He told me again, ‘My name is Steve Dunbar. I am interested also in your bed. And this table’ (it was a card-table bought for three and elevenpence). ‘That too folds up? I will buy that.’
I said, ‘I’m sorry. You see, we’ve got to get to Monrovia. I can’t possibly sell them before that.
He changed the subject quite suddenly, ‘This chief,’ he said, ‘is a good young man. If you want anything done tell me.’ I said I wanted chop for the men; I would pay a good dash for it in the morning. He told the chief. ‘The chief,’ he said, ‘agrees.’
‘I want the chop quite early,’ I said. ‘They didn’t have much food last night.’
The chief fanned himself with the Boy Scout cap. He was hot and excited. He sent several men off in different directions.
‘You are going to Ganta?’ Steve Dunbar said.
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘To Monrovia. But first to Grand Bassa. And Tapee-Ta. How do we get to Tapee-Ta?’
‘You want to see elephants?’ Steve Dunbar said. ‘You will see plenty. Hundreds. You go to Baplai. There is a civilized man at Baplai. He is a friend of mine. Mr Nelson. You will find him very agreeable. You may say you are my friend. From Baplai you will go to Toweh-Ta. You will see lots of elephants. They will run backwards and forwards all the time over the path.’ Across Steve Dunbar’s shoulder I caught sight of Laminah’s startled face. Steve Dunbar said, ‘I will leave you now, but I will see you again in Monrovia and we will talk about the bed and the chair.’ He stepped inside and looked at the bed again and then made off across the compound followed by his boy; he had the air of a well-established firm. The chief and I sat in silence. He had his eye on the bottle which Amedoo had put out on the card-table. Presently I could stand his sad covetousness no longer; I gave him a few fingers of neat whisky and he went away.
Almost immediately Laminah was at my side. He was excited (his woollen cap and bobble were all askew), and when he was excited it was almost impossible to understand him. I gathered he wanted a goat. ‘For chop?’ No, it wasn’t for chop. He said something about elephants. Amedoo came forward and explained that our path from now on would be through the biggest bush, that there were lots of elephants, and the labourers wanted a goat. I still didn’t understand. He explained that elephants were frightened by the noise a goat made; it need only be a very, very small goat. It seemed a tall story, but if it made them feel safer to have a goat, I didn’t mind paying for one. Goats had only cost two shillings at Ganta. I told the Paramount Chief’s messenger, who still hung about the verandah, that we wanted to buy a goat. About an hour later a piccaninny, not more than three and a half feet high, arrived with a tiny kid slung across his shoulders. The owner wanted six shillings for it; goats were, apparently, at a premium on the edge of elephant country. The carriers were indignant; they wanted a goat, but they would lose face if their employer paid too much; they would rather dare the elephants without protection. So I refused it, even when the price went down to four shillings. The carriers had never been outside the borders of their northern tribes before; they could never understand that prices varied according to supply and demand. When the price of rice, from Sakripie onwards, began to advance, they were shocked and indignant; they felt we were being humbugged.
I learned the origin of the goat idea later at Tapee from Colonel Davis, the Kru coast warrior. Apparently a goat once made a bet with an elephant that he could eat more at a meal. The elephant ate and ate and fell asleep. When he woke the goat was standing on the top of a high rock. He said he had eaten everything around and was now going to start on the elephant. From that day all elephants have feared the voice of a goat. I’m not sure whether Colonel Davis believed the story or not.
When the sun was low a clamour of voices brought me from bed. The population of Sakripie was pouring into the compound behind two huge stilted and masked devils. They must have stood more than eighteen feet high. They wore tall witches’ hats rimmed with little shells; their faces were black, the masks looked as if they had been made out of old cotton stockings, they wore striped pyjama jackets, with the sleeves sewn up to hide the hands, and pyjama shorts, while the stilts were wound with a thinner striped material. Their performance was humorous and sophisticated. They sat down on the roof-tops and idly fanned themselves with their legs crossed, then stretched a leg right across the thatch and pretended to fall asleep. They had a sense of climax which would have earned the applause of the most sophisticated music-hall audience as they leaned back their whole stiff inarticulated length at an angle of about twenty degrees and just recovered as they began to fall. They had the usual interpreter with them. He lay on the ground while they hopped on one stilt towards him, so that it seemed almost inevitable that the wooden hoof would be planted on his face; but always at the last moment they cleared him. When the entertainment was over, they left the compound by the wall; the gateway was too low for them. They sat on the ten-foot wall and lifted over each stiff leg in turn like old men crossing a stile, and for a long while after their witch hats were visible bobbing away above the huts towards their own compound.
It was dusk when they had gone, and I began to be impatient for the carriers’ chop. It was nearly forty-eight hours since they had eaten a really good meal. I sent a messenger for the chief, who said that the chop was at that moment being cooked. I made the mistake of giving him whisky, thinking it would make him more ready to do what I wanted, but it only made him sleepy and confused and less able than ever to deal with his disobedient townspeople. When it was quite dark and we were sitting in the compound squeezing limes into our whisky, he returned with a pretty nubile girl who was one of his two wives. His father the Paramount Chief, he said, had fifty-five. He drank more whisky and became rather fuddled. I was aware of the carriers hovering miserably out of range of my hurricane lamp; I wanted to impress them that I was doing something about their food, I was feeling guilty sitting there drinking whisky, waiting for my own chop to be served. I told the chief he was lying, that he had done nothing about the men’s chop, and he leapt up, dignified and drunk and a little too plausible, like the motor salesman he should have been. He said he would show me that he was not a liar; the chop was cooking now – I had only to follow him, and he set off with long strides towards the town. I called out into the shadows for Vande and pursued him at the run. It was a very lovely night; I had never seen so many stars; the whisky made me want to be at peace with all the world; I was quite ready to take the chief’s word when he halted outside one of the furthest huts and pointed to a circle of women, their faces lit by the slow low flames of the wood fire on which they were boiling a great cauldron of rice. ‘Is it enough?’ I asked Vande, and Vande said, Yes, it was enough. Neither of us could speak the language and ask the women whether the food was really intended for the carriers. A few sullen notabilities of the place loitered at the edge of the dark, hating us, hating the young drunk chief. We returned and presently I went to bed. After an hour or two someone moved in my hut. It was Amedoo come to tell me that the carriers had received no chop at all and had gone hungry to their beds.
The Tax-gatherer
The dry weather was breaking: in a few weeks the way to Grand Bassa would be impassable. When I woke at half-past five the rain was pouring down, the empty compound was lit by green lightning. The chief’s cows, great cream-coloured beasts with curled horns and velvet eyes, were standing close against the women’s huts for shelter. It looked as if we shouldn’t get away till late. There was no sign of the carriers: it was not until half-past six when the rain had stopped, though the lightning flickered on, that they drifted into the compound, wet and hungry and miserable.
I called Vande, gave him half a crown to buy a goat with whenever he chose, and told them to cook the little rice we had with us and eat it before starting. Then the young chief appeared in the compound; he had an aching head and a dry mouth, and he was embarrassed and ashamed. I pretended not to notice him until he climbed on to my verandah, and then I didn’t offer hi
m a chair. I waited until my carriers were close and then I cursed him. I was very Imperialist, very prefectorial as I told him that a chief must be judged by his discipline, that he ought not to allow his headman to disobey him. He couldn’t tell my satiric self-criticism as the ghost of Arnold of Rugby addressed his head prefect through my lips.
We did not get away from Sakripie till nine-thirty; we had never before been so late in starting, for by ten the heat was always intense. The paths were rougher than any we had encountered since Zigita, and the storm gave us an indication of how impossible the route would be when the rains set in. Already the paths were turning into swamps and the men had sometimes to wade waist-deep in water. We were not taking the quickest route to Tapee, which would have involved two long and scorching days on a path cleared of shade, and the villagers we now passed saw white faces for the first time. They ran screaming beside us, waving sprays of leaves, until we reached the boundary of the village land; there they always stopped at some invisible line across the forest path. Once they tried to seize my cousin’s hammock and rush it triumphantly through a village, but Amedoo drew his sword and held them off.
After five hours we reached Baplai. We were by this time among the Gio tribe, who live on the extreme edge of subsistence in the great bush. The steep pointed roofs were falling in, and the inhabitants were quite naked except for loincloths. They were so thin one expected to see the bones through the venereal sores. The presence of a ‘civilized man’, however, ensured their keeping a rest-house, one musty little hut with two rooms the size of large dog kennels, where, I suppose, Liberian Government agents slept if ever they came up into the Gio tribe.
Mr Nelson appeared from his own hut next door. He wore a pair of torn white trousers, backless slippers on his grey naked feet and a torn pyjama jacket which had lost most of its buttons. On his head was a kind of rough-rider’s hat, and his eyeballs were yellow and malarious. All vitality, except a little malice and covetousness, had been drained out of the half-caste, who lived here, year in, year out, squeezing taxes out of the village, with no pay but the percentage he chose to steal. He was officially reckoned civilized because he could speak English and write his name.
When I came in with my carriers he thought I was a Government agent and asked me what my ‘privileges’ were: how many free labourers I was allowed, how many hampers of rice unpaid for from this starved village. I said I had no privileges but wished to buy food for my men.
‘Buy?’ Mr Nelson said. ‘Buy? That’s not so easy.’ He said with a faint flicker of hatred, ‘These people would rather be forced to give than sell.’ Later I photographed him with his wife, an old Gio woman naked to the waist, and he came and sat beside me and talked languidly of politics. I spoke of the coming election. He said that Mr King had no chance of reelection, but all his opinion meant was that he owed his position, if you could call his dreary exile by that name, to Mr Barclay’s party. If King succeeded Barclay, even the Nelsons would be ruined. I asked him about Mr Faulkner, who contested the election in 1928 against King and who had started the League of Nations inquiry into slavery. Mr Faulkner had won the uneasy respect of everyone in Liberia; he had refused minor offices of every Government, he had spent all his own money, earned as an electrical engineer and the owner of Monrovia’s only refrigerating plant, in fighting president after president in the course of reform. ‘But no,’ Mr Nelson said, turning his yellow malicious eyes over the painted leaking huts, ‘we don’t like Faulkner.’ After a while he found enough vitality to explain, ‘You see, he has an idea.’
‘What idea?’ I said.
‘Nobody knows,’ Mr Nelson said, ‘but we don’t like it’.
A young man came out of the forest in the evening light followed by a boy with a gun. He was a native, with a round sad gentle face, dressed in plus-fours with bright little tassels below the knee and the same roughrider hat as Mr Nelson wore. He introduced himself: he was Victor Prosser, a Bassa man, schoolmaster of Toweh-Ta. He had been on a visit to the Catholic priest at Sanoquelleh, two days’ march away, to make his confession and fetch back to school his youngest pupil. He was a devout young man who had been educated by the Catholic fathers on the Coast, and was now established as the head of a little mission school. When he heard that I was a Catholic too, he was overjoyed. He sat there beside Mr Nelson, repeating over and over again in a soft hesitating English I had to bend my head to catch, ‘That’s very good. That’s good. Very good. That is good.’ Mr Nelson eyed him sourly and cynically and left us.
Victor Prosser said that he would call his youngest pupil to read me the Catechism, and gave an order to the boy with the gun. He didn’t ask whether I would like to hear the child; he assumed that any Catholic would be pleased to hear the Catechism recited at any time. The piccaninny appeared: a tiny creature of about three years old, dressed in nothing but a transparent shirt. The dark settled over Baplai as he began rapidly to read, his pronunciation so odd that I could only recognize occasional words – venial: purgatory: Communion of Saints. Victor Prosser interrupted him, ‘What is purgatory?’ and the small Gio repeated rapidly the definition established by I know not what council of the medieval church, ‘Purgatory is that state . . .’ He wasn’t really reading, I could tell that: he had learnt the whole thing off by heart, but if I were inclined to criticize the value of that, there before me was Victor Prosser who had in his time too been a piccaninny with nothing but a retentive memory for words which meant nothing to him at all, and now sat there visibly entranced over ‘purgatory’ and ‘the communion of saints’. The child, too, had an ancient English reader with little steel engravings of ladies in bustles and gentlemen with trousers buckled below their boots. Victor Prosser refused the drink I offered him and, rising to go, said that he would lead us himself next morning on our road as far as Toweh-Ta.
So this bare grimy pool in the deep forest had more goodness in it than we had expected: even the fat chief in his dirty robe and battered bowler, who had greeted us so surlily when we entered, mistaking us, as Mr Nelson had done, for Government agents, proved himself to possess a kindly heart. Amah and Vande were quite drunk with palm wine long before dark, and when we ourselves were sitting at dinner the waving of half a dozen torches announced the chief’s approach with the carriers’ chop. He stood there swaying in front of us between two tipsy torch-bearers, while Vande whispered in my ear, ‘Chief good man. Chief very good man,’ and his men brought up between the pointed huts, under the light of the flaming splinters, bowl after bowl of food. The carriers had never seen such a feast. Its stink reeked in the hot flyey night, the stink of fourteen bowls of chop and three bowls of meat scraps.
Later I was a little drunk myself, not this time for fear of rats but from mere good fellowship. I remember wandering round the village listening to the laughter and the music among the little glowing fires and thinking that, after all, the whole journey was worth while: it did reawaken a kind of hope in human nature. If one could get back to this bareness, simplicity, instinctive friendliness, feeling rather than thought, and start again . . .
I was more spellbound, I suppose, than Vande, who clutched my sleeve in the shadow of a hut and begged me to take the half-crown I had given him that morning into safe keeping: he was afraid to carry such wealth about him among this low bush tribe. He took a green leaf out of his pocket and unwrapped it: inside the leaf was a match-box: inside the match-box another leaf, and inside that the silver coin. Then he went back to his palm wine and later I encountered him again wandering in blissful drunkenness, hand in hand with the headman of the village, who had reserved for him a special bowl.
‘All Hail, Liberia, Hail!’
I woke at five. In my dream someone had been reciting Milton’s Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity. The version belonged entirely to sleep, but it seemed to me more moving than any poetry I had ever heard before. Two lines, ‘Angels bright Bathed in white light’, brought tears to my eyes, and for a long while after I woke I believed them to be
beautiful and even to have been written by Milton. The darkness was thinning behind the pointed huts. The smell of goats blew in on the damp misty wind. It was Victor Prosser, I suppose, who was responsible, who had brought the idea of God and heavenly hierarchies, of crystal spheres and light insufferable, into the empty pagan land.
I said good-bye to the chief and Mr Nelson. When I gave the chief a present of money he was taken aback, he wasn’t used to payment and automatically held it out to the tax-gatherer, and automatically Mr Nelson’s hand moved towards it. Then he remembered he was observed and turned the movement into a jest, a hollow jest unshared by the drained malarious eyes.
Victor Prosser had gone ahead with my cousin. There were a lot of things he wanted to learn before he reached Toweh-Ta. Was it true that Queen Elizabeth was a Protestant, and Mary Queen of Scots a Catholic like himself? Where did the Thames rise? Was London on the Tiber as well as the Thames? Were Sweden and Switzerland the same country? He asked what London was like, and my cousin chose to tell him of the underground trains, but it wasn’t an easy idea to convey to someone who had never seen an ordinary train. ‘Very remarkable,’ he said coldly and disbelievingly at the end of it and changed the subject by humming God Save the King, The boy with the gun walked behind and last followed the tiny piccaninny in the transparent vest. Victor Prosser walked very slowly, and with some pain, because he wore backless slippers for the sake of his prestige as head teacher of Toweh-Ta.
He asked my cousin to join him in singing God Save the King, which the Catholic missionaries on the Coast had taught him; I can’t imagine why, for they were all of them Irish. He said he knew some Protestant hymns and insisted they should sing Onward, Christian Soldiers together as they picked their way through the Liberian jungle. When I joined them he and two schoolboys were singing the Liberian national anthem: