InfoAnda - Family photos offer rare look at pre-war Liberia

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Yahoo! My Yahoo! Mail More Yahoo! Services Account Options New User? Sign Up Sign In Help Yahoo! Search web search Home Singapore Asia Pacific World Business Entertainment Sports Technology Weekend Edition World Family photos offer rare look at pre-war Liberia AFP - 59 minutes ago Send IM Story Print Family photos offer rare look at pre-war Liberia DAKAR (AFP) - – A worn manila envelope of old photos held the memory of two Canadian brothers' idyllic expat childhood in Liberia, a far-off land of wild beaches and lush jungle where they even had a pet chimpanzee. Three decades later, Jeff and Andrew Topham made the trip back, discovering their envelope also held a rare glimpse of the country before it was torn apart by two civil wars. Returning to Liberia was "something I have always wanted to do...especially since I had my dad's photos and this ideal vision of this place and my childhood," said Jeff Topham. But the sentimental journey turned into something much more. The brothers were only three and six when they moved with their parents in 1976. Over the next three years, their father John, who worked for the Canadian mining explosives firm Exchem, recorded their African adventure in thousands of photographs, from family shots to scenes and people in the capital Monrovia. As the boys lived out their "mythical" childhood, Africa's oldest republic was on the edge of disaster. In 1979, the year they left, a price increase in the staple rice set off bloody riots that claimed hundreds of lives and shattered Liberia's calm. A year later, soldiers led by Samuel Doe carried out a brutal coup d'etat, murdering President William Tolbert and later executing most of his cabinet. Doe's military regime ushered in civil war that dragged on until 2003, by which time a quarter of a million Liberians had been killed and the economy and infrastructure destroyed. The Topham brothers finally returned in 2010. Both had become photographers and Liberia was rebuilding. "We didn't really know what was going to happen," Jeff told AFP by phone from Canada. "We had this stack of photos, probably about 1,000 slides and 1,000 negatives in my dad's archives. We printed a bunch, about 100. The idea was to do a before-and-after photo recreation." The results are poignant. In one shot, a happy Topham family stands in front of their Liberian house. Its counterpart 30 years on shows the brothers before an overgrown ruin. But more jolting was the discovery that a whole generation of Liberians "had never seen Monrovia not destroyed." "When we started taking pictures we started talking to people and realised no one had pictures. These photos we had all of a sudden became this rare proof that Liberia once was intact and Monrovia was a working city," Jeff said. "It was a pretty shocking revelation." To make sure, they went to the rundown, looted Liberia National Museum. They found about 100 photographs in "a little closet in the corner", which they immediately scanned. "That was the whole national collection of photography," marvelled Jeff. Then came a chance meeting with "a guy" in a bar who had an interview booked with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf but needed cameramen. The brothers stepped in, met Africa's first elected female president and gave her one of their father's old photos of Monrovia. A wish from Sirleaf led them to start a full-blown bid to gather more pre-war photos to donate to the National Museum, an initiative they call the Liberia Photo Repatriation Project. Their website, www.liberia77.com, includes an appeal by Sirleaf herself. "We need photos like this to show what this country once was. I urge you to send all your images to us...," she says. The site also sells prints to raise money for the effort. "The response has already been tremendous," said Jeff, "from other adults who had spent time as children in expat families in Liberia, to a woman who bought one of their prints as it shows her childhood home." Photos of pre-war Liberia do exist outside the country, notably in a sizeable Liberia Collections Project at Indiana University in the US. Its coordinator Verlon Stone told AFP he often gets requests from Liberia. "Parents want to show their children these photos," he said in an email. The brothers have also made a documentary of their journey called "Liberia '77", which includes a moving bid to reshoot their father's team at Exchem. They heard only 10 men might show up but about 80 arrived. Some had walked for miles; a few dozen carried their old Exchem identity cards -- their only proof of better days, they said. "They had buried their ID cards to hang on to them in case Exchem ever came back. They said if the rebels found you with photographs with you looking happy or healthy you would be killed," recounted Jeff. Veteran photojournalist Sando Moore, 52, who also appears in the film, mourns the loss of photos more than most. His voice cracked with emotion when he told AFP he "cannot pinpoint to anything I have worked for in the past." He lost all his professional archives when The Observer newspaper was burnt down in 1990, as well as those kept at his home which was ransacked by looters. "If you don't know where you came from, how can you know where you are going," he says pointedly on the Liberia '77 website. 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