A lot of the scars on Monrovia have healed. Nearly a decade has passed since the end of the war. The city remains dotted by buildings reduced to hollowed-out shells. But smaller cuts such as bullet holes and wartime graffiti are no longer such common sights.
As a journalist new to Liberia, I’m trying get away from painting every event and issue I cover against a backdrop of civil war. I imagine Liberians must be sick of it; seeing every article about their country interrupted about a third of the way down by an editorially-obligatory paragraph explaining that civil wars engulfed the country from 1989 to 2003. But a lot of the literature on Liberia is of course shockingly-violent. And so on the flight over, reading up on the country to which I was moving, my head was filled with a some of the worst accounts of urban warfare I’ve ever come across. Consequently, walking around Monrovia, those stories are sometimes all I see.
Taller buildings are high ground. Bridges are choke points. Just a few blocks from where I’m staying, on Camp Johnson Road, Taylor’s men chased a rival warlord to the U.S. embassy in a massacre that killed dozens. A friend of mine lives on 12th Street; several times, the fighting there tortured residents for months on end. It’s down Randall Street where a bunch of former child soldiers still hang out. And so on. It’s all just part of the city.