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Africa Journal: Going Rogue
Gurley Street, Monrovia, Liberia.
Imagine you didn’t have squat. You live in a dirt-floored, corrugated zinc-roofed hut. You work and save and you finally get the opportunity to get a little something for yourself; let’s say an el cheapo transistor radio, so you can listen to the VoA or Liberia Today. Then somebody steals the little gimcrack you spent months saving for. How would you react?
Back in the ’80s, Liberians didn’t react well. When the call “Rogue!” went out, people came boiling out of their huts and shacks to chase, apprehend, and mete out rough justice to the rogue.
Thus, it was at/about 14 years of age, I first saw a man die by violence.
All the third-country kids (get of the diplomatic corps, international businessmen, and the Lebanese diaspora) went to the American Cooperative School in Liberia. About 200 kids, K-12, from 30 different countries. The ACS was located on Old Road, next to the Old Road Fish Market, where we’d buy road-baked fish (four for a dollar) that was amazingly good, once you batted the flies off.
There was a traditional big yellow school bus that would truck all the embassy kids from “embassy row” (Sekou Torre Ave.) to school and back. I’d been in-country for about two weeks and our bus was trundling home one afternoon down Old Road, when we had to stop for an insta-mob; hundreds of people shouting “Rogue!” The subject of the yelling was a 20-something looking guy, and the crowd was knocking the snot out of him right by our bus. I don’t know what the guy had done—or had allegedly done—but the crowd was relentless.
My bus-mates and I hung out the windows with a bird’s eye view of the mob beatdown. Eventually, a soldier showed up to take control of the situation. Wearing a ragtag uniform, literal hobnailed boots, and carrying an AK-47, he started putting his boots to the rogue. After a couple of minutes (seconds?) of mercilessly kicking the rogue, the soldier handed off his AK to a member of the crowd (!) and swinging both arms for momentum, he jumped up, and came down.
Most of my bus-mates screamed, some immediately puked; I just remember thinking that brains didn’t look at all like I imagined they would. Instead of the light, fluffy grey that textbooks depicted, they were dark, storm-cloud grey, with maroon and purple whorls. Yuck.
About a year-and-a-half later, I had Liberia dialed in. I knew all the places a young man could go to get into trouble. I knew and spoke the local patois. I had a deep love of the people.
One weekend evening, me and my buddy Dave were stumbling down Gurlry Street (the Monrovian red-light/bar district) getting ready to shamble home before curfew — not a parental curfew, but the citywide curfew Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe had put in place upon taking the reins of state via coup d’etat. We’d usually go to Dave’s house, which was on the beach, walk into the ocean fully clothed, and scrub down with sand to eliminate any olfactory evidence of our misadventures. Then we’d hang our clothes over the wall of his house, and sit on the beach until we were dry enough and sober enough to tiptoe into the house and rack out.
On our way off of Gurley Street, a guy started pestering us: asking us for money, offering to show us “de bes’ places” (Dude, I’m wearing a dashiki and talking to you in Liberian English — do I look like I need a tour guide?), and generally being a pain in the tuchus. Finally I wheeled on him and deployed “Ey, my man, how you can be humbugging me so?” He punched me in the chest, and took off running. Instinctively, I lit out after him. I knew within a step what he’d done.
Dad, on his travels, had picked up gold jewelry for my brother and me. The reason, he said, was that someday we might have to make it over a border or back to the Embassy unsupported; cash may not work, but gold will. I can’t remember what my brother got, but I’d gotten a lion’s claw, encased in a golden web, on a gold necklace. On the first stride of my chase, I knew he’d stolen my chain when I didn’t feel it thump against my chest. Son of a…
I chased him for a couple blocks, right behind him (y’know, it’s only after starting these Africa Journals that I realized how much running I had to do back in the day). He finally figured he wasn’t going to outrun me, close behind him and screaming “Rogue!” at the top of my lungs, and turned off onto an eroded dirt alley. I could see the end of the alley ahead of us. Half of the back end was occluded by a white, clapboard building. The other half led into one of the intermittent strips of jungle one found all through the city. He hits that jungle, he’s gone.
I upped my speed, reached out and grabbed the waistband of his trousers, picked him up, and ran us both into the white clapboard at full speed. It’s a technique. We both scrambled to our feet. I don’t know about him, but my bell was a little rung. He grabbed me by the throat with his free, not-holding-my-damn-necklace hand. Bad decision, wasted effort. Let me show you how it’s done. I punched him in the throat and he dropped; the paroxysms of a traumatized trachea can be pretty debilitating. I stomped on his exposed, palm-up forearm, and recovered my necklace.
Just before I could turn and make my egress out of the alley, a hand that was about the size and weight of a canned ham fell on my shoulder and turned me around. The owner of the hand was huge and hugely muscled. He didn’t have a shirt on, just a leather vest. And he had a leather eye patch over one eye. A frikkin’ leather eye patch.
Please don’t be his big brother, please don’t be his big brother…
“Ey, my man, t’enk you for catching the rogue.”
Not a problem, sir.
About then Dave came stumbling around the corner. “What’re we doing?”
We getting the hella outta here.
Published in General
You boys play some innerestin’ games. I’m ‘fraid I don’t get the “irrigate” story, though. Explain?
Thanks!
So, you got a wound and infectious bacteria gets into it. And the bacteria spawns two clones, and they spawn to clones, and so on and so on. Irrigating the wound, no matter how nasty the irrigation water, brings the wound-feasting-bacteria count back down to zero. Even if the irrigation fluid is rife with koodies, it’s better than letting the initial infection continue to grow at geometric rates.
Not to be rude — but I would have a Mole-Eyed person to have peeped it out already.
To add on to what Boss said, water and cellular regeneration/repair is of the utmost importance. While ingesting brackish water can be a death sentence, irrigation of wounds is a safer bet. However, I would opt for finding a moving water source rather than a standing one. On rehydration and non-potable water — no survivalist should be without a handful of dissolvable anti-bacterial/protozoan purification tablets. Like alka-seltzer but for Legionellosis and Botulism instead of Hangover.
If without, in a pinch you can always pinch….your rear entrance as your lower intestine is far more resistant to the infections of standing water critters than your stomach is.
But In Through The Out Door is my least favorite Led Zeppelin album.
Sorry, @jlock, but when this Mole-eyed person thinks “irrigate”, the association is farming and horticulture, not wound treatment. I work in a different kind of swamp, and garden for pleasure.
If this is a competition, I really need to up my game.
I think Gordon Liddy called it a “battlefield expedient.” Besides, the way I understand it, urine is more or less sterile.
Terrific post, thanks! I love the “Rogue!” Terminology! It’s good to hear from an old Africa hand.
Whoa. That’s a story!
What a story!
I specifically avoid “interesting” parts of the world. This post reminds me why.
Notice she brings two bottles of beer with the tops on, which he takes off. Correct etiquette.
Never accept a beer in Africa that has already been opened. You will have no idea what is in there.
In Africa, that is a formula for getting schisto (schistosomiasis). You want to neither consume nor bathe in it (or irrigate with it). That nice mountain stream is not a good place to go swimming. You’ll then have a lifetime of taking pills that never kill the liver flukes but keep them from eating your liver.
My first experience of being robbed while living in Africa wound up rather different. I gave a guy equivalent of about $20 to patch a tire repaired. He kept my money and the tire. He was caught and taken to the police. I came down to the police station and paid about $100 to file a police report on the guy. He was kept in a darkened cell (no windows, lights, toilet) and let out once a day for an hour when relatives could bring him food and he could clean up.
I never turned anybody else over to the police.
I don’t think I should even bother to play.
Seawriter
Who is he?
Yes, and if you miss out on the schistosomiasis, there’s always onchocerciasis to worry about. Better off taking the lid off that unopened bottle of beer, and using it instead. Waste of a good beer, but needs must . . . .
So, on battlefield expedience and survival medicine, they taught us “maggot therapy.” If you have a wound that’s gone septic, expose it to the flies for a couple hours, then cover it. When the maggots hatch, they’ll start feeding, but they’ll only eat the flesh that’s necrotic. Once they’ve chowed through the corruption, have a buddy irrigate with a nice, strong stream of piping hot urine.
Filed under: things that are nice to know, but I hope I never have to do.
No really, who is he? I have no idea.
Wowza! Great writing and what an education you had!
I have my share of stories, too. Like the time I went to Target on Christmas Eve. I’d tell you about it but I still have PTSD.
I have had experience with maggots. Trying to view them, in the forefront of my mind, as ‘the Lord’s little cleaning crew,’ works up to a point. Then I get out the Creolin. (Have not had to resort, at least so far, to the suggestion above). Thank goodness.
EDIT: Shameless self promotion alert. See under the “Wound Management” heading.
Fictional character created by author Vince Flynn.
She, you’ve logged the one time in history where use of a burqa was beneficial.
@She
“he is presented as an aggressive operative who is willing to take measures that are more extreme than might be considered commonly acceptable.”
That’s gold, right there.
Thank you good sir.
De rien, monsieur.
Or as we used to say – Situational Dependent.
METT-T, baby.
He didn’t like it much at all and I suspect that displeasure would translate to humankind. If men had been forced to wear burqas, I daresay the practice would have ended long ago . . .
Here he is again, not long after I pronounced him “healed.” You can still see the Blue-Kote insect-repellent spray, which I used a great quantity of, and which dyed his wool and horns purple for months. Also, little depressions just below and to the outside of his horns, which was where the little creatures were feasting.
We call him “Nomaggothead” now.
Like this, sirs, but the Church Lady-Marine is a little acronym-deficient: Translation, please/thank you? (Or do I want/need to know?) :-) Rah and S/F, hermanos! Blessed Sunday, too!
Mitch Rapp is badder than Jack Bauer.
We give rides to church to a Liberian woman, a widow in her 70s. I am trying to be friendly and get to know her better, but it is SO HARD to understand her English. It’s such a struggle and I get embarrassed that I so often have to ask her to repeat things. But she is very kind and loving, even with our limited communication.
Great story! Thanks for sharing it.