ABSTRACT
The rusting carcass of an abandoned Cadillac lay beneath a colonnade at the base of the national bank’s multistory headquarters. The Armed Forces of Liberia, the government army, retained soldiers within its ranks who were members of the tribes regarded by the government as automatically sympathetic to the rebel side. Wars have formed a part of the African landscape as the tragic accompaniment to the birth of democracy on the continent. Eleven months after the war had erupted, Liberia lay in ruins, a byword for horror, a nation torn apart. By the end of the first year of the war, there were at least 30,000 people under arms in Liberia, most of them teenagers, though some as young as nine or ten years old. Samuel Doe was dead, killed on 9 September 1990 by the faction led by Prince Johnson, which had broken with Taylor within days of the civil war being launched.
