Black.Light Project   Reality by merging words, photographs, and drawings...

 

Charles Taylor has gone into exile,
but he left his people trapped in a circle of shadow...

15 stories from Liberia, Sierra Leone,
Guinea Bissau and Ivory Coast

IVORY COAST

Black Sun

"The little man's motorcade drives through villages, mountains, borders. He travels incognito wrapped by the night: a dark honeycomb throbbing the heart of darkness. This man is a black sun radiating negative light. He moves and, as he does so, the darkness expands on each step he took, in each step he takes."
Welcome to Charles Taylor's King Lear.

Chez Shahin

Shahin is the son of an Iranian businessman that had to leave Teheran to Africa after the Revolution in 1979. Father and son ended up in Man, running a derelict "café". There is a former French legionary this morning, talking 'bout nothing.
"A friend of mine told me that if I ever get really depressed, that I should take a walk uphill to the hospital. He said that I will come out believing myself as the luckiest man on Earth".

Mikado 

Logging in forest sanctuaries to fund the war: "The prospector finally indicates the trunk that he identified in a previous survey. His job ends there.
The tree's life - twenty, fifty, one hundred years old, some even older – comes to an end as well.
Two men approach the tree. The tree seems to hesitate for a second.
Then, the nerves of the wood make a breaching sound and the large tree leans and falls, falls, falls, first with a storm of leaves and then with a guttural noise of a whale splashing the surface of the sea."

Notebook

Someone left a school notebook behind. I picked it from the mud. I read it when it got dry. Lesson for today, written by the hand of a child:
"To commit: is to practice something wrong
To condemn: is to punish the culprit
Mathematics: volumes of the cube, a x a x a = m3"
In footnote: "History: the French met fierce resistance everywhere in West Africa".

GUINEA BISSAU :

Shivering in ruins       

"One madman completely naked masturbates alone in the empty street, ignoring the soldiers that run past him for shelter as the Katiuska mortars start to whistle and fall in the neighbourhood".
June 1998, Bissau: two armies fighting street by street with heavy artillery. The farewell to Amílcar Cabral, the founding father and moral reference of the nation.

SIERRA LEONE :

The lost sons

"I don't remember killing an innocent man." Silence, revisionism, negation, or bare-faced lies abound in the testimony of the "perpetrators".
The most that the commission succeeded in extracting was an innocuous statement by Morie "Gabon": "I can't say I killed. I also can't say I didn't kill." As for the rest, "War is a bad thing…"

Morie

Morie was the only survivor of an all-day-long massacre of his entire village (1200 people). We traced the boy down in the swamps of Pujehun in 2003 and later we visited his teenager persona: the trauma lives on and came of age…
"Morie remembers this absurd detail of the massacre: «In the middle of the people, chickens, dogs, goats, all dead…»"

Drinking as dogs do

In the Bombuna Mountains, in a remote ghetto for amputees. «Balá Cissé knows how to drink water as dogs do, "just with my mouth." He learned how to do that when they cut off his hands and left him in the forest, fighting for life for seven days. His six friends were killed on the spot, immediately.
Cissé was shoved against a fence, where they extended his arms on top of the wood. When he saw the saber rise, Cissé screamed "Oh, God!!" They mocked him: "You have a god?" And the saber came down twice.»

City of Rest

An evangelical institution for drug addicts in Freetown. Gospel exorcizes the addiction by force…
"We have everything here, man. There are rastas, druggies, hippies, junkies, dreads, soldiers, rebels, thieves, murderers–"
Wyclin stops to assess the group around him. "You know, I don't think I'm the worst of them." And who is the worst? Wyclin glances at a man with an absorbed gaze, sitting in a chair, immobile in the middle of the courtyard.
"Well, man… It might be the devil…"

LIBERIA :

Dasia: When I first got here 

A master narrative on violence, politics, justice, trauma and humanity by Dasia Masaquoi – in memoriam! A spoken moral essay, literally walking down Broad Street.
"You see fear. Raw fear. And that raw fear is turned and transcend into power. The other side is a mirror. You are on the driver's seat and there's a victim in fear. And this fear is reflected between two people. This violence, you go into it and you don't question yourself again."

Dasia: God was good

"God was good to us, you know? When the killing was on, it was dry. When it stopped, the rainy season would start to wash all the blood away."

Dasia: The right bloodshed

"The only hope for Liberia is for those gentlemen to be eliminated. Nothing else. My friends complain and lament that this here is a bloodbath.
And I say: yes, it is–the wrong bloodbath. Because there are so many correct bloodbaths. If the blood of one man prevents the blood of a thousand, that's the right bloodbath."
I want blood for blood. I don't want justice."

The Zone

In rebel area with Commander Alpha Mike, the only officer leading an outpost of child soldiers, all high on drugs and beer.
«" - Careful, get his weapon!-" Before a burst of gunfire could erupt, the rebel was brought to his knees by his colleagues, to a flurry of lashing with belt buckles, till he offered no further resistance or reply, his eyebrow cut, humiliated, drooling blood and dirt.»

Commander Peanut Butter

In 'loyalist' area (across the river from Alpha Mike) with Commander Peanut Butter, the last general fighting for President Charles Taylor – with child soldiers too.
"They're not real children. These types have seen their family killed before their eyes and the ones who killed them didn't even bothered to take them away. Sometimes I can only think that I'm going to lose my mind. Why do I have to be here?"

"This guy showed up here in September, at a meeting we'd set up with LURD. I thought it was a meeting of Africans, and this huge white man shows up.
Excuse me? What are Americans doing here? It's not tourism, I guarantee you."

Birds of pray

A group of women "tired of war, tired of having no voice", has held weekly ecumenical demonstrations for peace at the airport.
"What' we want?"
"Peace!!!"
"When?"
"Now!!!"
One woman, apart from the group, falls to her knees and lies prostrate on the ground, trembling in a quiet, dry weeping. She murmurs names, and the names drive her to despair."

No shame!

Teene, former child soldier, aka Nasty: "At first I didn't know anything about weapons. They forced me to fight, to join them.
Then I decided to be worse than the others…" She has a baby in her arms.

No Monkey

"Bendu Sando metamorphosis was rapid and happened a short time ago: in June of this year, the rebels entered Bendu's town and an armed man approached her and said, «I wanna fuck the girl.» The girl was she."

One night in Florida

One long analysis on reporting violence and finding words for horror, when night falls back in "hotel" Florida –the ruins of a brothel, filthy with rats and roaches, run by an old Lebanese-, in the frontline of Monrovia.
On how to pierce out the thorns of the day, to retain only the elusive flowers – and keep on working next morning. "I did not, I did not…"