Video by Guillem Cruells | Words by Alexei Obolensky | Photography by Nil Puissant
The 5th County.
2:37am: Monrovia Airport.
“Give me your fucking shoes.”
The road to Liberia, or more specifically Robertsport, is long and winding, and not for the fainthearted. Read: 12 hour layovers in Casablanca, a crowd so rowdy on the flight it’s akin to a flight to Ibiza on a Friday night. Immigration on arrival is, not to beat around the bush, a shit show. A man appears, dressed in 2008 Chelsea Away kit and takes our passports. We’re too tired to be phased. The passports are returned, Visas freshly stamped in due to some kind connections pre-trip. We drag coffins and peli cases into the hustle, noise and heat that only Africa can provide.
A man asks for my shoes, I let him down gently.
Coffins are strapped to the wooden roof rack of an ageing Nissan, cigarettes are lit, Pelican cases on laps, keys turned, cough, black smoke, ignition and we’re on the way. Six hours on dirt roads to go.
To the 5th county.
3:07pm
“This place was the most glamorous hotel in West Africa. People came from all over, all over the world to be here. I used to play here for the American Ambassador with my band, The Piso Eagles, in 1984. It was a good time before the war, plenty of people came – there was plenty of money. Look at it now…”
We stand in the sweltering heat. Liberia is really, really hot. Especially at 3pm. My eyes are burning. My eyes are burning because my sweat is equal parts DEET and SPF 70. The bar still hasn’t been restocked; I fantasise over a cold Tsing Tao. Sam Coleman cuts a striking figure; the sixty, maybe even seventy-year-old local historian, musician and well, statesman of Robertsport guides us around the ruins of a 173-bed hotel, the structure still standing strong. Yet the insides are totally gutted. The roof is gone, there’s the unmistakeable footprint of hotel rooms, but nothing more remains than that footprint. The hotel was built in the seventies, and when the Rebel forces entered Robertsport in 1989, they took the hotel for their own, looted it and it was never to be rebuilt. It’s a stark reminder of the scars that still haunt Liberia and the challenges it faces to rebuild in the face of adversity.
Liberia has often been defined by its civil wars (two of them, from 1989-1996 and then 1999-2003), communities ripped apart, unspeakable atrocities on both sides. Child soldiers, rape weaponised. A bleak, bleak time that tragically and somewhat typically escaped the attention and crucially, the aid of the developed world, added to the list of Sierra Leone and Rwanda of forgotten conflicts of the nineties and early two thousands.
Mr Coleman gives us an in depth history of Liberia and the region. Liberia is the only country in Africa that was never colonised. It was bought by the Americans for emancipated slaves in 1822, who promptly enslaved the locals, triggering shaky foundations for the next one hundred and fifty years or so, which ultimately resulted in a civil war. Robertsport has been around since the mid 1800s and is located in the 5th county of Liberia, about 10 miles from the border of Sierra Leone.
Robertsport was a rebel stronghold in the war, and despite not being a major combat zone, it’s a jarring reality that most people we meet over the age of around 25-30 have the civil wars in living memory and still bear the physical and mental scars to this day. We hear stories from people we meet of child soldiers, hiding for weeks in the bush and the unspeakable horrors of war that we have been so fortunate to escape.
But it would be too easy to dwell on such past narratives. Too easy. And although the scars remain in the form of the gutted hotel we find ourselves in, the reality of daily life is one of hope in Robertsport. And surfing is at the forefront of that.
5:07pm: Robertsport Surf Club
“Only Club Beer left.”
“Is it cold?”
The display bottle is grabbed from the shelf. Dust ceremonially dusted off.
“No.”
Liberia, despite being beautiful, isn’t famed for it’s infrastructure; the lack of paved roads in any shape or form present logistical challenges. It is also extremely, and I mean extremely hot. Like 45+ in the shade. Hence, cold drinks are in demand and often a luxury. Below lies the order of drinks in preference verified by our crew. Each day, take two away from the list due to being sold out and after about three days it’s warm Club or water.
Tsing Tao
Heineken
Coke
Club Beer (cold)
Sprite
Non Alc Guinness
Water
Club Beer (warm)
It’s a lay day. Another one. Now, Liberian lay days are a slow affair. Palm trees sway gently in the wind. We wait for Club Beers to cool and fantasise about a Tsing Tao restock at the bar, whilst getting gently stoned on soft weed from Sierra Leone. Life is good. When one finds oneself in Bali, in Costa Rica, and Sri Lanka and one asks oneself, “I wonder what this was like 100 years ago” — this is the answer.
The crux of unspoilt paradise vs blown-out tourism is an interesting one. We need a charming American on secondment to USAID who is there to promote Liberian tourism and figure out well, just that. The pros of unspoilt paradise are obvious for all to see—the clue is in the name. It is paradise, unspoilt. The cons of blown-out tourism are obvious. Yet the cons of unspoilt paradise are rarely spoken of; it’s hard to get to with limited options on accommodation, there’s not much in the way of creature comforts. The same applies to the pros of blown-out tourism that you tend to ignore, that you take for granted, but when you don’t have them you miss them. Read: paved roads, air con, a reliable supply of cold beer, a menu that extends beyond rice and fish. But none of it matters, because Robertsport is paradise.
We’re blessed with a run of fun waves on our arrival, we surf our brains out for the first few days with a slew of lay days on the horizon. ‘Uptown’ Robertsport is effectively one of the most condensed wave-rich locations we’ve ever had the honour of visiting. A mixture of reverse J Bay (rocks and wave quality), reverse Gold Coast (sand and water colour) and with a mini skeleton bay at the end of the point set up leading into the fishing village of ‘downtown’ Robertsport and the sprawling mangrove bordered shallow Lake Piso behind.
Each day, we wake at dawn. We ceremonially gather all of our possessions needed for the morning and ‘go for a walk’, that is, walk up to the furthest point and check the waves along the way back, before making it home for lunch at around 1pm. We score, not a score score but we’re counting this as a score nonetheless. Eli throws tail, BG surfing a Frankenstein of a board also throws tail, William puts on a twin fin masterclass as usual. We pour over swell maps and directions, wind, period and energy, guided in turn by our all-things-Africa guru AVG as we reckon the potential this place has could be infinite, already playing our return for a substantial swell event.
10:09am: Phillip’s Guest House
“We’re going to do this the Liberian way,”
Peter tells me with a wry look on his face, toothpick perched in the corner of his mouth.
Word has got around that we’re carrying boards to give away. We’ve got boards, fins, boardies, and the groms are aware. They are more than aware. They are positively frothing. Peter, manager of the local surf club and all around excellent man, ensures the boards and equipment we have brought over are distributed fairly between the kids via the Robertsport Surf Club, who also provides our food and the occasional cold Tsing Tao – quite the operation. With the Liberian nationals around the corner, the better boards are stashed away in preparation for heats.
The Groms of Robertsport are omnipresent. No matter where you are, the kids are there. Never annoying, always inquisitive. They sit with camera crews on the beach, they sit on our balcony with us and watch the world go by. Some mornings we sit in silence, waiting for waves. Other moments are punctuated with howls of laughter. The soft thud of coconuts falling sends the kids running into the bush to find where they’ve landed. They’re then cut open and shared between the crew.
We notice some of the kids are pretty cut up, doubtless a result of running through the bush, so we tend to their wounds. The other kids get wind of this and suddenly we have our very own NHS walk-in clinic, with a queue of kids on our steps. Some days the kids have school, others not – we struggle to work out how the school hours work but we see kids getting chastised by the community for surfing when they should be in school and rightly so. There is a massive emphasis on education in Liberia, and with a country with a literacy rate of 48% (which goes down to 34% in rural areas and 24% amongst women), it’s evident that education will be instrumental in progressing Liberia’s future.
In the water the sheer talent of the local kids is impressive, with 90% identifying as goofy footers. We wonder if some of them have ever been right. We marvel at some of their techniques; we guess that without proper instruction and limited access to surf videos they have just worked out their own way of doing it. Boards are ridden in all sizes and shapes, like a living museum of surfboard history, in all stages of repair and disrepair. A particular highlight is a kid riding an old Channel Islands missing every single fin box, with just air where the boxes would be.
“I’m a girl boss, a general, a surfer – 8 years in the game.”
We meet Faith and Patience, the main female surfers from Robertsport. Surfing has taken Faith far, providing her with a scholarship through school and now onto university in the capital, Monrovia, where she studies agricultural management. These girls are leading from the front, role models in their community leading the younger girls up behind them. These are the foundations laid by the amazing work of Kent and his wife Landis, structuring and providing scholarships, providing education for the youth of Robertsport through the surf club.
11am: The Beach
“Jerry, it’s Alex. We’re going to need all the bikers, at the football pitch at 5pm.”
Liberian transport is as follows. Motorcycle taxi, or walk. We usually opt for the former. Now Liberian motorcycle taxis are quite like European taxis in the way that you can negotiate your fares in advance, and yes that might vary slightly with stops, traffic and surcharges for luggage. But that is where the similarities end. The rest is chaos. Beautiful, 125cc-powered chaos. Four people to one bike is quite standard, or if you have kids on your journey, no problem sir, we can accommodate up to six. We zip around on bikes into town almost daily, no shoes, no helmets, hair in the wind and DEET in the eyes. The drivers are all male, and it seems that aside from fishing, this is the principal and most aspirational source of employment for 18-30 year olds. They hoot and holler and are always on the horn, clutching the day’s cash takings in their hands or for those that have moved up the hierarchy, in their Gucci or Supreme bumbags. Jerry is our main man, and if you do ever find yourself in Robertsport, I implore you to use his services.
We (somewhat foolishly in hindsight) decide it would be a good idea to gather all the bikers we can for a shoot. The purpose of this shoot we’re still unsure of, but it graces these pages and those of you that have seen MIA’s subliminal music video for Bad Girls will most certainly get the reference.
5pm comes, a motley collection of bikers have shown up, enticed by our offer of 100 Liberian Dollars to anyone that shows up with a bike. We organise the lads into a V-formation, ready for the shoot. The boys do one run while a curious crowd watches. We rally again by the football pitch, ready for a second take. This is the last order we see of the day. Our carefully strategised V-formation with camera crews, radios and all has now completely disintegrated. The crowd is now about a hundred strong and fifty bikes are running riot on the main road, wheelies, burnouts, eight people on one bike, guys standing on the bikes, almost surfing them. One guy stacks it, three up on the bike and he’s standing on the handlebars. The assembled crowd goes wild.
We are masters of disaster and things are getting way out of hand now. There’s so much testosterone in the air you can practically taste it. This is equal parts exactly how we hoped this would go and equal parts terrifying. The motorcycle boys of Robertsport are getting revved up and there’s no clear way to end what we’ve started…
When we haven’t turned the main road of Robertsport into an episode of Nitro Circus, Robertsport is a tranquil town, bordered by rolling jungle hills, a huge saltwater lake and the ocean, where dug-out canoes from singular logs are hauled up on the beach after the morning’s fishing. In town, the Videoclub is the center of attention. Taking the form of a metal hut, it’s essentially an oven full of people, with a large flatscreen TV and some fuck-off speakers.
The Videoclub is where football-obsessed Liberians go to watch the Premier/Champions/Liga League. Football in Liberia is a big, big deal. The local team games on Wednesdays and Saturdays (we witnessed the Bikers vs Surfers with fights and all) on the town’s football field get a huge turnout. The familiar drone of Premiership commentators blaring at full volume from the Videoclub floats down the dusty roads of Robertsport, providing a surreal soundtrack to a totally alien backdrop of aluminium sheeted huts and dug out canoes.
Liberia is a loud, loud country. The soundtrack of Liberia is firmly based in US Gangsta rap, with some early 2000s RnB and if you are lucky, some UK garage. Stormzy. Ja Rule. Dr Dre. Fiddy. Kelly Rowland. Anything, as long as it’s Rap or Hip Hop with an offensive baseline played fucking loud, is pretty much in. Music comes from every hut, every phone, every bike, the backing track to the daily life in Robertsport.
Despite English being the official language of Liberia, it’s a different kettle of fish to the English we know. Shortened, clipped, no Ps and Qs. Things aren’t asked for, they’re demanded: “Give me water.” It’s English but stripped back. No excess noise. Diet English. We wonder at first if people are rude, if they don’t like us, then we realise it’s just how people talk. “What is this?” becomes “What thing this?” When asking how someone is, the reply is always just “fine”. Need someones attention that you don’t know? “Hey Fineboy…Hey Finegirl!” I now wonder if maybe the chap at the airport was asking me politely for my shoes. It’s all a matter of perception, after all.
Yours truly is still nursing a recovering broken ankle and decides an inflatable surf mat is the best option for wave trimming this trip which intrigues the kids beyond belief. “Give me air board” comes the command. I duly oblige and watch the kids riding the mat on the end section of the wave, sipping my warm Club Beer, wondering as to the future of the paradise that is Robertsport.
“And there’s another country I’ve heard of long ago
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know
We may not count her armies, we may not see her king
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering
And soul by soul, and silently her shining bounds increase
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.”
Our heartfelt thanks go to:
Kent Bubbs Jr & Landis Wyatt, Phillip Banini, Armstrong, Peter, Junior, Mr Coleman, Jerry, Faith, Patience, the Bikers, the Fishermen, and all the Groms of Robertsport who will no doubt carry this amazing town towards a beautiful future.
The 5th County
Starring William Aliotti, Brendon Gibbens and Eli Beukes
With Armstrong Johnson, Junior Doe, Williams Coleman and Patience Tetteh
Directed by Guillem Cruells
Filmed by Guillem Cruells and Alan Van Gysen
Produced by Alexei Obolensky
Stills by Nil Puissant
Sound Design and Composition by Thom Pringle
Colour Grade by Lita Bosch
Supported by Monster Energy
To make a difference to the community of Robertsport where it is most needed, we would urge you to donate to
universaloutreachfoundation.org
