Copyright © 2003 The Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee

Fritz Massaquoi says he originally called this piece of his artwork “Women in the Marketplace.” When he showed it to three different people, they all remarked on the strong spiritual theme. He said the Rev. Joe Ballard, rector at St. James, Knoxville, where Massaquoi is a communicant, proclaimed it a scene of the Transfiguration. “Three disciples were taken up the mountain,” Massaquoi said, “and there were nine left there. … And these [on the right] are waiting to see what happens when [the disciples] come back down.” Massaquoi said he gave the original piece to St. James and suggested that prints from it might be used as a fund-raiser.

photo by Sharon Rasmussen

By Sharon Rasmussen
Communication Director

Fritz Massaquoi has been many things in his 77 years: the son of a Liberian tribal chief; a college student in the States during the ’40s and ’50s; longtime employee of a Swedish mining company; patriarch over an extended family as his home country descended into the turmoil of civil war; teacher; artist; and communicant at St. James church in Knoxville.

He has always been an artist, interpreting his experiences in batik, tie-dye, weaving, painting and handmade papers. “Artwork was a hobby, it wasn’t my profession,” he said during an interview at his 11th Street studio. “I just did art. It came rather haphazardly. I learned to crochet from my mother. Traditionally, men weave in my tribe, and men do embroidery. Women dye. I watched them tie, so I knew how to do that, but I was not taken out to the bush and shown which leaves and which barks for which colors, so I do not know that at all.”

His artwork most frequently uses the themes of his youth, though it’s clear his mind turns often to the brutal rebellions he witnessed as an adult in Liberia. In describing the artwork he called “Repentance” that he created this year for General Convention, for example, Massaquoi said, “Maybe something went wrong, and we all need to pray seriously about it and repent. The problem started between the tribal folks and those [slaves who] returned from America. Maybe it is time we repent and make up. If we do those four things [named in the theme for the convention] – receive, repent, reconcile and restore – we would be on the right path.”

Childhood Memories

In listening to him, one gets the feeling that he revisits all the things he’s been with some regularity, turning over the memories and examining them for new insights. He describes events of his past as if they occurred recently: bright with details, clear in his mind’s eye.

When he was a child, his family spent part of the year in Monrovia, Liberia, where he went to school, and part of the year in the village where his father was chief.

“My father’s village is N’Jabacca, and we are near the border to Sierra Leone. When my father was alive, we never saw a Christmas in the city. School summertime was November to March, and when school closed in November, we’d pack up and go straight to the village.

“My father was in polygamy a long time, so that was a chance for all the other children to see their mothers. We all went to visit each other’s mothers, and it was a great time. There were 20 mothers in all. We’d come back to Monrovia, go to school, then back to the village again.”

He looks back a lifetime and across a world to another culture.

“I did my puberty rites in the village – they’d scare the life out of you – to make you a man. And I was only 11 at the time.

“To be in the village: There was nothing. They went out, what they came back with was what you ate. You went down to the creek to take a bath, to get water to cook with … it was simple.

Funerals were very simple. I remember when one of my uncles died, we had the body dressed in strips like bandages and put on a flat bed in the middle of the village outdoors. And the man said something in Arabic that I didn’t understand, and after his incantation, people my uncle owed came up and told how much he owed them, and then all who owed him also came forward, and everything was totaled. I remember there were more people he owed than owed him. My mother had given me some money to take up to put on the plate on his stomach, and I thought, ‘oh God, do I have to do that?!’ ”

Seeking Direction

He traveled to the States to continue his schooling, and he earned a bachelor’s degree at Iowa State University. He later did some graduate work at the University of Colorado. Restless, he took tests to define a more desirable direction, but when testing identified art as his primary aptitude, he knew his family would not support that as a career choice. “I knew I could not come home as an artist.”

He said the second aptitude that testing revealed was social-personal relations, and the third was education. He decided to combine those into a program in educational psychology, but elected not to complete a degree.

Returning home was difficult. “My brothers thought, ‘how can you go to America for nine years, and come and sit in the village – there’s no electricity, no water.’ ” He laughs.

“But after all, I started there,” and when he went home, “I wrote this wonderful letter to all my classmates and friends about being close to nature!” A year of that life was enough, and when an acquaintance invited him to consider working for LAMCO, a Swedish mining company, he went to see the general manager. He said they “clicked,” and he started work in the company’s human resources department.

During a two-year stint in Stockholm, Massaquoi said he was struck by the variety of opportunities the company gave employees to explore leisure interests. The company later moved him from personnel to recreation, and it financed a study tour of occupational and therapeutic recreation centers in Sweden to train him in the operations of such centers. It was during that tour that he developed interest in a Swedish weaving technique called “rya,” and he calls that the real beginning of his interest in art.

When Massaquoi returned to Liberia, he asked local employees their hobbies and interests, then organized groups of tennis players and bridge players, for example, under activity leaders. He said he started a hobby center for employees’ wives who at that time were not allowed to work. The center offered weaving, ceramics, woodwork, photography, music and other activities.

After 25 years with the company, he took a lump-sum retirement. He ordered 16 looms, three potter’s wheels, a kiln and the materials needed to open a crafts center in Monrovia. He stored the materials in his house while he worked on his dream.

Descent into War

But then, he said, with a long pause, “it all broke loose. The first thing, I was arrested and taken to the tribunal. They claimed I had not paid taxes on property. The [Monrovia] property is where the executive mansion is, and when I told them that, I said ‘I think somebody ought to pay me.’ ”

“The second time I was arrested was for my father’s estate. On the writ that they brought to me, to take me, my name was not on it. It was one of my sisters and my two brothers, but they were all three dead.” He could not pay the money they told him the estate owed, and they talked about seizing his property until he paid the debt.

He began to think about leaving his home.

“By ’89, everything was gone. The food was scarce, gasoline was scarce. Those who lived on the outskirts had trouble getting in to town.

“Folks asked how I could sleep so hungry, and I said ‘easy – you lay down and close your eyes and go to sleep.’ It was rough.”

He talks quickly, revisiting a story that is long past, but remains vivid in his mind.

“I was under house arrest twice – one of my nephews was chairman of joint security, and they were after him. A truckload of them came to the house looking for him.” They looked through the house and kept Massaquoi from leaving it for several days, saying that if they allowed him to leave, he would warn his nephew.

“A week later, they came again, looking for the nephew who was chief of police. … It got unbearable at that point. The crowning episode that made me leave was that a young man had been murdered. Everybody assumed he was a rebel.

“Late one night, I heard a car coming. The officers wanted to know which foreign government I was giving my house to. We had two houses the Swedish embassy used; one was the chancery and one the residence. He said to me, ‘we want to be sure you give it to someone who is our friend.’

“Because this guy had been murdered and I had been so alone, out of the town, the next morning I thought – get out. By that time I weighed not even 90 pounds.”

Massaquoi described how he’d declined an invitation from a cousin to an evening party. He went home to sleep and was later awakened by the cousin, who told him the president had been killed and his wife put in jail. When Massaquoi drove to town the next day, he said, “there were dead bodies everywhere.”

Word came that authorities were looking for his cousin, and Massaquoi thought it best to slip away, but his cousin decided to go to the authorities, saying he’d done nothing wrong. Massaquoi started the long drive back to his office, then later heard his cousin was among 13 people who had been tied to a pole and shot. “Of the 13 who were executed, nine were relatives.”

He decided to leave the country in 1990, and he said he passed through four checkpoints over the 11 miles from his home in Monrovia to the airport. He opened his bag to be searched at the first two, but “by the third, I was sick and tired of soldiers. I said, ‘I have just opened my suitcase two times. What do you think I would have put in here from that checkpoint to here? Soldiers are lined up all along the way, and where would I get out?’ ”

One of the soldiers suggested he may have a friend among the other soldiers, and Massaquoi said he responded, “You don’t trust each other?”

Though his house was intact when he left, Massaquoi knows it is no longer. “A lady in Washington D.C. sent me some photographs and told me she bought my photo albums in the market. She promised to send the rest one of these days. Another guy bought a painting I did – one of the paintings from my living room. Every-thing is all over the place.”

A New Life

After a long and grueling trip, he reached his sister’s home in Knoxville. He slowly settled in, and he worked to redirect his life. “I have always gone to church,” he said. “I’ve always prayed. [But] I prayed for one thing – to get out of the country.

“The second Lenten season I was here at St. James, I said to my sister I would fast during Lent. ‘What will you ask for this time?’ she said. I told her I wanted to smile from within.” He said he was tired of smiling at people and then after leaving them, “the whole world just drops down on my shoulders.”

“Then I went to Cursillo. I hadn’t cried so much in a long, long, long time. Then I went to Alpha. Between those things, I have gotten to realize that someone put me right here. People around here have been very nice.”

But he still had family in Liberia, and the news from home was hard to hear.

“I think the most tears I had was in getting my son here. That wore me out. He was at the airport the morning I left. I had tried to get a visa for him, but they told me they couldn’t give it to young folks because they would have no loyalty to want to come back. He was 19 then.”

“I had told my son not to travel around with his passport, because they were killing people from the Nimba area … the crowds were killing Gios [members of the Gio tribe], and he was born there when I worked for [LAMCO].”

At Christmas the first year he was in Knoxville, he learned his son was trying to get out by walking with a friend to Sierra Leone. He later heard the friend had lost contact with his son.

“After crying all night, I called a lady in Canada who I thought had connections with the International Red Cross. She called back three weeks, a month later, saying ‘we found your son in a food line.’ She gave directions on how to reach him.

“I went to [Al] Gore’s office – he was a senator then – and after I cried in his office, he could not help but write a letter for me. I went to John Duncan’s office, and did a repeat performance and got a letter from him. … I turned those letters in to the embassy to get a visa for my son.”

Thoughts of Home

Massaquoi shows his own green card, which he says he renews every ten years. He said he thinks about becoming a U.S. citizen, but worries that if he returns to Liberia, the government would not recognize the claim of a non-citizen on his family properties.

So he listens for news of improvements at home, hoping to some day go back and claim what belongs to him.

>“If things are really any better, I think I will go. … I don’t know – I could go back home to look around, but to start over … I’m 77 now. I don’t think I could do much now, the energy’s gone.

“My big problem with the whole situation today is that … well, you’ve heard that the peacekeepers are there, and Monrovia’s quiet, but they’re still fighting outside of Monrovia. And I think if they had disarmed the folks – that should have been a priority. They can be ruthless. They don’t even know what they’re doing. They’re little kids.

“If they would just disarm the folks, the young boys. …When I was growing up, you’d never do anything against your father, your grandfather. Now they’re shooting their fathers, their brothers. It’s gone bad.”

He says that he knows Liberia’s new interim leader, Charles Gyude Bryant, who also is chairman of the board of trustees for the Episcopal Church in Liberia.

“I know him and know that he was a good businessman. … He has been in and out of America long enough to know how people ought to be living.”

A statement on the Episcopal Migration Ministries Web site reminds us, “Even if our Biblical injunction to welcome the stranger did not exhort us to reach out to others, our commitment to our spiritual family certainly would.” In this issue, we look at human rights, the plight of refugees and their impact in our own communities.

Related stories in this issue:

• Agency, churches partner to change lives
• Poor People's March honors Martin Luther King's 'dream'