The sense of lives ruined for no purpose is pervasive in Liberia, a country colonised by freed US slaves, cultivated as a strategic anti-Communist American interest in Africa and largely ignored by the West during a post-Cold War decade in which its name became a byword for brutality. I first had a glimpse of Monrovia's ruined infrastructure, along with the wretched refugee camps near the border with Sierra Leone, in 1998. At the time Sierra Leone was caught in an internal conflict of its own with which the huge troubles of Liberia and the surrounding region are closely linked. When I returned to the country recently, after the announcement of a short-lived ceasefire in the latest civil war, I talked about my earlier visit to a Liberian woman in the queue at Immigration. 'It's still the same,' she said.

LRB 7 August 2003 | PDF Download