Sunday in Bolahun
It was Sunday in Bolahun, unmistakably Sunday. A herdsman drove out his goats among absurdly Biblical rocks, a bell went for early service, and I saw the five nuns going down in single file to the village through the banana plantations in veils and white sun-helmets carrying prayer-books. They were English; tea with them (a large fruit cake and home-made marmalade and chocolate biscuits wilting in the heat and delicious indigestible bread made with palm wine instead of yeast) was very like tea in an English cathedral town; it was an English corner one could feel some pride in: it was gentle, devout, childlike and unselfish, it didn’t even know it was courageous. One couldn’t help comparing the manner of these nuns living quite outside the limits of European protection with that of the English in Freetown who had electric light and refrigerators and frequent leave, who despised the natives and pitied themselves.
A great deal of nonsense has been written about missionaries. When they have not been described as the servants of imperialists or commercial exploiters, they have been regarded as sexually abnormal types who are trying to convert a simple happy pagan people to a European religion and stunt them with European repressions. It seems to be forgotten that Christianity is an Eastern religion to which Western pagans have been quite successfully converted. Missionaries are not even given credit for logic, for if one believes in Christianity at all, one must believe in its universal validity. A Christian cannot believe in one God for Europe and another God for Africa: the importance of Semitic religion was that it did not recognize one God for the East and another for the West. The new paganism of the West, which prides itself on being scientific, is often peculiarly neurotic. Only a neurosis explains its sentimental lack of consistency, the acceptance of the historic duty of the Mohammedan to spread his faith by the sword and the failure to accept the duty of a Christian to spread his faith by teaching.
The missions in the interior of the Republic are, of course, peculiar in being completely free from political or commercial contacts. The black Government distrusts them and no European firm has any trading posts in the Liberian hinterland. Faith in their religion is the only thing which can have induced American monks and English nuns to settle at Bolahun. There is no drama to compensate them for the fever, the worms and the rats; the only danger is the danger of snake-bite or disease. They are not ascetics, who find satisfaction in cords and hair-shirts; they have done their best, once settled in Bolahun, to make themselves comfortable. The fathers have built a little hospital, they get their chop boxes from Fortnum and Mason, wine comes in over the French border, vegetables once a month from Sierra Leone; they have even built a kind of rough hard court for tennis. They haven’t forced Christianity on an unwilling people, they haven’t made a happy naked race wear clothes, they haven’t stopped the native dances. The native in West Africa will always wear clothes if he has the money to buy them, he will always prefer a robe to a loin-cloth, and to anyone who has spent much time in the bush villages the roughest native robe will appear aesthetically preferable to the human body – the wrinkled dugs, the running sores. As for the dances and the fetish worship, the missionaries have not the power to stop them if they wished to; Christianity here has its back to the wall. Converts are comparatively few; there is no material advantage in being converted; the only advantage is a spiritual one, of being released from a few fears, of being offered an insubstantial hope.
And in Bolahun particularly there were material disadvantages in Christianity. No white man is allowed to own land in the Republic, the missions are at the mercy of the Government, and nine miles away at Kolahun lived Mr Reeves, the District Commissioner. Mr Reeves was a Vai, a Mohammedan; he belonged, psychologically, to the early nineteenth century, to the days of the slave trade. He hated Christians, he hated white men, especially he hated the English language. With his seal-grey skin, dark expressionless eyes, full deep red lips, dressed in a fez and a robe of native cloth, he gave an effect, more Oriental than African, of cruelty and sensuality; he was gross, impassive and corrupt. His wife was a Miss Barclay, a member of the President’s household, and it was said among the natives that when he was appointed the President promised him that he would be a District Commissioner for ever. He was sent first to Sanoquelleh at the other end of the country and an unpleasant story had followed him to Kolahun, a story of some Mandingo traders whom he was said to have caught smuggling goods over the border from French territory, and to have shut in a hut and burned to death. It was impossible in the Republic to investigate a tale like that, but there were other stories of cruelty and despotism for which I found plenty of evidence: stories of his house built by forced labour and paid for by the seizure of the natives’ produce; stories of how his messengers flogged the men working on the road, how no man from Christianized Bolahun dared show his face in the town. The nuns one day had seen him pass hurriedly by in a hammock, his messengers whipping the carriers on. So many stories leaked down to Monrovia that even a Government separated by ten days’ rough trekking was forced to take notice, and the President was on his way, at this very time, to Kolahun to listen to the chiefs’ complaints.
One had to remember that background to Benediction in the little ugly tin-roofed church. The raised monstrance was not a powerful political symbol: ‘Come unto me all ye who are heavy laden and I will give you commercial privileges and will whisper for you in the ear of a Minister of State.’ It offered, like early Christianity, stripes from the man in power and one knows not what secret oppression from the priests of the fetish. There were not many at Benediction: Christianity here was still the revolutionary force, appealing to the young rather than the old, and the young were on holiday. A tiny piccaninny wearing nothing but a short transparent shirt scratched and prayed, lifting his shirt above his shoulders to scratch his loins better; a one-armed boy knelt below a hideous varnished picture. (He had fallen from a palm-tree gathering nuts, had broken his arm, and feeling its limp uselessness had taken a knife and cut it off at the elbow.)
A Chief’s Funeral
A few days after our arrival Amedoo fell ill. All through the night I heard his racking cough, and in the morning the German doctor examined him and found one lung affected. He lay on the doctor’s couch dumb with terror, but he agreed to go into the hospital; he was frightened, but he was still the perfect servant. His illness introduced me to Mark. Mark was a Christian schoolboy; he came down from the mission to help Laminah and the cook; he was dirty and lazy, but he was amusing. He had a great sense of drama and a high neighing laugh; he soaked up gossip like a sponge, and he had this characteristic in common with white boys of his age, that he was the hero of imaginary adventures.
On the fourth morning early, there was a stir in the village below, a blowing of horns which faded slowly on the northward road. Long before anyone else Mark knew what had happened and he told it with malicious glee because he hated Reeves. Reeves with the chiefs had gone down to the limit of the road to meet the President, but the President had slipped quietly up by other paths to Kolahun and arrived at an empty compound: the horns and the shouts were Reeves’s party returning as quickly as they could to Kolahun. So I sent Mark off with a letter to the President asking for an interview, and while I and my cousin sat at supper, Mark dramatically returned, bursting in at the door, holding himself poised at the entrance with his hand raised, before he delivered the reply, stuck in a cleft stick, that the President had already moved on from Kolahun to Voinjema. You could tell that he was dramatizing the whole affair, he had persuaded himself that he had escaped by the skin of his teeth from the wicked DC.
Mark, because he was a Bande and could speak English, acted as my guide round Bolahun. A chief had died at Tailahun two miles away and Mark led us over to the village to see what we could of the funeral ceremonies. It was a tiny place perched on an uneven rock mound. The grave was in the centre of the village among the flat stones which marked the other graves; a mat was spread on it, and a middle-aged woman sat there, the youngest
mother among the chief’s wives. She was shielded from the sun by a roof of palm branches, and a pile of fuel and a cooking-pot stood there at the spirit’s disposal. Christianity and paganism both marked the dead man’s grave, for there was a rough cross stuck on the mound to propitiate the God whom the old chief had accepted on his deathbed, while in a pit close by, following a pagan rite, sat eight wives, naked except for a loin cloth. Other women were smearing them with clay; it was rubbed even into their hair. The majority were old and hideous anyway, but now, the pale colour of the pit in which they sat, they looked as if they had been torn half decomposed from the ground. They had lost with their colour their mark of race and might have been women of any nation who had been buried and dug up again. There was pathos in the bareness of these symbols, the cross, the clay, the youngest mother. One felt that two religions here were appealing on the simplest terms: splendour and the big battalions were on neither side. There must have been scenes very like this, I thought, in the last days of pagan England, when a story about a bird flying through a lighted hall into the dark played its part in the conversion of a king.
It was the third day after the burial. The next day the women would wash off the clay, oil their bodies and be free again, there would be dancing for three days on end, and again at the end of forty days. The girls were getting their hair frizzed out for the funeral dances instead of wearing it in the usual way gummed down in a neat pattern of ridge and parting. The local ‘devil’, Landow, from Mosambolahun had entered the village for the funeral, and it was really to see him dance that I was there. I had caught one glimpse of him at dusk in Bolahun striding by in his long raffia skirts and his wooden snouted mask. From each village on the way he collected irons, for on entering Tailahun he must pay the new chief a tribute of several bundles.
The new chief dozed in his hammock in the tiny palaver-house. I dashed him two shillings; it was the heat of the day, and he was bored and embarrassed by the visit. Two chairs were fetched for us, and about thirty people crowded into the cramped hut; the insects were hopping on the floor. Presently two men with long drums arrived; dangling below each drum a metal disc. They wore red caps with gold stars on them and a long tassel very like the caps of the Frontier Force I had seen at Foya. They stamped their bare feet among the jiggers and tapped their drums and metal discs with little curved hammers. More musicians slowly gathered in the cramped hot hut at the sound of the drums. Three women came with varying sizes of rattles – gourds containing grains of rice which they shook in nets, and a man with a harp of five strings made of palm fibre, attached to half a gourd which he pressed to his breast (the faint sweet twanging could only be heard when the drums and rattles were still). Last came a man with an ordinary big drum, which did give a kind of sexual urgency to a music hard for a European to understand. The music was continually mounting to a climax as the drummers beat their feet and sweated and the women rattled and swayed, but nothing ever happened. It seemed only one more meaningless climax when the devil at last appeared,
‘The Liberian Devils’
I call him ‘devil’ because it is the word most commonly used among the whites and English-speaking natives in the Republic. It is no more misleading, I think, than the word ‘priest’ which is sometimes used elsewhere. A masked devil like Landow (of what are known as the Big Bush Devils I shall have something to say later) might roughly be described as a headmaster with rather more supernatural authority than Arnold of Rugby ever claimed. Even in the Sierra Leone Protectorate, where there are many missionary schools, most natives, if they are not Mohammedan, will attend a bush school, of which the masked devil is the unknown head. Even the Christian natives attend; Mark had attended, though the Christians are usually favoured with a shortened course because they cannot be fully trusted with the secrets of a bush school. And the bush schools are very secret. All the way through the great forest of the interior one comes on signs of them: a row of curiously cropped trees before a narrow path disappearing into the thickest bush: a stockade of plaited palms: indications that no stranger may penetrate there. No natives, girls or boys, are considered mature till they have passed through the bush schools, and the course in the old days lasted as long in some tribes as seven years, though now two years is the more usual period. There are no holidays; the children are confined to the bush; if a child dies his belongings are deposited outside his parents’ hut at night as a sign that he is dead, and he is buried in the bush. When the children emerge again they are supposed to be born anew, they are not allowed to recognize their parents and friends in the village until they have been introduced to them again. One definite mark they bear with them from the bush, the mark of ‘tattooing’. The tattooing varies with the tribes: in some tribes a woman’s body from the neck to the navel is elaborately and beautifully carved. ‘Carved’ is a better word than ‘tattooed’ to convey the effect, for tattooing to a European means a coloured pattern pricked on the skin, but the native tattoo marks are ridged patterns cut in the flesh with a knife.
The school and the devil who rules over it are at first a terror to the child. It lies as grimly as a public school in England between childhood and manhood. He has seen the masked devil and has been told of his supernatural power; no human part of the devil is allowed to show, according to Dr Westermann, because it might be contaminated by the presence of the uninitiated, but it seems likely also because the unveiled power might do harm; for the same reason no one outside the school may see the devil unmasked for fear of blindness or death. Even though the initiates of his particular school, who have seen, as it were, the devil in his off-moments, know him to be, say, the local blacksmith, some supernatural feeling continues to surround him. It is not the mask which is sacred, nor the blacksmith who is sacred; it is the two in conjunction, but a faint aura of the supernatural continues to dwell in either part when they are separate: so the blacksmith will have more power in his village than the chief, and the mask may continue to be reverenced, even when discarded, and fed by its owner like a fetish.
Mark, when I knew him better, told me a little of his own experience. As a Christian boy he spent only a fortnight in the bush, and all he did, he said, was to sit and eat rice. He was in the mission school one day when the devil, this same Landow, came for him. There had been no warning. His teacher told him not to be afraid, but the devil, through his interpreter (for the devil does not speak a language the native can understand), said, ‘I’m going to swallow you.’ He was not allowed to go home first; he was bound hand and foot and his eyes were bandaged and he was carried into the bush. He was very scared. Then they flung him on the ground and cut him with a razor, but he said it didn’t hurt much. They made two little ridges on his neck, two under the armpit, two on the belly. I asked him if he was beaten, for Dr Westermann, writing of the Pelle tribe in Liberia, has described a kind of Spartan training. He said he was beaten once: one day the devil told the boys they were not to go outside their huts all day whatever they heard; of course they disobeyed and were beaten. At the end of a fortnight he was dressed in white clothes and taken back to the village in the dark. He admitted at last rather reluctantly that the devil, who didn’t wear his mask in the school, was the blacksmith at Mosambolahun: so perhaps they were wise to teach him nothing, but just to let him sit and eat rice for a fortnight. In any case they are easy-going, lazy, not very religious in Bande country. It was to be different among the Buzies.
The Masked Blacksmith
It was the blacksmith of Mosambolahun then who now swayed forward between the huts in a head-dress of feathers, a heavy blanket robe, and long raffia mane and raffia skirts. The big drum beat, the heels stamped and the gourds rattled, and the devil sank to the ground, his long faded yellow hair billowing in the dust. His two eyes were two painted rings and he had a flat black wooden snout a yard long fringed with fur; when it opened one saw great red wooden tusks. His black wooden nose stuck up at right angles between his eyes which were almost flat on his snout. His mouth opened and clo
sed like a clapper and he spoke in a low monotonous sing-song. He was like a portmanteau word; an animal, a bird and a man had all run together to form his image. All the women, except the musicians, had gone to their huts and watched Landow from a distance. His interpreter squatted beside him carrying a brush with which, when the devil moved, he kept his skirts carefully smoothed down lest a foot or arm should show.
The devils need an interpreter because they do not speak a language the native can understand. Landow’s mutterings were fluent and quite unintelligible. Anthropologists, so far as I can gather, have not made up their minds whether it is a real language the devil speaks or whether the interpreter simply invents a meaning. Mark’s explanation has the virtue of simplicity, that the Bande devil speaks Pessi, that the Pessi devil speaks Buzie; the Buzie devil, on the other hand, he continued with a convincing lack of consistency, spoke Buzie, but in so low a tone that no one could follow him.