Journey Without Maps

THE DICTATOR OF GRAND BASSA

Black Mercenary

I FELT very dirty as I followed the sentry into the wide clean compound and rather absurd, with my stockings over my ankles, my stained shorts, my too, too British khaki sun helmet. I was very much at a disadvantage, standing beneath a verandah crowded with black gentlemen in the smartest of tropical lounge suits and uniforms. They had just finished lunch and were smoking cigars and drinking coffee: I wondered which was Colonel Davis. There was an air of subdued activity as I stood there in dirty neglect in the sun : clerks kept on delivering messages and running briskly off again, sentries saluted, and the supercilious diplomatic gentlemen leant over the verandah and studied with well-bred curiosity the dusty arrival.

The sentry returned and led me across the compound to another bungalow, a less smart one this time, with a few rickety chairs on the verandah. The District Commissioner appeared in the doorway, a slatternly mulatto woman peered over his shoulder. He was a middle-aged man with a yellow face and Victorian side-whiskers; he hadn’t shaved for a long time; his teeth were bad, and he wore a shabby khaki uniform and the dirtiest old peeling white sun helmet I had ever seen. He was like a stern and sadistic papa in a Victorian children’s story; his name was Wordsworth, but he was more like Mr. Fairchild than the poet. I think his appearance maligned him and that really he was shy and afraid of humiliation; I this quite possibly, like Mr. Fairchild, he had a heart of gold under that repressive exterior. Now he stood above me like a little yellow tyrant, and I really believed at first that he would refuse me a house, but instead he called his young brother, the Quartermaster.

Mr. Wordsworth, junior, was quite different. He had a round seal-grey face with soft lips (there seemed to be less white blood in his veins) and he had a passion for friendship. He it was who had raised his hat to me at the crossing of path and road at Ganta. He led me to the next bungalow : a palatial building of four rooms and a cookhouse. In one of the rooms we found the Paramount Chief, squatting on the native bed, eating his lunch with the clan chief; he was very like the ex-King of Spain and wore a soft hat and a native robe. We had arrived at Tapee during a conference of the local chiefs. They had made complaints against the District Commissioners, especially against Mr. Wordsworth, and Colonel Davis had arrived as the President’s special agent to hear the complaints. There were several D.C.s now staying in the compound. We had arrived in the lunch interval.

I sat down in a wooden chair and waited for the others to arrive. The Paramount Chief hastily came out of the bedroom and said the chair was his. I could sit in it, but it was his. The palaver-house m the compound began to fill up with chiefs who streamed in at the gates in soft hats under umbrellas, their chairs carried by boys. I began to ask the Paramount Chief to sell me rice for my men. Thin, vital, Bourbon-nosed, he seemed to pay no attention whatever. He strode away to say something to the clan chiefs, then strode back and said I could have rice at four shillings a hamper. I said that was too-much, but he was gone again. His mind was full of state affairs, he hardly had time to bring the price down to three shillings, and before I could propose half a crown, he was off to the palaver-house. Then a bugle blew and Colonel Davis, accompanied by the D.C.s, walked across the compound to the council.

Even at a distance there was something attractive about the dictator of Grand Bassa. He had personality. He carried himself with a straight military swagger, he was very well dressed in a tropical suit with a silk handkerchief stuck in the breast pocket. He had a small pointed beard and one couldn’t at that distance see the gold teeth which rather weakened his mouth. He was like a young black Captain Kettle and reminded me of Conrad’s Mr. J. K. Blunt who used to declare with proud simplicity in the Marseilles cafιs, “I live by my sword.” He had noted our arrival and presently the seedy Commissioner appeared to say that the President’s special agent wished to see our papers.

It was the first time in Liberia that our passports had been examined. The absconding financier whom I have imagined settling in the unpoliced hinterland of Liberia, taking his holidays at will in French Guinea, a good enough substitute for Le Touquet without any tiresome bother about papers, would do well to avoid Tapee-Ta. For there is a prison in the compound at Tapee-Ta, and though the dictator of Grand Bassa was satisfied with our passports, which certainly did not include permission to pass through Central Liberia, the financier might have fared worse. That prison, next door to our own bungalow, combined behind its thatch and whitewashed walls and tiny portholes the sense of darkness and airlessness, and the kind of mindless brutality which sometimes vents itself in this country in the torture of a cat (the head warder was a moron and a cripple). Each porthole, the size of a man’s head, represented a cell The prisoners within, men and women, were tied by ropes to a stick which was laid crosswise against the porthole outside. There were two or three men who were driven out to work each morning, two skinny old women who carried in the food and water, their ropes coiled round their waists, an old man who was allowed to lie outside on a mat tied to one of the posts which supported the thatch. In a dark cavernous entrance, where the whitewash stopped, a few warders used to lounge all through the day shouting and squabbling and sometimes diving, club in hand, into one of the tiny cells. The old prisoner was a half-wit; I saw one of the warders beating him with his club to make him move to the tin basin in which he had to wash, but he didn’t seem to feel the blows, Life to him was narrowed into a few very simple, very pale sensations, of warmth on his mat in the sun and cold in his cell, for Tapee-Ta at night was very cold, One of the old women had been in prison a month waiting trial. She was accused of having made lights rung in her village, and there was a pathetic impotence in her daily purgatory under the staggering weight of water from the stream half a mile away. If she could make lightning, why did she not burn the prison down or strike the dilatory Commissioner dead? Very likely she had made lightning (I could not disbelieve these stories; they were too well attested), but perhaps the natural force had died in her during her imprisonment, or perhaps she simply hadn’t the right medicines with her in that place. I asked the Quartermaster when she would be tried; he didn’t know.

The council in the palaver-house went on till after five: the place was packed. It must have been appallingly hot. One suspected that the whole inquiry was designed to quiet the chiefs rather than try the Commissioners, for the judge was a cousin of the principal accused. But at any rate he showed patience and endurance.

Later that evening came the ceremony of lowering the Liberian flag, carried out with solemnity; two buglers played a few bars of the national anthem—

In joy and gladness with our hearts united, We’ll shout the freedom of a land benighted and everyone on the verandahs stood at attention. When it was over I sent a note across to Colonel Davis asking for an interview and received a reply that he was worn out by nine hours of council, but would spare me a few minutes.

The ‘few minutes’ developed into several hours, for the Colonel was garrulous, and after more than an hour’s conversation on his verandah, we adjourned to mine for whisky. He had once been a private in the American army and his career, if frankly written, would prove one of the most entertaining adventure stories in the world. As a private or a medical orderly in a black regiment-I forget which-he had served in Pershing’s disastrous Mexican expedition when hundreds of men died in the desert for lack of water; later he had seen service in the Philippines; and finally, for what reason I do not know, he had left America and come to Monrovia. He was very soon appointed medical officer of health, though I do not think he had any kind of medical degree, and from this vantage point he had worked his way into politics. Under Mr. King’s presidency he had been appointed Colonel Commandant of the Frontier Force and had managed to shift his allegiance to Mr, Barclay when Mr. King was forced to resign after the League of Nations inquiry. No story was undramatic to Colonel Davis, and the whole shabby tale of Mr. King’s participation in the shipping of forced labour to Fernando Po and his rather cowardly acceptance of the League’s condemnation, which threatened Liberian sovereignty, followed by his resignation when the Legislature proposed to impeach him, became an exciting melodrama in which Colonel Davis had played an heroic part.

“They were thirsting for his blood,” Colonel Davis said dramatically, but nothing which I saw later of the coastal Liberians lessened my doubt whether they had the vitality to assault anyone; with cane juice they would work themselves up to a height of oratory, but as for murder … He lowered his voice. “For twenty-four hours,” he said, “I never left Mr. King’s side. The mobs were going about the streets, thirsting

for blood. But they all said, littleWe cannot kill King without killing Davis.’” The Colonel flashed his gold teeth at me, deprecatingly. “Of course “

“Of course,” I said.

I approached the subject of the Kru war by way of the Colonel’s other military exploits. I felt that after the British Consul’s report he might feel shy of the subject, but I always over-estimated the Colonel’s shyness. When I expressed my admiration for the way in which he had disarmed the tribes, the Colonel took up the subject with enthusiasm. As far as I could make out the operation had turned on a cup of Ovaltine rather than on rifles or machine-guns, for he was a sweet-tempered man : butter wouldn’t have melted between the gold teeth. One tribe had sent out armed men to ambush him, but he had learnt their plans from his spies, had taken a different path and entered the town while it was quite empty except for women and old men. From the report on the Kxu war I should have expected Colonel Davis to have set fire to the town while his men raped the women: but no : he called for the oldest man, made him sit down, gave him a glass of Ovaltine (with the barest glance at the opposite verandah, where my whisky and glasses were laid out, the Colonel remarked, “I always have a glass of Ovaltine at the end of a day’s trek”), made friends with him, and had him send messages out to the warriors to return in peace. “Of course,” the Colonel said, “I made him understand that he and the other old men would have to remain as my guests until the arms were handed over …”

The character of the Colonel eluded me. Lord Cecil in the House of Lords had called him a ‘buccaneer’, but that was perhaps pardonable exaggeration. He was obviously a man of great ability; his disarming of the tribes testified to it, and that he had courage as well as brag the whole Kru story showed. I had not only his own word for it: the fact emerged even from the unfriendly report of the British Consul. He had come down into Chief Nimley’s district as the President’s special agent, under a guard of soldiers, to collect long overdue taxes. He knew well the man he had to deal with and he knew the risk he was running when he agreed to meet him at a palaver in the village. It had been agreed that neither should bring armed men, but when Davis arrived at the palaver-house with his clerk he found Nimley and his leading men sitting there fully armed. Even then, Davis thought, all would have gone well had not the Commander of the Frontier Force, Major Grant, who had taken a stroll round the village, rushed into the hut, interrupted the palaver, and cried out that Nimley had armed men concealed in the banana plantations. Davis commanded him to stay where he was, but Grant, crying out that he was responsible to the President for Davis’s safety, ran from the hut to summon his soldiers.

Davis’s later opinion was that Grant was in the pay of the Krus, for his action had the immediate effect of endangering Davis’s life. Nimley left the hut and his warriors swarmed round the Colonel. Naturally he made the most of the situation to me, as he leant there over the Tapee verandah with one eye on the drinks. (“I said to my clerk, Take the papers. They won’t harm you. Walk slowly up to the camp and stop the soldiers from coming here.’ I stood with my back to the wall and they flourished their spears in my face. My clerk said, ‘Colonel, I will not leave you. I will die here with you I said to him, There is no point in dying. Obey orderslittle “) But the facts were undisputed. He had been a prisoner and he had escaped. He said that when his clerk had gone, he left the wall and walked very slowly to the door. They made gestures of stabbing, but no one would stab first. Then an old man appeared with a great staff and beat them back and cleared a way for Davis through the village. “Afterwards Nimley killed the old man.”

His cook appeared on the verandah behind us and said that dinner was served, but the Colonel wouldn’t let me go : he had an audience for a story which had probably become rather stale on the Coast.

‘That night I was sitting on my verandah, as it might be tonight; it was ten o’clock, and there, just where the sentry is, I saw a big warrior dressed in war paint with little bells tied under his knees. He came up and said, ‘Who’s the big man around here?’ I said, 1 guess I’m the biggest man here. What do you want?’ He said, ‘Chief Nimley send me to tell you he’s coming up here at five o’clock in the morning to collect his tax moneylittle So I said, Tou tell Chief Nimley that I’ll be waiting for himlittle

“And at eleven o’clock I looked up and there was another warrior, a small man, all in war paint. He came up to the verandah and said, ‘Are you the big man here?’ littleWaal,’ I said, T guess you won’t find anyone bigger around this place. What do you want?’ He said, ‘Chief Nimley send me to tell you that at five o’clock he come to see if he’s a man or you are a man.’ So I said, Tou go back to Chief Nimley and tell him if he comes up here at five o’clock, m show him which is the manlittle

“And at midnight I looked up and there was a little piccaninny in Boy Scout uniform, but all dressed in war paint. He came up to the verandah and he said, ‘Where’s the big man?’ So I said, ‘Are you a Boy Scout?’ and he said, Tes’. I said, ‘Who’s your National Director of Boy Scouts?’ He said, ‘Colonel Elwood Davis.’ I said, ‘Where’s Colonel Davis now?’ and he said, ‘In Monrovia.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m Colonel Davis. Now what do you mean by appearing before your National Director of Boy Scouts in war paint?’ So he got kind of shy and said, ‘Chief Nimley told me to come up here.’ I said, ‘You go back to Chief Nimley and say I wouldn’t let a Boy Scout deliver a message like that.’ “

That seemed to be the end of the story. I said, “And did Chief Nimley come?”

“Oh no,” Colonel Davis said, “he just made lightning. But there were a lot of Buzie men in the camp, members of the Lightning Society, and they laid out their medicines and the lightning hit the trees on the beach and didn’t do any harm.”

He brought up the subject of the British Consul’s report himself. He said what had gone most to Ms heart in a very unfair document was the story that six children had been burnt alive. There was no one who loved children more than he did. He had piccaninnies of his own, and I had only to ask his wife, his second wife, whether every night he didn’t tell them stories before they went to bed. His enemies in Monrovia, who were jealous of his position, had pretended to believe in these atrocities, and even his mother, back in America, had read about them; but she knew him better, she’d dandled him on her knee, and she didn’t believe. Colonel Davis said, “If you want to know the truth of that story”

Apparently one evening he had heard children crying and had sent soldiers from the camp who found two babies in the swamps. They had been hidden there when Nimley’s tribe took to the bush. The next day he sent more soldiers to search the neighbourhood, and they brought in four more children. He was a mother to those children. He had made the soldiers wash them, had given up his own porridge and the last of his own Vaseline; then next day he had sent men to capture a few women to look after them. These were the very children he had been accused of having burnt alive.

His cook again appeared and said that chop was getting cold. Davis snapped at him, but he had no control over his servants. He was very smart, very astute, but I think it was this which was wrong with him. He came over to my verandah and drank whisky and told us all about his first marriage to a teetotaller and how he had cured her by guile of her prejudice, and his servant kept on popping up at intervals to remind him of chop, while Davis stubbornly sat on, just to show who was master.

It is the simplest explanation of the facts contained in Blue Book, and. 4614: the woman just delivered of twins shot in her bed and her children burnt; children cut down with cutlasses; the heads and limbs of victims carried on poles; for otherwise Colonel Davis has to be pictured as a monster, and a monster one simply couldn’t believe him to be, as he flashed his gold teeth over the whisky, a bit doggish, a bit charmingly and consciously shy and small boy in the manner of the black singer Hutch.

He came across again the next evening for whisky and nearly finished all we had. It was a bitterly cold night, and a heavy storm came up : there could be no doubt that the rains were on us. After an hour or two the Colonel grew sentimental, leaning bad in his chair with a wistful misunderstood air; and it became difficult to believe that he had even so much as witnessed the atrocities. “I was on a liner once,” the Colonel said, “and I remember the Captain calling me up to the bridge after dinner. He made a remark I have never forgotten. He pointed to a boat that was going by and said it reminded him of three books that were in the library down below: Ships that Pass in the Night-can you guess the others?”

We couldn’t.

“Well, the Captain pointed down at the deck where the other passengers were and said to me, There, Davis : The People We Meet9; and then he turned to me and said, littleBut more important still, Davis, The Friends We Love?”

I filled the dictator’s glass. “It was a beautiful thought,” he said, looking away.

I worked the. conversation back to Liberia and politics. Colonel Davis was North American by birth, but he was a Liberian patriot. “As the poet wrote,” Colonel Davis said, ” Is there a man with soul so dead, Who never has said, I love my own, my own country?’ ” I asked him about Mr. Barclay and his chances, and whether Mr. Faulkner would be opposing him as well as Mr. King. No, he said, Mr. Faulkner had retired from politics. He had seen Mr. Faulkner in the Post Office just before leaving Monrovia and Faulkner had told him that he was neither supporting nor opposing either candidate. “So I said to him, ‘Mr. Faulkner, there is a parable in the Bible. A disciple came to Christ and said, ‘One in the next village is casting out devils in Beelzebub’s namelittle and Christ said, ‘Who is not with me is against me.’ ” My ignorance of Monrovia contributed to the drama of the political scene: I couldn’t tell that the Post Office was a loft in a wooden shed to which one climbed by a ladder.

Victorian Sunday

I woke next morning with a bad cold after spending the night under two blankets with a sweater over my pyjamas. A letter was waiting for me at breakfast from die Quartermaster :

Dear Friend Mr, Green: Good morning. I’m about to ask a favour of you this morning which I hope you will be able to grant” If you have any Brandy kindly send me a little or anything else if Brandy is out. Some would be very appreciated by me. I’m feeling very, very cold this a.m. you know hope you both well. With best wishes for health. Your friend Wordsworth. QM. N. B.-I’ll bring my sisters to pay a visit to you and cousin this p.m. as they like you for their friends,

I sent him a glass of whisky and asked for a coconut and some palm nuts which the cook needed for lard. Presently back came a coconut and a bottle of palm oil and a note :

Dear Friend: Too many thanks for such a kind treat this a.m. it was highly appreciated. I shall always regard you as my friend… .

The place was very still : it was Sunday and a heavy Victorian peace settled over Tapee. Even native dances were forbidden. The prisoners were driven out to wash tied together by ropes, and a gramophone from the bungalow where two D.C.s were staying played hymn-tunes across the hot empty compound : Hark, the herald angels sing and Nearer, my God, to Thee. But after a while these gave place to dance music and American hot songs. I went for a walk; I was feeling ill and homesick; the Coast seemed as far away as ever. I felt crazy to be here in the middle of Liberia when everything I knew intimately was European. It was like a bad dream. I couldn’t remember why I had come. I wanted to be away at once, but I simply hadn’t the strength, and Dr. Harley’s warning against walking any distance in the West African climate weighed on my mind. I had to have these days of rest, and so did the boys. Mark was dead tired, and even the nerves of Amedoo and Laminah were strained. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that it was only six days to Grand Bassa and if Colonel Davis were to be believed we should not have to wait longer than a week at that miserable little port before a boat passed.

While I was having a bath in preparation for a long siesta the Quartermaster arrived. He wanted to buy a bottle of whisky for his brother and his brother had sent five shillings. I said I had none left, or at any rate only just enough to see me to the Coast Then at two-thirty by my watch, when I had just fallen asleep, he came again with a note from the D.C. inviting me to dinner at two o’clock. I had eaten a large lunch already, but I went, taking with me half a bottle of whisky very diluted.

I was reminded of one of those curious thick crude groups by Samuel Butler. One had slipped back sixty years in time to a Victorian Sunday dinner. The only thing lacking was the wife; she helped to serve the dinner. There at the end of the table sat Papa, yellow-faced Wordsworth in his heavy side-whiskers dressed in a thick dark Sunday suit with a gold watch-chain across his stomach and a gold seal dangling from it. On the walls were faded Victorian photographs of family groups, whiskers and bustles and parasols, in Oxford frames. All except myself and Colonel Davis, who sat at the other end of the table and carved the goose, were in Sunday clothes: an old negro who had withered inside his clothes like a dried nut in its shell and who was one of the Judges of Assize, the native Commissioner from Grand Bassa and another Commissioner who was very shy and scared of Colonel Davis and whom I suspected of having played the hymns. The Commissioner of Grand Bassa, I suppose, was responsible for the hot music.

Conversation was halting: the weather, devils and secret societies, the small talk of Liberia. Colonel Davis was a firm believer in the power of the lightning societies. He had visited towns where the members had performed in his honour. They would tell him that lightning would be made at a certain hour, and at that hour out of a cloudless sky along all the hills for miles around it would begin to play. Mr. Justice Page capped the story with a few legal decisions of his own on the subject of lightning. makers, but Colonel Davis was determined to raise the conversation to a high social level : to food. He had toured Europe with Mr. King and he remembered very well the Caviare.

Colonel Davis explained to the dark blank faces, “Caviare is the black eggs of little fisheslittle’ He turned to me, “Of course, in England now, you no longer get the Russian cigarette.” I said I really didn’t know: I thought I’d seen them in tobacconists’. “Not real oneslittle’ Colonel Davis said, “they are very rare indeed. A season or two ago in Monrovia they formed a course in themselves at dinner parties.” “Where did the course come?” I asked. “After the fish and before the saladlittle’ Colonel Davis said, while the Commissioner from Grand Bassa learn forward and drank in every syllable describing the gilded life of the capital. “The lights were loweredlittlelittle he paused impressively, “and one cigarette would be served to each guestlittle’ The judge nodded; he came? from Monrovia as well.

I remember saying to Colonel Davis how surprised! T was not to have seen a single mosquito. He, toi he said, had not seen one since the last rains; he mid suffering a little from prickly heat, but Liberia was really the healthiest place in Africa.

He was always inclined to over-state his case, as when he told me that in the Km war no women had been killed, only one woman accidentally wounded, while the British Consul’s report spoke of seventy-two women and children dead. Now he remarked that there had never been any yellow fever in Liberia; the manager of the British bank who had died of it in Monrovia (his death was one of the reasons why the British Bank of West Africa withdrew altogether from Liberia) had brought the infection with him from Lagos. All the other deaths could be traced to inoculation. There was less malaria, he went on, in Liberia than in any other part of the West Coast: I had seen myself, he said, that there were no mosquitoes. But providence gave Colonel Davis a raw deal in this case because, when evening came and we were waiting for him to join us over our whisky, the Quartermaster brought news that he was down with a bad attack of fever.

So the Quartermaster entertained us our last evening in Tapee-Ta, sitting moonily opposite with his great seal’s eyes begging, begging all the time for friendship. He had taken an immediate fancy to me, he said, when he saw me come out of the French path by Ganta; he had felt then that we would be friends. He would write to me and I would write to him. It was lonely in Tapee : he was used to the life of the capital; in Monrovia it was so gay, the dancing and the cafιs on the beach. By the time we arrived the Season would be over, but it would still be gay, so much to do and see, dancing by moonlight. His great lustrous romantic eyes never left me. He said, because his mind was full of love and friendship, dancing and the moon, “You’ve come from Buzie country. They have wonderful medicines there. There is a medicine for venereal disease. You tie a rope round your waist. I have never tried it.” He said wistfully, “I guess you white people aren’t troubled with venereal disease.” He brooded a long time on our departure. He wished he was coming too, but he would always be my friend. He would have letters from me. That night when I was making my way out of the compound into the forest he intercepted me. He said he hoped I wouldn’t mind his stopping me, but there was a very good closet behind the Colonel’s bungalow with a wooden seat. It was more suitable for me than the bush, he said, but I couldn’t help remembering that he had not yet tried the Buzie medicine and I went inexorably on into the forest. He got up very early next morning to see us go, and the last I remember of Tapee was his warm damp romantic handshake in the grey deserted compound.