Monrovia – There are birthdays bought with imported wine and gold-rimmed invitation cards, and then there is the one Liberia watched on its phones this week. When George Manneh Weah turned sixty, he did not fill his Jamaica Resort with the rich. He filled it with cassava-and-coconut women — the roadside traders who sometimes go home with five or ten dollars after a whole day of sweat — and he made them a promise: whatever you earn today, I will turn your ten into fifty. The common people trooped in on their own feet, cookpots and all, and what rose from the coals was not caviar but Tanpo-soglo, the comfort food of the waterside poor. THE ANALYST followed the celebration and reports.
Monrovia: Picture it. A sturdy Oldma sails through the gate of the Jamaica Resort with her blackened coal pot balanced on her head like a crown, and the sharp-dressed security men, in their dark shades and pressed shirts, freeze — not sure whether to salute her or run from the smoke. She plants the pot down on the shiny resort floor the way a queen takes her throne, fans the coals with one practiced sweep of her hand, and a grey cloud (smoke) goes up over the fine chairs. Welcome to King George’s sixtieth. Leave your airs at the gate; the cassava is on.
Then the smell did what no gold-rimmed invitation ever could. Big men in stiff agbada, pro-poor suits and ladies balanced on high heels began drifting toward that humble pot like schoolchildren at break time, pretending they were only passing by. One fine gentleman grabbed a stick of cassava straight off the coals, yelped, and started shaking his fingers and blowing on them while the whole corner burst out laughing — hot cassava has no respect for a big title. For one smoky afternoon, the roasting pot, not the high table, was the center of the universe at Jamaica, previous home of VIP visitors.
And then the word ran through the crowd like current through a live wire: whatever you make today, Oldma — make ten, you take fifty. The place simply caught fire. “Wow! Wow! Wow!” rolled from mouth to mouth until it became a chant; one woman nearly dropped her coconut, grown men clapped like small boys, and a cassava seller who had come expecting a hard, ordinary day stood there blinking as though the sky had opened. For a few electric minutes, the Jamaica Resort did not sound like a birthday party at all. It sounded like a stadium in the old days, the second King George put the ball in the net.
It is not every day that market women push their charcoal pots through the gate of a former president’s resort and set them down on the manicured ground as though it were their own backyard or a dusty street in New Kru Town. But that is exactly the picture that lit up Liberian screens this week, as George Manneh Weah — the footballer the whole world once called King George — marked his sixtieth birthday at his Jamaica Resort in Paynesville.
He chose the date with a smile for a neighbour, too. “Let me extend happy independence to all my friends in Nigeria,” he said. “This is Nigeria’s Independence Day. We share the same day.”
Born on the first of October, 1966, Weah shares his birthday with the giant of West Africa — and this year he turned the coincidence into a party for the smallest Liberians of all.
THE FOOD THAT RAISED THEM
Anybody who grew up poor in Clara Town, New Kru Town, or West Point knows the taste by heart. Roasted cassava, hot from the coals and eaten with a piece of dry coconut, was the faithful friend of the broke student and the hustling ma — cheap, filling, and sweet in a way no fine restaurant has ever managed to copy. In Kru country they call it Tanpo-soglo, and the name alone can carry a grown man straight back to his barefoot days.
So when the former President reached for that same humble diet, it was as if he wanted to nurse an old nostalgia, to taste again the food that raised him before the world learned his name. Big men in fine ‘pro-poor suits” and agbada and small people in slippers stood in the same line, and every class met over the same roasting cassava. For one afternoon, Tanpo-soglo was the great leveller.
“IF YOU MAKE $10, WE WILL GIVE YOU $50”
But beneath the fun was a plan with a tender heart, and the former President said it began a complaint from the indigent women of the cassava trade. The women whose whole business is cassava and coconut, he explained, are among the hardest-working and worst-paid people in the land. “In present day Liberia, some of them go home with five dollars, ten dollars,” he said. “A whole day, and they can’t make ends meet.”
So he turned his birthday into their market, perhaps knowing that some of the elite friends would come by to see him, and while they congregate at Jamaica, they would help patronize the women.
“I thought it was a perfect opportunity to bring them here on my birthday,” he said in a standing crowd-enveloped interview with his aide. “They bring their cassava and their coconut — and whatever you make, if you make ten dollars, we will give you fifty.” By his own pledge, the old traders who had come expecting to sell only a few sticks of cassava would go home instead with fifty United States dollars apiece. “At least today,” he said, “they will carry fifty home.”
He waved away any suggestion that it was for show, “to eat show” as it is said nowadays by comical folks. “I’m doing this because somebody complained to me,” he said. “It’s the way I can help — and it’s a special day.”
There was another reason, too, he said. The cassava women had been lamenting that their roasting trade had grown thin and barely profitable under the present government, and he wanted them to make a little honest profit, at least on his birthday. If the hard times would not let the market smile on them, then the birthday would.
FROM SELLING BOTTLES IN GIBRALTAR
If the gesture landed so naturally, it is because the man giving it has sat exactly where those women sit. George Weah did not learn poverty from a book. “I grew up in Gibraltar,” he said. “I went to the market myself. I was selling bottles.” The boy who once hawked empty bottles on the waterside is the same man who would one day lift the Ballon d’Or in Europe — and he has never once pretended the two are strangers.
“Look where God brought me,” he said, the gratitude plain in his voice. “I was born in Liberia; we are from the street. I went to Europe, and I made it. But God carried me through all the difficulties of greatness. This is the only way I can say thank you, Lord.”
A PEOPLE’S PARTY
It was, by every account that reached us, pure fun — the laughter of ordinary people and their former president under one roof, the cookpot-smoke rising, the music playing, the greetings pouring in from near and far.
This was not the cold, roped-off affair the word “resort” usually suggests. It was a community that simply walked in and made itself at home, because the man of the day has never, in the eyes of these Liberians, stopped being one of their own.
By nightfall the scene had done what good pictures do in this country — it travelled. Across Facebook, WhatsApp, and the radio talk shows, Monrovia buzzed with an avalanche of greetings for King George at sixty. And the image everybody kept sharing was not of the cake or the cars, but of those cassava women, cookpots and all, inside the big fence — going home with fifty dollars and a story they will tell for years.
In a country tired of being kept outside the gates, that one picture said something a thousand speeches could not.