Biography

In the beginning:
All I ever wanted to be was a writer and a teacher. While still living in Gbarnga, Bong County along with my more than three dozens siblings, I would pray earnestly in secret...the proudest prayer a boy could think of, "Dear God, make me a great writer and a great teacher. Let me celebrate your glory through writing and teaching, and be celebrated myself. Make me famous throughout the world dear God...make me immortal. After I die, let people speak my name forever with love and admiration for what I wrote and how I taught my students. In return, I will give you my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility....every hour of my life....amen." But this secret and sacred prayer was short-lived with my father's passing. Oh how I missed this traveling father of mine who remains an enigma to a boy who wanted to be just like him and needed his every precepts to guide him along this unforeseen journey called life.

My father, J. Moses Clarke was one of the savviest businessmen that walked the face of this Earth. Reared by semi-educated Americo-Liberian (descendants of free slaves that went to Liberia in the early 1800s in search of genuine freedom) family in Arthington, outside Monrovia, my father went to Bong County to impart knowledge and to open a rubber plantation which would provide employement opportunities for the locals. Though dad was married in Arthington, he exploited some 19 native Kpelleh women in the area. My mother was one of those women he married at the tender age of 16. I wondered how mom felt marrying someone twice her age? She went on and born ten children of which four passed on leaving her with only six....while this is not a biography of my father, I thought it would interest many of you the readers. While dad died three decades ago, his spirit still lives on in me and his legacy remains forever.

A little something about me:
I was born at Phebee Hospital in Bong County, Central Liberia. I cannot vividly remember my early childhood because it was often marked by quarreling mates who often accused one another of witchcraft. After my father died in 1979, I was taken down to Monrovia by my brother, J. Fredrick Clarke to live with a very nice kru family that I didn’t know from nowhere. This was a new learning experience for me, and I loved and cherished every bit of my new life. In order to fit into the life in my new home, I had to grow up fast. I had to get used to the city life; like, going to the market to sell parboil rice with my new grandma, going to fetch water at the government's pumps whenever the water in our house stopped running, and even learn to speak the Kru dialect etc. Of all these experiences, I love going to the local public school. The first school I attended was Oral M. Horton on Carey Street in Monrovia....how can I forget this school when we used to carry our own chairs on our heads to school.

McDonald Street, where I grew up, was a very rough place in the heart of the city. At first, Mac Street, as we often called it, was quiet until the military government of Samuel Doe transferred the parking station there. The parking station brought along with it many things: pickpockets, drug addicts, prostitutes, criminals, and all those things that give a neighborhood a bad reputation. Surrounded by negative outlooks and bad influences, I had to turn to education as the way out of Mac Street. Living in a small and often crowded house surrounded by quarreling neighbors and honking car horns; at night, I would lie down in bed and wondered what turns one neighbor against another or what made our next door neighbor look down on me as someone lesser than her son? As a teenager, I wrestled with these questions and the question of how I would make it through my hardships.

Quite often, after my chores, I would sit on the big rock which was located behind the house under the tree and would watch the starry sky with its drifting clouds and passing shooting stars, and would wonder what my tomorrow would be like. I would ask myself, “Will I be a president, a minister, a singer, a school teacher or a writer which I’ve always prayed to become?” Whenever I got out of my deep thoughts, I was only embraced by negativities that reminded me of my dreams with a view to nowhere. For most of us boys growing up on Mac Street, all we saw were; shouting car loader looking for passengers for their vehicles, neighbors gang beating petite criminals as well as other troublemakers, husbands beating wives for infidelity and the list of negative things go on and on.

My understanding of my surrounding led me to believe that there wasn’t anyone to look up to as a positive role model. Instead, I blindly chose then President; Samuel Kanyon Doe as my role model. "I love Doe, and I want to be just like him when I grow up." I once told my best friend, Rev. Tarkolo Miller. This was because he exuded power, prestige, and everything a little boy could dream of being. Whether he was the most reviled man the world had ever seen, I could not tell. For me and others without a role model, he was the epitome of all that we wished to become, and I was proud to tell everyone how I love this man until my mother, Regina Wehtee Gaye was arrested in the afternoon of November 15, 1985, three days after the abortive coup that almost ousted the President. That afternoon, I went along with our mother and her arresters into the fence of the Chief Compound on Mac Street where she was kicked to the ground and manhandle by rouge soldiers of the Armed Forces of Liberia who were out intimidating peaceful citizens. During that incident, I was Kong on the head and was told to sit on the floor along with our mother and uncle, the late Archibald Brown. With that incident, I began to have other notions about the man I so admired. Like many others, I began to see little evils in my mentor.

During my early childhood educational years, I was interested in becoming so many things: a teacher, a writer, a singer, or a medical doctor. When the civil war erupted in the late1 980s, my hope of becoming any of those things I often dreamt of fumbled, as the educational system of the country collapsed. To keep my dream alive, I kept on reading during the height of this dirty uncivil war in 1990. Unbelievably, I read the 66 books of the Bible twice. I graduated from the William V.S.Tubman High School and later enrolled at the University of Liberia, but due to the constant fighting within the country, I could not complete the University of Liberia as I fled the country and spend years in various refugee camps around West Africa. In Freetown, Sierra Leone, I began my writing career as a newspaper reporter for the ‘Footprints Newspaper’ on Short Street. This job rekindled my passion in a long held dream, to become a writer.

In 1998, my siblings and I came to the United States to join our mother who had emigrated to Hightstown, N.J., a few years earlier. During my earlier years as a new immigrant in America, I took on odd jobs while attending college full time with a hope of fulfilling my earlier childhood dream which was getting a college education. While in college, I continued to write short stories and kept doing some soul searching, and ultimately earned an AAS in Computer Programming along with a certificate in Project Management from Mercer County College and a BS in Engineering and an MS in Information System from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. I am currently residing in New Jersey and Monrovia, Liberia. I am an executive for an IT company in Monrovia. currently in the US, I do business consulting in data analysis, project management, strategic IT management, business analysis etc. I am also an adjunct professor at Mercer County Community College. Please stay tune, more to follow...