You can tell you're flying into Liberia because the world goes dark. An hour out of Banjul, lights on the ground disappear. Eighteen months into its first proper peace since 1989, after 14 years of spectacularly brutal civil war, Liberia still doesn't have electricity or running water. It hasn't had any since February 1990, when Charles Taylor - former warlord, later president, currently in exile in Nigeria, where he's still causing trouble, according to the Coalition for International Justice, funding armed groups and political parties across West Africa - sent his militia to take out the electricity plant. During his presidency, which he won in 1997 with the sinister campaign slogan 'You killed my ma, you killed my pa, I'll vote for you,' and the promise that if he wasn't elected, he'd go back to war, he didn't bother to fix the lights or the water. Either because he was spending the money on cocaine, guns and women, or because he was preoccupied with failing to repel the rebels who finally got him to stand down in the summer of 2003, after attacks on Monrovia so fierce that Liberians still call them World Wars One, Two and Three.

LRB 2 June 2005 | PDF Download