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The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War, by Stephen Ellis, New York University Press, 1999, 256 pp.; $36.50
In 1989, a civil war broke out in Liberia, Africa's oldest republic. The ensuing conflict can be described in two very dissimilar ways, depending on which aspects of the war are highlighted. One perspective emphasizes that the war was launched by Christianized, American-educated, and Libyan-trained military commanders who quickly broke into numerous factions. Although the ultimate goal of each party was to secure the presidency of the country, the short-term goal was to take advantage of available resources by selling diamonds, iron ore, rubber, timber, and other products to world markets. In short, it was a typical late-twentieth-century "small war" influenced by numerous international players with rational men battling each other for resource control and access to the globalized world economy.
By contrast, the war could be de scribed in a completely different way. Ragtag armies of insurgents launched a civil war that quickly evolved into conflict between ethnic-based factions. The militants dressed in bizarre attire and protected themselves with various charms. Their leaders used all sorts of means—including alleged human sacrifice and cannibalism, which functioned as symbols of spiritual power—in order to capture political power over the nation's people. To foreign observers, all the characteristics of "Darkest Africa" seemed to have returned to re claim a country that historically thought of it self as more American than African.
These two accounts do in fact describe the same war. The Liberian Civil War launched by the Charles Taylor-led National Patriotic Liberation Front (NPLF) in December 1989 plunged Liberia into a decade-long conflict, which became increasingly difficult to comprehend as the contending factions proliferated. To further complicate matters, many observers believe that ECOMOG[1], the Nigerian-led West African peacekeeping force, prolonged the war in order that Nigeria's military leaders could maximize their strategic regional influence and bolster their profits from business dealings in Liberia. What ultimately emerged was a very different political landscape in West Africa, with Nigeria's hegemony in the region boosted and with every country and leader realizing the precariousness of their own internal and external sovereignty.
How can one explain such a conflict? How can a war launched with such an apparently "modern" agenda—the search for political power and resource accumulation—be carried out in such a seemingly "primitive" fashion? Further more, why did religion and the spirit world become such an important aspect of a "modern" war?
In The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War, the Leiden-based scholar of African history Stephen Ellis tries to bring the two dimensions of the war together—the capitalist agenda and the spiritual one. Ellis draws on everything from "pavement radio" (rumors) to the sayings and writings of "book men" (intellectuals) to provide a well-researched and carefully told story of the war—a story in which the muddy politics, the dirty business deals, and the search for raw power are set in the context of spiritual conflict. While being honest about the brutality of what occurred in Liberia, Ellis nevertheless defends Liberians from the familiar accusation that barbaric wars are a common African occurrence—a predictable reversion to a primitive past. From Ellis's vantage point, the "primitive" often looks very "modern" and the "modern" often very "primitive."
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