Firestone, then in the process of establishing itself as America’s leading tyre manufacturer, had found itself dangerously exposed after the First World War to a price-fixing scheme organised by the dominant force in global rubber production, British planters in Malaya and the Far East. To avoid paying what it saw as inflated British prices for the raw material, Firestone sought its own source of supply. Liberia promised exactly what the company was looking for, somewhere the company could create its own large-scale production.
It took three years to agree the final deal, largely because the Firestone plan for Liberia was much more ambitious than anything the weak West African state had ever dealt with before, but in 1926 the Liberian government leased a million acres of forest to the company for ninety-nine years. It is a deal that still represents, on paper, the largest single rubber-growing project in the world. In theory, tens of thousands of Liberians would be offered steady employment planting and maintaining rubber trees, and if the plan worked the government of Liberia would, for the first time, enjoy the guarantee of meaningful revenues.
But, as ArcelorMittal was to find out with its rail project so many years later, Firestone discovered that its role in Liberia went beyond that of financial partner. The tyre company became both the great hope of the country and the scapegoat for local wrangling. Within a few years of the agreement being signed, the firm got caught up indirectly in the slavery scandal investigated by the League of Nations, accused of using unpaid labour on its plantations. Local chiefs, it was alleged, were co-opting tribal rivals and forcing them to work at what had already become known simply as ‘Firestone’. Any pay was then pocketed by these unscrupulous chiefs.
Firestone was later cleared of all slavery charges, but this did not stop critics of American foreign policy accusing the firm of promoting US economic imperialism. Allegations of exploitation and malpractice have gnawed away at Firestone throughout its decades of involvement in Liberia. Production largely ceased during the fighting of the 1990s and even in recent post-war years, when the company has sought to restart production, harmful new allegations have surfaced, this time concerning the use of child labour.
The millionacre dream was never fulfilled, as only a small fraction of the land was ever developed and the country’s ambitious hopes for sustainable economic growth on the back of the rubber industry were never met. Just like diamonds in Sierra Leone, rubber in Liberia promised more than it delivered.
More than any other time in the trip, the five-day hike after Ganta felt like a route march because our final destination, the port of Buchanan, was now in reach. We began to see yellow signboards, relics of LAMCO days, marking the distance to the port but they had an unsettling effect because, for the first time in the journey, it somehow became important to know exactly the mileage we were covering. The first one told us we had 118 miles to go and the fact that we had seen one sign raised the expectation of others. I started to look out for them and when I spotted one, poking clear of the foliage, I would eagerly anticipate what distance it would show. But just as the watched clock in double physics lessons at school turns more slowly, so the longed-for signboards never quite showed the mileage I had hoped.
With the countdown to the finish begun, I thought of what I might take from my journey. For those trying to make sense of modern Africa, Liberia has always been a problem. As an African nation that was not colonised by white outsiders, the example of Liberia undercuts those who blame white colonialism for all the continent’s problems. Outsiders settled in Liberia where they enjoyed disproportionate status but the country was never in the possession of a foreign power. By touching on both Sierra Leone, a former white colony, and Liberia, never a white colony, I felt the trip allowed me get away from the stranglehold of colour-obsessed analysis and consider their common problems.
When I first went to both countries as a reporter it had been a time not just of war but of barbarity. The cruelty of the RUF in Sierra Leone and the ritualistic atrocities committed by wig-wearing militia in Liberia were so vile I had struggled for understanding. It meant the background for my journey could not have been more different from Graham Greene’s. He came in the 1930s at a time when fascism was on the rise in Europe and the world’s economy was struggling to recover from the Great Depression. He was eager to find what made this part of Africa different from the rest of the world but his antipathy to his own 1930s world, I felt, coloured his conclusions. He found here purity, simplicity and virtue.
Greene’s analysis simply cannot explain what has happened in recent decades, the corruption in both countries that has led to resentment, jealousy and eventually war. He had failed, I felt, to fully account for the role of the Poro, something he regarded as no longer being active or relevant. But my journey through Sierra Leone and Liberia convinced me he was wrong on both counts.
When I had first read about the Poro, before my journey, I admit to being in some way relieved. Devil-worshipping secret societies appeared reassuringly alien, allowing me, as a white European, to distance myself from the cruelties they were blamed for in both countries. Faced with wartime atrocities, it was comforting to blame the Poro, an impenetrable, inexplicable side of Africa that was in some fundamental way different from the value system I was familiar with as an outsider.
But as I trudged along on the last days of the trail, I realised that my opinions had been changed. What had appeared alien and illogical had slowly come to make sense. I did not approve but I felt I better understood. Village life in this environment is so remorselessly tough that people can only survive if they work together: preparing common fields where food is grown, keeping water sources clean, sharing knowledge about herbal medicines capable of fighting disease. From my trek I learned that to survive alone out here is effectively impossible – the individual has to surrender to the community, every person playing their part in an order overseen by a hierarchy of knowledge-keepers capable of making sense of the harsh natural environment. That they were called zo or devil was unimportant. What was much more important was that they represented the best hope for people subsisting in the jungle as they protected proven tenets of knowledge, refined over the centuries, on how to survive. Some of the Poro’s ceremonies and internal discipline were vile and cruel but I begrudgingly accepted the rationale that lay behind it. If you believe, as many in the Poro do, that a person does not exist fully as a human unless initiated, then the killing of a non-initiate for ritual reasons is, in many ways, no worse than the killing of an animal for the pot.
With its devil nomenclature and fetishism, Poro is darkly dramatic, but it is essentially no different from similar initiation belief systems observed by aboriginal communities around the world. Writing in the 1940s, Dr Harley identified parallels with initiation ceremonies in Australia and the Pacific Islands. And ritual murder associated with such animistic beliefs is today not limited to Liberia and Sierra Leone. In African countries as far apart as Uganda and South Africa, specialist police units exist to investigate murders committed for ritual purposes. When the headless, limbless torso of a young Nigerian boy was found floating in the Thames in 2001, British police eventually concluded his murder – still unsolved – was connected to African ritualism. To outsiders like me the killings are inexcusable but to the believer they can be justified in a number of ways, often on the grounds that the victim is not actually a human but a spirit in human form.
I feel sure that some of the brutal atrocities of the Liberian and Sierra Leonean wars were committed by individuals motivated by an interpretation of the Poro’s values. Modest attempts had been made early in the twentieth century by both governments to suppress the Poro but the wars allowed it back as law and order, in the sense of a state-wide police force or criminal justice system, collapsed. It is undeniable that ritual cannibalism took place during the fighting, often the consumption of human organs as a way for the winner to gain strength. But my journey taught me that to focus purely on these horrific acts is, in fact, to overlook a mo
re pernicious and corrosive impact of the secret societies, one that I feel holds back the development of those African nations where they play a role.
The trek showed me an intense spirit to survive in Sierra Leone and Liberia, whether in the vermin-infested shanties of Freetown or the lassa-ridden villages of Nimba County. Millions of people in this region lost everything during the wars and were condemned to flee to forest camps, returning home to find houses destroyed and property stolen. And yet they managed to rebuild lives and dwell not on what was lost in the past but on what might come in the future. Theirs is an arduous life, a subsistence existence relying on water drawn from rivers, rice eked out from jungle clearings and health problems treated with little more than traditional medicine. But it is at least life, something provided by their fighting spirit.
While the spirit to survive is strong, the spirit to thrive is not and this, I came to believe, is because of the deadweight of traditional taboo, such as the Poro. It is a community-focused phenomenon, born from the necessity of surviving in the tough West African bush, and by its nature it stresses the value of the group over the individual, of developing at the pace of the lowest common denominator, not the advanced outlier. And it is this feature of Poro, and any other secret society found elsewhere in Africa, that condemns its followers to flatlining stagnation. Stephen Ellis, an academic who has studied the role of tribal religion and spiritualism in Liberia, describes the Poro as ‘highly egalitarian’, not allowing for individualism, private initiative or personal success. In The Mask of Anarchy, published in 1999, Ellis says great effort is made by the Poro to present devils as non-humans. He wrote they deliberately wear costumes and masks to deprive themselves of their individuality as a human so as to avoid any sense of that person claiming to be primus inter pares. His observations reminded me of Graham Greene’s description of the devil’s assistant near Bolahun carefully brushing down the raffia skirts of the dancing devil ‘lest a foot or arm should show’.
One of the Poro’s key features is its ferocious demand for all members to adhere to rules and hierarchy. Its defenders say these rules are its strength, the means to glue society together, but, for me, these rules, these tribal taboos, are key to understanding the weakness of countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia.
The totems and taboos worked when tribal groups were modest in size, before the era of the nation state in Africa, when an individual’s place in society could be defined by their place in the immediate community, whether it be the village, clan or tribe, and success by the achievement of survival and procreation. But the founding of nation states in Africa from the nineteenth century onwards called for a new sense of community, a commitment to a different public good connected with the broader nation, not the narrow tribe. It is, I believe, the failure of this new national public good to dominate over atomistic tribal interests that has led to so many of modern Africa’s problems. In the case of Liberia, with twenty recognisably different tribal groups and many more sub-groups, it is the failure to force the devil to cede his power that has undermined the country’s development and made it prone to civil strife and, ultimately, war.
It might sound perverse but while Africans survive in Africa, to thrive they go elsewhere. In the diaspora, they do incredibly well, whether as doctors shoring up the National Health Service or as sporting superstars in the United States, and their success can be measured in purely financial terms by the scale of financial remittances. Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist who won the Nobel Peace Prize for pursuing environmentally sustainable projects in the face of fierce political oppression from a corrupt regime in Kenya, gave figures for remittances in her 2009 book The Challenge for Africa. Her figures showed Africans living abroad each year send more money back to their families than foreign companies invest in the entire continent.
As I trekked through the bush I thought of how individual success in Africa makes that person a target. Until that reality is changed I fear the continent is condemned to fall behind the rest of the world. The devil – the senior, tyrannical figure atop a suffocating belief system of secret, unaccountable, rules that crush the individual – must be chased away.
The final section of the Greenes’ trek was, in many ways, the most significant part of their journey and would have an enormous longterm impact on both of them. The depressive author, who had once flirted with suicide, would learn a fresh zeal for life, and his cousin would find reserves of stamina and common sense she never knew she had.
Long before coming to Africa, Graham Greene admitted how danger and discomfort got him through his darker moods. Writing in 1925 to his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, he urged her to forgive his depression and understand that taking risks was how he best dealt with it. ‘The only thing worth doing at the moment seems to be to go and get killed somehow in an exciting manner,’ he wrote.
Agreeing to explore Liberia for the anti-slavery campaigners brought him closer than any of his adventures to meeting a premature end. After absentmindedly leaving the expedition’s medicine chest back in Freetown, he had little more than Epsom salts with which to fight the illness first spotted by Barbara Greene back in Zigida. She begins to describe in great detail how he came out in boils, his hands started to shake and a nervous tic above his right eye got stronger but, as the illness worsened, it was fever that really concerned her. They had bought a large new tin of Epsom salts from Dr Harley in Ganta and Graham Greene would heap spoonful after spoonful into his tea in the hope of easing his fever but it didn’t work. Delirious and barely conscious he had to be carried in his hammock.
Barbara Greene’s description of the final days of the trek reads like a medical journal as she charts her cousin’s nausea, rollercoaster temperature and worsening lethargy. On one occasion she wrote that he began to totter like a drunk and when he finally agreed to be put to bed she looked at his grey, sunken features and readied herself for the worst.
Graham would die. I never doubted it for a minute. He looked like a dead man already …I took Graham’s temperature again, and it had gone up. I felt quite calm at the thought of Graham’s death. To my own horror I felt unemotional about it. My mind kept telling me that I was really very upset, but actually I was so tired that …I was incapable of feeling anything. I worked out quietly how I would have my cousin buried, how I would go down to the coast, to whom I would send telegrams.
Much to her astonishment he made it through the night. The hollow cheeks and dark rings around his eyes were as bad as the night before but, she noted, his fighting spirit soon returned. When she suggested he rest, he flatly refused, insisting on pushing on for the coast, desperate to end the tedium that he had come to loathe. Graham Greene would later play down the danger he was in, subtitling the relevant passage in his book ‘A Touch of Fever’, but he readily admitted the experience had brought about in him a fundamental change of heart about the relative merits of life and death.
I had made a discovery during the night which interested me. I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living. I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable. It seemed that night like an important discovery …one may be able to strengthen oneself with the intellectual idea that once one had been completely convinced of the beauty and desirability of the mere act of living.
Almost as if in counterbalance to her cousin, Barbara Greene got stronger on the last section of the trail, taking on more of the responsibilities, such as arranging food and shelter for the expedition whenever they reached a village. In her diary she noted how ‘this weather agrees with me’ and for a short while she led the column, with her Freetown-hired servant, Laminah, loyally walking so close at her side that once he was able to save her from stepping on a snake.
As their journey neared its end, Graham Greene grew prickly, complaining for the first time since Sierra Leone of the creeping, coercive impact of white influence the closer they got to the coast. Gone was the purity of the untainted African villages he
had eulogised about back in Guinea. Trudging down from the higher, hillier area around Ganta, temperatures soared and the expedition’s food supplies petered out so the pair fantasised about the food they missed most. Both of them had to throw away their walking boots as the soles had worn through, leaving them with nothing to walk in but sport shoes. Barbara Greene complained about the new footwear as she could feel every stone she stepped on.
A mutual tetchiness developed and they began to fall out over trivialities. Barbara Greene developed an irrational anger with the way her cousin’s socks kept falling down, while he grew incensed by the peculiar shape of the shorts she had had made back in Freetown.
It took David, Johnson, Mr Omaru and me five days to cover roughly 150 miles from Ganta to the sea, our average daily distance now much higher than when we started back in Lofa County. But the daily averages were going up not just because we were getting fitter and more acclimatised. We all began to feel we had had enough and, like the Greenes in this same terrain in 1935, wanted the end of the trek to come.
There was, fortunately, little chance of David and me falling out with each other. Not only was he too tactful for that; we were simply too tired at the end of each day to squabble. For sustained exhaustion the trek through Liberia and Guinea was the most demanding thing I have ever done and when we stopped in the evenings it was all I could do to wash, take down my notes and make ready my tent. Anyway, David was not my only travelling companion. The worry that stems from being responsible for a dangerous expedition kept me company. I still had to work out where we were going to stay in Buchanan and how we were going to get from there to Monrovia by sea, as the Greenes had done. There was little time or energy left for petty infighting.
My own diary records headaches and occasional dizziness but, as the miles and nights rolled by, nothing like Graham Greene’s fever. I remember sleeping particularly heavily, perhaps because of our approach to sea-level, and having dreams that crossed the line into the realm of nightmares. The one that troubled me most was a suburban scene, a street where people were milling about carrying burnished steel dustpans. Looking closer, it dawned on me, with the slow, inexorable realisation of a nightmare, that the edges of the pans had been sharpened like cutlass blades. As the understanding crystallised that they were weapons I started to run, chased by dustpan-waving madmen until I hid in the boot of a Mercedes crammed full of amputated limbs.