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Liberia: Ghosts of Kendeja On Rampage
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The Analyst (Monrovia)
ANALYSIS
14 April 2008
Posted to the web 14 April 2008
Most citizens who opposed government's surrender of Liberia's only culture center, Kendeja, to Billionaire Bob Johnson to build a 4-star hotel have asserted, amongst other things, that the deal was a gross disrespect for, if not desecration of, Liberia's cultural heritage.
Supporters of the deal countered that modernization and globalization spinning in the air, as well as the cash value they bear, carry with them virtues that culture or heritage can hardly match.
The latter arguers won, not necessarily on the strength of logic but on the power of political authority. And in a spontaneous manner, the inhabitants of Kendeja, women and children, were torpedoed out; courtesy of the Mighty Dollar, to which many proponents of the deal are seemingly obsessed.
But before the first brick touched the soil of what used to be the only surviving culture center of the nation, hell broke loose. The team of pro-hotel architects has cracked. At least one is announced severed. Suspicion is high that more await liquidation.
The Analyst Staff Writer takes a look at the implications of both the Kendeja deal and the brouhaha that it is triggering.
Some might call it a superstitious belief, but there are others who are conjecturing that the ancestors of the native land have begun to rise up in anger against what they consider desecration of the nation's cultural heritage.
The deal that gave the piece of land what used to be called Kendeja Culture Center to an American billionaire to construct a four-star hotel has left a horde of physical and psychological injuries not only on Liberia's deportment on cultural values, but also on the social well-being of the people who inhabited it.
Bob Johnson, the American Billionaire who took interest in the picturesque situation of Kendeja, won the hearts and minds of government officials with a huge investment in the country's tourism business.
He intends to build a four-star hotel, according to government sources, at Kendeja which lies inches away from the scenery Atlantic Ocean beach along the Roberts International Airport and Monrovia, Liberia's capital.
Government, caught in the throes of massive public expectation to deliver on its many campaign promises, apparently sees the Bob Johnson investment as grease to its elbow since it would help balloon state revenue intakes and provide employment opportunity for citizens.
These social and economic baits have apparently blinded the government and proponents of the deal to the extent that they have flagrantly ignored other vexing imperatives.
As soon as the window of opportunity was slightly opened, the government rushed for the bait, accepting the Billionaire's request to take over Kendeja without considering that the village had long been the sole hub of Liberia's cultural artistry.
Opposition grew against the deal from citizens who thought that government was putting pecuniary gains or the Mighty Dollar above the sanctity of Liberian heritage. Both the government and zealots of modernity and globalization retorted that Liberia could not afford to forego a four-star hotel investment for a culture center they describe archaic and "un-modernized".
But as critics insisted on respect for Liberian culture, the government quickly announced that there were plans to dislocate the culture center to a more "civilized" or "modernized" premises.
However the irony and unnaturalness of "modernizing" the culture center, no such promise was translated into reality until the government, through the Ministry of Information, began to evict the residents out of Kendeja at odd hours of the night.
Following a nocturnal meeting, which adjourned with threats of immediate forceful eviction of residents, the inhabitants went amok immediately, taking to their heels in search of alternative homes.
There were reports that some of the fleeing Kendeja residents, mostly women and children, sought refuge in church compounds along the Monrovia-RIA route and in makeshift huts akin to wartime displaced centers.
Under the relocation theory of the Kendeja hotel deal was also the school problem, the fate of children and youth whose only source of learning was a public school located in Kendeja.
The Kendeja High School, according to an administrator of the school, hosted nearly 2,000 students, who were evicted from the school to give way for the construction of a 4-star hotel.
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Officials of the schools also told The Analyst that the relocation of the school to a cramped up alternative building was as spontaneous and coercive as the dismantlement of the whole of Kendeja and the eviction of its inhabitants.
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