The Rising Beyond Self

By Isobe Gborkorkollie

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462876594

Book preview

Savage Leaders

Thus, they have proven no sense of sensitivity for the many.

The lower of the ladder have cried for years, so many years.

The lacks and have nots have suffered always at the hands of the unscrupulous.

Is there sense in the thoughts of this age-old game of economic control?

Should the cries of the downtrodden go without justice?

When the stay of a country is mismanaged for so long, the hopes of its

people drop on a ladder that becomes so hard to climb.

Let freedom reign for those that held in servitude.

Let freedom reign for the eyes that are full of tears.

The stain of corruption is unwholesome.

People of all ages have lived to see whether there is any good in their leaders, but none seems to bring hope.

Many years have come and have passed, and yet there seems no benefits to a people so damned to death by the hands of corruption.

Let God arise and hammer the names of those whose hearts are bent on the overthrow of social and economic freedom for my people.

Let God arise and stage a change for the poor of Liberia.

For freedom will not and cannot come by the will of their egoism.

Needy people stand by the roadsides on all streets begging the hands of the few who consume the vast wealth of Liberia.

The blind, cripple, the sad, and bewildered roam the streets of hopelessness.

All cry out for intervention.

Many sing songs of sadness, yet no one seem to keep their tears.

Let God arise and overthrow the heartless and the meanness of mad men and women, whose hands are stained with the blood of my people.

December 24, 1989

Bam, bam was heard all over the lonely walls of this country, Liberia. It is the sound of guns, missiles, and rifles of all types brought in and already held by the hands of some in government and by those who want the government to exit the throne of corruption so they too can ruin us further.

The hands of another unscrupulous group soon found to be in the later years, have touched the already ravaged country.

It is those in the thorny bushes controlled by small and big powers. They have come in the name of saving us, but soon they are killing us all.

Fear roams in huts, in homes, and a few told to us about this ruthless army of power hunters.

No one seems to be on our side to protect our heads. No, not one is to put us in safety, but destruction they bring to the gates of our homes.

Little we see through windows. The vast majority of them are the lower ones controlled by US dollars put in the pockets of thieves and not us who have always strived to survive from the hands of this roaming gangs led by the sons and daughters of age-old Liberian settlers and their local thugs.

Their desires and intents are sinister, we will soon find out. The support they receive is against us, for they have promised revenge.

Do their supporters see the ruins in their hands?

The odds against us are great.

There are no escape routes for the poor.

Those who have sat in the places of power in the past and present are leaving by the number each day.

On all sides of the country are independent armies against our will to survive the terrors by night and day.

Even the cries of the little ones can no more be heard.

Daughters and sons seem abandoned on the roadsides, in homes, and in marketplaces.

I manage to peep through windows to see the bright daylight but to no avail.

There is terror everywhere.

The scene is horrendous and unforgiving.

I still try to look through the cracks alongside my front door to see whether there is hiding near the house one of the rebel soldiers.

It is not because I love their presence.

But I am terrified by the presence of these men whose leaders sit in Libya, in America, in France, and in the capitals of the nearby countries, remotely controlling their evils against the innocent people.

The roads are now closed.

The news leaks to us in homes by the British radio station and by the Voice of America (VOA).

No TV is opened to watch the news, not even the streets can be viewed anymore.

Declarations are coming from all sides. No one we can believe. Their armies are ruthless and bent on accomplishing the wills of their leaders, not against the enemy armies, but against us, the downtrodden.

News of ambushes is coming in unfiltered.

Some few hundred tried to cross St. Paul River, close to one of America’s ex-slave settlement called Virginia.

Unfortunately, about two thousand people, many of them children and women, are killed as they escaped the terrors of the city.

Groups of unarmed people of all tribes, about several hundreds, are reportedly slashed to death this morning at the Red Light, one of the big markets in Monrovia.

A neighbor, who managed to slip out of his home to fetch cassava and eddoes for his children, is among the about one hundred killed in Fendell at the notorious Colorado devil’s gate.

Fendell is behind the university and mostly occupied by the internal indigent Liberians, who once worked for ex-American slaves.

The people here are mixed and outrageously poor.

The communal lives they lived in the past are taken away by uninhabited lands whose owners live in the West.

Their daily living condition here is a replica of those in other parts of the country—worse in sister settlements around Monrovia.

It is incredibly unreasonable and hard to believe that settlements are below mere village standards by many accounts.

After all, sons and daughters from these settlements have for many years used the wealth of the country and controlled political offices without question from the majority of the people.

To see that the wealth they have amassed over the years from government offices have not trickled down to their brothers in the settlements is a question hard for the interior palm oil taper to ask even in secret.

Leaders of the group holding the country hostage on all sides are members of the settlers’ clan.

The pronouncement we are hearing today from the local radio stations taken hostage in many counties is that they want to revenge the death of their compatriots.

I am not sure what this means for us—the ordinary people.

Is it that this revenge means a comeback to power to ruin the country after doing so for more than a hundred years?

Can we believe that these economic renegades and sectionalistic elements understand that their leadership was as awful and repugnant as the one they have come to take out?

It’s hard to relive the terror of the pre-1980s.

This era is marked for its cruelty to the ordinary Liberian citizen.

Uncle Sam knows that.

The rest of the world is a witness to black slavery by the West, enslaving native African people on this west coast of Africa.

The period before the 1980s is a period to remember.

Liberia is flourishing with foods of all kinds.

The interior people are here responsible to waste their blood on shifting cultivated lands to feed the population.

They sweat always, laboring on the farms of the big shots in Monrovia, even as they work to feed the population from their own native farms.

Their labor on the big shots’ farms is not paid for.

Their children work in the homes of the big shots without eating rice or the foods the privileged children eat in those homes. The house aids, known as country boys, have trousers that are torn, and clearly, their buttocks can easily be seen; and they’re mocked as a reminder that they are not part of the homes they work so hard to maintain.

In the churches, they are welcomed, but in the backseats or on the floor of the church, in obscure corners so that they cannot be seen.

Their names are changed to reflect their so-called slavers’ names.

They can easily