Destined to Witness Read online

  Aided by his political savvy, charm, and rugged good looks, Massaquoi quickly advanced with a number of appointments to important government posts, including Secretary of the Interior, charged with the responsibilities of bringing tribal chiefs and the Liberian government closer together, investigating tribal grievances, and settling intertribal disputes. With broad popular support from his adopted Americo-Liberian class as well as his tribal people in the hinterland, the aristocratic Massaquoi became a political power to be reckoned with. He also became the subject of whispers in high political circles that touted him as the next occupant of the Executive Mansion. Some of these whispers reached President King, who decided that it was high time to put an end to them. The question was how? Before long, he would have his answer.

  It came in the form of a visit from a representative of Germany’s first postwar government, which was headed by President Friedrich Ebert. The German envoy, a Dr. Busing, met with President King in the Executive Mansion to discuss closer cooperation between Liberia and Germany. Also present at the meeting was Secretary of the Interior Momolu Massaquoi.

  The president and Massaquoi rose as the short, slightly obese envoy entered King’s office in the Executive Mansion. The German was dressed in a rumpled white linen suit and held a white sun helmet with which he fanned himself perpetually in a futile attempt to obtain a measure of relief from the stifling tropical heat.

  Unlike the visitor, the two Liberians seemed comfortably cool. King, a tall and elegant man with a heavy mustache, and Massaquoi, a stocky, cleanshaven man with bold features, were both impeccably attired in dark gray, London-tailored suits and fashionable high stiff collars whose pristine white contrasted sharply with their dark faces.

  After the three had lighted their cigars and sat down, the German came to the point of his visit. Speaking in precise and fluent, heavily German-accented English, he explained that both President Ebert and Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau had asked him to convey their gratitude to President King for his willingness to listen to their proposal.

  His government, he continued, felt that the time had come for Germany and Liberia to establish diplomatic relations through an exchange of consul generals. Such an exchange, Dr. Busing explained, would be mutually beneficial in that it could facilitate the opening of a much-needed market for Liberian raw materials and products such as rubber, cocoa, and palm oil, while giving Germany unencumbered access to these vital commodities, access it had forfeited when it lost the war and was stripped by the Allies of its African colonies.

  President King not only expressed interest in the proposal but urged that the plan be put into action as soon as possible. Much of the success of such a plan, the envoy cautioned, would depend on choosing the right man for the job. What the president needed, he pointed out, was a man of extraordinary qualities. He must be highly intelligent, articulate, and have a well-rounded education. He must also have a thorough knowledge of Africa in general and Liberia and its culture in particular, and finally, to succeed in class-conscious Germany, he should have excellent social skills.

  “I think I have precisely who you are looking for,” the president responded, with an unmistakable look at his Secretary of the Interior. “In fact, I know I have.”

  Six months after the visit of the German emissary, on June 12, 1922, Momolu Massaquoi, newly appointed Liberian consul general to Germany, arrived in Hamburg with his wife, Rachel, sons Nathaniel, seventeen, and Arthur, one, and daughter Fatima, ten, on the German Woermann Line’s S.S. Wigbert to assume his new post. Five of his six adult sons from his previous marriages, Jaiah, Manna, Jawa, Bei James, and Abraham, stayed behind in Africa. His oldest son, Al-Haj, had already preceded him to Europe as a student in Dublin, Ireland.

  HERMANN BAETZ

  It was a Sunday morning in February and bitterly cold. The year was 1905. As many times before, quarry master Hermann Baetz made his way through the wintry forest landscape of central Germany’s scenic Harz Mountains near the small town of Uftrungen. He was headed for the powder hut, the depository of large quantities of dynamite, to fetch a few sticks for a blasting job scheduled for the next morning. Normally, it was only a brief walk from the stone quarry to the powder hut, but now, with the snow almost a foot high, Meister Baetz made only slow progress. He was of sturdy build and medium height and, like most self-respecting German men of his era, wore the symbol of manhood, a heavy handlebar mustache.

  This particular morning, he was apprehensive, and for good reason. Twice during the last month he had survived narrow brushes with death. The first time he had been climbing a rope ladder in the quarry to mark drilling holes in a steep wall in preparation for blasting when one of the ladder’s two main ropes broke. Fortunately, he was able to hold on to a rung long enough for several of his men to pull him to safety. A few days later, when he was almost crushed to death by a falling boulder that missed him by only a few centimeters, he realized that these weren’t accidents. A careful inspection of the broken ladder and the dislodged boulder confirmed his suspicion. Both had been tampered with; somebody wanted him dead.

  Even before the “accidents” he had been warned by his wife, Martha, to be extra careful. Ever since he told her that he had fired six Italian workers in order to replace them with unemployed Germans, she had been fearing for his safety. While he felt no animosity toward the foreigners, he was a patriotic German of simple principles, which included the firm conviction that charity begins at home. For years, several Italians had worked at the quarry when jobs were plentiful. But the unwritten rule had always been that they were the last to be hired and, if there was a shortage of jobs, the first to be fired. Feeling unwanted or, at best, tolerated as necessary evils, the Italians were mostly resentful of the Germans, but wisely kept their resentment to themselves. They all lived in the worst houses on the outskirts of town and kept their contact with the native townfolk to a bare minimum, which suited the natives just fine.

  Mindful of his wife’s warning, Meister Baetz approached the hut with caution. When he entered it, an ear-shattering explosion ripped through the silent forest, causing the ground to tremble and setting off a chain of echoes that were heard by everyone within a radius of many kilometers—by everyone, that is, except Meister Baetz.

  When Martha heard the explosion, she immediately knew that something dreadful had happened to her husband. Although nearly eight months pregnant, she hurriedly gathered the three youngest of her eight children, Bertha, two, Frieda, five, and Karl, seven, and they ran as fast as their legs would carry them to summon help in town. But several quarry workers, alerted by the unusual blast on a Sunday, had already formed a small expedition and were on their way to the quarry. Martha prepared to follow them, but was held back by sympathetic quarry wives. When the men returned late that night, their faces were grim. The news they brought was even worse than Martha had feared. All they had found on the powder-hut site was a gigantic crater, some fragments from the hut’s logs, and a piece of heavy chain that had been cut with a saw. There was not a trace of Meister Baetz, except a mother-of-pearl button from his vest and the grisly remnants of his severed right big toe.

  At an inquest held the day after the disaster, it was concluded that Hermann Baetz had been the victim of an assassin or assassins, who by some undetermined means had set off the explosion the moment the quarry master entered the hut. There were strong suspicions that it had been an act of vengeance by some of the fired Italian workers, but no conclusive evidence turned up to link any person to the crime. Within a few weeks, after the shock over the disaster had subsided, life in Uftrungen returned pretty much to where it had been before the disaster. For Martha and her children, however, the explosion on that Sunday morning in February 1905 had shattered their entire world. A day after her husband’s funeral and the burial of his meager remains, Martha was obliged to vacate the little company-owned cottage to make room for the new quarry master and his family. Adding to her woes was the fact that her already sizable brood increas
ed even further with the untimely arrival of another baby girl, Clara, bringing the total to nine. Despite seemingly insurmountable handicaps, Martha, barely forty, dug in and raised her children the best she could. Moving from town to town wherever she could find work and lodgings she could afford, she cleaned homes, took in laundry, and helped out at baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Eventually, she and her children settled in Nordhausen, a picturesque medieval town. There, falling back on her early training as a midwife, she was able to make a comfortable living by helping little Nordhausers into the world.

  By the time World War I broke out in July 1914, Martha, now nearing fifty, had almost achieved the goal she had set for herself, which was to raise her children as decent human beings until they could fend for themselves. Anna, thirty-one, her oldest, was happily married to a well-to-do butcher and had children of her own. Hermann, twenty-eight, was a foreman on a large farm. Her daughter Martha, twenty-five, was employed as a skilled seamstress. Hedwig, twenty-four, was earning a living as a cook in the household of a wealthy family. Paul, eighteen, had just completed his apprenticeship as a pastry baker, and Karl, sixteen, was winding up his tailoring apprenticeship. The only ones still living with Martha at home were her three youngest daughters, Frieda, fourteen, Bertha, eleven (who, in due time, would become my mother), and Clara, nine. While each of Martha’s children differed widely in disposition, temperament, and outlook on life, they all shared their mother’s irreconcilable distrust of Italians, a prejudice that over the years she had broadened to include all Catholics.

  As the war dragged on, one Baetz boy after another joined the Imperial Army of His Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm II—Hermann joining the artillery, Paul the infantry, and Karl the cavalry. All three served with valor and distinction on the battlefields of France, the way they knew their father would have wanted them to. Hermann, in the process, earned the Iron Cross First Class but lost his right eye. When the brothers returned to civilian life in 1918, after the German army surrendered and the Kaiser took up exile in Holland, unemployment in Germany was widespread, and the future looked dim. This gave Hermann, the most adventurous of the brothers, the idea to try his luck in the United States, the land of unlimited opportunities where, he had heard, jobs were said “to go begging.” The plan was that as soon as he had gotten a toehold in the New World, he would send for the rest of the family. During the early 1920s, Hermann sailed for New York, then proceeded to Chicago, where he had been promised a job as a handyman in a German restaurant. Within three years of putting away every dime he could spare, he had saved up enough money to make good on his promise to send for Paul, Martha, Hedwig, and Clara. Karl and Frieda were to be next, but they had gotten married and decided to remain in Nordhausen with their mother, whose diabetic condition had worsened to a point where emigrating to the United States was out of the question. Bertha, who had just finished her training as a nurse’s aide at a local hospital and who also had been preparing to join her siblings in America, suddenly changed her mind. Hearing of an opening at a small private hospital in Hamburg, the seaport city that had always fascinated her, she packed her suitcase, kissed her mother and small-town life goodbye, and jumped on the next Hamburg-bound train. In due time she would find out that it had been a much bigger jump than she could have imagined in her wildest dreams.

  GERMANY’S FIRST AFRICAN “AMBASSADOR”

  The post-World War I Weimar Republic, where newly appointed Consul General Massaquoi made his diplomatic debut in the spring of 1922, was a volatile volcano ready to erupt. Street riots brought on by dissatisfaction with high unemployment and runaway inflation were the order of the day. There were repeated violent clashes between opposing political parties that ran the gamut from the extreme left to the extreme right. Nationalists, enraged by the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles that had been dictated to Germany by the victors of World War I, vented their anger by lashing out at Jews, whom they branded as traitors and conspirators. Within two weeks of Massaquoi’s taking office in Hamburg, Germany’s Jewish Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, who was instrumental in beginning the reparations payments required under the Treaty of Versailles, was gunned down by anti-Semitic right-wing fanatics as he was riding in an open car to his office in Berlin. The abortive Beer-Hall Putsch in Munich the following November, in which an unknown Austrian by the name of Adolf Hitler tried to topple the Bavarian state government and the central government in Berlin, was only one of many attempts to destabilize the already shaky Weimar Republic.

  Such inauspicious conditions notwithstanding, the Liberian envoy took to his new diplomatic post and life in the thriving Hanseatic metropolis like the proverbial duck to water. As the first official representative of Africa since Germany’s loss of more than one million square miles of African colonial territory with more than fourteen million inhabitants, Momolu Massaquoi became the most visible African personality on the European continent. Within a few years, he had firmly established himself as one of the best known and most popular members of the seaport city’s consular corps and as a much sought-after host to some of the most prominent and distinguished residents of and visitors to Hamburg. African nationalists who, like Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, were fighting colonialism from exile in Europe found the congenial atmosphere at Massaquoi’s villa near the Alster on Johnsallee 22, in the upscale Rotherbaum district, an ideal setting for their secret strategy meetings. Other personalities who at one time or another enjoyed the Liberian envoy’s hospitality included civil-rights activists, entertainers, intellectuals, and athletes from the United States. The most notable among these were singer-actor-activist Paul Robeson, NAACP cofounder W. E. B. Du Bois, poet Langston Hughes, jazz star Louis Armstrong, ex-heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, concert singer Roland Hayes, and scholar Alain Locke. Some of them Momolu had known since his student days in the United States.

  In addition to tending to his many consular responsibilities, Momolu still found time to write, teach, and lecture on African languages, especially Vai, at various institutions, including the prestigious University of Hamburg, and translating the Bible into Vai. Proving himself years ahead of his time as a communicator, he authored and published a handsome illustrated booklet entitled The Republic of Liberia, which, as far as Germany was concerned, literally put Liberia on the map. Written in English with German translations on facing pages, the booklet clearly stated the author’s aim “to make clear what Liberia is, what the ideal is for which she stands, and what she offers to the world’s market to perpetuate the progress of civilization and the advancement of the human race.” In addition to winning friends for Liberia and influencing people, the booklet also revealed his sure touch as a politician and diplomat. On its opening page it featured a full-page photo of President King, resplendently attired in order-bedecked tails, while a much smaller photo of himself in a regular business suit was buried.

  By this time, the major elements for my pending arrival on this earth were gradually falling into place. But destiny still required a few little nudges here and there to bring about the “oddity” of my German birth. One such nudge came in the form of tonsillitis suffered by my grandfather-to-be. During his brief hospital stay to have his tonsils removed, the chivalrous VIP charmed the doctors and nurses and quickly became the most popular, and hence the most pampered, patient on the ward. Upon discharge from the hospital, the ex-king was moved to reciprocate the befittingly royal treatment he had received by throwing a lavish bash at his villa for the doctors and nurses who had cared for him.

  Present at the party—and here’s another little nudge from destiny—was Momolu’s oldest son, twenty-six-year-old Al-Haj, who happened to be on holiday from his studies at Trinity College in Dublin. Overindulged ever since he was a baby by his father and mother, a London-educated “Americo-Liberian” beauty from Cape Palmas, Al-Haj had duly turned into a spoiled, self-centered young man who was used to having his way. In addition to these rather negative, learned attributes, he had the good fortune to have inherited a
fair amount of his father’s intellectual powers and his ability to charm, especially members of the opposite sex. On the evening of the party, while circulating among his father’s guests, he spotted a pretty, brown-haired young woman, barely out of her teens, who was standing alone in a corner of the crowded reception room. “I’m Al-Haj Massaquoi,” he introduced himself, amused at the young woman’s obvious discomfort at being spoken to by a stranger. “Do you speak English?”

  The young woman shook her head. “Es tut mir leid. Ich verstehe nicht (I’m sorry. I don’t understand).”

  “In that case, we’ll have to make do with what little German I know,” he responded in fluent yet heavily accented German. “What’s your name?”

  “Bertha,” she replied while shyly studying the elegant young African, his impeccably tailored Savile Row suit, his handsome, velvety dark face, his close-cropped black hair, and his meticulously clipped mustache. She especially noticed his well-shaped yet strong-looking hands and his flawless, incredibly white teeth. Bertha thought how very different he was from the awkward, rough-talking and crude-acting young men in her hometown of Nordhausen. Most of the fellows she had gone to dances with were farmworkers or tradesmen.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” Al-Haj told her. “I don’t bite. I don’t know what they have told you about us Africans, but I can assure you that I’m not a cannibal.”

  Embarrassed that he had mistaken her reticence for fear, she hastened to tell him that no such thoughts had crossed her mind. That’s why she didn’t hesitate to say yes when he asked her whether she would join him the next day for a ride in his new automobile, a gift from his indulgent father. That automobile ride, which was followed by many more, was the beginning of a whirlwind courtship during which Al-Haj swept the unsophisticated Bertha off her feet. Commuting between Dublin and Hamburg as often as his studies permitted, Al-Haj took Bertha to all the popular nightspots on St. Pauli’s Reeperbahn, to the horse races, the theater, the opera, and even boxing matches. Occasionally, they would take trips to other cities, such as Berlin. In the rush of activities, Al-Haj kept postponing the long-promised trip to the altar, explaining, whenever Bertha raised the subject, that his exams didn’t leave him enough time to plan and execute a wedding grand enough for the son of the Liberian Consul General. But destiny had already given its final nudge. I made my unheralded debut at Eppendorfer Krankenhaus two months prematurely on Tuesday, January 19, 1926. My mother named me Hans-Jürgen, in keeping with the prevailing popularity of hyphenated names, and in due time, like most German children, I started calling her Mutti. By an unusual coincidence, only six months later, on July 31, Momolu’s wife, Rachel, presented him with another son—and me with a baby uncle—whom they named Fritz.