Building of the Month: The Ruin at Clay Street & Camp Johnson Road

One of post-conflict Monrovia’s primary architectural characteristics, featured through the M2M Architectural Tour, has been its ruins. The city is bookended by abandoned monuments, or rather monuments to abandonment—the never-was Ministry of Defense in Congo Town as you enter the capital, and the Ducor Hotel, situated both at Monrovia's highest point and atop the termination of the long Mesurado peninsula (with the oceanside Hotel Africa complex in Virginia as an eastward outlier). Megastructures of the country's former affluence and importance dot the cityscape: the Pompeii of Post-Conflict.

Aside from these larger commercial complexes, there have always been lots of smaller-scale ruins across the city, from shells of sprawling split-level '70s ranches the fin-de-belle-époque to skeletons of historic mansions in town. If the hulks of five-star hotels and the unfinished frames of intimidating ministries are mausoleums of Monrovia's Cold War relevance, these domestic dilapidations mark the graves of personal tragedies: families and businesses fallen. 

Carey Street, 2008 & 2009.

In Central Monrovia, there have been half a dozen such ruins featured in the Architectural Tour over the last five years: a few compelling examples where an intact, multistory stone or concrete shell stood vacant amid the crowded, chaotic bustle of the town. a Victorian-style façade, still grayish-white with old paint and once-resplendent with double-height front porch, now rooflessly houses a carpenter's yard on Carey Street. About a block away, a grandiose triple-decker whose front entry had been built out into a video club and garment shop, the front parlor home to a wide, green plum tree that reaches up to the crumbling eves, a second vines over the back of the house.

Carey Street 2009.

The most magnificent of all, unquestionably, was the Ruin on Camp Johnson Road at the corner of Carey Street. Like so many of Monrovia's old buildings, its original purpose was difficult to ascertain, although by its size and location is was almost certainly an anchor of what was once Monrovia's fifth avenue shopping street. Taking up an entire lot, the four-story high structure had five wide windows all around, and some sort of interior circulation shaft, perhaps a central stairwell, or almost as if a larger building had been built up around the outside of a smaller inner building. Whatever the relationship between the two elements, they unmistakably recall an outer peristyle and inner cella of a Greek temple.

Camp Johnson Road, 2013.

The scene is made rather less like the Acropolis in Athens and rather more like Angkor Wat by the last and third element: a massive, vining tree, sprouting knottily out the inner sanctum and over the top of the concrete structures like a dome. At its ankles, like many other of Monrovia's ruins, was an arcade of small shops, a bustle of hustle: a baby-care store, a bar and restaurant with an enclosed sitting area, painted in bright lime green. If Monrovia is post-colonialism's Rome, than here is a scene of Canaletto, or at least of Hubert Robert, as the ordinary citizens reoccupy the old edifices, not to keep their livestock, but sell plastic toys and warm Club Beer.

Hubert Robert, French. Roman Ruins, c.1760.

This arrangement was an arresting site. First, like all of Monrovia's other war wreckage, it is ruin porn, less ironic than the Ducor and less hilariously menacing than the Ministry of Defense, as the previous life of the building is not evident. It is striking both for the visual orchestration, and that such a feral germination had proceeded with only disregard and accommodation, without intervention or mitigation—without anyone on the busy street around it taking any action to stop it.

But it has stopped. As of earlier this week, the concrete-block walls have been knocked down. A pile of rubble covers the twisted roots of the thick-trunked tree, which will undoubtedly meet the blades of chainsaw in the coming weeks.

Photo ©Glenna Gordon February 2014. 

What will come in its place here is not known: another cement shop front, with heavy iron doors, selling used mattresses or auto parts. Perhaps the second floor will be apartments. A diesel generator will run outback. One more store for Camp Johnson Road. Jobs will be created, commerce will commence: it will be another step in the march of progress and recovery, and Monrovia will become more like every other West African capital, with one less of its unusual sights.

Special thanks to Glenna Gordon for use of her Instagram photo. All other photos ©Matthew M. Jones.

Street Photo: The Blood of Jesus

Randall Street, October 2013. Not sure what liquid is in all those various thermoses, but it's a little off-putting that the little wheelbarrow cart has been bequeathed the name, The Blood of Jesus. Something unintended and unappetizing in that appellation. Presumably the vendor is just being an inventive mobile Hatai entrepreneur. I stuck around for a few minutes but couldn't find the owner of the repurposed wheelbarrow to find out.

The Problem is not the Pehn-Pehn

"These guys are like suicide bombers," my Liberian friend sighed from behind the wheel as our car slowly made our way through central Monrovia recently. Outside of our vehicle, an kamikaze-like swirl of motorbikes flitted within inches of our car, seeming to bounce off the fenders of the vehicle in front. Any gap between cars of more than a few feet was ample territory to be conquered, and was soon filled with buzzing bikes.  In what has become a typical scene on Monrovia's streets the motorbikes, known locally as pehn-pehns (or pen-pens), for the sound of their endlessly repetitive bleating horns, created a chaotic choreography set to their own cacophony, making the movement of the car down the block stressful and difficult.

Pehn-pehns have never been widely beloved among Liberians, but seem to be particularly loathed by those Monrovians who have the luxurious option of moving around by private vehicle. Even among Liberians who take pehn-pehns regularly, pehn-pehn operators are held somewhere between a head-shaking disregard and a teeth-clenching outrage. There seen as lawless, senseless. Although the streets of many African cities swarm with motorbikes, they are a particularly notable feature of Monrovia, a city whose contemporary crowding seems most noticeable in three expects: its sprawling suburbs, its overstuffed slums, and its standstill street traffic.

As Monrovia's economy has burgeoned in the last few years, the capital's once-potholed and empty main roads, now smoothed over with recent tarmac, have filled with vehicles, resulting in crawling congestion during daylight hours, particularly during an increasingly-epic rush hour along the city's spine, Tubman Boulevard, from the city's eastern residential fringe into the commercial center. While these jams pale in comparison to the legendary Lagosian go-slows or Accra's dawn-to-dusk parking lots, in the last few years have Monrovians partaken in that most mundane of moans: complaining about the endless traffic.

Partly, geography is to blame: stretched across a long peninsula, Monrovia now spills across the swampy plains to its north and east. Connected by a single road, the city is poorly-equipped to handle commuter traffic from its historic central area to the now-burgeoning suburban areas such as Paynesville and Duazohn, which stretch for as much as twenty miles from the heart of the city. The traffic problem worsens each month as each container ship full of cars unloads at the city's Freeport, and has grown noticeably worse, somewhat ironically, with the addition, starting last year, of a series of low-function traffic lights at major intersections along Tubman's length, which seem to ensure bottlenecks along the city's single street.

Packs of Pehn-pehns dart dangerously through this traffic, riding the double-yellow line down the center of Tubman as if they were merely inches wide, "playing chicken" with oncoming traffic as they rush head-on towards a line of side-view mirrors. There's no question its dangerous and annoying.  It's also envy-inducing to see travelers zipping past standstill vehicles, their ride costing less than a dollar.

Much is made in the press about the background of pen-pen drivers, most of whom are young and male. I've read countless press reports that declare pehn-pehn riders to largely ex-combatants, or mostly foreigners from Nigeria, or criminals. Speculation that drivers are drunk or high are frequently voiced-who knows if its true. I've never seen any survey statistics to back this up, much less a count of just how many pen-pens operate in Monrovia, although the riders are organized into a union.

What's less disputable is that pehn-pehns, despite their dangers and annoyances, constitute an essential form of affordable transportation for a great number of Monrovians, and are therefore an irreplaceable component of the transport infrastructure of a fast-growing city where there are few forms of public transport. Even if Liberia's National Transit Agency doubled the fleet of Indian-donated buses that ply Monrovia's streets, pehn-pehns would remain a vital form of transport for the vast majority of the city. The result is an inverse relationship between their irreplaceability and the scorn they engender.

The demographics of the drivers aside, an unaddressed issue in the loathing the pehn-pehns bring, is that their role in the city's transport system has not been formalized and integrated thoughtfully. The placement of traffic lights at many intersections has further impeded traffic movement; many big intersections are crowded and impassible not necessarily because of the volume of automobiles, but due to curbside taxi and pehn-pehn parking areas, where commuters switch between shared taxis and motorbikes to continue their journey. These intermodal zones are not officially designated or set aside, and so slowing taxis and rows of parked motorbikes block a lane, causing cars to squeeze by.

Image courtesy FrontPageAfrica 

Authorities in Liberia have often taken an adversarial approach to the pen-pen drivers and their representatives, seeming to transform the general public's dislike into draconian (and vague) regulations. In the last few years, the government has imposed a series of increasingly-aggressive restrictions on pen-pen movement, of which last week's sudden ban is the most severe. In 2011, the Liberian National Police imposed a night-time curfew for motorbikes, supposedly in to thwart armed robbers from their get-away vehicles of choice. Perhaps surprisingly, this curfew has held.

"Our biggest problem is motorcyclists. The Motorcycle Union is growing almost every day. You have new riders coming on the streets every day, and many of them are not trained. They do not understand the traffic rules, and they don't want to protect themselves," --Minister of Transport Tornorlah Varpilah, October 29th

In a city still mostly devoid of formal or even informal employment opportunities for the undereducated youth of the city, hopping behind a pehn-pehn and immediately collecting 20 or 50 LD per ride is an all-too-rare means to find enough to eat rice each day, if not a rung on the ladder to any kind of economic self-sufficiency.

I've had my run-ins with pehn-pehns, quite literally: for every 18 months that I've lived in Monrovia, I've had a motorbike crash into my car, sometimes while I was driving. No one has been hurt, thankfully, but the aftermath of each has been a highly unpleasant confrontation in which I was threatened with physical violence and monetary pay-offs were demanded, even though it wasn't my fault that my vehicle was hit and damaged. I wouldn't recommend the experience to anyone. Nearly every car trip in the city features an aggressive encounter with a motorbike, whether a close cut-off or near-collision. It is this disregard for the rules of the road that partly explains the widespread disdain for pen-pen drivers, but equally, I think, is the class distinction between the possibly-ex-rebel drivers and the rest of the public, be they office workers or ministers. Many Liberians abhor disorderliness, which the risky, careless motorbikes seems to embody.

I am fully supportive of regulations for the motorbikes, including those that are being debated this week: ensuring that drivers are licensed and trained, that helmets are worn, and safe driving is practiced. But this latest edict, effectively outlawing most journeys by motorbikes, seems not so much an attempt to improve safety but to rid Monrovia's auto lanes of a pestering annoyance of having to share the road with pehn-pehns. This has its connotations in the canyon-like class divides in this city, where the better-off openly disdain their poverty-stricken fellow citizens, who struggle to get by. Rather than decreeing that motorbikes (and the people that operate them and reply on them) disappear, Monrovia would be better off if it developed a comprehensive plan to carve out dedicated space for the city's motorbikes, and their users, and recognized how both are vital and beneficial to this city and its residents.

Dampened Liberia

Monrovia is extraordinarily rainy, and this year's rains have been extraordinary. I was told by a professional in rain-water collection that its rained almost twice as much as usual this year. It's the second half of September, and yet the rainy season doesn't seem to be slowing down. It's still raining. One week in August, it rained more or less continuously from Sunday afternoon to Thursday evening, cycling from drizzles to downpours. Streets fill with water. The clouds are low and the light is dim-- as depressing as a Scandinavian winter.

I wrote about the rainy season last August, including the phenomenon of motorbike guys drying off in the wall-sized exhaust vents of huge generators, who are almost always designed to spew their filthy smog out into the street. The very same observation of the very same half-clothed huddle was mentioned in a recent Baobab column about Monrovia's rainy season, which is copied below.

A sudden stiff wind offers momentary respite from Monrovia’s punishing humidity, but it is only the harbinger of worse to come in Liberia’s capital. As huge rain-drops begin to spatter the ground, people scarper for cover. Motorcycle-taxi drivers abandon their bikes as the heavy sky empties its load.In the month of July alone, Monrovia sees almost double the rainfall that London does in a year. It is the wettest capital city in the world, fighting back the floods from May to November. During this period, those who drive to work in UN or Liberian government cars complain of patchy internet service and the increasingly pot-holed roads. But as ever, it is Liberia’s poor majority who really bear the brunt.Monrovia is a tropical, seaboard city with many communities built on Mangrove swamp. Mosquitoes multiply as the water level rises. On higher ground, wells overflow with the run-off from the city’s open sewers. Water-borne bacteria thrive; typhoid and dysentery spread. Worse still, the capital’s controversial mayor, Mary Broh, has chosen this rainy season to demolish many of the city’s squatter settlements. With this looming threat, new roofing seems a poor investment for Monrovians...Over the past fortnight, at the height of the rainy season, the main roads to many regional capitals have been impassable. With key arteries blocked, the prices of basic items spiral. In Voinjama, in northern Lofa County, a gallon of petrol can fetch almost $9. In Sinoe County in the south east, a single egg, at the end of its long journey from India, sells for more than 50 cents.Nine years after the end of the civil war, the lack of decent roads to places like Sinoe County seems a damning indictment of the government’s approach to rural development under President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Sinoe, after all, has attracted large international concessions agreements for Palm oil, gold and timber. Many locals, who were told the presence of these companies would improve their lives, now blame the swift degeneration of the roads on the weight of foreign firms’ lorries laden with the Liberia’s bounty.Back in Monrovia, smiles return as the rain finally stops. In the prosperous Mamba Point area, near-naked motorcycle-taxi drivers dry themselves by the heat of a big generator, still the main source of electricity for those with sufficient means. President Johnson Sirleaf has promised that work will finally begin this year to restore the country's huge Mount Coffee hydro-electric plant, which has been left derelict since 1990. Time will tell if Liberia's water curse can be turned into a blessing.

Not only does it give some description of the incredible wetness, but its astonishing effects, in every meaning of the word dampening Liberia: making most of the country's roadways impassible to vehicles, virtually shutting down the interior trade networks of the nation.

Added to this the extremely common yet no less bizarrely extreme aversion of many Monrovians to getting wet. People miss appointments, fail to show up for work, with the endless excuse, the rain. As if rain was actually acid to the skin, yet many Monrovians do not own any type of raincoat.

When the rain starts, the city slows. Not as you might expect in many cities, where inclement weather induces caution in motorists and causes traffic: quite the opposite, the chaotic roads of the city are devoid of pedestrians, waiting taxi passengers, and motorbikes. Traffic streams along the boulevard smoothly: more than one friend has told me he loves it when it rains because it is so easy to get from one part of the city to the other (especially now that traffic has gotten so bad). I often wonder, with an economy growing at over 8% per year, how much quicker it might be developing if it had better roads and more plentiful, less expensive utilities. I also wonder, in weeks like these, how much of Liberia's GDP is lopped off due to the rains, and the lack of preparation for it.

Looks Like Liberian Art, Is not Liberian Art

In April the excellent website African Digital Art featured the graphic design work featured in the opening credits of the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell. The illustrations are the work of Olaf Hajek, a Berlin-based artist. 


I was a bit surprised by this-- I had noticed the very atmospheric artwork in the film's opening, but hadn't thought afterwards about the artist. I had presumed that a local Liberian artist had done the work--especially given how quintessentially local the art evidently is. 

But it is not a local, Liberian artist. Instead, this is the work of a Dane, Olaf Hajek. As is so often the case, the sentiment is best encapsulated in the comments section of the ADA post, from an African Digital Art visitor named "Lars:"

Nice visuals, but they bordering on a rip-off of local artists work. Why not use a Liberian artist? There are plenty of capable billboard and cartoon artists in Liberia who have emerged in recent years to become artists of international standards. In fact pic #2 is lifted from an anti-rape billboard still visible in Monrovia. The producers would have done better to use photographs of actual street art, rather than pay a European to cut and paste them under his name. This is not xenophobia, its simply common courtesy to offer a shot to local talent who have survived the hell portrayed in this film, and now struggle to make a decent living.  What a shame. Opportunities like this to do right by local artists do not come by too often.

Via the BBC, above is that anti-rape billboard, which is prominently situated on Tubman Boulevard near the Airfield. Veteran Monrovian ex-pat Chris Herwig's Flickr photo stream has several more images of it, ©2007. As you can see, the pair is indeed copied entirely: even the color of the clothing has not been changed by the Danish drawer. I would be interested to investigate the professional disposition of Hajek in this situation: would Hajek have so readily reproduced an exact copy of a fellow European's handiwork? Does he not recognize this (unfortunately nameless) Liberian artist as having equal creative protections other artists' work? 


Completely aside from that issue, Lars is totally right, what a shame in terms of missed professional opportunity. Despite a handful of individual, noteworthy talents, the contemporary Liberian art scene is moribund, restricted by a dearth of patrons, supporters, and venues outside of a tiny clientele for paintings and woodwork, and the occasional commercial opportunity such as a billboard or sign. 

Weightlifting Competition 2

This is my second "local" weightlifting competition, and although I have been really under the weather this week, I was glad I came out for it. Once again, the event was held this morning at the Joe Bar Market area, and sponsored by Mr. Big, the former Mr. Liberia, whose gym is just down the Old Road from Joe Bar Market Junction.

Same as last time, it was just a bench press competition, using "African weights" (really old machine gears) so the amounts involved were a little approximate (the guys would call out the weights in "African pounds", as in "175 African pounds." To get real weights from overseas is difficult and expensive, and there isn't a lot of money to be made out of starting up a gym.

However, there's no question that these guys are strong! Even using their conservative estimates for the weights, the champions were lifting 2-3 times their own body weight off the bench. Pretty incredible!

Baby Chimp for Sale

I've mentioned seeing baby Chimpanzees on the street before, but here was one just sort of hanging out on a storefront on Benson Street this morning. Still cute, still sort of sad, and still a mystery exactly what the plan once it is no longer a cuddly infant.

Football at Spriggs Payne/Fish Market

I've written before about the great little public space at the end of the Spriggs-Payne runway, which is usually packed with people playing football.

Apparently, no action has taken place on Spriggs Payne's attempts to remove these people, and the place remains one of the few public recreation grounds in the city, albeit in flaunt of the law, to a certain extent.

My friend Paul Jones, who runs the fantastic Keta Sandlanders in Ghana, is in town, and so when we drove by here earlier and he spotted the action, he proposed coming back and being a spectator. We went this afternoon hung out for a while, watching some of the matches. It was pretty dry and dusty, but it was a great afternoon, and the football was pretty exciting.

Redemption Road

Its a bit difficult to get pictures of this area, which is below Capitol Hill, behind the Barclay Training Ground, south of Central Monrovia. Anyway, it is, in my opinion, a spot with totally fantastic potential to be a public space and a real asset to the city.

As it is, however, it is a largely neglected, derelict zone, with stinking garbage everywhere. But much of the city is like that.

I know I am no professional photographer, but I really hope that these images convey the inherent potential of this area to be a jewel of the city.

My Neighborhood

I've said since I moved in that's been really a nice change to live in an actual neighborhood. This is the view of my end of 9th Street. As you can see, there is a basketball court on the street.

What's interesting to me is that when I tell locals that I live near the basketball court, everyone knows what I am talking about. It goes to show how small the city really is, and what sort of things people here pay attention to.

Football Grounds at Spriggs Payne/Fish Market

This week, I read in the paper about the Airport Authority's effort to remove the squatters from the area and reclaim the land as their property. The next time I drove by, I saw this banner, stating roughly the same.

Its a difficult, complex situation. On the one hand, the Airport is right. Its their property, and it is really important to re-establish property rights as part of a proper, rule-of-law environment.

On the other hand, this dusty little spot is one of the few public recreation spots in the whole city, and it is very prominently situated along the main road into town (it is even mentioned in a New York Times article about Hilary Clinton's visit). I just wish that the place could remain as it is (and by that I mean have a significant investment to make it a true public park), rather than reverting to the domain of the airport authority, where it will likely not be as publicly used as it is in its current state.

Flag Day Weightlifting Competition

I was invited to a weightlifting competition today in Joe Bar market, on the Old Road section of Sinkor. Its a holiday here (flag day) so the gas station was simply taken over, and some guys brought out the equipment from a nearby gym, run by Mr. Big (the large guy in the brown and yellow striped jersey) who is a former Mr. Liberia. He seemed to be the main organizer of the event.

As you can see, there were a lot of people there. It was sort of nice to see all the kids, as I like to think of weightlifting as a healthy way to encourage young people to care about themselves and their health.

As the only non-Liberian present, I was something of a celebrity, and curiosity, and sponsor, and announcer...

No Free Sitting!

This notice is stenciled on the wall of one of my favorite local joints on 3rd Street, Sinkor, where I go on Fridays sometimes. The Club Beer is cold, and the music is loud. There is even wait service at the tables. But they do have this policy. It isn't the only example around town, a lot of local bars and restaurants have signs like this, but I like the phrasing of this one. In fact, I love this sign so much that I had a copy made.

On Dogs, Peepee, and Peepee Like Dogs

A lot of handwritten signs are noticeable on walls all over town, warning people of dogs, and imploring/shaming people not to urinate on the walls or other locations. This sign bridges the two topics, equating a public urinator with a dog.

Public urination/defication is actually a common issue and problem. Driving around town, it is really normal to see men with their back turned to the street, pissing in to the grass or on a wall. Sometimes, their back isn't even turned. Its gross, of course, but its also one of those cultural issues that is easy to look down upon without examining the circumstances which cause the phenomenon (like a lack of public restrooms, running water, or other alternatives).