Dr. Amos Claudius Sawyer: An Appreciation by Lansana Gberie
The death of Dr. Amos Claudius Sawyer is an abject loss for Liberia and Africa, and will be insupportable to his family, his wide circle of political associates and friends, and to his many mentees across Africa and the world. He was Liberia’s most important intellectual, and his sterling accomplishments were many and various. They included a highly productive professorship at the University of Liberia in the 1970s and 1980s, a key role in drafting Liberia’s most open and democratic constitution during that period, and holding the interim presidency of Liberia for four of its most turbulent years. He later dedicated all his energies as Chair of the Governance Commission towards creating or reinforcing institutions to ensure a more stable democracy.
From the beginning of his career at the University of Liberia in the 1970s, Dr. Sawyer was a committed political activist. He was a prominent member of the Movement for Justice in Africa, MOJA, which, founded in 1973, was the first truly progressive left-wing political movement in Liberia – and one which espoused both comprehensive political changes and a pan-African message of solidarity with other continental political and social movements. He remained committed to its ideals even as he buried himself deep into the archives to produce substantial scholarly works, including his magnum opus, The Emergence of Autocracy in Liberia: Tragedy and Challenge, published in 1992. Rigorously researched, the book appeared when Dr. Sawyer was serving as interim president of Liberia, though he had completed the manuscript before taking on that onerous role in 1990. He had relied almost entirely on archival and published sources to write the book, and because he was now a central player in the country’s affairs, the book felt somewhat aloof in an affected way. The same, with perhaps more justification, can be said about his subsequent book, Beyond Plunder, published in 2005.
This criticism, however, would not have worried Dr. Sawyer: with almost pedantic care, he always tried to separate his commitment as a political activist and his work as a scholar. It is no reproach to note that the effect of this was not always a happy one – they very often are not – but Dr. Sawyer’s standing as a humanist and serious intellectual remained consistently high throughout his long career. In his final labours as Chair of the Governance Commission – focusing on land reform, decentralisation, national reconciliation, and the limits and parameters of presidential power, including transitions – these twin commitments at last meshed into a sort of pained grandeur.
When he was appointed to this role by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in 2006, he was perplexed, he wrote me in an email, by what he saw as two competing approaches to governance reform. The more prominent, far better funded one was being implemented and directed by Liberia’s external partners, and its sole focus was drawn from a playbook Liberia was all too familiar with: the boilerplate about improving public sector management through fighting corruption, rationalizing ministries and other government agencies and other institutional accretions. Dr. Sawyer instead immediately decided upon another approach: in his words, “a visit to foundational issues that have to do with a sense of community and national identity, local government empowerment, land reform and judicial reform.” He deplored the fact that the United States was creating what amounted to a new army for Liberia before the country’s citizens had made up their minds whether they needed one, and what kind: before a security sector review was attempted or a security sector policy drafted and discussed. These, he said, “require vigorous consultations among Liberians, including a national conference.”
Considering that the military in Liberia had played so central a role in the country’s recent carnage as perpetrators – and that, during its disarmament, it had paraded an astonishing 19 Generals or Lt. Generals, 36 Major Generals, 111 Brigadier-Generals, 579 Colonels, 765 Majors, 1238 Captains and 550 Lieutenants – this was not at all a trivial issue. Dr. Sawyer pushed for, and got, both the security sector review and policy. Whether both documents had much influence upon the Americans is another matter. In the event, according to information released by the United States government in February 2015, the Americans had by that time invested over $411 million in Security Sector Assistance to Liberia, most of that (about $300 million) on the army and only $108 million toward the development of the Justice Sector and Liberia National Police. The jury is out on what this means for Liberia’s future stability.
I first made contact with Dr. Sawyer in, I believe, early 2001. In November 2000, at the height of President Charles Taylor’s catastrophic reign, men armed with knives and hammers attacked Sawyer in the Monrovia offices of the Center for Democratic Empowerment (CEDE), which he had set up shortly after his term as Interim National President of Liberia, 1991-1994, to advocate good governance and the peaceful settlement of the ongoing civil war in Liberia. The assailants beat him and his colleague Conmany Wesseh, CEDE’s Executive Director, viciously, and vandalized the offices. While in hospital recuperating, a friend who was close to the Charles Taylor regime discreetly advised Dr. Sawyer that the attack was a message from Taylor: leave the country or else. Sawyer took the hint and, along with Mr. Wesseh, fled Liberia.
Dr. Sawyer relocated to the United States, where he set up a branch of CEDE and launched a campaign against Taylor, whom he accused of being the mastermind of the wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone – evidence of which were later well-documented by Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Dr. Sawyer got support from a few US lawmakers, once the Special Court for Sierra Leone was set up, to have Taylor indicted by it. However, the US State Department and National Security Council were somewhat indifferent, not because they didn’t have evidence of Taylor’s culpability but because – as Dr. Sawyer explained to me in an email at the time – such an indictment would mean that the US would have to accept the responsibility of delivering Taylor to the court. And American officials did not like the idea. Meanwhile, Mr. Wesseh had relocated CEDE to Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire, where Madam Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the future President of Liberia, had also made home as an exile from the Taylor regime.
I was then the West Africa lead for a project launched by the Canadian NGO Partnership Africa Canada on ‘conflict’ diamonds. Two UN reports had implicated Burkina Faso as a conduit for diamonds emanating from Angola and Sierra Leone as well as illicit weapons from dubious European sources that were ferried to Taylor, some of which ended up in the hands of the Revolutionary United Front for Sierra Leone. The Project thought that as a former journalist I might be able to sniff around the region and get greater detail of the transactions. Dr. Sawyer had put us in touch with CEDE in Abidjan.
I was well-received by Mr. Wesseh, whom it had been my immense pleasure to meet earlier at a conference on child soldiers and small arms hosted by then Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy in Winnipeg, Canada. I spent a week in Abidjan, during which time Mrs. Medina Wesseh arranged a delightful dinner with Ms. Sirleaf, before I headed to Burkina Faso via the now-defunct Air Afrique. I was far less well-received there. I was immediately arrested upon showing my passport to immigration authorities at Ouagadougou airport, interrogated for an hour or so, and detained in a cavernous room at the airport for hours. I was then placed on the next available flight to Abidjan as the last passenger before take-off. Ouagadougou was then hosting its annual film festival, which I felt would be nice to attend, so the deportation doubly hurt. This was in 2001. I was to have met with a prominent NGO in Ouagadougou with which PAC had established contact, and our contacts in the country later suggested that the Burkinabe authorities had intercepted those telephone and email exchanges. I doubted this at the time, but I can think of no other explanation.
In 2008, I moved to Liberia to head an international human rights organization supporting the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its Security Sector reform process. I met with Dr. Sawyer often during that time. In September that year, I convinced him to be the keynote speaker at a conference organized by my friends at the Concord Times newspaper in Freetown. We both stayed at the Bintumani Hotel in Freetown for three or four nights, during which I took him to a luncheon with former President Tejan Kabbah (photo), who was a great raconteur at such moments, and who later chaired the conference at which Dr. Sawyer was the keynote speaker. I also arranged a lunch meeting with Dr. Peter Tucker, who was then Chair of Sierra Leone’s Law Reform Commission, also now deceased. Dr. Sawyer was immensely impressed by the work that Dr. Tucker was doing on various legislations, including those focused on land tenure. He later, alone, visited Dr. Tucker at his offices.
In Liberia, Dr. Sawyer, who was born in remote Sinoe County, was often accused by his political foes of being a Sierra Leonean at heart because his father had emigrated from Freetown. But during our time in Freetown, Dr. Sawyer appeared to be a total stranger. He had been to the city before, but his stay, mostly during peace talks, had been confined to the hotels by Lumley Beach. He didn’t appear to have known of Youyi Building in central Freetown, which houses many of the country’s government ministries, when I took him there, for example. He marveled that such a facility existed in Sierra Leone, whereas in Liberia government ministries were scattered around in privately-owned houses in often insalubrious settings. The Concord Times conference was a great success, and Dr. Sawyer and I flew back to Monrovia in a small commercial plane, which he regretted: he wanted to travel by road to see more of the country, but we had been slow to make the arrangement: the road then was atrocious.
Every morning during our stay in Freetown Dr. Sawyer worked away on his statement to the TRC, which had begun public hearings months earlier. He shared his statement with me, which, like his big book, had the tone of a more or less disinterested academic looking at events through archival and other documentary sources. This was partly, I suspected, because of the clumsy language the TRC commissioners used in inviting Dr. Sawyer and leading players in the progressive movement and in subsequent roles to provide “a critical review and expert perspectives into the dynamics and processes of governance and their impact on the Liberian conflict.” Still, I found the written presentation curious – one was looking for some personal reflections, some kind of introspection. Some of that came later, in response to questions from the commissioners: I was in the audience. The exchanges were often animated, and one sensed a lot of discomfort on the part of Dr. Sawyer.
It is part of the difficulty I alluded to earlier, the need, as Dr. Sawyer saw it, to separate the academic from the politician or political activist. Facing the sometimes maliciously probing TRC commissioners, this pose became difficult, but Dr. Sawyer still managed to be entirely truthful without being particularly illuminating. In the immediate postwar Liberia, pre-Samuel Doe Liberia was seen as almost idyllic – a paradise shattered by the so-called Progressives with their popular front-style agitations and rice riots and, this was generally hinted at, their inspiring of the catastrophic Doe coup which led inevitably to the even more catastrophic Taylor war. Dr. Sawyer clearly did not agree with some of the actions of the likes of Gabriel Bacchus Mathews, a charismatic and unscrupulous demagogue who inspired the Rice Riots of 1979 by his inflammatory action of calling for popular demonstration at night, but he was very reluctant to openly criticize him. This for him would have meant, I suspected, letting down the side and playing into the hands of those ignorant revisionists now blaming the progressive movement of the 1970s, not the great institutionalized corruption of settler rule and the brutal autocracy of Doe, for Liberia’s great plight.
A few months before his death, after prolonged illness and no doubt now more aware of his mortality, Dr. Sawyer announced his resignation from politics. He became more introspective, openly admitting to some of mistakes of the late 1970s and even criticizing Mathews. He was writing his memoirs.
Those of us who profoundly admired him as a great human being, an unsurpassed scholar, a brave freedom fighter, a builder of institutions, and a mentor, can only hope that he had completed those memoirs before his death. It will likely be his best book, now no longer constrained by the expediencies of his committed politics, and perhaps his greatest political legacy.
About the author
Dr. Lansana Gberie is Sierra Leone’s Ambassador to Switzerland and Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva.
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