By the late afternoon nearly everyone was asleep, but they woke when the promontory that shelters Monrovia came in sight: the German consulate and just above the beach the long White front of the British Legation. Everyone began to tidy themselves for the capital, put on waistcoats and ties, and there, after a brief panic as we heeled over the bar, was a little jetty and a reception committee of smart politicians cheering and waving and embracing each other with excitement.
I never got quite away from my fellow-passengers. For every day I spent in Monrovia some seedy individual would pluck at my sleeve among the wooden shacks of the waterside, and drawing me on one side would remind me that we had travelled together, pointing out to me, as the financier of the Opposition party, that he had left his affairs in Cape Palmas or Sinoe in bad order and was finding the capital city very expensive. Most of the Opposition, indeed, had to be sent home at the expense of the President
Monrovia
To the casual visitor, at any rate, Monrovia is a more pleasant town than Freetown. Freetown is like an old trading port that has been left to rot along the beach; it is a spectacle of decay. But Monrovia is like a beginning; true, a beginning which has come to little beyond the two wide grassy main streets intersecting each other and lined with broken-paned houses all of wood and of one storey except for the brick churches, one little brick villa belonging to the Secretary of the Treasury, the three-storeyed Executive Mansion where the President lives, the State Department opposite, and the unfinished stone house of ex-President King. An asphalt drive, ‘for motor traffic only’, goes down to the water-front, but there are very few motors and all pedestrians use it. Along the waterside are the shops, the big wooden stores of the English PZ, of the German and Dutch companies where you can buy gin as cheap as ninepence a bottle, and the small huts of the Syrians, the wooden shed of the Post Office with a ricketty ladder on the outside. There are telephone poles along the main street and out by the one motor road towards Mount Barclay and the Firestone Rubber Plantations, but the telephone service no longer exists. The residential street runs gently uphill towards a waste of scorched rock and sand, the road to the English Legation and the lighthouse, and here and there among the rocks are planted the beginnings of stone houses, sometimes only the foundation laid, sometimes several storeys, so that these unfinished buildings have the appearance of houses gutted by fire.
They are the only form of investment Liberia provides, for though prospectuses have been issued for the Bank of Liberia Ltd, with a capital of 1,000,000 dollars divided into 200,000 shares, nobody has subscribed; as early as 1923 the Legislature granted the bank the exclusive right of issuing banknotes and coins, but Liberia still depends for its currency on the British. The only Liberian coins in circulation are heavy copper pennies. So from ex-President King downwards anyone with any money to spare not invested in the Firestone Bank (the British Bank has left Liberia) puts it into building, but the buildings are very seldom finished. The foundations and the first storey usually exhaust the owner’s capital, though sometimes years later a few more stories are added to the follies dotting the rough slopes near the sea.
It is easy to make fun of this black capital city; of the Secretary of State who, when a white man expressed his amazement that he should occupy such a position at so young an age as thirty-four, replied, ‘Pitt was a Prime Minister at thirty’, of a town where almost every other man is a lawyer and every man a politician. ‘There is no body of men,’ Thomas Paine wrote, ‘more jealous of their privileges than the Commons: because they sell them,’ and one cannot doubt that this motive forms a part of Liberian patriotism. The native in the interior, if he comes in close contact with a Government agent, has every reason to deplore ‘the mighty calamity of Government’. But there is a pathos about these stunted settlements along the coast, the grassy streets, the follies on the rocky hillside, the pathos of a black people planted down, without money or a home, on a coast of yellow fever and malaria to make what they can of an Africa from which their families had been torn centuries before. No one can pretend they have made much of their country. Colonel Davis’s conduct of the Kru campaign is only one example of the horrors of their history, but to me it seems remarkable that they have retained their independence at all: a kind of patriotism has emerged from the graft and the privation.
England and France in the last century robbed them of territory; America has done worse, for she has lent them money. Without any resources of their own, except what they could squeeze out of the unfriendly natives in an undeveloped interior, they have had to borrow again and again. Each fresh loan has only paid off the previous indebtedness and left them with a smaller surplus and an inflated interest. They have tried to build roads before, as they are trying to build them now, and I had seen outside Grand Bassa how previous roads had gone backward, not forward. They once had a telephone system, but now they have only the leaning poles by the roadside. They had bought machines, but they hadn’t had the money to work them, and driving out to the rubber plantations one passed the old dredges rusting in the scrub. I couldn’t wonder at their inanition in the soaking heat. I remember that one day, going out to Mount Barclay, we passed a motor-lorry broken down on the road with one wheel off; there were the remains of a camp fire and the crew were sleeping in the bush. It was only twenty miles from Monrovia, but as I went out next day to visit ex-President King the lorry and the crew were still camping there waiting for something to happen.
Nor can you wonder at their hatred and suspicion of the white man. The last loan and the last concession to the Firestone Company of Ohio all but surrendered their sovereignty to a commercial company with no interests in Liberia but rubber and dividends. The Liberian has quite rightly been condemned for his abuse of power in the interior, but the native can hardly expect a much higher standard of treatment from a commercial company without any responsibility to world opinion. It was a quite unconstitutional concession, in return for a loan, of 1,000,000 acres of Liberian territory on a lease of ninety-nine years. In 1935 only 60,000 acres were under cultivation: 45,000 acres outside Monrovia and 15,000 at Cape Palmas, but the concession remains an impediment to any form of development.
It was imagined, one may charitably suppose, that Firestone’s would bring more than money into the country, that they would provide employment and stimulate trade. The year of my visit they were employing 6,000 natives supplied by the chiefs; no one could really tell whether that labour was voluntary or forced, but if the million acres should ever be cultivated and the employment figures rise in proportion, voluntary labour will certainly not supply the demand, and there is a great moral distinction between the usual form of forced labour in Africa, which at least pretends to be for the good of the community, and forced labour for the good of shareholders.
The wages paid, though it must be admitted that they compared favourably with some of the British Government’s rates in Sierra Leone, were not likely to bring prosperity to the Liberian tribes. The wages of tappers ran from eight-pence to a shilling and a penny a day, of clearers from seven-pence to a shilling. Out of this they had to buy their own food, but not to the benefit of local trade. They must buy at the Firestone stores and Firestone’s imported their own rice, so that it had to be sold at a rate one and sixpence in the hundredweight dearer than it could be bought in Monrovian stores, and the rate in Monrovian stores was already much dearer than anywhere else in Liberia.
Little wonder, then, if in the past the Liberian Legislature had chosen to look on the white man as somebody to be squeezed in return, and nobody can say they have not shown imagination in their methods. At one time a German shipping agent was the chief sufferer. His chauffeur killed a dog and the next day was arrested at the suit of the owner. The German agent was brought into court, and the owner in evidence said that last year her bitch, which she valued at ten dollars, had had five puppies which had fetched ten dollars each: that in a week or two she would have borne five more puppies, which she would have sold for the sam
e figure. The court fined the German sixty dollars.
On another occasion the same agent was fetched out of bed by the police to meet a claim for damages suffered by a Liberian woman who was travelling in an Italian steamer for which the German line acted. She had been scratched by a monkey belonging to another passenger while the steamer was in Spanish territorial waters. The doctor had put iodine on the scratch and no harm was done, but the woman mentioned the incident in a letter to her husband and he brought an action against the only person who could be reached, the German agent. The court awarded him 30,000 dollars. This was going too far and after a protest by the representatives of England, France and Germany, the Supreme Court found that the action lay outside the scope of the Liberian courts.
The Exiles
A curious international life was led by the few whites in the little shabby capital. Apart from the Firestone employees, who lived outside in European comfort on the plantation, there were not more than three dozen whites in Monrovia; there were Poles, Germans, Dutch, Americans, Italians, a Hungarian, French, and English; two of them were doctors, others were storekeepers, gold smugglers, shipping agents, and consuls. There was some comfort to be found at the legations; and though there was not such a thing as a water-closet in Monrovia, nearly everyone had an ice-box, for in the little dingy town there was little to do but drink, drink and wait for the fortnightly mail-boat which might bring frozen meat but was unlikely to bring a passenger.
These men and women were more exiled than the English in Freetown; they had less comfort and far less amusement; there was no golf course and the surf was far too dangerous for bathing. Once a week they played a little tennis at the British Legation or had a game of billiards, and once a week, too, the older men of the white colony shot with a pistol at bottles perched above the beach at the edge of the British Legation ground. That custom had been going on for years, every Saturday evening until the light was too bad to see. One advantage their isolation had: it killed snobbery. Chargé d’Affaires and shop assistant, Consul-General’s wife and storekeeper’s wife were equal in Monrovia. It was the democracy of men and women wrecked together on a deserted coast, and to the casual visitor social life there seemed more human and kindly than in an English colony, in spite of the scandals and the tiny commercial and diplomatic intrigues and the fever, always the fever. I was only in Monrovia for ten days during the most healthy season of the year, but eight of the tiny population of whites went down with fever while I was there.
One couldn’t expect them to do anything else but drink, beginning after breakfast with beer at each other’s houses and ending with whisky at four in the morning. But what was worst was the iced crème de menthe. It was served everywhere automatically after lunch and dinner: it would have been thought eccentric not to like the sweet nauseating stuff, as it would have been thought curious not to enjoy at sundown, in the damp heat of the evening, while the backs of the hands and the armpits sweated all the time, the heavy cloying Tokay the Hungarian doctor kept. They had every reason to drink; you couldn’t read much in a climate which rotted your books; you couldn’t even deceive yourself that you were there for some good, ruling the natives, for it was the natives in this case who ruled you and presented, so far as the Cabinet Ministers were concerned, a depressing example of sobriety and attention to business; you couldn’t womanize, for the range was too embarrassingly limited; there were no games to play, no strangers regularly bringing the gossip of one’s own country; there was no ambition, for Liberia, whether to the diplomat or to the storekeeper, was about the deadest of all ends; there was really nothing but drink and the wireless, and of the two the drink was preferable.
But, nevertheless, all the English had wireless: at six o’clock they would turn on the Empire Programme from Daventry, but even that limited and depressing choice of entertainment was inaudible; the West Coast defeated any instrument; and as a background to every drink and to all conversation the powerful instruments would wheeze and groan and whistle until eleven o’clock. This was the nearest they got to Home, this piercing din over the Atlantic. By eleven o’clock one was too drunk to mind, anyway.
As for the intrigues which brought a little liveliness into the hot damp day, a little activity, a small sense of importance, there were two while I was there. A gentleman with a great financial reputation had arrived in Monrovia to try to obtain for a big British trust the concession for all gold and precious minerals that might be found in the interior and to drive out such small lonely prospectors as Van Gogh. It was a confirmation of the story I had heard in Bo. He had arrived at the right moment, within two months of the Presidential election, when money was urgently needed, and he was prepared to spend £30,000 on easing the concession through. The only danger was that he might be backing the wrong horse, but in a Liberian election this risk is small; no one really doubted that Mr Barclay would be re-elected. Unfortunately within a few days of his arrival the financial expert was taken ill before he had been able to interview the President, and nothing would persuade the Liberian Ministers but that this was an astute move to lower the price. They were the soul of stiff politeness, but it was obvious that they intended to show that they could bargain too.
The other intrigue was diplomatic and concerned the Royal Jubilee. The Secretary of State had been for a very long while trying to persuade the British Chargé d’Affaires to go to church and hear the sermons of the Minister for Education. There was nothing political in his motives, he was an earnest humourless young man, he just thought that it would do anyone good to go to church, and the services at this church were almost identical with those of the Church of England. But his reforming zeal gave the British representative a chance to perform a diplomatic coup. He told the Secretary of State that not only would he come to church, but he would guarantee the presence of every British subject and probably of the other foreign representatives as well if on the particular Sunday the Minister for Education included in the prayers some reference to the Royal Jubilee. The Secretary of State, I think, was a little taken aback: he asked for time to consult the Minister of Education, but alas! I did not stay long enough in Monrovia to hear whether the bargain was struck.
One could hardly wonder that the more excitable representatives in the international colony craved for a faster life. They were living on the barren edge of the country; not one of them had been more than a few days’ trek into the interior, they had the most meagre and mistaken ideas of the native tribes; nor would any longer journeys or a more profound knowledge of Liberian conditions have been welcome to the Government, who had seen what damage a roving foreigner could do them in the British Blue Book based on a Vice-Consul’s journey down the Kru Coast. There was an occasion, many years ago, when the British residents raised the English flag in Monrovia, trying to re-enact on a miniature scale the Outlander revolt in Johannesburg, but the result failed as ignominiously as the Jameson Raid. I do not think there was any imperial ambition among the storekeepers of Monrovia, or among the foreign representatives, nor had they much to complain about from the Government. There was less discrimination against the white than there was against the black in most white colonies, and I think a fair observer would have been astonished at the moderation of the black rulers. What the Whites suffered, they suffered with the whole population, from the lack of drainage, medical services, communications, and the desire to intervene was an expression of boredom rather than of imperialism. The man, perhaps, most to be pitied was the American financial adviser, an elderly man who had seen successful service in Arabia and the Philippines, but whom Liberia had defeated. For since the President had declared a moratorium, he had been without any work. Two Poles were the active unofficial advisers, and the American lived on in Monrovia at a reduced salary with nothing to do but shoot at bottles and hit billiard balls.
A flare-up of nervous irritation occurred a short while before my visit. The chauffeur of the French Consul had cornmitted some offences, and an ignorant policeman who knew nothin
g about diplomatic immunities followed the servant into the Consulate and tried to arrest him. The Consul threw the man out, put on his diplomatic uniform and went down to the State building to demand from the Secretary of State an official apology from the Government. The Minister, young earnest Mr Simpson, was quite prepared to apologize himself, but he refused to apologize on behalf of the Government. The whole affair would have been comic if it had not been a little tragic, for it showed to what absurdity, to what frayed nerves, the scorching damp, the bare exile, the shooting of bottles on Saturday evenings, the whistling loudspeaker lead. The French Consul went up the hill to the wireless station, which is run by a French company, and sent a message to a French gunboat he knew was passing down the coast. The gunboat anchored off Monrovia, the captain came ashore in a surf boat and the two solemn uniformed Frenchmen returned to Mr Simpson’s office. The captain laid his sword on Mr Simpson’s desk and said it would remain there until the Consul received an apology from the Government. The apology was given, the gunboat steamed away. I don’t know what happened to the policeman.
Quite outside this strained, dreary and yet kindly life, at the end of several hours’ rough driving from the capital, live the Firestone men in houses containing shower baths and running water and electric light, with a wireless station, tennis courts and a bathing pool, and a new neat hospital in the middle of plantations which smell all the day through of latex, as it drips into little cups tied beneath incisions in the trunks. They, more than the English or the French, are the official Enemy, and no story of whipping post, smuggled arms or burnt villages is too wild to be circulated and believed among Liberians of both parties.