And then luck changed. It was as if fate had been merely curious to see how the worst would affect us. Suddenly the carriers arrived with Vande grinning and happy and proud in the rear. Somehow he had persuaded them to cross the river in this pitch darkness, and there they were with the beds and nets and food and filter, sinking to the ground by the hut too tired to grumble. So after all one was protected, protected from the flies which stayed awake all night, from the mosquitoes, the cockroaches and the rats, by one’s net. But it wasn’t easy to sleep. Outside, the carriers sat round the lamps and had their chop and I heard vitality come slowly back to them and Alfred’s voice sowing dissension. When their lamp went out the rats came. They came all together, falling heavily down the wall like water. All night they gambolled among the boxes, and the cows snuffled round the wall and made water noisily. A jigger burrowing under one of my nails burned like a match flame. By half-past five the village was awake again.
Chapter 3
INTO BUZIE COUNTRY
The Horrible Village
I WASN’T surprised when the carriers struck work next morning and demanded a day’s rest. They said Nicoboozu was a full day’s journey away. I sent for the chief and Mark interpreted. The chief said Nicoboozu was seven hours off; he was lying or Mark was lying. But I had stood out against the carriers once before and had been proved wrong. Now they didn’t believe me: they believed I was driving them hard on purpose, and so I granted their demand promptly to try to win their confidence again. But it took me more than one day to do that. They were like children who have caught a grown-up lying to them.
It wasn’t a place I would have chosen to rest in. It was a really horrible village. The only thing to do in it was to get drunk. I noted in my diary, ‘A woman goes round scraping up the cow and goat dung with her hands, children with skin disease, whelping bitches and little puppies with curly tails and bat ears nosing among the food Souri is cooking for us in the dust outside a hut, skinny chickens everywhere, dust getting into the throat. Roofs touching. Indelible pencil all over the hands. Damp pages. Lot of trouble with the carriers. A long walk to get away from the village to relieve oneself.’
It would have been stuffy anyway in the narrow space between the huts, but all day a crowd of villagers crushed out what little air there was. They had never before had a chance of examining white people closely. I couldn’t take out a handkerchief without a craning of heads, nor raise a pencil without a pressing forward of watchers who didn’t want to miss a thing. This intent unamused stare got on the nerves. And they were so ugly, so diseased. The thought of disease began to weigh on my mind; I seemed to swallow it in the dust which soon inflamed my throat; I couldn’t forget where the dust had come from, from the dung and the bitches and the sores on the feet.
Only a few of the women broke the monotonous ugliness of the place. The adults had been beautifully and elaborately cut in bush school; the patterns were like metal plaques spread from the breasts to the navel; and there was one small girl in a turban with slanting Oriental eyes and small neat breasts who did appeal to a European sexual taste even in her dirt. To their eyes she was probably less attractive than the village beauty who gazed at herself all day in a little scrap of cracked mirror, a girl with swelling buttocks and smeared and whitened breasts which hung in flat pouches to her waist. It was curious how seldom they did appeal: perhaps sexual vitality was lowered by the heat and the marches, but it was partly, I think, their lack of sexual self-consciousness. They weren’t, until we came near to the Coast and ‘civilization’, interested in the sex of their visitors, but only in their colour or their clothes. The nakedness, too, was monotonous; it brought home how few people, and for how short a period of their lives, one can see naked with any pleasure.
There was something shifty and mean about Duogobmai, even apart from its dirt. It was the only place, until I got into Bassa country where the coastal civilization had corrupted the natives, in which I found nothing to admire. The chief was a Mohammedan, but no sooner had I produced a bottle of my whisky than he arrived with a present of palm wine and some eggs, all of which were bad. I gave him half a tumblerful of neat whisky and he tossed it down as if it were lemonade, then rolled away towards his hut. An agreeable and depraved old man with thin white hair twisted into tiny pigtails brought two eggs; he was the oldest man in Duogobmai, the owner of the hut; and he explained through Mark that he didn’t want a dash. He sat down close by, his reward was a ringside seat, and watched the show: the white man writing, drinking, coughing, wiping the sweat from his face. Presently I gave him a swig of whisky; it went immediately to his head. One moment his lip was on the glass, the next he was swaying and giggling in senile tipsiness. He tried to smoke a cigarette, but the smoke got in his eyes. He was like a withered plant one has tried to revive with spirit; it begins immediately to open and flutter its petals, but a moment later the spirit has run its course and it is more dead than ever. In the middle of lunch the chief arrived again to introduce his brother, a fourth lieutenant in the Liberian Frontier Force, through whose village we would pass next day. He was a young simple brutal man in a fur cap with a small metal Liberian flag on it. They had obviously come for whisky and I gave it them; it sent the chief back to his hut for the rest of the day.
He was quite right; there was nothing else to do but drink. The difficulty was to get drunk; the spirit ran out in sweat almost as quickly as one drank it. The race between the night and drunkenness became furious as darkness fell. For I still feared the rats: I wanted something to make me sleep; but drink was quite useless for that purpose and most of the night I lay awake listening to the rats cascading down the walls, racing over the boxes. I had already learnt that one could not touch the earthen floor with naked feet without catching jiggers under the nails; now I learned that at night anything left outside a case would be eaten – by cockroaches or rats. They would eat anything: shirts, stockings, hair-brushes, the laces in one’s shoes.
Rats
Rats indeed take some getting used to. There are said to be as many rats as human beings even in England in the large towns, but the life they lead is subterranean. Unless you go down into the sewers or haunt the huge rubbish dumps which lie beyond the waste building lots under a thin fume of smoke, you are unlikely to meet a rat. It needs an effort of imagination in Piccadilly Circus to realize that for every passing person, there is a rat in the tunnels underneath.
They are shy creatures; even while I slept among them, and heard them round me all night, I never saw one until I arrived in Ganta, where they were bolder and didn’t wait till dark. Flash a torch: they always avoided its beam; leave a lamp burning: and they played just as furiously in the shadow outside the range of light. *
I remembered the first live rat I ever saw. I had returned with my brother from a revue in Paris to a famous hotel on the left bank near the Luxembourg. It was about one o’clock in the morning; my brother went upstairs first; and lolloping behind him, like a small rabbit, went a rat. I could hardly believe my eyes as I followed them; it didn’t go with the dapper lounge, the wealthy international guests. But I wasn’t drunk; I could see quite distinctly the rough brown fur at its neck. I suppose one of the million or two rats in Paris was reconnoitring. Its appearance had a premeditated sinister air. I thought of the first Uhlans appearing at the end of a Belgian country road.
The next rat I saw was dead. I had taken a cottage in Gloucestershire and the country scared me. Something used to make a noise in the thatch every night, and I thought of rats: I knew the villagers went ratting along the hedge at the bottom of my garden. The rat-catcher, a rat-like man himself in old army breeches who was said by cruel village rumour to have allowed his first wife to starve, came with his ferrets; they scrambled along the thatch, rearing at the chimney stack like tiny polar bears; one of them couldn’t keep his footing and continually fell off until he had to be put back in the bag. There weren’t any rats, the catcher said, and refused payment. He had a pride in his profession an
d would only be paid by results, at the rate of a shilling a rat. But that night there was a knock on the door. A village woman stood in the door and held out a dead rat, jumping with fleas. She said, ‘I thought maybe you might like to see a rat. We’ve caught twenty down the hedge,’ dangling the body under my lamp.
It is not, after all, unreasonable to fear a rat. The fear of moths, of birds and bats – this may be nerves, but the fear of the rat is rational. To quote Hans Zinsser, ‘It carries diseases of man and animal – plague, typhus, trichinella spiralis, rat-bite fever, infectious jaundice, possibly trench fever, probably foot-and-mouth disease and a form of equine ‘influenza’. . . . They have nibbled at the ears and noses of infants in their cribs; starving rats once devoured a man who entered a disused coal-mine.’ It wasn’t in the least comforting to remember that there are forty million rats in England; the thought of the one rat which the sister at Bolahun had found sniffing at her hair was enough to hinder sleep.
And lying awake and hearing the rats play among our boxes, I couldn’t help remembering, too, the list of diseases I had read in England: leprosy, yaws, smallpox. . . . They were all, I felt certain, to be found in Duogobmai, and it was no comfort to know that leprosy was hardly at all contagious and that none of these diseases could be transmitted by fleas in a rat’s fur. One felt that even the dust in the cramped dirty town was poisonous, no less than fleas.
And yet all the time, below the fear and the irritation, one was aware of a curious lightness and freedom; one might drink, that was a temporary weakening; but one was happy all the same; one had crossed the boundary into country really strange; surely one had gone deep this time.
Buzie Country
If we seldom sank as low as Duogobmai we seldom rose as high as Nicoboozu, which we reached next day after an easy cheerful trek of only three hours. Alfred had gone home; he had decided that the journey was not going to be a holiday; and in his place Vande had taken a friend of Babu’s, a Buzie man called Guawa. Guawa was an asset; he had the carriers singing before Duogobmai had slipped behind the trees. He sang and he danced, danced even when he carried a hammock or a load; I could hear his voice down the trail, proposing the line of an impromptu song which the carriers took up, repeated, carried on. These songs referred to their employers; their moods and their manners were held up to ridicule; a village when the carriers pressed through in full song would learn the whole story of their journey. Sometimes a villager would join in the chant, asking a question, and I could hear the question tossed along the line until it became part of the unending song and was answered.
At the village before Nicoboozu the fourth lieutenant waited to greet us; he led us to his hut, and his brother brought a present of a large cockerel and a dozen eggs. The fourth lieutenant brought out his weapons, a long spear with a leather grip softened by fur and with a leather sheath, and a sword with goatskin at the hilt. He showed me his warrant as a fourth lieutenant dated 1918, and a letter from his commander recommending him for personal bravery and stating that, though he was completely illiterate and unable to learn the new drills, he was a good officer in peace and war. He said he had fought the Grebos and the Krus, and there was a young naive brutality in his manner of touching his sword, a pride in killing and death.
Nicoboozu was a clean little town, the huts wide apart, and the chief was old, hospitable and incurious. He dashed us a chicken and a hamper of rice, saw that the hut we were to sleep in was swept, and then retired to his hammock and shade from the midday sun while we had a bath in a tin basin and the jiggers were cut out of our toes.
Nicoboozu was as favourable an example as we could find of a village touched by the Buzie culture. Here the women wore little silver arrows in their hair and twisted silver bracelets, beaten by the blacksmith out of old Napoleon coins brought from French Guinea, and heavy silver anklets; the men wore rings, primitive signet rings with a flattened side, and decorative beaded rings and rings twisted to match the bracelets. The weavers were busy, and every piece of craftsmanship we saw was light and unselfconscious. There was an air of happiness about the place which next day we did not find in Zigita. Zigita is the principal town of the Buzie tribe, it is a town where even the commonest bush cutlass is beautiful, but it isn’t happy. It is Buzie in another fashion, the fashion of witchcraft and fear.
The village women danced to us that evening in starlight to the music of rattles. It was not a lovely dance; they were not lovely dancers but emaciated old women slapping their pitted buttocks in a kind of Charleston; but they were cheerful and happy, and we were happy, too, as they slapped and rattled and laughed and pranced, and we drank warm boiled water with whisky and the juice of limes, and the timelessness, the irresponsibility, the freedom of Africa began to touch us at last.
It wasn’t easy to analyse the fascination behind the dirt and disease, but it was more than a personal fantasy, satisfied more than a personal need. Different continents have made their call to different ages, and people at every period have tried to rationalize in terms of imperialism, gold or conquest their feeling for an untouched land, for a country ‘that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance; the graves have not been opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges, nor their images pulled down out of their temples’.
The old women danced and were cheerful, with the sores on their breasts and the silver arrows in their hair. There were mines in Nigeria broken by sledges: over the border in Sierra Leone were other mines. Justice ruled on the north, the east and the west: here there were injustice, massacre, exaction, but the forest stayed forest, it was hardly pitted at all by the little holes the white prospectors had dug, the steep paths to Zigita sparkled with mica, but the minerals remained where they were in the soil of the country, and the images had certainly not been pulled down out of the temples.
That Zigita proved, the Buzie town reached by forest paths so steep that I hardly had to bend to use my hands in climbing. The President might speak of building motor roads through the Republic: these paths proved what difficulties lay before him. He had forgotten or never trodden this way, as hard and rough, according to Sir Alfred Sharpe, as any in Africa, which leads to Zigita sprawling across a high plateau, surrounded by forests and higher hills, five and a half hours’ trek from Nicoboozu. Zigita itself is nearly two thousand feet up, and to the north-west, Ongizi, a thimble of almost perpendicular rock, rises another thousand feet, the home of evil spirits. But all round Zigita are hills and forest; it is overlooked from every side but one, and on nights of storm the lightning runs along the top of the hills, circling it with green flame.
The Big Bush Devil
In Zigita it is quite easy to believe that there are men in Buzie country who can make lightning. The use of lightning is little more than a postgraduate course to be taken when the ordinary initiations of the bush school are over, just as the women may take poisoning as their post-graduate course. About six years ago the old blind chief of Zigita lost his wife. She ran away to the hut of a younger man, and when the chief sent to him to claim the proper fine, they had gone. This flight, this failure to pay the customary fine, made the couple guilty, not their adultery. A year later the chief travelled down to Monrovia to a conference with President King. He heard that the young people were living in the town with their baby. He was a forbearing man and again he sent to them to demand that the fine be paid. When the young man refused, the chief, who was a member of the Lightning Society, made artificial lightning which struck the hut, killed the man and the woman, but left the baby, who lay in the bed between them, unharmed. This story is believed by everyone in Liberia, white and black. I heard it from several sources, and it never varied. The old chief I did not see, because he was away at Voinjema meeting the President.
A Liberian District Commissioner is stationed at Zigita: the compound lies up the slope of a hill above the town, above the long field of thatched and
pointed huts like stooks of bound beanstalks. The town chief, who brought to my hut in the compound a crowd of men with swords and daggers and jewellery for sale, seemed young and downtrodden. He was ordered about by the DC’s clerk (the DC was away at Voinjema), but if the DC had the chief well under his thumb, there was a higher, though more secret, authority than the Commissioner’s: the Big Bush Devil, in Dr Westermann’s phrase the Grand Master of a Bush Society, whom it is death or blindness for an uninitiated native so much as to see and who must be distinguished from the devils we had watched dancing in grotesque masks, the mere heads of the local bush schools. A new hut was being fenced in for him by the townsfolk as my carriers climbed the slope to the compound: this was a force ruling by terror and poison, which had already driven away one District Commissioner, the other side of the Buzie medal to that which now, as we sat on the verandah with the town chief and the clerk, so richly displayed itself.
The servants did the bargaining. Bracelets and daggers were sold for a few shillings apiece; a sword with a carved ivory hilt was bought from a fat man with the authoritative air of an Eastern eunuch for eight shillings. He lost his temper with Laminah, who, he said, was spoiling the market. He had a few words of English; he said, ‘yes’m’ and ‘no’m’; there was something servile and baleful in his manner. He was one of the richest men in the town. I met him in my stroll that evening and he asked to have a picture taken of him. ‘Which is your hut?’ I said. ‘I’ll take you in front of it.’