Ganta

Ganta, also written Gompa, grew up in Mano and Gio country in northern Nimba, where paths from the forest met the trade routes running north into the Mande towns of what is now Guinea. Kola nuts, iron, cloth and salt moved along them long before the Liberian state reached this far, and Mandingo traders brought Islam with them.

The town's modern history begins with the United Methodist mission founded in 1926 by the American doctor George Way Harley, who ran a hospital and a leprosy treatment centre here for decades and became one of the outside world's main recorders of Mano and Gio masks and society practice. The mission's hospital and schools drew people to the settlement, and the highway from Monrovia, later paved, turned the junction into the trading centre of the interior.

Nimba County was where Liberia's long crisis began: in December 1989 Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia entered Nimba from Côte d'Ivoire, and the fighting that followed took on ethnic lines, with violence against Gio, Mano, Krahn and Mandingo civilians. The town was fought over and badly damaged, and many residents left. Since 2003 it has grown quickly, rebuilt on trade rather than on any plan, and disputes over land and belonging have taken a long time to settle here as elsewhere in Nimba.

Ganta is a meeting point. Mano and Gio, often called Dan, are the peoples of the district, and the Dan are known internationally for their carved wooden masks, which belong to society and ceremonial life rather than to the market, however many copies are sold to travellers. Masquerade, drumming and dance mark funerals, initiations and celebrations in the villages around the town.

The Mandingo community has traded here for generations and gives Ganta a Muslim presence larger than in most Liberian towns, with mosques near the market and Quranic schools beside Methodist and Pentecostal churches. Guinean traders, French-speaking and often Maninka, cross daily, so the market carries a mixture of languages, currencies and goods that is unusual in Liberia.

The Poro and Sande societies remain central to village life, and their bush schools and groves are closed to outsiders without exception. The war is recent enough that questions of land, property and belonging are handled carefully, and reconciliation between communities has been a long project in Nimba. In ordinary dealings the town is brisk and commercial by Liberian standards, but greetings still come first, elders are addressed before anyone else, and asking permission before a photograph is expected everywhere.

Ganta had an estimated 41,000 residents in 2008, which makes it the second most populous city in Liberia, and its population swells on market days with traders from the surrounding districts and from Guinea. Trade is the livelihood: produce bought from farmers and bulked for Monrovia, manufactured goods and fuel moving the other way, freight yards, repair shops, money changing and transport.

Around the town, families farm upland rice, cassava, plantain and vegetables, with cocoa, coffee, rubber and oil palm as cash crops, and some young people work in mining, formal at the Nimba range and informal in gold and diamond digging. The mission hospital remains one of the most important medical institutions of the interior. Electricity comes from generators and solar panels, water from wells and pumps.

The day runs from early morning at the market and the taxi park to a slow afternoon and an evening of shops, bars and church halls along the highway. Traffic, dust in the dry season and mud in the rains, the state of the feeder roads, cross-border price swings and youth unemployment are the recurring subjects of conversation. Movement is constant: few towns in Liberia see as many people pass through.

Nimba eats country rice, the upland rice grown on farms cut from the forest, and the standard meal is rice under a soup. Palm butter, made from oil-palm fruit boiled and pounded, is the richest; cassava leaf, cooked slowly with palm oil and dried fish, is the most common; potato greens and soups thickened with bitterballs, small bitter garden eggs, fill out the range. Pepper is used generously.

Dumboy and fufu, both from cassava, are eaten with pepper soup in Mano and Gio households. Dried and smoked fish from the coast, goat, chicken and, in the villages, bushmeat are the usual proteins, and forest produce — palm oil, kola nuts, honey, snails and wild mushrooms — is sold through the market in quantity. Kola nuts are as much a courtesy as a food, offered to guests and elders.

The border gives the market things the rest of Liberia sees less of: Guinean bread, coffee, tinned goods and produce from the highlands around N'Zérékoré. Roadside eating is roasted corn and groundnuts, fried plantain, cassava chips, kala doughnuts and grilled meat at the junction. Palm wine and cane juice are the village drinks, with bottled beer and soft drinks trucked up from Monrovia.