We were there two hours, right into the full heat of the day; the men had their chop in the end, and the chief began to get sleepy and forgot that he was supposed to detain us. I don’t really know why we ever went; the schoolmaster was the only blot on the place; I think we might have been very happy there all night. Perhaps if I hadn’t been a bit drunk I’d have stayed, but the idea I thought I had lost, that one ought to stick to time-tables, came up again in the Parisian air, and I was a little uneasy, too, lest the schoolmaster should have sent a quick messenger to the French Commissioner and that we might find ourselves under arrest – the French colonies are very carefully preserved. So I refused to stay. Before we went I photographed the girl, but she wouldn’t be taken as she was, insisted on putting on her best dress for the picture: the chief would not be photographed. By that time two men had to support him. He followed us a little way out of the village, sleepily imploring us to stay, until we were out of earshot.
It was another four hours’ march to Ganta. Soon after Djiecke we left the forest behind and took a path through elephant grass towards the River Mani or St John, which forms the boundary line between French Guinea and Liberia and runs south-west into the sea at Grand Bassa, a hundred and sixty miles away. That was where we were to end our march, though I didn’t know it then. We were now at last off the route followed by other English travellers, for Sir Alfred Sharpe in 1919 went up northwards into French Guinea, another ninety miles or so, and then retraced his steps and went down to Monrovia between the Loffa River and the St Paul.
The Mani here was about forty yards wide with steep banks. We crossed by dugout canoe, and the spirit of all the carriers lifted on the other side. They hadn’t really liked France, and Mark’s enthusiasm as he stepped on shore, the monkey clinging to his skull, infected them. ‘Now we are in our own land again.’ It was an unexpected example of national feeling, for they were certainly not among their own tribe; they were in the land of the Manos, where ritual cannibalism practised on strangers has never been entirely stamped out. Amah ran up and down the line of carriers with a load on his head encouraging them to a longer stride because this was Liberia.
One came to Ganta through a series of leopard traps, winding maze-like paths between walls of plaited reed, and then out on to a beaten road, beside a straggling line of huts across a wide treeless plain, up the side of a hill and down again, with the Liberian flag flying above a whitewashed compound and more people than we had seen for weeks, Mandingos and soldiers among them. There were stores here, the first we had seen in Liberia, with the goods laid out on the ground, but the whole appearance of the place was as nomadic as a forest market. It looked as if it had been built up overnight and might be shifted next morning. It was the plain, I think, which gave it that air. One was used to villages circumscribed by a hill-top, with the burial stones and the palaver-house in the centre, looking as old as the rock itself and the cracked soil. This ribbon development along a highway which was being driven north and south had a raw look. Only the District Commissioner’s compound at one end and the little group of mission buildings a mile down the road at the other had a stable air, as if the next rains wouldn’t wash them away.
As our caravan came out on to the road from the river path and the leopard traps, a group of yellow-faced Liberians in European clothes, more like Italians than Africans, turned to watch us. One of them, the only dark-skinned one, took off his topee. Later in Tapee-Ta I was to get to know him better, and those soft sad lustrous seeking-a-friend eyes of his. He was called Wordsworth. He watched us yearningly as we toiled up the bare scorched road towards the Methodist mission. Already he was intent on joining that odd assortment of ‘characters’ (the Grants and the Kilvanes) one collects through life, vivid grotesques, people so simple that they always have the same side turned to one, damned by their unself-consciousness to be material for the novelist, to supply the minor characters, to be endlessly caricatured, to make in their multiplicity one’s world.
PART THREE
Chapter 1
MISSION STATION
The Lowlands
MR SOMERSET MAUGHAM, I suppose, had done more than anyone to stamp the idea of the repressed prudish man of God on the popular imagination. There was an earlier time when Stevenson’s Open Letter allowed us to recall Father Damien; Rain has impressed the image of Mr Davidson over the missionary field: the Mr Davidson who said of his work in the Pacific Islands, ‘When we went there they had no sense of sin at all. They broke the commandments one after the other and never knew they were doing wrong. And I think that was the most difficult part of my work, to instil into the natives the sense of sin’: the Mr Davidson who slept with the prostitute, Sadie Thompson, and then killed himself.
I remember at school finding it a little hard to reconcile the popular idea of missionaries with the thin tired men who used to stand on a platform rapping with a small stick while the starved-looking bodies of black children slid across the screen. They seemed to be less biblical than Mr Davidson; they seemed to be more concerned with raising a few shillings for the support of the hideous tin church which was projected as a grim climax onto the sheet than with the sense of sin. The sense of sin lay far deeper across the altar steps of our own school chapel. Here was all the prudery and pornography one needed. These visitors from Africa, I felt, were not only innocent beside our own masters, they were innocent among the blacks they taught. There they stood, in their ruined health and their worn simplicity, begging for our shillings for a new altar cloth, a silver cruet stand; I couldn’t believe they had done much harm among the alligator societies, the human leopards, nor corrupted very effectively those men whose secret ritual it is to sacrifice a child once a year to the great python.
In Liberia I discovered another kind of missionary. I do not imagine Dr Harley, the Methodist medical missionary, is unique in Africa: a man with a body and nerves worn threadbare by ten years’ unselfish work, cutting away the pus from the huge swollen genitals, injecting for yaws, anointing for craw-craw, injecting two hundred natives a week for venereal disease. He had made his home in this corner of Liberia with his wife and two children, curious little elderly yellow-faced boys; he had lost one child, who was buried at the mission. *
All the way along the Liberian border I had heard of him; he was the man in Liberia who knew most about the bush societies – the little time that the long hopeless fight against disease allowed him was devoted to these investigations. But he did not care to talk about them before his servants for fear of poison.
We had been lent a house a hundred yards from the mission, a luxurious little house it seemed to us by this time, for it was built of wood with a tin roof, the floor raised to escape the ants. At one end was a dispensary, and just outside was the open hospital building, long wooden benches under a roof of thatch. The forest came up at the back, like a small private wood. Ganta scared me: there was a smell of chemicals, of sickness and death about the place. Quite suddenly we had dropped down from the highlands, and the air had changed. It was heavy and damp. There were palms about and a sense of drenched ground, flies and ordure. I would never have believed that a climate could so completely change in the course of a day’s march. It had an immediate effect on the health: all energy left me: that night it was difficult to walk as far as the mission house for dinner; my stomach quite suddenly ceased to function.
I remember a rather grim dinner. Dr Harley had been out all day and was tired, and ready to fall asleep where he sat; it was the dead boy’s birthday. When he heard that I had walked from the Sierra Leone border without using a hammock, he said I was mad to do it; he had just sent a man – Dr D – home dead who had made the comparatively short trek from Monrovia on his feet. Nobody could walk long distances in this climate without danger. I tried to turn the conversation to the bush societies, but he sheered away from them. He said that Sinoe, which we had planned to reach, was at least four weeks away. The pain I had been feeling for some days now in my stomach seemed to get
worse at the news. I could have been happy enough settled in one place for months, but the thought of four more weeks of physical exertion, of rising before dawn and walking for six or seven hours through the dreadful monotony of the forest, I could not bear.
On the way back to our house I remembered we hadn’t taken our quinine for two days. The rats had been at the hairbrushes and gnawed the bristles. They ran along between the wall and the roof in my room without even waiting for me to put out the light. I took a handful of Epsom in the warm boiled water from the filter which was dripping regularly in the corner and watched them scamper along the narrow crack above my head. I didn’t care a damn about the rats any longer, the sisters at Bolahun were right; I was scared in the same way as I had been in England when I suddenly found that my plans had gone too far for me to back out of the Liberian journey; I could remember reading the British Blue Book and thinking, ‘In three weeks I shall be there,’ ‘there’ meaning the long list of diseases and of Colonel Davis’s atrocities. I got no thrill at all; I was just scared. I comforted myself, ‘I shan’t try for Sinoe,’ but I knew I hadn’t the moral courage to make straight for Monrovia. The rats jumped down when I turned out the lantern, but I wasn’t any longer afraid of rats. I was discovering in myself a thing I thought I had never possessed: a love of life.
Liberian Commissioner
Of course by daylight I felt better; it is difficult to believe in death before sunset. But a four weeks’ longer trek to Sinoe was beyond me, especially as I hadn’t enough men with me now to use the hammock. There was one other excuse, too; no money. I had no means of getting more money at Sinoe and I should not have enough to pay the carriers after the longer trek.
We thought it politic to walk up through Ganta to call on the DC. He wore a well-cut tropical suit, a small military moustache, his skin was slightly yellow; he looked more Latin than African. He had a reputation for fairness, honesty and efficiency. Now he was engaged in driving the Sanoquelleh-Ganta road south. Once again we were encountering Liberian patriotism. This time it was of a more European brand. There was not a carrier who would not have welcomed white intervention; patriotism in their minds had nothing to do with who ruled them, it was love of a certain territory. But Commissioner Dunbar was one of the rulers. His patriotism was like a European’s; to him the thought of white interference was hateful and because England’s attitude to the Kru rebellion suggested a danger to Liberian independence, he suspected and disliked the English. He was courteous and reserved and it was hopeless to try to convince him that our journey had no political motive. I felt our amicable expressions becoming shrill in the effort to convince, beating hopelessly against the hard courteous surface of his mind. There was no need to convince him; but he was a man with such admirable qualities that one wanted to leave him with a good impression. But the more we struggled to leave that good impression, the more our voices sounded in our own ears false and hypocritical.
I tried to make him express some of his suspicions by mentioning the town on the forbidden coast-line, but he contented himself with saying that it would probably take us another five weeks to reach Sinoe. Should we have to wait long for a boat to Monrovia? Perhaps a month, he said, leaning back in his wicker chair, the blazing sun over the compound behind giving his yellow handsome face a blurred black outline. It was a politic inaccuracy, because, as we learnt later, there was a weekly launch. I suggested Grand Bassa as an alternative and he encouraged the idea: we could do it in ten days, he informed us, but that was an exaggeration. He didn’t know the road himself, it was used only by the Mandingo traders; impassable in the rains, it would be a very rough way through the biggest bush, but ten days should see us on the Coast.
The Commissioner had other reasons than patriotism to distrust the white man. There was a Catholic priest at Sanoquelleh, his headquarters, and the previous Commissioner had been married to a Catholic. The priest had resented the difference between Dunbar and his predecessor; Dunbar had stood strictly to the letter of the law, allowing the priest no privileges. The priest tried to get rid of him, writing letters to the President in Monrovia; and the heat and desolation worked on both men. The priest saw his chance when one of the men working on the roads fell sick. He took him into the mission and the man died there. Immediately the priest wrote a letter accusing Dunbar of having starved his workers and beaten one to the point of death. Dunbar acted with admirable promptitude; he arrived at the mission with a squad of soldiers before the man was buried and carried both the body and the priest over the eighteen miles to Ganta, where he asked the American doctor to examine the body. Dr Harley exonerated him and the priest was expelled from the Republic. As for Dunbar, he had been made to realize that whites were not only hypocritical in their attitude to the Republic, they could be crooked in their dealings with individuals.
The Secret Societies
That afternoon the doctor came in to talk about the bush societies. His investigations were the only enthusiasm he had kept after ten years, but he wanted to be sure that my boys were out of the house. I went and looked in the kitchen where they slept. It was empty. Laminah was sitting in the shade of the hospital looking sick. The doctor had drawn a tooth of his in the morning: I had heard the painful dog-like howls through the wooden wall: and now he was afraid that he was going to die because the gum still bled. He was too sophisticated to paint himself with native medicine, but he had brought a pot of cold cream with him from Freetown and was smearing it all over his face and neck and scalp.
I am not an anthropologist and I cannot pretend to remember very much of what Dr Harley told me: a pity, for no white man is closer to that particular ‘heart of darkness’, the secret societies being more firmly rooted in Liberia than in any other country on the West Coast. The Government have put up the feeblest of resistances: though Colonel Davis, so he told me later, had court-martialled and shot fifty members of the Leopard Society in a village near Grand Bassa. Indeed, they could not properly resist because they believed. President King himself was rumoured to have been a member of the Alligator Society. When the League of Nations Commission was appointed to inquire into Liberian conditions, Mr King and several members of his cabinet – so it was believed in Monrovia – had sacrificed a goat. After the sacrifice, which should traditionally have been a human one, a boatload of young Krus had been drowned close to the beach at Monrovia, and it was generally felt that the alligator was dissatisfied with the goat.
It is a grim world, this of the societies, of the four men who, Dr Harley said, came to Ganta a year or two back from the north looking for a victim. Everyone in Ganta knew they were there, with their ritual need of the heart, the palms of the hands, the skin of the forehead, but no one knew who they were. The Frontier Force were active, searching for strangers. Presently the fear passed. The Manos round Ganta knew what the men were seeking, for they have their own cannibalistic societies, and though I had said nothing of this to my boys and there were no Manos among the carriers, Laminah and Amedoo knew all about it. Laminah said to me one day, ‘These people bad, they chop men,’ and they were happy to leave the Manos behind. This is the territory the United States map marks so vaguely and excitingly as ‘Cannibal’.
The Terrapin Society of the women and the Snake Society of the men, of course, are not peculiar to the Manos. There is the ordinary snake society, a kind of postgraduate course in handling snakes, in curing their bites and dancing the snake dance, and the secret society which does actually worship a python, to which one baby should be sacrificed each year by the fully initiated. This was a common terror once: we came across the memory of what I suppose was a related cult at the sacred waterfall beyond Ganta; now only in Liberia, where the secret societies are so immune from interference, do cases of child murder or disappearance occur with any frequency.
Dr Harley was particularly pleased with having discovered the nature of one devil, the most sacred in the women’s eyes, whom it is death for a woman to see. He found it was not an individual at all
, but a circle of young warriors who had entered bush school at the same time as the chief’s son. The women were warned by drums that the great devil was out, and the young men danced fully armed beating the ground with staffs.
Among all these devils, Dr Harley said, there was one supreme devil, whose fiat ran the length of the Coast and who had the power to stop war between tribe and tribe. He could appear simultaneously in places far apart: he was known by his distinctive mask and robes. These were probably stored in every place of importance along the Coast, above the palaver-house or in the blacksmith’s hut. For the blacksmith of Mosambolahun, it appeared, was not peculiar in being the local devil. Dr Harley was inclined to believe that the craft of blacksmith was always linked with the status of devil.
It is a curiously Kafka-like situation: headmasters who wear masks and turn out to be the local blacksmith. . . . One reaches the village at the foot of the Schloss, to discover that almost anyone may be the master of the Schloss; his agents are everywhere . . . there is an atmosphere of force and terror . . . occasionally beauty . . . ‘meaning behind meaning, form behind form’. I can imagine that after seven years of investigating this formal but Protean religion, one may still despair of an interpretation. Olga in Kafka’s novel, it will be remembered, tried to construct ‘out of glimpses and rumours and through various distorting factors’ an image of Klamm. ‘He’s reported as having one appearance when he comes into the village and another on leaving it, after having his beer he looks different from what he does before it, when he’s awake he’s different from when he’s asleep, when he’s alone he’s different from when he’s talking to people, and – what is comprehensible after all that – he’s almost another person up in the Castle.’ Take the case of the rich and sinister headman at Zigita: for all anyone knew he might be the devil himself . . . or was the devil the blacksmith? or was there a devil in the sense of an individual at all, any more than the group of young warriors had been a devil, was it perhaps a fraud practised by the initiates? But it was a mistake to suggest that the young warriors were frauds: in their composite form they were the devil.