From my morning romp around Monrovia.

Posted on the Walrus

At the end of last year, I traveled into the rural Wakiso district in Uganda with a team of police officers, to watch them destroy several acres of marijuana. The plants were slashed with machetes, put in three-metre high piles, and then set on fire.

In this lush rural area, plants and vines and trees form practically impenetrable walls of green. Marijuana grows easily, and sells for about ten times as much s the same quantity of a starchy staple called cassava. Police officers estimate that about three-fourths of Wakiso residents grow marijuana, and just about everybody smokes it. Though this most recent spurt of activity has destroyed a couple of hundred acres, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimate there are still tens of thousands of acres of cannabis growing in Uganda.

Police alternate between calling it “enjaga,” the name in Luganda, and opium. I point out the opium is actually a different drug made from poppies, and an officer nods, points to a towering stalk of marijuana and says, “Yes, opium.”

The officers I accompanied explained to me that the only way to reverse the ill effects of marijuana is to drink milk. And that it can purify your intentions. Or help you accomplish your goals. But can also make you kill someone. And that’s it’s best smuggled to the UK in cabbage leaves.

The Ugandan police have identified destroying “opium” as a key element in fighting crime. Uganda is a heavily policed nation, and since most police officers are former military, it’s also a heavily militarized nation. Fear and rumor replace information. And in a rural area like Wakiso, cash crops like marijuana are the only way for a peasant farmer to even hope that his kids will go to school and maybe not have to grow a marijuana to be able to afford things like mosquito nets and clean water.

As we left the site in Wakiso, the groggy officers realized they forgot to bring back any “evidence.” One of them hopped out of the truck and ran to collect a branch the size of a Christmas tree. I commented that perhaps not everything had burned, since this was still around.

“You can’t eliminate it, you can just reduce it,” said the officer, who had clearly not even tried to eliminate it in one area. He also brought back an idler – a village resident who had said the police weren’t doing anything useful. On the floor of the truck, the officer placed his machete, the huge branch of weed, and the idler, who the officer announced would be tried by a court of law for his insolence. There’s about a five-year backlog in the court system in Uganda.

Perhaps police headquarters failed to consider that they are destroying a livelihood in addition to fighting crime. Perhaps police headquarters also failed to consider that burning acres of marijuana could potentially get the rural officers very, very high.

So you want to be a lawyer? (Wronging Rights)
So you want to work in a developing country? (Chris Blattman)
So you want to start an NGO? (Blood and Milk)
So you want to be an aid worker? (Road to the Horizon)
So you want to go to Somalia? (Rob Crilly)
So you want to be a journalist? (Scarlett Lion, that’s me)

Thanks for nominating me, whoever nominated me . I’m up for the Africa category, so go ahead and vote.

The Ducor Hotel was one of Africa’s first five start hotels. It had 300 rooms, a French restaurant and swimming pool. It closed its doors in 1989 when things turned for worse yet again.

When I visited last week, the only people there were a handful of sleeping Nigerian peace keepers and a few kids wandering around the outskirts.

Before I came here, most people I told I was coming to Liberia referenced the Michael Jackson song, or asked me what I’d be doing in Libya.

Turns out, the song is partially in Swahili, which is not spoken in Liberia, and that I have no intention of going to Libya.

Anyway, these lovey girls were sitting around doing each other’s hair on the corner near where I’m staying. I hung out with them for a bit and took some photos.

Updated Feb 1 for J., A., S., and V. and for the general sake of clarity.

I’m staying in an apartment in an area called Mamba Point in Monrovia. I’d read about this neighborhood of Monrovia before, and I had expected something akin to Kampala’s Kololo as it’s usually described as the “expat neighborhood.” Kololo is all mature gardens, wide roads, beautiful old houses I couldn’t afford.

Mamba Point is nothing like Kololo. The apartment I’m staying at is fine-o. It has four bedrooms and it has four five bathrooms though only two of the bathrooms have lights one of the bathrooms had a nonfunctional light, which I hear is now functional. Right now there are six people staying here. There’s a big hallway with a moldy less than shower fresh couch of indeterminate age and several surfboards.

There’s electricity every day from 7 am until 9 am, and then again from 6 pm until 2 am. Rent goes up exponentially with the number of hours your place has current. This place is on the cheaper side.

When I stand on the concrete balcony, I look down directly on a neighborhood of Liberians living in one-room homes with tin roofs. Most of the roofs are held down by rocks placed around the edges. Laundry hangs to dry, children play, women cook, men sit.

Kololo is isolated from the lives of average Ugandans. Mamba Point is not. While there’s much more security here than in other neighborhoods since we’re just down the street from the US Embassy and UNDP, the place we’re staying is far from a sprawling Kololo home with a view.

Describing it as a concrete bunker would be reductive. It’s kind of like if none of the Bugolobi flats had ever been fixed up and if Namuwongo was interspersed among the blocks. But it has character, things left behind by past residents. There’s a tongue in cheek portrait of Ma Ellen and paintings of several past residents as Margaret Thatcher. There are DVDs of the Family Guy, Broken Flowers, and other shows and movies. In the bookcases, I found an old copy of Q and A, the book upon which the current hit movie Slumdog Millionaire was based, and a copy of Class Struggle in Africa, first edition, priced at $1.25, by Ghanaian intellectual Kwame Nkrumah, with a laundry receipt from August 2006 as a page marker. There are blister packs of over the counter medications and bottles of hair gel, bug spray and sunscreen.

I wonder about the differences between the two neighborhoods. Urban layout clearly accounts for parts of the difference, but it makes me wonder what Monrovia looked like in its heyday. Was Kololo always nice or did the 70s and 80s treat it as badly as other parts of Uganda? And if so, is that what Mamba Point will look like it fifteen years?