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Ray Martin Toe
Mleyaun: A Man from Nyaake
The Native Boy: An Autobiography of a Man from Nyaake. By William K. Reeves. Northridge: New World African Press, 2004, 278 pp.
In a more literate society, an accomplished professional stands rather obliged to hand down in a written form his life story for the benefit of his posterity. In some respects, the autobiography by William Kamma Reeves epitomizes the fulfillment of his obligation to future generations of Liberian educators. A retired schoolteacher and administrator of nearly forty years, the septuagenarian is now sharing his experiences, challenges, and achievements in a thrilling book written in anecdotal form, if somewhat of a convoluted style.
The book centers around the anything but “obscure life” of teacher Reeves. The veteran schoolteacher reveals the personal qualities and passions that he brought to the teaching profession. Thanks to Christian benevolence and self-help community development initiatives, he was able to stumble into a rare opportunity to learn how to read and write in his ancestral home, thereby becoming an early crusader against illiteracy in rural Liberia. Reeves shares his thoughtful reflections on the barriers that he encountered while treading the chaotic path of schooling and teaching. It is also a history of the professor’s consciousness of traditional Grebo society, as well as his adaptation to the changes induced by missionary education in southeastern Liberia.
The book is also a socio-cultural documentary and a psychological mirror, exemplifying the psychic and cultural tensions that are inherent in the process of attaining a western education in a disintegrating traditional society. Flashes of Reeves’s fighting spirit pervade the book, evincing the vigor with which he rode rough waves and tackled a lifelong battle against ignorance and illiteracy in Liberia. His voice is that of a daring, resilient and triumphant chap, a wise and keen observer of the Liberian leviathan. Despite formidable odds, this rural man of enormous courage was able to attain a higher education and live his life in full.
A master storyteller, Reeves seasons his story with wry humor that leaves one chortling throughout the 200+ pages. The theme of education is at the core of this somewhat rare testimony by a Liberian man of the classroom. It implicitly underscores the belief that education is the redeeming grace for every Liberian, especially for a rural Liberian who has been at the fringes of the Liberian nation-state. Like “righteousness,” education “should be sought first” in order to “foster your ambition in whatever field you desire to pursue.” This remarkable story strongly affirms education not only as an effective means of creating one’s niche, but also as a potential wheel of upward social mobility, even in the highly stratified Liberian society of the professor’s generation. For, did not Kpaye Kamma, a nude village boy, later christened William Reeves in the village of Kablake, transform through literacy to become a Liberian educator, a “mleyaun” donning a three-piece business suit?
Indeed, to his Grebo kinsmen, William Reeves is a “mleyaun,” a descriptive Grebo people` pejoratively use to refer to a westernized, educated Grebo. The word means a man of Mle, a powerful chief who welcomed and accommodated a group of African-American repatriates who, in the 19th century, transplanted to the Grebo coast a westernized community that was initially styled the state of Maryland in West Africa, but which in 1857 became Maryland County, one of Liberia’s sub-political divisions. Thus, after Reeves was invited to attend school and become a Christian, his father, a former Gold Coast migrant worker, perceived him as a “mleyaun.” No sooner had Reeves started preschool than his father bought him “a silver spoon” and declared, “Here, student in waiting, you must begin to be like people in school by eating with kwi thing.”
Reeves relates the story of his transformation with relish. In fact, he may be said to typify a member of Liberia’s educated elite who supposedly reflect the destiny of their backward country being guided through western education into modernization. Yet, on a personal score, Reeves has upheld “the Christian philosophy of life defined as sharing, especially of self, a sharing that hurts and can be a cross,” by choosing teaching, a profession that “gives copiously to all seeking help without any cost to them.” However, unlike many educated Liberians, William Reeves was not alienated from his ethnic heritage, nor was he ashamed of being a Grebo man.
“Yes, it is very true that you can get a man out of the bush but you cannot get the bush out of him,” joked his Americo-Liberian host, who was serving as a commissioner in Gbeapo District, “I did not know that an educated man like you would recourse to his father’s way of wearing cutlass across his chest.” The college-educated Reeves had just been assigned as acting principal for the Tubman Wilson Institute High School in Zwedru, the headquarters of Grand Gedeh County. As he had to trek “on the winding trials to Kanweake,” from where he would catch a money bus to Zwedru, the village boy turned school teacher, in typical Grebo fashion, was wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts, sneakers, a white helmet, a cutlass in sheath across his chest, and a rifle braced on his left shoulder. Commissioner Charles Cummings killed a rooster to entertain Reeves that day. What he did not know was that William Reeves was of notable Gedebo parentage, a heritage he is profoundly proud of.
“I come from two distinguished family lines,” he divulges, “all with the names of celebrated warriors, who ably defended and preserved the territorial integrity of the small fertile Grebo country, a leading rice-producing chiefdom in the then Eastern Province.” His maternal grandfather, Tarju Tarmu, was a mystically conceived warrior, a sort of reservist commando for the defense of the Gedeboland against all encroachments. His paternal grandfather, Nagneh Pawah, was the highest profile herbalist and the most perceptive seer in the circle of Grebo soothsayers. While in the traditional Grebo society this social background was “solid ground for a youngster to grow steadily,” Reeves accepted the challenge of leaving home to be socialized in a rather microcosmic western environment. He attended boarding schools for twelve years, one run by the Webbo District in Nyaake, the provincial headquarters in upper Maryland County, and another run by Irish-American Catholic missionaries in Harper, Cape Palmas. For, as he says, although he had not made his “father’s glory" his, Reeves’s warrior genes clearly marked him for distinction and provided him with a unique perspective that spurred him on through very challenging pursuits.
Every opportunity that came the way of William Reeves was like manna from heaven. It began one Christmas when the young Reeves and other children accepted candies from a visiting missionary in Kablake, who asked them to be baptized and go to school. Kpaye Kamma became William Reeves and consequently found himself under the tutelage of the legendary Ma Helen Young (grandmother of O. Natty B. Davis, the renowned Liberian lawyer called the "Law Tree"), a zealous African Methodist Episcopal missionary teacher and “torchbearer of Christianity and education “in Grebo villages.” The next opportunity presented to Reeves was in his father’s compound, where prominent “Suwroke elders converged to plead with my parents to give their son to attend the newly established Webbo District sponsored boarding school.” He took great advantage of this “glorious opportunity” and acquired rudimentary skills in reading and writing. So he did with the opportunity to attend Our Lady of Fatima High School, a legendary Catholic school in Harper, Maryland County. It was here that Reeves subsequently earned a college degree in teacher education from the now defunct Maryland College of Our Lady of Fatima.
Reeves owes every milestone of his cognitive development to Nyaake. It was here that the idea of a boarding school for him and other rural boys was wisely conceived. Reeves got his solid grounding in literacy and numeracy from this boarding school for “nine stormy and rocky years.” He has fond memories of this rural town and presents it as the “gateway to education, civilization, commerce, and trade” in that part of Liberia. The town teemed with people of diverse ethnic backgrounds, esteemed community leaders and distinguished teachers, most of whom mentored and influenced his professional life. We meet the innovative Gabriel Gadegbeku, nicknamed "New Idea," a Togolese immigrant and the school’s committee chairman; Reverend Joseph Andrews, principal of the boarding school and an etymologist who taught Latin and bookkeeping; Peter Kun, the Gold Coast educated Kru man who taught Reeves the quickest method of solving a math problem; and Henry Nyema Prowd, district supervisor of schools and professor of English who inspired Reeves to appreciate the English language.
Situated on the west bank of the Cavalla River, Nyaake had indeed been a beacon for European missionary activities and business adventures, including German, English and Portuguese traders who brought migrant workers from neighboring West African countries. Historically, Nyaake was a source of feuds among some sections of the Grebo, with each claiming it as theirs. However, it also served as a rallying point for the 1910 Grebo Resistance against the “brutality, suppression, oppression, and sometimes killings” of Grebo villagers by the “marauding Liberian Frontier Force of the Americo-Liberian settler government in faraway Monrovia.” For the greater part of his time in Nyaake, Reeves stayed away from his home village of Kablake “to be closer to the book learning and achieve my goal in time without faltering,” and to avoid the “very intruding presence of some members of the Liberian Frontier Force,” the “roving armed men” who frequented the villages to forcibly recruit porters.
Life at the boarding school was not all rosy. Due to the failure of the Webbo District to “meet its duty and obligation to support the school,” the sixty-plus boys and their principal lived in cramped dwellings, sleeping on “naked floors, not cemented, in rooms without doors and windows without shutters.” Reeves and fellow minors had to grapple with the condescending and authoritarian behavior of senior students while a “battle against the bloodsucking fleas called jiggers,” coupled with the scarcity of food, fiercely raged on. These deplorable hardships took a personal toll on Reeves when he developed a “sore about an inch deep on my leg.” When the sore abscessed and would not cure, a worried Reeves remembered a myth among his people: “There was a legend in the Gedebo country that a foreign white missionary, a Methodist (old), was maltreated, and the cruel treatment left him with sores all over his body. Because of this, the legend alleges that anybody from a one hundred percent uneducated indigenous group seeking a western type of education, would fall victim to sores.” Reeves, notwithstanding the curse of sores, graduated from the makeshift boarding school triumphantly as the valedictorian of his class.
It took us nine stormy and rocky years to attain this height tonight. As I know as well as you do, the journey was not all stormy or rocky, it was also blissful and challenging. And challenged we were. And therefore, we need a watchword, carefully chosen from among the many useful words, a word that would propel, enliven, and encourage us daily, of the English language. Perseverance was our unanimous choice and Thorndike or Webster defines it briefly as follows: “Sticking to a purpose or an aim; never giving up what one has set out to do.” With God leading and guarding our way, we persevered to capture this which we gloriously claimed a noble height. My dear students, I would therefore advise you to have a cause to achieve or die for.
If it was Nyaake that gave Professor Reeves a solid grounding in literacy and numeracy, Harper provided the inspiration for his lifelong career in education. Reeves was no sooner hired as an inventory clerk at the Firestone hospital in Cavalla, Maryland County, than he landed another “glorious opportunity” to attend Our Lady of Fatima High School, where Catholic missionaries recruited boys who could not "afford the tuition fees," and would "teach for the mission upon completion.”
Eating meager portions of “farina and salt for breakfast, cassava and smoked fish for lunch, and rice," without much meat, "with soup, greens or palm butter,” as well as battling “blood-sucking, and malaria-infesting insects,” Reeves with other boys were vigorously drilled in algebra, English and Latin among other subjects by a dedicated group of priest teachers led by the late Archbishop Francis J. Carroll. He was appointed prefect for the boys, whom Monsignor Carroll jokingly called “black monkeys,” in response to which one of the boys had “the guts to openly call the bishop Irish monkey.” Reeves got his share of racial slurs and verbal abuse from a priest when he one day asked a younger friend to perform a chore on his behalf. “You baboon, you black monkey,” the annoyed priest derided Reeves, “you have no right to ask any of the junior students to perform your assigned task.” Reeves relates that the priest then “struck my head” with a stick that he had in his hand. Surprisingly, the priest was immediately transferred in disciplinary action for his inappropriate behavior. William Reeves, however, remained ever grateful to the Catholic Mission, despite having to deal with occasionally abusive priests. When his fellow boarding students, for whom he was a leader, were rebelling against a decision to deny them a break, Reeves admonished them:
Here, we are seeking education to better our lives in the future. As I know as well as you do know, many of us, if not all of us, cannot get the necessary support from our respective parents, willing as they are, I presume. What our parents cannot shoulder, the mission is unreservedly, spontaneously, and willingly sharing with us – education enriched with Catholic religious life. Are we saying that education is not what we desire? Then why did we come here? We must not abuse the God given opportunity.
When he graduated in 1955 as salutatorian of his class, Reeves was assigned to teach at Fatima Elementary School in Harper, which he describes as “conservative, orderly, and disciplined . . . an ideal and suitable place for a beginner teacher . . . where 80% of the students . . . hailed from well established Christian homes.” The Catholic Mission assigned him to Harper so he would be “afforded the opportunity to attend college.” At the teacher training college, Reeves studied child psychology, educational psychology, and philosophy of education among other courses. He was especially sensitive to the cultural contents of courses taught at the college. For example, he found classical music "childish," "irritating," and “baffling.” He explains his reaction when he heard a traditional Grebo call to action that occurred during music class, which he used as an excuse to escape a class he disliked:
While the gramophone record was barking, the great alarm horn was announcing some event in Hoffman Station, a suburb of Harper City. In short, the horn was summoning all able-bodied men to rush on the scene of the happening. At once my Grebo blood, sensing the magnitude of the happening, I gathered my man form and moved aggressively about the classroom. The priest wanted to know why I appeared upset. “Do you hear and understand the horn, the sound of which is echoing around here?” I asked the concerned instructor. “Oh, you don’t understand what the horn is saying? The same way your classical music baffles me.” Outside I moved very fast towards Hoffman Station, wanting the class and the instructor to believe that I was really going to the place where all able men were being summoned. I disappeared behind the towering trees, and home I went.
Reeves left Harper with a bachelor’s degree in teacher education. “No doubt you are academically and professionally prepared,” one of his professor priests told him, “to serve your people and country.” William Reeves ably served Liberia. Grand Gedeh County took a greater part of that sacrificial service. His story is worth reading.
Copyright © Ray Martin Toe
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