No Screws Unturned
When I came on shore I was met by an elderly Kruman carrying an umbrella. He said reproachfully, ‘I’ve been waiting for some hours.’ He held a cable in his hand from London; it asked him to get in touch with Greene, who was leaving for the Republic. ‘My name,’ the Kruman said, ‘is Mr D.’ He knew the Republic well, he could be of use.
An even more august authority was giving me unwanted help. Before I left the boat I had been handed a letter from His Majesty’s Chargé d’Affaires in Monrovia, the capital of the Republic, saying that he had announced my visit to the Secretary of the Interior, and the Secretary had informed all the District Commissioners in the Western Province. ‘Any courtesies shown these persons by the Commissioners and Chiefs with whom they contact will be very highly appreciated, and it is incumbent that you leave no screws unturned to make their trip a pleasant one.’ The phrase about the screws had a slightly sinister ring, but this fairylike activity had been no part of my plan. If there was anything to hide in the Republic I wanted to surprise it. Luckily the Secretary of the Interior had suggested a route for me to follow, and it would be quite easy for me to avoid it, to avoid indeed the Western Province, after a few days, altogether.
It would have been easier if I had been able to obtain maps. But the Republic is almost entirely covered by forest, and has never been properly mapped, mapped that is to say even to the rough extent of the French colonies which lie on two sides of it. I could find only two large-scale maps for sale. One, issued by the British General Staff, quite openly confesses ignorance; there is a large white space covering the greater part of the Republic, with a few dotted lines indicating the conjectured course of rivers (incorrectly, I usually found) and a fringe of names along the boundary. These names have been curiously chosen: most of them are quite unknown to anyone in the Republic; they must have belonged to obscure villages now abandoned. The other map is issued by the United States War Department. There is a dashing quality about it; it shows a vigorous imagination. Where the English map is content to leave a blank space, the American in large letters fills it with the word ‘Cannibals’. It has no use for dotted lines and confessions of ignorance; it is so inaccurate that it would be useless, perhaps even dangerous, to follow it, though there is something Elizabethan in its imagination. ‘Dense Forest’; ‘Cannibals’; rivers which don’t exist, at any rate anywhere near where they are put; one expects to find Eldorado, two-headed men and fabulous beasts represented in little pictures in the Gola Forest.
But this was where Mr D, the elderly Kruman, could help; he knew the Republic.
Mr D lived in Krutown. Krutown is one of the few parts of Freetown with any beauty; the Krus, the great sailors of the coast, whose boast it is that they have never been slaves and have never dealt in slaves, have escaped Anglicanization. The native huts still stand among the palm trees on the way to Lumley Beach, the women sitting outside with their long hanging breasts uncovered. Mr D’s house was in the only Europeanized street. A bare wooden stair led into a room with wooden walls on which were hung a few religious pictures in Oxford frames. There were four rickety chairs and an occasional table with a potted plant on it. Crudely painted Mothers of God bore the agony of seven swords with indifference, Christ just above his head exposed a heart the colour of raw liver. Insects hopped about on the wooden floor and Mr D gently instructed me how to reach the frontier. A little way over the border there was an American mission, the Order of the Holy Cross at Bolahun; it would be as well to stay there a few days and try to get carriers to go through with me to Monrovia. He examined the route suggested by the Secretary of the Interior; that had got to be avoided as far as possible; though I should have to follow it to Zigita. On the blank spaces of the English map, Mr D made his pencilled suggestions; he couldn’t be really sure to a matter of ten miles where to put the places he mentioned; the English map confused him with its inaccuracies. At last he gave it up altogether, and I simply wrote the names down in my notebook, spelling them as best I might: Mosambolahun, Gondolahun, Jenne, Lombola, Gbeyanlahun, Goryendi, Bellivela, Banya. But it is unnecessary to give them all here, for as it turned out I did not follow this route at all, didn’t even aim at Monrovia, which had been my object when I sailed. Circumstances in a country where the only way to travel is to know the next town or village ahead and repeat it as you go, like the Syrian woman in Little Arthur’s History who said ‘Gilbert, London’ across England, were to alter my plans again and again until my small book was filled with lists of probably mis-spelt names in smudged pencil of places I never succeeded in finding. Examining it now I discover this cryptic entry: ‘Steamer calling C. Palmas and Sinoe. Keep S. dark. Get off at S. Take the beach to Setta Kru, Nana Kru. At N K, Dr V, Am. missionary. To Wesserpor or Dio. Tell people to take me to Nimley. On to New Sasstown and CP.’
This is the record of another plan which came to nothing through lack of money and exhaustion. I had brought with me from England a letter of introduction to Paramount Chief Nimley of the Sasstown Tribe of Krus, the leader of the rebellion on the coast in 1932. It was in the fight against Nimley that the Frontier Force under the command of Colonel Elwood Davis, the President’s special agent, a North American black, had, according to the British Consul’s report, killed women and children, destroyed villages, tortured prisoners. Peace had been patched up but not with Nimley, who with the remains of his tribe was hidden in the bush vainly hoping for white intervention. No white man, Mr D said, would be allowed to travel to the Kru coast, but it would be allowed by booking a passage on a coasting steamer from Monrovia to Cape Palmas to change one’s mind on board and land unexpectedly at Sinoe. From Sinoe one would travel along the beach to Nana Kru, and from there it would be necessary to get guides who knew the way to Nimley’s hiding-place.
I only mentioned these plans which came to nothing, these routes which were not followed, because they may give some idea of the vagueness of my ideas when I landed at Freetown. I had never been out of Europe before; I was a complete amateur at travel in Africa. I intended to walk across the Republic, but I had no idea of what route to follow or the conditions we would meet. Looking at the unreliable map I had thought vaguely that we would go up to the Sierra Leone railway terminus at Pendembu, then go across the frontier the nearest way and strike diagonally down to the capital. There seemed to be a lot of rivers to cross, but I supposed there would be bridges of some kind; there was the forest, of course, but that was everywhere. One apparently reliable book I had read on Sierra Leone mentioned a number of prospectors who had crossed the border into what was supposed to be an uninhabited part of the forest looking for gold and had never returned; but that was a little lower down (the Republic was on the bulge of Africa’s coast-line, and I could never properly remember the points of the compass).
Mr D discouraged me. It wasn’t possible, he said, that way. It was evident that he was particularly anxious for me to travel down by Bellivela. Bellivela was the headquarters of the Frontier Force and was being used as a concentration camp for political prisoners, those who had given evidence before the League of Nations Commission of Inquiry into slavery in the Republic. ‘They’ll have to invite you inside the camp for the night,’ Mr D said, ‘and then you can poke around and see things.’
That night I dreamed of Mr D and the Customs at the border, a muddled irritating dream. I was always forgetting something; I had arrived at the Customs with all my bags and boxes and Mr D tied up in a bale, but I’d forgotten to get any carriers and I had no boys. I was afraid all the time that the Customs inspector would discover Mr D, that I would be fined for smuggling, and have to pay a heavy duty.
The Three Companions
We arrived in Freetown on a Saturday and the train for Pendembu left on the following Wednesday; I had hoped to find servants engaged for me when I arrived; but Jimmie Daker, to whom I had an introduction, who had promised months before to do his best, had forgotten all about it. He was vague, charming, lost, and a little drunk. He
sat in the Grand bar drinking whisky and bitters and talking about the Nazis and the war; he began as a pacifist but after his third drink he was ready to serve again at any moment; his face was scarred from the last war. He hadn’t any idea of how to get boys for the journey, though he agreed that it wouldn’t be wise to take any of those who stood all day at the entrance to the hotel offering their services. He didn’t know anybody who knew anything at all about the Republic. No one in Sierra Leone had ever crossed the border.
‘Oh, Jimmie,’ they all said in Freetown, ‘poor dear Jimmie,’ when I said that Jimmie was finding me boys. ‘Jimmie doesn’t know a thing.’
In the end I got the best boys in Freetown. My head boy, Amedoo, was famous all the way up the line, and Amedoo chose the second boy, Laminah, and the old Mohammedan cook, Souri. And Jimmie Daker was, in a way, responsible. If I had not been to Jimmie’s for a sun-downer, I wouldn’t have met Daddy, who had been twenty-five years in Freetown and knew every native in the place. He was quite drunk. He drove rapidly up and down the hills choosing the worst roads, he nearly got arrested for taking off a black policeman’s hat, the atmosphere was rather like Boat Race night in Piccadilly. ‘Everyone knows Daddy,’ he said, trying to drive into Government House at two in the morning (but the gates were closed), reversing rapidly to the edge of a ditch, plunging uphill again while the sentries stood at attention and watched the car disappear with impassive faces, roaring past the barracks (the guardroom emptied at sight of a car on to the grass and everyone stood to attention in the green underwater light), up a muddy track off the road, coming to a halt against a bank. ‘You poor innocents,’ he said. We were stranded like criminals in a small lit cage above Freetown. ‘Have you ever been in Africa before? Have you ever been on trek? What on earth made you choose to go There?’ ‘There,’ it appeared, was quite unspeakable, though, of course, he knew it only from hearsay; he would never dream . . . Had we any idea of what we were up against? Had we any reliable maps? No, I said. There weren’t any to be got. Had we any boys? No. Had we let the DCs up the line know of our coming and engaged rest-houses? No, I hadn’t known it was necessary. When we crossed the border, how were we going to sleep? In native huts.
‘You poor innocents,’ he said. He nearly wept over the wheel. Had we ever considered what a native hut meant? The rats, the lice, the bugs. What would happen if we got malaria, dysentery? ‘Something’s got to be done,’ he said, reversing, driving rapidly backwards downhill. His mind switched over to the alternate theme: ‘Everyone here knows Daddy.’ He stopped the car in Krutown beside a policeman and thrust his head out of the window. ‘Who am I?’ The policeman approached nervously and shook his head: ‘No. Come here. Come close. Tell me; Who am I?’ The policeman shook his head and tried to smile; he was scared; he supposed it was a game, but he didn’t know how to play. ‘Who am I, you black varmint?’ A young girl tried to slip through the zone of headlight back into the dark: she had no business! out at that hour, but Daddy saw her. ‘Hi,’ he said, sticking his head out from the other side of the car, ‘come here.’ She came up to the car; she was far too pretty to be scared; her bare breasts were small and firm and pointed; she had the neat rounded thighs of a cat. ‘Tell him,’ Daddy said, ‘Who am I?’ She grinned at him. She wasn’t scared by any game a man could play. ‘You know who I am?’ Daddy said. She leant right into the car and, grinned and nodded. ‘Daddy,’ she said. He slapped her face in a friendly way and drove off. He seemed to think he’d proved something. ‘Have you thought of the leeches?’ he said. ‘They’ll drop on you from the trees.’ We stopped outside our hotel; the wooden floors, the stairs, were alive with ants. Daddy said, ‘I’ve got to do something for you, I can’t just let you go like this,’ drooping over the wheel with sleep.
At dawn a madman began to go groaning down the street; I had heard him at intervals all day; I slipped out from under my mosquito net – to watch him trail his rags through the grey early morning; he moved his head from side to side, groaning inhumanly like a man without a tongue. There were no vultures to be seen so early, the tin roofs were bare; do vultures nest? and the bats had gone, the fruit bats which streamed out across the town at seven o’clock.
Strange to say, Daddy remembered next morning that he had promised something. He turned up early at the hotel and said he had the boys outside waiting. I didn’t know what to say to them; they stared back at me from the bottom of the hotel steps waiting for orders: Amedoo, grey-faced and expressionless, holding his fez to his chest, a man of about thirty-five; Souri, the cook, a very old toothless man, in a long white robe; Laminah, the second boy, very young, in shorts and a little white jacket like those barbers wear, with a knitted woollen cap on his head crowned by a scarlet bobble. It was several days before I learnt their names, and I could never fully understand what they said to me. I told them to come back next day, but they haunted the hotel from that moment, the two older men appearing suddenly in the passage, standing silently in front of me with lowered head and fez pressed to their chests. I never knew what they wanted; they always waited for me to speak. It was only later that I realized Amedoo was as shy as myself. I couldn’t have imagined then the affection I would come to feel for them.
Our relationship was to be almost as intimate as a love-affair; they were to suffer from the same worn nerves; to be irritated by the same delays; but our life together, because it had been more perfectly rounded, seemed afterwards less real. For there is so much left over after a love-affair; letters and mutual friends, a cigarette case, a piece of jewellery, a few gramophone records, all the usual places one has seen each other in. But I had nothing left but a few photographs to show that I had ever known these three men; I would never again see the towns we had passed through together and never run into them in familiar places. *
Up to Railhead
Everything was strange from the moment we pressed our way into Water Street Station through the crowd which always watched the twice-weekly train depart, and waved good-bye to Younger, beyond the black barrier of faces. I felt more at one then with the Kuhn-Kan players; I could appreciate the need in a strange place of some point of support, of one or two things scattered round which are familiar and understandable even if they are only Sydney Horler’s novels, a gin and tonic. For even the railway journey was strange. It is a small-gauge line, and the train noses its way up-country with incredible slowness (it took two days to go two hundred and fifty miles). There are three first-class compartments. The experienced traveller (there was one on the train) engages the middle compartment, which is quite empty, and puts up his own deck-chair; in the other two compartments the company provides wicker armchairs.
One was ‘off’, and one was horribly afraid of doing the wrong thing; the etiquette of travel in wild places is as exacting as the etiquette of a new club. Nobody in England had warned me of the centre compartment, although I now understood that as a white man I should have made some effort to engage it. I began to fear, too, my first meeting with a chief; I had been told that I would be ‘dashed’, probably a chicken or some eggs or rice, and I would have to ‘dash’ back money in return; I must shake hands and be friendly but aloof (it was a relief to enter the Republic and no longer feel that I was a member of the ruling race).
This question of dashes was a complicated one; in the course of the journey we found ourselves dashed not merely the usual chicken (value 6d. or 9d. according to quality; return dash, which should always slightly exceed the true value, 1s. or 1s. 3d.), eggs (return dash 1d. each), oranges and bananas (value about forty for 3d.; return dash 6d.), but a goat, a dancing monkey, a bundle of knives, a leather pouch, and innumerable gourds of palm wine. It was not always easy to calculate the value, and it was a long time before I overcame my reluctance to press a shilling into a chief’s hand.
I had been told by Mr D that I might meet three chiefs before we left Sierra Leone, Chief Coomba and Chief Fomba at Pendembu, the end of the line, and Chief Momno Kpanyan at Kailahun, our last stopping pla
ce before the frontier. Chief Momno Kpanyan was a very rich man, and the thought of having to dash him a few shillings clouded the whole of the journey.
I had never been so hot and so damp; if we pulled down the blinds in the small dusty compartment we shut out all the air; if we raised them, the sun scorched the wicker, the wooden floor, drenched hands and knees in sweat. Outside, the dusty Sierra Leone countryside unrolled, like a piece of drab cloth along a draper’s counter, grey and dull green and burnt up by the dry season which was now approaching its end. The train rattled and reeled forward at fifteen miles an hour, burrowing intimately through the native villages almost within hand’s reach of the huts, the babies rolling in the dust, the men lounging in torn hammocks hung under the thatch. The bush was as ragged and uninteresting as a back garden which has been allowed to run wild and in which the aspidistras from the parlour have seeded and flourished among the brown-scorched grasses and the tall wrinkled greenery.
All the way along the line the price of oranges went down, from six a penny at Freetown to fifteen a penny the other side of Bo. The train stopped at every station, and the women pressed up along the line, their great black nipples like the centre point of a target. I was not yet tired of the sight of naked bodies (later I began to feel as if I had lived for years with nothing but cows), or else these women were prettier and more finely-built than most of those I saw in the Republic. It was curious how quickly one abandoned the white standard. These long breasts falling in flat bronze folds soon seemed more beautiful than the small rounded immature European breasts. The children took their milk standing; they ran to the breasts in pairs like lambs, pulling at the teats. But though the region of modesty had shrunk, it was still there. The train crossed the Mano river; far down below the bridge, a hundred yards away, natives were bathing; they covered their private parts with their hands as the train went by.