Aug 31, 2026
By Rocheford T. Gardiner
A Pristine View and Legacy
The Hoffman River in Harper City, Maryland County, serves as a major source of survival for thousands of fishermen and marketers (mostly women) in the area. It is also a major contributor to the scenic view and unique geographic features all packed into one location – Cape Palmas. There is a cape, an estuary, a barmouth, a peninsula, an ocean, an isthmus, an island, and a cliff.
Small fishing canoes scale upstream, while larger motorized boats bulldoze through rough waves at the point where the Atlantic and the waters of the tidal Hoffman join forces—then out into the deep blue Atlantic Ocean for bigger game.
Market women—some of whom could be considered “legacy” marketers who can point back to a few generations that negotiated between annexed, makeshift, corrugated iron sheet stalls at the Harper General Market—call out over the tops of their voices: “Buy your fresh herring here!” “Fresh pepper here!”
The Stench of Death
However, beneath this rather lyrical characteristic of a West African marketplace chorus lays a devastating stench, not far from death itself. A mix of rotting fish, dead sewer rats, stray dog and pig dung, decaying vegetables, and other debris swept through semi-clogged drainages, topped off with a fine touch of additional homemade garbage—polythene bags, old footwear, and all the regular condiments of a municipal waste configuration—mostly strewn into or on the banks of the Hoffman River, right there at the market’s “waterside.”.
More appalling are the “overhang latrines,” where one can easily witness a live session of yellowish-brown human droppings plunging straight into the river below, as young schools of tilapia fish and stray pigs jostle for a bite. Just nearby, where the fishermen pull in their dugouts, there is an occasional splash as kids (mostly children of local fishermen and sellers) take dips to “cool off” from the scorching midday tropical sun beaming down mercilessly from overhead. They were practicing their fishing skills just a while ago, hooking up the very same tilapia that had just fed off of the live human-droppings session.
A Sad Observation
By all indications, the garbage and waste management problem has now reached alarming levels. Harper, a city that initially hosted a population in the range of 10,000 people in the 70’s and 80’s, has now quadrupled exponentially. Population growth and rapid urbanization are key factors here. Unfortunately, the city’s waste management infrastructure has not even been restored to its prewar status.
There is a looming public health crisis, as conditions for the spread of disease and food contamination are at a critical point. As with many other urban areas across the country, Liberians have yet to see rigid policy enforcement and direct action from both central and local government to tackle this threat—especially in a place like Harper, which hosts the now overburdened James Jenkins Dossen Memorial Hospital.
