For love of country

Emmanuel Urey's quest to empower Liberia winds through Wisconsin

by

Emmanuel Urey could not read until he was a teenager. He grew up in a tiny, impoverished and embattled village called Gormue in an isolated part of Liberia. Only when he and his family fled to Guinea to escape the civil war destroying his country did Urey finally have access to a school.

“My father thought I was too old to start school,” Urey remembers. “So, he sent me to apprentice with a blacksmith. I stayed with the blacksmith for two weeks. Then I went back to my family and told my father ‘I just want to go to school.’”

His father relented, and Emmanuel became the oldest, tallest child in kindergarten. Urey’s insatiable drive for education eventually led him to the UW-Madison, where this month, he earned a doctorate in environmental studies.

Urey says education has changed his life. And now, at about 36 years old — he does not know exactly when he was born — he is preparing to return to Liberia, where he hopes to help transform his country.

This month, he will start a job with the nongovernmental organization Landesa, working to reduce poverty by strengthening land rights for women and indigenous people. Urey is looking forward to returning home, although he hopes his wife and five children — his youngest was born six months ago — can stay in the States for two more years so his wife can finish nursing school at Madison College and his two oldest sons can graduate from West High School.

Urey’s already had an enormous effect on his homeland, helping to organize the country’s presidential archives and training college students to make videos of the country’s elders. He’s also raising money to build a school in his old home village.

Gregg Mitman, a UW-Madison professor of history and environmental studies with an academic interest in Liberia, says that the university has benefited greatly from having Urey study here.

“He’s brought so much to the UW in the context of the Wisconsin Idea and community engagement and really taking that public service mission to a developing country like Liberia,” says Mitman, one of Urey’s academic advisors. “He’ll be very much in Liberia as a kind of ambassador, if you will, of the University of Wisconsin.”

He expects Urey will go far. “It’s not often that that happens where someone who gets this higher degree is willing to go back to serve their country. Emmanuel is really committed and passionate about that,” Mitman says. “That to me speaks to his character.

To understand Urey’s life story, you need to know a little about what was happening in Liberia while he was growing up.

The Republic of Liberia is located in West Africa. It is about the size of the state of Tennessee. Many Africans migrated there over the centuries in search of fertile soil and access to the ocean. But, in the 1800s, the indigenous peoples were joined by several thousand African American settlers from the United States. They came because many white Americans had become worried about the increasing number of free-born and freed slaves living among them. Some of the white Americans simply wanted free blacks out of the country; others were Quakers and abolitionists who wanted black people to live free.

Tensions grew between the African American settlers and the native people. The settlers attempted to replace traditional practices and values with the Western, Christian society they had become accustomed to in America. As time passed, many of the American Liberians became the country’s ruling elite. They sought to create strong ties between the American and Liberian governments and encouraged investments in Liberia by American businesses.

One of the largest of those investments came from the rubber company Firestone, which took a 99-year lease in 1926 for a vast tract of land to raise rubber trees. Firestone promised to reimburse the people displaced by its rubber plantation, but never paid. Those who had lost their homes and farms blamed the government for their losses. Finally, in 1979, when government raised the price of rice, a dietary staple, resentment turned to rage, and protests against the government began.

The government cracked down hard on the protesters, and in 1990, a civil war erupted. Government and rebel soldiers, some of them still children, committed terrible atrocities, raping and murdering people of all ages. An estimated 200,000 people were killed, and another 800,000 were displaced. And 7,000 became refugees in neighboring countries.

This was the world into which Urey was born.

Urey was not yet 10 years old when he first became aware of the turmoil gripping his country.

“I remember that it was Dec. 24, 1989, and we were celebrating Christmas when we heard a war had started,” Urey recalls. “I was a small child and didn’t understand what the adults were talking about.”

He recalls walking three hours to the nearest market town where there was also a military barracks. “We saw military trucks leave in the morning with soldiers going to fight and only a few of them returning in the evening,” he says.

The following spring, soldiers came to his own village. “They took our three sisters,” he says.

The sisters were in their late teens. The soldiers held them for a month before the girls returned. Eventually, he says, his sisters married their captors. Soldiers also targeted boys in the village.

“Rebel fighters would come to our village to try to conscript me and other boys,” he says. “I was taken three times, but each time, I escaped.”

After a brief period of relative peace, war broke out again when Charles Taylor, who had been accused of war crimes for his involvement in Sierra Leone’s civil war, became president following a coup.

This time, Urey and his family were in the thick of it. Taylor had chosen to establish his seat of government in a town near Urey’s village. Because the people in Urey’s area had allowed Taylor to do this, rebel fighters brought the war to the families in and around Gormue.

“We were targets, and my father decided we had to leave,” he says.

The family walked a few hours across the border into Guinea. Then they walked for more than a day to reach a refugee camp filled with other Liberians fleeing the war at home.

The camp had the school where Urey began his education.

When the family finally returned to their village several years later, they found it had been burned to the ground. Urey’s father decided to stay and rebuild. His father asked a relative, a government official, to help Urey, now ready for seventh grade, continue his education at a middle school in the capital city, Monrovia. Urey went to the city, moved into a boys’ dorm, and started classes.

Urey’s new school was affiliated with the Salvation Army, and he joined the choir and drum and bugle corps. And, he was taken under the wings of a missionary couple who ran the school.

‘The missionaries were very good to me,” Urey says. “They let me make a garden at their house. They sent me to driving school. I did not know it at the time, but they were saving money for me to go to college.”

After high school, he went to Cuttington University, in Suacoco, Liberia, and earned a degree in pre-medicine in three years instead of the usual four. When he graduated, he realized he did not want to be a doctor. Instead, he got job with the government land commission, working on land policy reform and environmental issues for about a year. While in that job, he learned of a USAID scholarship that might make it possible for him to study in the United States.

Mitman says that Urey was a natural fit at the UW, which has a long history of working on land rights through the Nelson Institute’s Land Tenure Center.

“The Land Tenure Center at the UW was very active a few decades ago and produced a number of alumni who have been advising governments around the world about land rights,” he says. “It’s that UW network that helped Emmanuel get into the UW and the Nelson program.”

Urey started at UW in 2011. There were some early culture shocks. One night not long after starting school, he got off at the wrong bus stop and quickly became lost. He spent hours wandering around south Madison, trying to figure out where he was. He couldn’t find anyone to help him and feared he’d have to sleep on the street.

Finally, he came across a tourist from South America who helped him find his way home. “We were just four or five blocks away,” he remembers.

Mitman says that Urey has been a huge help to him in his research on Liberia. “Meeting Emmanuel was really serendipity,” Mitman says. “I was planning to go to Liberia in the summer of 2012 to do research, and a colleague at the Nelson Institute told me there was a student from Liberia in the graduate program and introduced us.”

Since then, Urey and Mitman have collaborated on two documentaries about Liberia. In the Shadow of Ebola looks at the effects the infectious disease has had on the country as it recovers from civil war. The Land Beneath Our Feet explores how Firestone company changed the country by planting massive rubber plantations that displaced farmers, depriving them of a living. Mitman says the exploitation increased social and economic inequality and was a factor in the growing tensions between the ruling elite and ordinary people. The film grew out of Mitman’s discovery of old footage shot by a medical expedition in the 1920s.

“We took that footage with us to Liberia and showed it to the people of Gormue,” Mitman says. “The villagers were very interested in the footage, especially by how much Liberia had been changed with Firestone’s arrival.

“Emmanuel became the main protagonist in that film,” Mitman adds, noting that viewers see the impact of Firestone’s rubber plantation through Urey’s eyes.

Mitman and Urey have collaborated on other projects, including organizing the country’s presidential archives and working to preserve the knowledge of Liberian elders by starting a project video recording them.

Both projects address a crisis facing Liberia. After decades of civil war, many elderly people have been killed and the country is predominantly made up of young people — in 2015, the average age was 18.6.

“We have a very young population and we don’t know the knowledge of our past,” Urey says.

The loss of that cultural knowledge has made it difficult for the country to find stability. Urey believes it has made some Liberians prone to violence, something he noticed as an undergrad. Students there were quick to riot, burning tires in the street and blocking traffic.

“All of us grew in war time. So we don’t know peace time,” he says. “How do we connect young people who grew up in a violent situation to the past of a peaceful country? Your time was a bad time, but this country was once peaceful and it was good.”

Urey is also working to change the lives of children still living in the village where he was born by raising money to build a school. Through a GoFundMe site and PayPal, he has raised about $5,000 toward his goal of $10,000, which will cover construction.

“Each time I travel to Gormue and the surrounding villages, I feel sad to see the over 80 school-age children who are not going to school,” he writes in a fundraising letter.

The plans call for four classrooms, a bathroom, offices, a hand pump, and a solar system to illuminate classrooms at night for adult classes. At first, some of the more educated parents will serve as volunteer teachers. Eventually, Urey hopes to be able to hire teachers with more experience.

Mitman believes the school project will be a success because it is a grassroots effort.

“Emmanuel is a determined and persistent man,” Mitman says. “He has charisma, and he has the trust of the people of his village. Unlike many failed attempts by outsiders to establish schools in the county, the local people are investing their own labor to build the school and establish a farm to earn money to sustain it.”

Wilmot Valhmu, a fellow Liberian who is friends with Urey, believes Urey will go far back in their home country. “He is good at getting people involved and he has good leadership abilities. He is honest and credible,” says Valhmu, who works for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. “I am impressed by his humbleness and his desire to serve the people of Liberia and improve their lives. I believe he will have a great impact when he returns to Liberia.”

Urey understands that land is everything to Liberians. And that is why the country’s long history of exploitation has been so devastating.

“The only thing they have is land. They are connected to the land for their livelihood, their cultural heritage,” he says. “People are angry, poor, desperate, because the land has been taken from them and they have nothing to do.”

Liberia continues to grapple with land grabs by wealthy corporations. Today, the country faces exploitation from Asian companies interested in the country’s palm forests. When Urey returns, one of his priorities will be to lobby for the Land Rights Act, which protects community ownership of land. Developed in 2014, a watered-down version passed a lower house. But environmental and social justice groups are fighting to get the original language passed.

“It recognizes indigenous peoples’ rights over the land,” Urey explains. “Nobody will be able to just go grab the land, they’ll have to go and negotiate with the community.”

In pushing for the law, Urey knows that he is putting his life at risk. There have been recent killings that some believe were linked to the government. In April, a journalist was killed and a BBC reporter fled the country after being publicly criticized by President George Weah.

“This is not something I’m walking into blindly,” he says. Some people — including Liberians — have tried to talk him out of going back. But Urey is determined.

He has his eyes on even greater heights, expecting to one day run for office, perhaps even president. “There are a lot of Liberians with integrity, but they don’t want anything to do with the government,” says Urey, adding that these are the people the country needs.

Because the country’s constitution gives the president a lot of power, he dreams about how the right person could do a lot to transform Liberia — by fighting corruption, addressing land reform, developing the infrastructure, and appointing honorable judges and officials.

“When I go back to Liberia, I’ll be able to make a real change in the lives of the people,” he says. “The country needs people like us with integrity and technical know how.

“I do not want to be president because I want power,” he adds. “I want to be president because that is how I can make the greatest impact on society and help ordinary people. That is my passion.”