no matter how terrible.

He ends the article by advocating the use of the symbolic language of Liberian spirituality to understand the anarchic spiritual world of Liberia and then using that as a bridge to the Christian faith. He makes a good point. If the church refuses to acknowledge the perceived anarchic spiritual world, they cannot deal with it and help those in their congregation to move forward.

All in all, The Mask of Anarchy is a well-written and comprehensive book. Ellis takes what is bizarre, grotesque, and seemingly inexplicable—and makes it understandable. While he spends most of his time explaining the actions of elites, he does not neglect ordinary people, their motivations in participating in the war, and the ways in which they experienced the war. Ellis provides a refreshing perspective by showing that events unfold as a result of individual choices, in contrast to the common perception that war and brutality are inevitable in Africa.

Writers such as Robert Kaplan have predicted that the kind of wars that took place in the 1990s in Liberia and Sierra Leone are the wave of the future: conflicts led by frustrated young men fighting over the control of scarce resources rather than ideology, conflicts in which nation-states and borders will become increasingly meaningless. In many ways these wars do represent the future of globalization totally exposed, where the desire for people at all levels of society to become a part of global business and culture leads to unspeakable horrors. However, the conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone and the way they were ad dressed also symbolize a changing system of international engagement in the post-Cold War era, in which Africans will increasingly be encouraged to play important roles in the management of continental conflicts. Is this change a result of greater confidence in the ability of Africans to man age their own affairs, or is it rather a sign that the rest of the world has given up on the continent and no longer wants to be too closely involved?

Shelly Dick grew up in Nigeria, Liberia, and Kenya as the daughter of American missionaries. She attended Wheaton College and worked with the Peace Corps in Eritrea. Currently pursuing a master’s degree in Development Studies with a focus on forced migration, she spent the past summer doing research in a Liberian refugee camp in Ghana. Wiebe Boer grew up in Nigeria as the son of missionaries. A graduate of Calvin College and a doctoral candidate in African History at Yale University, he is presently in Nigeria conducting his dissertation research on a Fulbright Fellowship.

Footnote:

1. ECOMOG was launched by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a regional economic and political grouping. It officially stood for Economic COmmunity Monitoring Group, but was unofficially known as Every Commodity Or Moveable Object Gone, a clear indication of the types of non-military activities many ECOMOG troops were involved in.

NOTE: For your convenience, the following product, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase: • The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War, by Stephen Ellis