Reply #57: Liberia 1980; South Africa, late 80s and mid 90s

[HamdenRice]

Liberia wasn't yet a war, but a post-coup situation. Lots of road blocks by stoned, trigger happy young "soldiers" demanding "dash" to be allowed to proceed down the road. Most of the time, I was in a very remote, rural village and the unrest was pretty distant. Oddly, when I was in the capital, Monrovia, Sgt. Doe, the coup leader, was popular among the middle class and intellectuals. They actually thought he would turn things over to the professional classes. But we could see he was already being propped up by US special forces who took over a big base in town, and Liberia went from being one of the more stable, prosperous West African countries to civil war, to currently one of the poorest countries on earth.

South Africa was in a low intensity civil war when I lived there. Daily reports of ambushes and firefights on the border. That was creepy because I had to cross the border by car into Botswana. The most bizarre experience I had was that an Afrikaner farmer I met randomly in the Afrikaner town of Zeerust took a liking to me (we both knew the same royal Tswana family) and he bribed the security police with a bottle of liquor to help me jump to the head of a long line of mostly white South Africans to get through a border security check called a "police certificate." That was strange because I found white farmers to be generally berserk.

On one of my first days in SA, a news photographer who is still one of my best friends, took me to a political rally at a church in Soweto. The police showed up, surrounded the church and fired tear gas. Then they started pointing their shotguns. My friend grabbed me and we started running and jumping fences and walls and ended up a few blocks away at his sister's house, where we had a few beers as though what had happened was the most normal thing in the world.

There was also the occasional bombing in Johannesburg where I lived -- unfortunately, mostly in my old neighborhoods of Joubert Park, Hillbrow, Berea and Braamfontein, because that was where black people were being allowed to move into the city and the ANC operatives would not raise suspicion living there. There were crack downs when armored vehicles would suddenly swarm all around.

Toward the end of my stay in SA, I was caught in the middle of a firefight in front of Soweto's huge Barragwanath Hospital. I was in the parking lot waiting to hear about an old man I had delivered to the emergency room when the firefight broke out. Everyone else in the lot and I ran into the emergency room, and ducked down below window level because of the flying bullets. Then, when the shooting was over, they started bring in the dead and wounded, and for the first and only time in my life, I saw a guy die of gunshot wounds right in front of my eyes. He was covered in blood from several gunshots on one side of his body, and the (black, Asian) doctors and nurses had gotten an IV into him, but he started shivering violently and died. The whole room smelled like blood. Then the white security policy came in and pointed their rifles and shotguns in each person's face, including mine. The idea back then was that if you panicked having a policeman point his shotgun in your face, you were probably a "terrorist." That was the day I decided to give it a rest and come home to the US.

I was doing some volunteer teaching while carrying out my research and after I returned home I learned that one of my students had been killed in the internecine fighting.

It was actually crazier when I went in 1993 to study the transition. There was a complete collapse of order. I rented cars to get around, but had three stolen in the course of about a month. The very nice white police officer who came to the home where I was staying said that a lot of the disorder was because the civil war in neighboring Mozambique had ended. The soldiers on both sides there were not demobilized in any orderly way but just took off their uniforms and sold their AK-47s in the market at Maputo. Soweto gun runners would drive up to Maputo, buy a van full of guns for about $5 a piece, and return to Soweto to sell them. Everyone had a gun, even middle class people. You would put a loaded AK-47 on the floor of the front passenger seat when you drove around. There was a big discount store, like Costco, a friend took me to, and they had a little booth for you to check your assault rifles, which were not allowed in the store. At night you didn't stop at red lights because your car could be hijacked. I saw a white tourist couple almost kidnapped by gangsters on the street in broad daylight in downtown Johannesburg, but they managed to break away and run across the street. My friends from Katlehong Township had to move to Johannesburg because it was overrun with fighting between the ANC and Inkatha.

I heard a story about a very well educated, sophisticated professor at the University of Witwatersrand who happened to be of Zulu ethnicity and originally from KwaZulu. When one of his close relatives was murdered in the ANC-Inkatha fighting, he drove to the area, carried out a revenge killing, and was back teaching at the university in a few days.

I attended a number of the the constitutional negotiations at a "convention center" outside Joburg, with borrowed press credentials. Security was laughably lax, because they generally wanted the whole thing to be extremely open and transparent. As a result, the white, neo-Nazi, anti-constitution faction was able to steel an armored vehicle, drive it to the convention center, and crash it right through the glass walls of the conference center where the country's leadership was negotiating! I didn't see that, but when I was there, a whole exterior wall was made of plywood because of it.

The most amazing thing was that when I went back a year later, everything was perfectly calm. It's amazing how a political settlement can just end political violence over night. That's what happened in South Africa.