Graham Greene - Howard Witt - Storyville: Iron Ladies of Liberia TV -
The sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits – love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature. Graham Greene
A brutish, nearly illiterate army sergeant ... seized power in 1980 after disemboweling the previous president in his bed. Howard Witt, Chicago Tribune
Evidence mounted that Doe and his ministers were stealing much of the [US] money. Howard Witt
The soldiers of President Samuel Doe's army wear the uniforms of American GIs as they go about their business murdering Liberian civilians on the streets of the capital, Monrovia ... and the bodies of many of the civilian victims are dumped in the morgue at the American-built John F Kennedy Hospital. Howard Witt
16th January 2006 Inauguration Day: ‘Today thousands of Liberians crowded the streets of Monrovia to get a glimpse of the country’s new president-elect, the so-called Iron Lady.’ Storyville: Iron Ladies of Liberia, news, BBC 2007
‘The future belongs to us because we have taken charge of it.’ ibid. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
‘The war – so many people were displaced.’ ibid.
‘The implementation of programmes are just too slow. ibid.
‘Don’t forget those poor people out there you have impoverished.’ ibid. to ex-fighters