In the
author’s eye, wage labour stands for that descent into the proletarization of
people and communities, their systemic impoverishment through the appropriation
of their labour time, amounting to civil wars and overall societal unrest. Readers
may recall that Moore’s stated objective from writing the novel has been her
attempt to specify the reasons that lead to Liberia’s civil war (1989-1997)
during which she, a toddler (born in 1985), and her family were forced to flee
the country and settle in the US. It is worth recalling that Liberia is the
first nation-state in Africa. Its independence dates back to 1847, well before
countries such as South Africa, Egypt or even Ethiopia. But the country has remained
largely unstable and the advantage of Moore’s novel is that it promises to take
its reader to the motoring principle behind that instability and violence, that
is, to the foundation of wage labour system.
Moore’s
early attempts in fiction writing is a children book titled: I Love Liberia
(2011). She similarly champions a non-profit business adventure called ‘One
Moore Book’. Note the pun in ‘Moore’, highlighting both the word ‘more’ and the
author’s last name. The project aims at circulating “… culturally relevant
books to children who are underrepresented and live in countries with low
literacy rates.”(1) Besides, Moore’s faith in the
universal extension of knowledge to unfortunate young minds underscores her
initial cause of dispelling illusions and falsehoods, including those that have
put Liberia on the road of misery, impoverishment and interminable wars.
Several
observers and experts will keep reiterating that behind that generalized instability
and descent into bloody civil wars lies the same people’s backwardness,
incapacity to found an enduring social contract and endemic divisions between multiple
social components. All these factors should perhaps be approached with a grain
of salt because the listed ‘reasons’ subscribe more to the logics of
justification, not explanations. Indeed, such arguments are culturalist in
nature and all they succeed in achieving is to blame the victims and, in the
meanwhile, lift the blame from the real harm-inflictors, both people and structures.
The present essay underscores the need to consider the author’s approach and
setting of the story, since taking that into consideration, I claim, can be
conducive to register exactly what happened, and the way in which what indeed
happened (not that which is fancied as what happened) had ushered in in the
long term the civil war of the 1990s.
The
differential between that which indeed happened and that which portends to have
happened is a historiography that promises to propagate towards universal
emancipation. Leaving that which triggered the author’s own exile unexamined is
to remain stuck in superficialities-sold-as-histories, with the cost of
ensuring that cycles of violence will not only keep emerging but those cycles’
rhythm will have to be confronted with a telling regularity.
Before
detailing on wage labor, there exists the need to broach first on several
social players of modern Liberia as traced by the author in She Would be
King. We find at least two main components:
the first is the Vai and other indigenous communities as represented by Gbessa’s
story in the early part of the novel, offering a window into precolonial life in
an African village before European intrusion. Through the stigmatization of
Gbessa on the ground of her ‘ill-fated’ birth date, Moore illustrates that
precolonial life, that is, well before the incursion of European powers into
the continent’s interiors, life in Africa was far from being either idyllic or perfect.
Readers find that Gbessa is cursed simply because her birth date coincides with
an event interpreted as a bad omen. Through no fault of her own, and at the age
of eight, Gbessa is sentenced to die by abandoning her in the deep jungle. Her
parents are ostracized for bringing a child on a ‘wrong’ day, overlooking how
the wrong day is wrong only in the calendar of alienation!
The second category
of social actors are returnees, victims of slavery but who found themselves
obliged (like June Dey) or entreated (like Norman Aragon) to return and find
peace in Monrovia. Let us recall that these last two characters are themselves descendants
of enslaved Africans who do not necessarily come from Libera, or even nearby
localities such as the Ivory Coast or Ghana. Throughout the decades and even
the centuries, the first enslaved people died and their enslaved descendants
simply retained “Africa” or its idea less as their place of origin and more as a
place where they used to be free, their humanity round and unquestioned. It
should be noted that places such as Cameroon, Nigeria, Tanzania or the Congo
are recent inventions that come with colonial expansionist plans and labels
since by the time chattel slavery become generalized, these appellations (not
places) simply did not exist.
In She
Would be King, we find this affinity with Africa, less as a geographical
space or biological affiliation and more as an existential attachment to a promise
for emancipation with Nanni, Norman’s mother. Despite having the choice to live
among several Maroon communities in Jamaica, Nanni always feeds Norman, her son,
the obligation to leave Jamaica and to re-join Africa. To seize on her steadfastness
in bonding with Africa, readers cannot miss how she endures Callum’s pseudo-scientific
whims, slavery and even rape, all for the sake of earning a boarding passage to
Africa. Africa, she seizes, is both the physical territory and mental space
conceptualized as existential freedom, a radical breach with the reductionism
of one’s humanity that underlies her life as a slave. Nanni, Norman and June
Dey, as elaborated below, are Pan-Africanists avant la lettre. Well
before the foundation of the early to mid-twentieth century movement of
Pan-Africanism, we read that slaves in the Americas entertained not only exalted
dreams but elaborate plans to equally find and found freedom in Africa. Alternatively,
freedom became synonymous with their idea of Africa. The two are intricately
attached so much so that they serve as a prerogative for Africa-as-freedom and
freedom-as-African.
The runaway
slave June Dey similarly comes from a tobacco plantation in Virginia, named
Emerson. His biological father is a slave from a neighbouring plantation who was
cheaply sold to the Emersons in the hope of saving the crumbling plantation capital
and helping it regain its former wealth and glory. We read that June Dey’s father,
June, killed the overseer in his last incarcerating place because that overseer
had killed his wife and baby. June is subsequently killed in Emerson because he
dared to defend his second family, the one he founded after arriving at Emerson
and from this union June Dey is born. June Dey’s biological mother, Charlottes,
occupies a mixed space between a domestic and field hand. During the day she
serves in the mansion but at night she sleeps in a shack with other field
slaves. She too was brutally murdered soon after getting rid of June. Their
baby christened Moses, was trusted to Darlene, a domestic slave and another
victim of the infamous system. Even when no one dared to divulge a single word
in respect to his father’s feats, June Dey or Moses truly stands to his
biblical sake name. The insurrectionary spirit becomes contagious and is
transferred from father to son nevertheless. He was raised as a domestic, but
when Mr Emersons decides to dispense with some slaves in order to raise funds
for a second nearby plantation that would plant cotton, June Dey leads the
insurrection that brings the Emerson plantation and its expansionist plans all down.
Indeed, we
read that the two June Dey and Norman Aragon are repatriated to Monrovia:
Norman because that was his mother’s dying wish but for June Dey the trip was
totally unplanned. After his spectacular fight against the masters of Emerson,
the opportunity presented itself as the runway June Dey is knocked out of
consciousness and finds himself in a ship, run by the famous American
Colonization Society (ACS) and is bound for Africa. All over the 1840s, the ACS
used to raise resources from the US Congress to secure the repatriation of both
free and freed Africans to Liberia. Meanwhile, the ACS established a footing
for US imperial planners during the heated race for colonies.
When
knowing that even Gbessa too had been in exile as she was excommunicated from
her village on the pretext of being cursed, the three characters conceive of
Africa less as a place of origin and more as a promise for greater, that is,
communal emancipation. This suggests how readers are invited to favour
ideological affiliation, not biological association. Indeed, Norman and June
Dey meet outside the Monrovia prison searching for ways of reaching Freetown
which is much of a mythical land and which involves how it is less a physical territory
and more of a life journey.
Why underlying
the symbolic meaning of the land? Lest Africa is fetishized, the simple act of
setting foot in Africa registers as just the beginning of the journey, the
commencement of the arduous work, neither an end in itself nor a call for passive
resignation. Moore’s vision for Africa serves the facilitation of encountering
like-minded individuals to unite the efforts and beat up against intruders for
collective and communal emancipation. Encountering Gbessa when she is literally
on the verge of death (she has been beaten by a snake), Norman has been at that
point looking for a medicinal herb (significantly, a living root—not one that
is cut) to attend to June Dey’s terrible stomachache. Instead of caring for
one, Norman has now to attend to two patients whom he barely knows. He could
have simply abandoned them to their fate and carried out his journey alone. But
he realized that a journey is meaningless without companions and fellow
travellers. Once this initial task of caring for the physical well-being of
committed Africans is successfully carried out, facing intruders both local and
foreign is next on the agenda. The three face French soldiers as the latter are
burning villages and driving the inhabitants into the slave market. Unparalleled
feats of success are achieved as Norman and June Dey save the villagers and they
all eventually mount a rebellion against the French enslavers. Historically, France
was a latecomer in the slave trade and France grudgingly abolished slavery as
late as 1848. French enslavers take Gbessa a prisoner; later, she is stabbed
and is left bleeding. But Gbessa’s curse specifies that she cannot die. She
stands for the undying spirit of insurrection, which explains why soon enough,
we meet Gbessa in Mr Johnson’s mansion, taken care of by Maisy, a servant. Understandably,
Mr Johnson plays a prominent role in the young and independent republic of Liberia.
By then, the
narrative may look like it slides into insignificant preoccupations: Gbessa’s
marriage with a prominent army lieutenant, Gerald Tubman, in the then newly
founded Liberian army. The union starts as a marriage of convenience but
eventually becomes rotating around love. The new elites of settlers badly
desire peace. How else to achieve that peace and trust with the unruly tribes
of the interior except through a marriage with Gbessa? The union stands as a
pledge, not a testimony, that Liberia will hopefully remain a single and
functional entity. June Dey and Norman are now mixing with the crowds. But the
mixed marriage should not lend a superficial reading of the novel. Already,
readers notice that within early Liberian high society, composed of individuals
who themselves had been slaves or had experienced slavery at a close range in pre-civil
war America have themselves resorted, however indirectly, to enslaving
practices in the form of wage labour.
Maisy’s fate,
when closely considered, speaks volumes. Kidnapped is one of the last enslaving
raids, her entire tribe was annihilated. As a sole survivor, she is now a
servant of Mr Johnson. The latter is presumably a popular leader of the young
nation but in fact he is the spokesperson of the settlers, those now powerful
people repatriated by the ACS. In a dialogue between prominent ladies, Miss.
Ernestine raises the remark that in being a house servant Maisy brings unhappy
reminiscences regarding the fate of domestic slaves on plantations in the
antebellum United States. The snide remark is swiftly answered with a tinge of
irony where Mrs Johnson points at the rumours which circulate how Miss. Ernestine
could be abusing the native inhabitants in her coffee plantations, treating
them like field slaves, implying that she perhaps should mind her own business
before attending to others.
The conversation
between the ladies, however calm in tone and seemingly casual, even friendly, remains eye-opening. What cannot be missed, however, is how these early founders of the
Republic of Liberia were not only conscious of the cultural divisions between
the inhabitants but were also aware of the long-term consequences of these
divisions. The bombastic and celebrations attitudes of starting a social order that
promises to be a rupture with the practices of the past and its institutions,
such as slavery, is now increasingly challenged. The ladies, as the exchange
illustrates, are in no way fooled by the promises of new or egalitarian beginnings,
allowing us to fundamentally question the chances of new beginnings or how the
idea of new beginnings serves as a strategy to fool idiots and simpletons. Engrossed
in their thriving businesses, the founding elites were aware that they were
leaving behind other social actors and that marginalization would be a
time-bomb, which if not immediately addressed, social unrest and even generalized
instability will transpire into the future. Nevertheless, each selfishly clanged
to short term interests and business calculations. Interests and calculations turned
out in the long run to be costly miscalculations.
The natives,
non-educated members of the interior tribes, were treated by returnees from
Jamaica, the US and other places (who were mostly enslaved) as second-class
citizens. Reading the history of coups in Liberia, it is these two social players
that constantly seek to undo and cancel each other. Even in the civil war that
pushed the author’s own parents to leave for the US, it was Charles Tylor ousting
Samuel Doe. The latter comes from the Krahn ethnic group, whereas Tylor is a
descendant of the socially upscale minority, a descendant of nineteenth-century
returnees from the US. The feud is more about who holds monopolies over-extraction licenses for foreign companies to mine gold and diamond. Still, the
feud is exacerbated by the historical divide that goes back to Liberia’s
unhappy foundation. This divide ushered in yet another cycle of violence and
looting for diamonds and other valuables. Both Tylor and Doe met with a violent
end and both were re-enacting the feud between on the one hand descendants of
former slaves, who to this day think themselves more entitled to rule since
they have been more civilized and on the other descendants of native inhabitants,
who excel in selling their credentials as the eternal victims of the
brain-washed former slaves!
This brings readers back to She Would be
King where lieutenant Gerald suggests at first and later instructs Gbessa not
to manually work in the farm, and to call for the help of the plenty servants
he is hiring so that she can lead a life of a lady. As the wife of a dignitary
in the young republic, he wants her only to supervise the workers simply
because Gbessa is now a society woman and her social manners should reflect the
social pomp of members of the high class. Any other Gbessa’s reaction, Gerald reasons,
reflects poorly on him, his social status as well as his chances of promotion. Naturally,
his eye lies on more prominent roles in the leadership of the young nation. In
his mind, he did not marry Gbessa to remain ‘stuck’ with a secondary role in
the army or administrating the barracks. Readers may evoke how Gbessa reacts: despite
the plentiful abundance of servants/slaves, she adamantly rejects and prefers
to carry out domestic duties, both indoors, in the garden and the adjacent
field, herself. Readers find out that Gbessa was particularly mindful not to charge
the numerous servants and workers with any task, domestic or otherwise. For
her, the practice however inadvertent summons slavery. No one can pretend that the
fresh memory of the inhuman practice is not overshadowing people’s everyday
interactions. Closely considered, the practice itself, not just its fresh
memory, casts its gloomy footprints on wage labour, rendering the latter anti-egalitarian.
Thus, wage labour sows the seeds of socio-political fragmentation and disharmony.
Bourgeois economics specifies that hiring aids and workers falls into the eternal norm of the division of labour where each individual works according to his or her skills set and fairly receives remuneration according to the tasks executed. Only the division of labour—through wage labour—found the basis of civilization, according to the same bourgeois theoreticians.
But in line with Karl Marx’s elaborations on the division of labour in The German Ideology (1848), Gbessa categorically rejects this commonsensical presupposition and deems it in service of justification, not an explanation. Indeed, the system of labour does not consider the worker’s actual coercion to grudgingly accept a wage in exchange for the task performed. In addition to seeking excellent and skilled performances, the division of labour primarily shuts means of independent subsistence, of that genuine aspiration of making a living without being forced to work for some boss or a hiring institution. Thus, wage labor, Gbessa reasons fuels inequality and sows seeds of generalized instability. Readers of the novel note how Gbessa’s soulmate, Safua, raises a rebellion against the leaders of the new republic because of the communal values which the wage system has been busily destroying. The Vai community–like several in the pre-colonial setting—cherish communal freedom. The Vai resisted the appropriation of their grazing lands and fiercely rejected domestication through wage labour. Now it is Safua’s son who is in charge of resistance.
Readers close reading Moore’s novel wherein Gbessa hopes against hope to stop the bloodbath, making sure not to pit the Vai against the settlers who are now the de facto rulers in Monrovia. Hence, the idea of Gbessa being king, as suggested in the title, should be taken as a pun: both a king and its negation, since Gbessa is a woman and the right expectation is rewarding her with the title of queen, not king, for active attempts to lift violence and foster the sense of citizenship among suspecting and uncooperative interior tribes. Indeed, Moore’s title squeezes her project as one that is radically egalitarian. In refusing to call the aid of workers and domestics, Gbessa rejects the title of king or queen. She views the title not only as the expression of an unearned or undeserved privilege but simply as the formalization of wage labour, the essence of slavery and disharmony.
Fouad Mami
Université
d’Adrar (Algeria)
ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524
