"Anyone would guess it was a prison. Its
four-metre-high walls are topped with coiled barbed wire and punctuated with
watchtowers. Its tall metal gates are locked. Yet a glimpse through one door,
left slightly ajar, reveals its inmates died years ago. The site in Monrovia,
Liberia's capital, is an abandoned cemetery where no one has been buried for
decades. The walls aren't there to confine the dead, but to keep out the living
– people whom Liberian society has forgotten who inhabit its crumbling tombs.
"There was a body there, but I took it
out and threw it away," says Junior Toe. A veteran tomb dweller, as those
occupying the cemetery are known, he has lost count of his years living among
the dead. Standing on the worn edge of an open tomb, he peers into his
second-hand bedroom. The empty space, about two-metres deep, is finished with
stained green tiles crossed by vines. "When you look for a tomb, the body
can't be too fresh," he advises. "It has to be really dead, then you
can clear it away into a bag..."
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