‘If one of them happens to have died his mother finds a jar of rice at her door on the night before his hoped-for return,’ Dr Junge wrote in African Jungle Doctor – Ten Years in Liberia. ‘This is the first and only news she will ever have of the fate of the son whom she sent into the Bush years before.’
Young men and young women go through similar procedures of education and initiation, and the whole process, Dr Junge stressed, is not to be spoken of to the uninitiated. Those who break the code of silence or who stumble accidentally across the schools out in the bush are put to death by poisoning.
Writing in the 1950s he felt confident the modernisation and development of Liberia would soon do away with these traditions: ‘The time has no doubt come when this primeval institution must fall victim to the advance of civilisation’.
I thought of this conclusion one morning when we were about halfway across Lofa County. We were on a remote track a long way from any road suitable for cars when, from a distance, we started to hear faint moans. They did not sound like the cries of people expecting to be heard but of anguished wretches very much in the grip of terror. We were on flat terrain, with thick jungle on both sides of the trail, and I could not be sure if the voices, all male, were coming from in front of us or behind us. I started to look around but Johnson grabbed my arm and told me to leave well alone.
‘They are asking for help, asking for food,’ he whispered.
‘But who are they?’ I gasped, now struggling to keep up with Johnson’s accelerated pace.
‘It is a bush school run by the Poro. They are the students being trained before initiation and they are always treated badly with little food or water. It is really dangerous for us to stop because what happens there is secret. We have to keep going.’
Arriving in Zorzor after 110 miles of trekking from the Sierra Leonean border felt a bit like reconnecting with a more modern, less magical world. It was the first real town we had come across, with a busy mission hospital, roadside shops and even a restaurant, a good place for a pit-stop before we tried to enter Guinea on the next section of the trip. We had been using jungle trails through Lofa County but for the last stretch into Zorzor we were forced out onto the national highway, a wide dirt road that runs all the way to Monrovia, a couple of hundred miles to the south on the Atlantic coast. Without any tree cover we had no shade to help us cope with the heat so our pace dropped significantly, and the occasional passing traffic brought with it an irritating dousing in dust that clogged our breathing and stung our eyes. Worse still, the relatively even surface of the road meant my feet would strike the ground at exactly the same angle, step after step, putting repeated pressure on the same small area of my soles. I started to miss the uneven jungle trails when no two strides were the same and the entire underside of my foot was made to have a workout. The road section into town was only about 5 miles long but out of nowhere I sprouted a new set of blisters.
Zorzor lies on an old trade route into Guinea and because of its size it was fought over and destroyed repeatedly during the war. Very little reconstruction had taken place by the time we walked gingerly into town and the headquarters of the local police was nothing more than a thatched roadside hut. This was the first government building of any sort we had passed since entering the country and I felt now was the time to sort out our immigration status – without any entry stamps in our passports we could be regarded by nitpicking officials as ‘illegals’.
At first sight the commander, Major Andy Russ Gborley, seemed like the officious type. Foreign nationals were monitored closely in Zorzor because of its proximity to an international border and when we arrived Maj. Gborley was bawling at an old man about an identity document irregularity. The unfortunate victim of his tirade kept repeating, ‘I was born here, I was born here’.
David and I took our places on a bamboo bench and as we waited I saw a notice on the wall, signed by the major himself, saying, ‘All officers to report to work in uniform and on time.’ I then looked at the major again. He was not wearing any uniform.
When our turn came he listened closely to my account of our entry into the country on the other side of Lofa County, our interest in the Greenes and how there had been no border official to stamp us in at the entry point we used. He asked to look at our passports and then made a long call by mobile phone to a superior, the sort of phone conversation where the caller does a lot of silence and a great deal of head-shaking. I feared the worst but need not have because when he finished he smiled and said he would be happy to stamp us in himself. Furthermore, he gave us a handwritten note stamped with the mark of the Ministry of Justice urging all other Liberian government officials to give us ‘all necessary assistance and protection needed while en route to and from your place of assignment’. This was my first encounter with Liberian officialdom in the post-Taylor age and I was impressed.
Throughout their trek, the Greenes had endless niggles with their porters who, after agreeing a price back in Bolahun, would complain about the difficulty of the terrain and threaten to go on strike unless given more money. Graham Greene describes the growing tension and endless discussions until, not far from Zorzor, the crisis point came and the porters said they were leaving. He handled it like a poker player, simply calling their bluff. That’s it, he said, you can all go home now and I will simply find replacements from a local village. It was quite a risk, as hiring new porters would have been both hugely expensive and time-consuming, but the tactic worked and within moments the Bolahun men switched from being angry and self-righteous to meek and joshing. He had no more porter problems after that.
I faced similar issues in Zorzor when Johnson and Mr Omaru both approached me, despondently complaining about the way they were being treated. At first I could not work out what they were concerned about as they both gave rather rambling, incoherent accounts of their worries with mumbled threats about going home. It was the first time during our trip that they had appeared anything but willing and I thought initially that they were reluctant, for whatever reason, to go any further and cross into Guinea. When we started together back in Bolahun the agreement had been to travel together for a few days and then decide if we would go further, so perhaps they were exercising their escape clause.
And then slowly it became clear that they had every intention of accompanying David and me for the full journey and all they wanted was a cash advance. In Bolahun they had both agreed to be paid only on completion of the trip but, given that our journey was now going to take weeks instead of days, it was only fair for me to hand over an interim payment. I gave them several hundred dollars each and the mood of despond lifted immediately. They headed cheerfully into town but, as neither of them was a drinker, I knew they would not be blowing their money. I was touched when they came back wearing matching new black baseball caps and T-shirts.
‘It is our team uniform,’ Johnson said, smiling. ‘We thought it would be good to have our own uniform when we head into Guinea.’ They were clearly up for attempting an unorthodox border crossing.
Graham Greene was deeply disappointed by Zorzor. For the first time since Freetown his writing betrays contempt, even loathing, for outside influences on Africa.
If Duogomai was the dirtiest place in the republic, Zorzor was the most desolate. It hadn’t been left to itself; the whites had intruded, had not advanced, had simply stuck and withered there, leaving their pile of papers, relics of a religious impulse, sentimental, naïve, destined to failure.
His mood was not helped by his host, an eccentric Lutheran missionary, a hefty and troubled widow who seemed to have lost her senses living upcountry and who mumbled incoherently about the impossibility of dinner invitations. Graham Greene said she was so heavy she needed eighteen porters to carry her in a specially made hammock on the rare occasions she left town and Barbara Greene described her as a ‘large white lump, like bread before it is put in the oven to be baked’.
The woman referred to by Graham Greene as Mrs Croup had long go
ne but the Lutherans still maintain a presence in Zorzor, battered by the war but refusing to accept the defeat Graham Greene suggested was inevitable. The original Lutheran church in the town centre is completely destroyed but the Curran Lutheran Hospital on a hilltop nearby has been partly rebuilt and is treating patients and training local health workers once again. It was founded ten years after the Greenes passed through, largely through the work of an American nurse and midwife, Esther Bacon. She would become a much-loved figure in the local community, cherished particularly for reducing the rate of Liberian mothers dying in childbirth.
As I walked through the grounds of the hospital I found her gravestone. It recorded how she gave her working life to Liberia, arriving in 1941 and dying in Zorzor of lassa fever at the age of fifty-six in 1972. Her headstone bore the same epitaph as the one I had seen back at Bolahun, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’, and there was a memorial plate bearing a tribute I found particularly moving.
This plaque is dedicated to her loving memory by her Liberian friends for whom she gave everything, even her life.
We stayed nearby in the local compound of Concern, an aid group with projects spread across Liberia. It has a well-built, single-storey house behind the obligatory high wall common to humanitarian groups. The security guards were so touchy they refused initially to let Mr Omaru and Johnson inside but my companions did not seem to mind, happy to head into town to look for accommodation. Concern’s local head of office was away so David and I had the run of the place, washing our filthy clothes, dressing our feet and planning the next stretch of the journey.
While we were there we experienced our first major rainstorm, with thunder and lightning so strong it made the building shake. I was glad not to be outside in my netting tent that night. As well as being weather-proof, the house also had a gas ring, a generator and a well-stocked larder. I had tried to find food in town but the only meat available in the market was bushmeat, a rather malodorous and impossible-to-identify smoked animal body part, covered in flies and with its hands/paws/hooves balled by tendons tightened by the heat of a fire.
We had been told to make ourselves at home so, with rain pounding the roof of the house, I took a few tins of fish from a large pile stacked on the cement floor of the larder and David cooked up a huge pot of fishy pasta, a wonderful change after seven evening meals of bland rice and chicken. Both of us went to bed with swollen bellies and we slept long.
When I eventually got up the following morning I met the house-keeper employed by the aid group.
‘I have a question for you,’ she said after introducing herself. ‘We have tins of cat food made from fish. This morning I found lots of empty tins. What did you do with it all?’
CHAPTER 9
Guinea Worm
David Poraj-Wilczynski
The chief’s voice carried clear and strong across the St Paul River but it failed to have the desired effect on the people I could make out on the far bank. The watercourse marks the international frontier between Liberia and Guinea and it was evident that the fishing community over on the Guinean side was too busy to respond to the shouted request for a ferryman. Women were wringing out clothes and bedding soaked in the previous night’s storm, draping them over domed, igloo-shaped grass huts to dry. In midstream, a fisherman was not to be distracted from slowly casting and retrieving a circular net from his small canoe. The rising water level had improved the chance of a catch and no amount of shouting by Chief Peter Sumo of Kpaiyea, the last village in Liberia before the river, was going to disturb the morning’s fishing.
‘Don’t worry,’ Chief Sumo said, looking ever so slightly abashed. ‘My nephew will go and find one of our own people from this side of the river to take us over.’
The chief, who was in his late fifties, gave orders to Moses, which had the teenager scurrying out of sight along a muddy river bank over which the hem of the jungle loomed. This was the only time during the whole trip that we were guided by a chief and it illustrated clearly that while their authority on home territory can be considerable, that power is limited very much by terrain. Step outside the village domain and it can dwindle to nothing.
The river, known locally as the Dianni but more widely as the St Paul, lies roughly 10 miles east from Zorzor and reaching it was an important moment on our journey. The coup that had brought a small and unknown cohort of junior officers to power in Guinea had taken place just a few weeks earlier and quite what this change of government’s impact would be over on the other side of the river was unclear. Worryingly for us, there had been a bit of noise on the news wires from the newly installed regime warning the population to be on the lookout for ‘white mercenaries’ and ‘international drug smugglers’ bent on destabilising the new order, but I took the view that as we were not carrying anything dangerous like guns or narcotics it was still worth risking the river crossing. We had rested for two days in Zorzor and during that time Johnson had ridden with Mr Omaru to the main road crossing into Guinea and, through skilful sleight of hand involving modest cash donations and verbal flattery, had persuaded a border official to pre-stamp our passports as having entered Guinea. If we could find a way across the river our papers would be in order in the event that we encountered Guinean authorities.
There was, I concede, some personal vanity at work that morning. I had travelled extensively in Africa but never had I moved from one country to another across a jungle river frontier. It felt like a throwback to an earlier age and for me it had a nostalgic appeal. Back in the post-independence period, when the popular press still covered Africa, there was a famous rivalry between a gang of Fleet Street reporters who for years used river crossings as a way to outdo each other for what we call ‘dramatic colour’. A favourite and often-used intro went something like, ‘I crossed the crocodile-infested waters of an African river to bring you this report …’ It was so common as to become a newspaper cliché, although the long-standing battle within the group was eventually won by a daring young reporter called Peter Younghusband from the Daily Mail when he reached Zanzibar during a rebellion in the late 1960s. No rival could top the intro he came up with on that occasion: ‘I swam shark-infested waters to the riot-torn spice island of Zanzibar …’
Graham Greene records spotting what he believed to be alligators in the rivers on the frontier with Guinea so I had a good look that morning when our dugout eventually took us out onto the water, paddled by one of Chief Sumo’s villagers. But with apologies to my journalistic forebears, I cannot honestly describe the St Paul as crocodile-infested, largely because any such creatures would have long since been shot for the pot. Instead, the river was dark, slow-moving and fouled with the jetsam of rainy-season torrents, half-sunk trunks of dead trees and boulders the size of houses. I felt rather smug that we had found a way across, a feat that was beyond an American rubber plantation executive who came to this exact same spot on horseback during a bush tour in the 1940s. Writing in his journal, H. H. Burgess describes how he rode from Zorzor to Kpaiyea:
I then sent the horse back and attempted to cross the St Paul. However, this well-marked crossing (on the map) did not exist, so we returned and trekked upstream.
In the dugout, Chief Sumo sat with his jaw jutting out, as if trying to restore some authority, while I shifted my camera bag to my lap and held on tight. The small boat was not nearly as stable as the pirogues I had slept on travelling down the Congo River and with our weight the tops of the boat’s sides sank to within an inch or two of the river’s surface. The slightest tilt would have us shipping water but if we tipped over I wanted to give my camera bag the best chance of surviving the soaking and had images of myself swimming one-armed, one arm held aloft like the Lady in the Lake, holding on to the bag. David was more worried about keeping his mouth shut. Guinea worm is one of Africa’s nastier parasites and is caught by ingesting its larva from rivers such as the St Paul. Swallowing or even just splashing in rivers can cause infection, as it allows the waterborne larva to enter the body thro
ugh abrasions, cuts or other breaks in the skin. When inside a human the grubs grow into worms that can reach prodigious lengths, sometimes as long as three feet, inflicting agony on the host who has the feeling of snakes worming through their lower limbs. For a long time the condition was known as fiery serpent disease.
To complete the life cycle the worms eventually cause a painful boil to grow on the victim’s skin which erupts, spewing out thousands of fresh larvae. To remove it from the human body, you have to dig around in the boil cavity, find the tip of the worm and attach it to a twig which is then turned, drawing the creature out as if balling string. It’s a delicate manoeuvre and if it breaks, leaving part of the worm still in one’s body, the resulting infection can kill. Endemic to the region, it was named by seventeenth-century mariners who first reached the coast of West Africa, an area known for a long time as the Gulf of Guinea.