Promoted by Steven D to the front page, and now placed back in the diaries section as it has scrolled off the front page. Thank you, Marie.
The story of Thomas Eric Duncan (NYTimes link) and his families has been reported in such a piecemeal and somewhat frenzied fashion that even people that think they are well enough informed to comment keep repeating falsehoods and speculations as facts. This confusion hasn’t been helped by incomplete, and possibly untrue, statements from Louise Troh and those she’s asked to speak on her behalf. While much still remains unknown, the two latest NYTimes reports, Here and Here are more coherent.
Mr. Duncan, who goes by Eric, is the youngest of seven siblings, according to his brother, Wilfred Smallwood, who lives in Phoenix. His father was an engineer for an American mining company, Mr. Smallwood said.
After five years in the refugee camp in French-speaking Ivory Coast, the family moved to Ghana, where there was less of a language barrier, Mr. Smallwood said. A sister, who now lives in Charlotte, N.C., was the first of the clan to make it to the United States, shortly after the war began. Their mother came a decade later, followed by Mr. Smallwood, but Mr. Duncan left Ghana and returned to Liberia, where he stayed.
Some additional background from The Guardian:
Duncan’s half-sister, Mai Wureh, had arrived with her husband in the US in 1989, shortly before Taylor’s invasion, and helped her family apply for resettlement there, but the application was denied.
“Mai had filed for us to leave the war zone, but after a long time, the US rejected all of us,” Smallwood said.Duncan, Smallwood and about 20 other family members fled in the opposite direction from Taylor, to a refugee camp outside the Ivorian border city of Danane.
Reading that for the second or third time shamed me into recognizing how little I knew of the Liberian First Civil War and from there how little of knew about Liberia other than the war criminal Charles Taylor and the Nobel Peace Prize winning President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. (What a really bad hand Sirleaf was dealt.)
At some point in my readings, it occurred to me that whatever Mr. Thomas Eric Duncan did or didn’t do in his difficult and tragic life, USians should really STFU about any negative impacts on the US from Liberia or Liberians. This country could have followed Nantucket’s lead and abolished slaverywith the founding of this country. Instead the “good people” of this country followed Britain’s lead in finding a place to ship free black men and women in this country. The American Colonization Society was like an early 19th Century NGO.
In December 1816, alarmed by the rapidly growing free black and slave populations, the Reverend Robert Finley, a Presbyterian minister from Basking Ridge, New Jersey, travelled to Washington, D.C. to gather support for colonization which he saw as the solution to the growing racial tension in the United States. He led a meeting which created the ACS on December 21, 1816. The meeting included some of the most powerful and influential men in the country such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Randolph of Virginia. Finley believed the presence of blacks in the United States was a threat to the national well-being and felt Africans Americans would only be able to fulfill their potential as human beings in Africa. …
Free black men and women of that time were Americans in language, thought, education, technology, skills, and religion. Whether anticipated or not, these Americo-Liberians became the minority rulers for 133 years. They declared their independence from the American Colonization Society in 1847, but maintained political and economic ties to the US.
A coup in 1980 ended the one party Whig rule. Formally, relations between the US and Liberia were unchanged. However, the sectarian divide pot was being stirred. Charles Taylor, in custody in the US for embezzlement charges filed against him by the new Liberian government, just happened to escape from jail and made his way back to Liberia. His help? Charles Taylor ‘worked’ for CIA in Liberia.
US authorities [in January 2012] say former Liberian leader Charles Taylor worked for its intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the Boston Globe reports.
The revelation comes in response to a Freedom of Information request by the newspaper.
A Globe reporter told the BBC this is the first official confirmation of long-held reports of a relationship between US intelligence and Mr Taylor.
The Liberian First Civil War ensued and Mr. Thomas Eric Duncan and his family fled to a refugee camp in Ivory Coast. We are such an arrogantly proud and cruel people.
