TWO CITIES: What are the two cities you like most?
Or impressed you most?
Or most important in your life?
Why?
ROSE GEORGE: I choose Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, and Venice, which isn’t a capital but thinks it is. Monrovia because it impresses me and Venice because I love it.

TC: How would you describe these two cities?
RG: Monrovia is a city in West Africa on the ocean. It has white beaches and old buildings. It also has bodies buried in those white beaches, after 20 or so years of hideous war, and the buildings are mostly crumbling, and there is hardly any electricity or running water. Also, for many of the last couple of decades, Monrovia sheltered nearly all of Liberia’s population.

Venice is also a city on the sea. I love cities on the sea, and there is nowhere that seems more on the sea than Venice, as you have to cross the water to get to it. The best way to reach Venice is by train from Mestre, its ugly sister town on the mainland. The train goes over the lagoon that Venice sits on, so you arrive over water, and you get off the train and walk up the platform, and the first thing you see is more water, as the station is right on the Grand Canal.

TC: What can these two cities mean to you?
RG: Monrovia for me means hope. That sounds so cheesy, but it’s true. Liberia’s history has been so terrible: gruesome civil war, widespread rape and gang-rape. No-one has not been touched by what has happened in Liberia since the early 1970s. The city shows all this history. Take a right turn downtown and you end up at the stretch of beach where Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, who had just mounted a coup by disembowelling the president, tied the cabinet ministers to telegraph poles in their underwear and had them shot. Sometimes, you couldn’t set foot outside because there were so many bullets flying. People set out to buy rice from the next neighbourhood and ended up stranded there for months. But now Monrovia is bustling. It’s had peace for over two years. Its vile former president, Charles Taylor, is on trial for war crimes at the Hague, and Charles Taylor’s vile son is under arrest in the US. Last year Liberia elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first woman president, and a couple of months ago, Sirleaf switched on Monrovia’s first street lights. For twenty years, Monrovia has either been dark or hummed to the sound of generators, the only way to get electricity, and prohibitively expensive. Water is sold by water entrepeneurs. Yet Liberia, and Monrovia used to be so wealthy and peaceful, other Africans would fly there to do their shopping. It was really cool to have a Liberian passport. Monrovia today is a city that is healing. It has peacekeepers on the streets, an impressive president, and a little electricity. That’s why Monrovia for me means hope. Journalists always concentrate on war and rarely on what happens post-war. Monrovia is what can happen post-war, if things work. Someday it might be known again for its beaches.

Venice: I lived in Treviso, a northern Italian town 20 minutes from Venice, for 18 months. For a long time, I found it incredible that I could get on a train and 20 minutes later be in Venice. I would go there and just walk around, but I also had a friend with a house there, so we would go and have Venetian weekends. Venetian weekends involve aimless and purposeful walking – there are no cars in Venice. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a friend with a boat. The weekends will also involve aperitivi – a spritz, usually – at the Bar Rosso in Campo Santa Margarita, and at some point a slice of pizza from the takeaway pizza place in the Campo, which I maintain is the best pizza I’ve ever tasted. But mostly I love Venice because of all the water and all the walking. On a bad day, you can get to Venice and get on a vaporetto to the outside islands, and sit on it for hours. Or go to San Michele and walk around the cemetery. People who complain that Venice is noisy or overcrowded or too touristy are wrong. Well, there are too many tourists and not enough residents, it’s true. But it’s never too noisy or overcrowded. If you follow the masses from the station to San Marco, it’s crowded. All you have to do is take a turn to the left and you’re in the Ghetto, the world’s first. There’s hardly ever anyone there.

TC: How would you describe the people live in these two cities in general?
RG: Monrovians are resilient, mistrustful and difficult. They’re also warm, welcoming and they laugh, despite everything. They work hard, because no-one has anything much. They are proud, because they live in Africa’s only republic (Liberia was founded by freed American slaves). And they are deluded, because they think that the US, for example, cares about them as much as Monrovians care about the US. Monrovia gets its name from US president James Monroe, and the Liberian flag is a single star and stripes, after the American one. The US has been supportive of the peace agreements, but in the years before that, abandoned Liberia to civil war twice by refusing to intervene, when they could easily have stopped it, and when the US has benefited from Liberia – by basing listening posts there, and by using it to fly planes from during World War 1. There are many tribes and allegiances in Liberia, and these have caused and still cause problems. Huge unemployment and a very difficult life means that things can get nasty very quickly. But there is mostly good humour and hope.

Many people don’t like Venetians, with good reason. They rip off tourists, they don’t like outsiders, they are snobs. This is all true. But compared to the residents of Treviso, where I was living, Venetians seemed perfect. Trevisans can be racist, insufferably bourgeois and unfriendly. Centuries of having been a sea-going imperial power I think makes Venetians more used to foreigners, as does the mass tourism. If you speak Italian, as I do, they are welcoming enough. But they are certainly a closed and insular people, though their islands look out to the open sea. They are supposed to be proud, but they are leaving their city in thousands, because they can’t afford to live there. There are only 60,000 Venetians living in Venice, which is a shame.

TC: Tell us about your life in these two cities?
RG: I never really lived in Monrovia, but I have written a book about Liberia, so I have visited it several times. I have stayed with friends and in hotels. Last time, I was there to write about HIV rates in the country, which are alarming. It was the time of the presidential elections, and I stayed downtown in the Palm Hotel, which has a rooftop café and a very nice Lebanese owner. The Lebanese have a long history in Liberia, and they run all the supermarkets and most of the hotels. I always had a driver, and we would drive around Monrovia and upcountry to refugee camps. I would walk around some, but because I’d first been there as a guest of an NGO, I got used to not walking around. NGO people don’t generally walk around for security reasons. I was always working, so didn’t have much time for entertainment, but sometimes I got a chance to go up to the beach resorts, or I’d have a beer at the Golden Sands, a restaurant near the Executive Mansion which is right on the beach, and where you can watch dumb new arrivals swimming in the ocean water which – as Liberia has no functioning sewage system – is filthy with sewage.

My life in Venice was always an escape from Treviso. Often, I would just get off the train and walk. I rarely did anything cultural. I think I went to one museum and a few churches. But I preferred to walk, or take a boat out to San Michele or Murano. There is always peace to be found in Venice. But we would also have adventures, on boats without lights, crossing the lagoon in the early hours, or sitting on a boat in a lagoon packed tight with other boats – so tight, you could walk across the lagoon jumping from one to the other – during the Festival of the Redeemer, which has the most splendid firework display I’ve ever seen. We would walk through the calles (the Venetian word for street) and stop at ancient bars with ancient bar-tenders, or a little restaurant where a grumpy woman only served pasta with squid ink, and if you asked for anything else, she’d yell at you. Sometimes, we’d find something like the Venetian bowls club. In Venice, I went to parties in the Palace of the Armenians, dancing in the only disco in town – a dreadful place called Round Midnight – whizzed around the canals in boats, watched boat races from a friend’s palace on the Grand Canal. The only thing I never did in the city of water was swim.