The JRB presents an excerpt from Adéwálé Májà-Pearce’s forthcoming book Shine Your Eye: In Search of West Africa.

Adéwálé Májà-Pearce
Shine Your Eye: In Search of West Africa
Hurst Publishers, 2026

In the midst of all the Nigerian drama, and still on the staff of Index on Censorship, I undertook a number of trips within the subregion. One was back to Liberia in 1995, which I had left just one month before Charles Taylor’s 1989 invasion that swiftly engulfed the country but for Monrovia, which was quickly secured by ECOMOG, a four-thousand-strong regional peacekeeping force convened by ECOWAS. I went first to my old hotel in the downtown area, but it was now occupied by squatters, refugees in their own country with nothing to do all day but sit on the balcony and watch the money changers on Broad Street, or venture downstairs in search of food. I was later told that the Lebanese proprietor had fled back home just before Taylor launched a futile attempt to dislodge the foreign troops and declare himself president, such was the scale of his ambition. The ensuing carnage, in which children as young as eight were recruited to join battle with trained soldiers, lasted for weeks and killed a quarter of the city’s population. The traumatic consequences of these events were still keenly felt six years later during my second visit.

I was told a story concerning one of these children, a girl of ten or thereabouts. Ironically, the story involved another Lebanese man by the name of Ghassan. I had already heard about Ghassan from John, a tall, slight man in his mid-twenties who cleaned my room and fetched water and took me along to the basketball matches that were the only fun to be had before the evening curfew. It seems that Ghassan had once saved his life. It happened that one afternoon during a lull in the 1989 Taylor assault John went in search of food in Monrovia. On his way back, and already within sight of the building he and the others were occupying, he was accosted by a government soldier who asked him what tribe he was from, which was the standard question. John evidently gave the wrong answer. The soldier told him to strip to his underpants—just as Israeli soldiers are doing to Palestinians in Gaza as I write—and follow him. ‘By this time, all the women were crying,’ John said, whereupon Ghassan came forward and pleaded with the soldier. He said that John was his son and offered him fifty Liberian dollars (US$1) in one-dollar coins, which was all the money he had. ‘If not for him,’ John said and shook his head.

But it was another person, a young woman called Phoebe, who told me about the ten-year-old girl soldier. It went like this. One day, Phoebe and Ghassan went in search of food when a rebel jeep pulled up beside them, whereupon one of the rebels confronted Ghassan and said that he was going to kill him and drink his blood. Ghassan begged and begged but the rebel remained unmoved. Ghassan started crying as he entered the jeep but, as they were about to take off, Phoebe, even now not understanding what possessed her but knowing full well the possible consequences of what she was about to do, asked the rebel if she could come along. He shrugged so she got in. That was when she saw another girl in the front seat with an AK-47 across her lap. They drove some distance from the city centre, the rebel all the while telling Ghassan that he was going to kill him and drink his blood. Finally, they came to a stop. The rebel told Ghassan to get down. Ghassan started pleading all over again and it was then that the girl in the front made her move. She climbed out of the jeep as leisurely as you please, stood directly in front of the rebel and calmly told him to leave the white man alone. The rebel refused. He insisted that he was going to kill the white man and drink his blood; that he had never before tasted the blood of a white. The girl soldier cocked her AK-47, pointed it at his chest and said that she would shoot him if he didn’t obey.

Phoebe paused for a moment, searching for the words that would properly convey the surreal nature of what she had witnessed, but then shook her head. ‘And he obeyed her,’ was all she could add. The rebel stood to attention, saluted the girl, and got back in the jeep. Shortly afterwards, Ghassan followed his compatriots back to Beirut. Before I left Monrovia on that my second trip in 1995, I asked Phoebe if she had seen the girl since. She said that she hadn’t, although she was always on the lookout for her. The girl would be a grown woman by now, if she was still alive; and I wondered at the bitter harvest for a country in which children had learned to kill or be killed: one month after I left, unidentified militiamen attacked the small town of Yosi in the interior, which was ostensibly under the control of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), and hacked sixty-two people to death. Although they were apparently armed with guns, the militiamen (or soldiers or rebels or bandits or whatever they called themselves) preferred to use machetes and clubs. Most of the victims were women and children, but then most of the victims usually are in wars of this kind, as witness Gaza today.

Everybody in Monrovia had their own story. There was AB, for instance, not yet twenty but already building a small house for himself and his widowed mother on the plot he had acquired. I called him ‘the philosopher’ because he was forever trying to engage me in lectures (his word) about the meaning of life. He recounted to me on more than one occasion how his best friend was beheaded right in front of him. ‘Did you know that a head does bounce like a football?’ he kept repeating in renewed astonishment. He might well have wondered about the meaning of life.

~~~

• Born in London, Adéwálé Májà-Pearce grew up in Lagos. The author of The House My Father Built and This Fiction Called Nigeria, he holds an MA from SOAS University of London. Previously an Africa researcher for the Index on Censorship, he has written for The New York Times and Granta.

~~~

Publisher information

An acclaimed British-Nigerian writer’s odyssey through West Africa, starkly transformed since his youth.

‘There is a quiet rage in Adéwálé Májà-Pearce’s writing. With dark humour and unflinching social criticism, he tells a personal story that intersects with the collective narrative. In doing so, he takes us to a deeper understanding of West Africa’s broken trajectory.’
—Véronique Tadjo 

West Africa is at a crossroads. Boasting tremendous natural wealth, its inhabitants are among the world’s poorest. Despite apparent multi-party democracy, there have been coups, conflict and corruption since independence. Where can it go from here?

Journeying along the coast and across the Sahel, from Ghana to Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone to Senegal, Adéwálé Májà-Pearce uncovers a restless region on the verge of great change. Visiting fourteen countries—and seeking out the Nigerian diaspora in each—he reflects on these societies’ dramatic shifts since the late 1980s, when he first travelled their roads. Refusing IMF loans and rejecting Western-imposed currencies, West Africa’s diverse, expanding and overwhelmingly young population is staging a quiet revolution for its future, and discarding an aging elite still propped up by European power—from demonstrations against police brutality to the forced withdrawal of French troops.

Speaking with local journalists and dissident scholars, street hawkers and immigration officers, Májà-Pearce brings to life the compelling story of a region at breaking point—as told by West Africans themselves.