ABSTRACT
The rusting carcass of an abandoned Cadillac lay beneath a colonnade at the base of the national bank’s multistory headquarters. 1 I heard music playing. I had heard the song many times without knowing who played it. It became the song of the war for me, but nobody could tell me who was singing with the pain of a man who had suffered, who was looking for hope when everything around him seemed hopeless and the rules he had been raised to abide by no longer seemed to apply in the difficult world into which he had been thrust. It was July 1990, and more than a year later I stopped beside the road for a rest in the heart of the Cameroonian rain forest. A truck drove by playing the song, and I chased after the driver and found him in a bar and asked him the name of the singer, and he slowly wrote it down on a piece of paper for me, so I could buy a copy of it and play it, to remind myself of the afternoons spent in Monrovia, the city of the dead.
