Journey Without Maps

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA

A Boatload of Politicians

MY host woke me early to say that if I cared to catch it a Liberian motor-launch was leaving that morning for Monrovia. If I missed it, I might have to wait a week for a Dutch cargo-boat, but he advised me all the same to stay.

The boat was making its maiden voyage down the coast from Cape Palmas to Monrovia. It cannot have been more than thirty feet long, not that I was able to pace it when we scrambled on board from the surf boat, for it was packed-packed with black politicians. There were a hundred and fifty of them on board, and if the owner of the boat had not been with us we should not have been allowed to embark. They shouted that there was no room, that we should sink the boat, they implored the captain not to let us on board, they were scared, for most of them had never been at sea before and the previous evening they had run on a rock and narrowly escaped off Sinoe. The launch tilted with their fear, first one way, then the other. But the owner got us on board, he even found us enough room to set up chairs and sit down, though we couldn’t, once settled there, stir a foot.

The launch, the owner told me, had been bought second-hand for £18 and repaired for £25. It hadn’t even got marine engines. He had installed two second-hand automobile engines, a Dodge and a Studebaker, and except for the rock off Sinoe, it had done well. We slid farther away from the yellow sandy strip of Africa, from the fringe of dark green forest behind the tin shacks of Grand Bassa. The captain, a great fat Kru man in a wide-brimmed hat and a singlet, stood in a little glass shelter and shouted orders down a telephone to the engine-room just beneath his feet, the sun came blindingly up over the thin Japanese cotton awning, a black Methodist minister went to sleep on my shoulder, and the politicians temporarily ceased arguing about the election and began to argue with the captain.

“Say, captain,” they protested in their formless nasal American negro voices, “you don’t wanta use both engines yet. You gotta put out farther before you use both engines,” and the captain argued with them and presently gave way. He couldn’t issue any order without setting the passengers arguing with him.

It was sixty miles to Monrovia and the launch took seven and a half hours, lurching with incredible slowness across the flat scorching African sea with the rocking motion of the hundred and fifty politicians. It was an Opposition boat and the presence of a white man on board seemed to the politicians to have deep significance. Before we reached Monrovia every delegate was convinced that England was behind them. There was to be a Convention in Monrovia of the Unit True Whig Party to elect a Presidential Candidate to oppose President Barclay and the True Whig Party. AU is fair during a Liberian election and the Government agent at Cape Palmas had tried to arrest the owner of the boat and hold it up till the Convention was over. Some of the delegates were supporters of a Mr. Cooper, some of ex-President King, so though they all belonged to the same party, they had plenty to argue about, and the arguments got fiercer after midday, after the tin basins of cassava roots had been handed round (for meals were included in the tariff) and the bottles of cane juice. The cane juice in the midday heat worked quickly; almost immediately half the hundred and fifty politicians were roaring drunk. They couldn’t do anything about it, because if they moved more than a foot the boat heeled over, and once there was a panic on board at a loud crash which reminded them of the rock they had hit the night before. Some tried to stand up and others shouted to them to be still as the boat heeled towards the glassy sea and the captain was heard shouting that he would put any man who moved in irons. I couldn’t move because the Methodist minister was asleep on my shoulder, and the panic soon subsided. We hadn’t hit a rock, somebody had passed out under the cane juice and his head had hit the deck.

The owner of the boat said to me, “These men : they are quiet and gentle now, but you wait till they get ashore. They are thirsting for blood. They would rather kill Barclay than see him elected.”

An old man without any teeth suddenly said, “Do you know in Monrovia they have a map of the whole of Liberia? I am going to go and see it. It is in the possession of a family called Anderson. They have had it for years. Everyone who goes to Monrovia goes to see the map. Sinoe is marked on it, and Grand Bassa and Cape Palmas.” Then a lot of people tried to trap me into saying whether I was financing Mr. Cooper or Mr. King. I might have made history that day, for I am sure if I had said I was financing Mr. Cooper, no one would have voted for Mr. King. And all the while behind the frieze of black heads, five hundred yards away, the yellow African beach slid unchangingly by without a sign of human occupation. Somebody was fishing from the end of the boat and with tiresome regularity catching a large fish. It might have been the same fish, just as it might have been the same patch of sand, but every time the captain left the wheel, trod over the sprawl of limbs into the bow and presently announced in a loud commanding voice, as if he were ordering somebody to be clamped into irons, “A fish!” and entered the fact in a log-book. There would be a momentary break in the babble until a voice began again, “Mishter Cooper ish ish a young man.” “Ex-Presh-Prθs-Presh, Mishter King has exshper, experish …”

The Nonconformist minister hadn’t drunk anything. He woke up suddenly and without removing his head from my shoulder said, “We shall never go straight in Liberia until we let God into our conventions. We must let God choose.”

I said, “I agree, of course, but how will you know which candidate God wants to choose?”

He said, “God made pencils, but man made india-rubber.”

The old man without any teeth said, “That’s a true word.”

The minister said, “They’ll give us cards when we go to the convention and we shall have to put a mark against a name. But pencil can be rubbed out with India rubber. If we want God to have a chance in this convention we must take our pencils and push the point right through one of the names, tear it right out, then they won’t be able to do anything with India rubber.”

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 of 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-storied 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 onlylittle’ 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 P.Z., of the German and Dutch companies where you can buy gin as cheap as nine-pence a bottle, and the small huts of the Syrians, the wooden shed of the Post Office with a rickety 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 bank-notes 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 stones 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 themlittle’ 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 have 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 ot 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 eightpence to a shilling and a penny a day, of clearers from sevenpence 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 same 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 other 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 die light was too bad to see. One advantage their isolation had : it killed snobbery. Chargι 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 crθme 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 womanise, 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 reelected. 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 Chargι 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 committed some offence, and an ignorant policeman who knew nothing 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 apologise himself, but he refused to apologise 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 loudspeakers 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.

Politics

We arrived in Monrovia when the political campaign was getting under way; those politicians embracing each other on the jetty were only a foretaste of the excitement. For the curious thing about a Liberian election campaign, which goes on for more than two months if there’s enough money in hand, is that, although the result is always a foregone conclusion, everyone behaves as if the votes and Sie speeches and the pamphlets matter. The Government prints the ballot papers, the Government owns both the newspapers, the Government polices the polling booths, but no one assumes beforehand that the Government will win, or if it is the turn of the Opposition, the Opposition. A curious fiction is kept up even among the foreign representatives. There are excited conversations at dinner parties; bets are always on the point of being laid. But the fiction, of course, stops short of losing money. Perhaps to an American, who is used to his state elections, the conditions seem less odd.

At this election, though, there may have been a very slight uncertainty just because the President was taking it so seriously and instead of surrendering his office was ensuring, by his plebiscite, that he would hold it for more than the length of three turns. There were rumours that the Cabinet was split, that Mr. Gabriel Dennis, the Secretary of the Treasury, who had distinguished himself by the sharp eye he kept on the funds of the Republic, was going to be jettisoned by his colleagues, and there was the unusual factor, too, that the President in power had as his opponent a former President who had shown his astuteness in manipulating the political machine. (For years the Presidential opponent had been Mr. Faulkner, the head of the People’s Party and of the Monrovian ice factory, who had no experience in the finer shades of political manipulation. Indeed, ex-President King won the first round. For when Mr. Faulkner finally retired from the contest and his supporters joined the Unit True Whig Party, otherwise known as the dissident Whigs, half a dozen members of the People’s Party kept together long enough to hold a convention to nominate Mr. King. As Mr. King was also nominated by the Unit True Whig Party, by Liberian law he would be able to have a representative of each party at every polling booth, while the Government would only have one, a very important point.

It will be seen that Liberian politics are complicated. Corruption does not make for simplicity as might be supposed. It may be all a question of cash and printing presses and armed police, but things have to be done with an air. Crudity as far as possible is avoided. For example, Mr. King could not be the only candidate at the convention of the Unit True Whig Party; at some expense supporters for Mr. Cooper had to be brought to the convention, even though it was known beforehand that Mr. King would be nominated. I received on the morning of the convention a programme issued by the organisers, signed by Mr. Doughba Carmo Caranda, the General Secretary, and attested by Mr. Abayomi Karnga, the national chairman (the names indicated the policy of the party, Liberia for the Liberians, everyone had been busy finding themselves native names to contrast with the Dunbars, Barclays, Simpsons, Dennises of the Government). The proceedings, I read, were to end with a procession to the house of the nominated candidate, but rather ingenuously the route of the procession was given, by the Masonic Hall, up Broad Street, on to Front Street, “to the residence of the candidate.” It was Mr. Kong who had a house in Front Street, not Mr. Cooper, so that the programme took some of the edge off the excitement. Rather damping, too, was the non-arrival of most of the delegates, for .the second launch was not so successful as the one in which we travelled and stuck on a sandbank outside Monrovia. The convention was to open with prayer at two-thirty, but when we arrived at three-thirty they were still waiting for the marooned delegates. Afterwards things got rather rushed, for when we arrived back at five the convention was over. The brass band was trying to get out of the ground and head the procession, but the mob was too great, and our Legation car helped to block the road. Several delegates hissed feebly at the little flag on the hood and a fat perspiring black pushed his head in at the window and asked furiously whether we did not know that this was a national occasion. There was a reek of cane juice and a few people looked nearly drunk enough to throw stones.

Meanwhile the President had staged another demonstration in front of his house: native dancers from the waterside slum of Kru Town rushed up and down before the Executive Mansion waving knives They looked like Red Indians in their feathered head dresses, and their spirited performance robbed the convention of a great many spectators. Later, when the blare of brass warned Monrovia that the procession was on its way, a rival procession was formed hastily outside the offices of state with large banners inscribed “Barclay the Hero of Liberia” and a rather enigmatic statement : “We want no King. We want no car. We want no money for our vote. Barclay is the Man”. For some time I thought it was inevitable that the processions would meet in tiny Monrovia, but I had under-estimated the ingenuity of their leaders. Drunk as everyone was by this time, they were not drunk enough to risk a fight. The Kru dancers and their friends swarmed into the Executive Mansion and were given free drinks, to the disgust of the President’s True Whig supporters, who had received nothing but the dictator’s thanks from a balcony at his formal nomination.

The Opposition procession meanwhile trampled into the front garden of Mr. King’s house, his wooden house in Front Street, not the large uncompleted stone palace in Broad Street. It was quite dark by that time, but a few paraffin lamps indoors cast a pale light on the eyeballs of the crowd. Mr. King, who had been ill, spoke a few words from a balcony, but there was too much cheering and drinking going on all over the town for one to hear more than a few phrases: “national independence”, “hand of friendship”, “foremost part among the nations”. The voice was tired and mechanical : it occurred to me that the fiction might be a sad one to the principal, who must go through all the right posturings without any hope at all. No one knew better than Mr. King that a President is never defeated by votes.

I visited Mr. King a few days later at his farmhouse outside Monrovia. With an old blue bargee’s cap on the back of his head and a cigar in his mouth, he put up an excellent imitation of die old simple statesman in retirement. There was no doubt that he was a sick man. We both drank a good deal of gin while he went over and over the events of his downfall. From his obscure corner of West Africa he had managed to attract quite a lot of notice with the shipping of forced labour to Fernando Po and the pawning of children. He had feathered his nest nicely : he had his own little plantation of rubber trees he was waiting for Firestone to buy; he had his two and a half houses. But he hadn’t really any hope of a return; he was quite ready, he said, if he was elected to accept the League of Nations plan of assistance, tie his finances to European advisers, put white Commissioners in charge of the interior, give away Liberian sovereignty altogether, but he knew quite well he wasn’t going to be elected. All the rumours of Firestone money, all the speeches meant nothing at all.

He was complying with a custom; one could see that he would be glad to go back to bed. He had had a finer fling than most Liberian Presidents : banquets in Sierra Leone, royal salutes from the gunboat in the harbour, a reception at Buckingham Palace, a turn at the tables at Monte Carlo. He stood with his arm round his pretty wife’s shoulders on his stoep while I photographed him, a black Cincinnatus back on his farm.

A Cabinet Minister

The Secretary of the Treasury belonged to a newer, more scrupulous Liberia just coming into existence. He, too, had travelled to Geneva and the United States. Plump, well-dressed, with soft sad spectacled eyes, he had a dignity unknown to the Creole of an English colony. There were no prefects to laugh at him, he laughed at himself, softly, without emphasis, for being honest, for caring for other things than politics, for letting slip so many of the crap-game chances. Mr. King had built himself houses and bought himself a rubber plantation; all the Secretary had bought was a little speed-boat in which to play about in the Monrovian delta among the mangrove swamps.

He lived in a little brick villa on grassy Broad Street; he was a bachelor; and when he gave us tea it was served by young clerks from the Treasury Department He had dressed himself for the occasion (there was to be a little music) in an open-necked shirt and a large artistic tie. He was like a black Mr. Pickwick with a touch of Shelley. After tea we went into the music room, a little cramped mid-Victorian parlour with family groups on the walls, the Venus of Milo, hideous coloured plaster casts of Tyrolean boys in sentimental attitudes, and paraffin lamps on high occasional tables. He played some songs the President had composed; the piano, of course, in that climate was out of tune. They were rather noisy, breathless songs, of which the President had written the words as well as the music; romantic love and piety: “Ave Maria” and “I sent my love a red, red rose, and she returned me a white.” Then he played the President’s setting of “I arise from dreams of thee”. His friend the President, he said sadly, twirling on his stool, had once written much music and poetry : now-the Secretary of the Treasury sighed at the way in which politics encroached. He said, “Perhaps you know this song,” and while the clerks from the Treasury went round lighting the paraffin lamps and turning the shades so that the glow fell in a friendly way on the Tyrolean children caressing their dogs or listening to stories at their mother’s knees, he began to sing : “Whate’er befall I still recall that sun-lit mountain side.” It was sestheticism at the lowest level if you will, but it was genuine aestheticism. The pathos of it was that this was the best material coastal Liberia could offer to a sensitive gentle mind: the music of Mr. Edwin Barclay, the plaster casts, The Maid of the Mountains, the paraffin lamps, a sentimental song called Trees, and the President’s patriotic verses which he now beat out upon the piano : The Lone Star Forever.

When Freedom raised her glowing form on Montserrado’s verdant height, She set within the dome of Night ‘Midst lowering skies and thunderstorm The star of Liberty! And seizing from the waking Morn Its burnished shield of golden flame She lifted it in her proud name And roused a people long forlorn To nobler destiny.

It was no worse than most patriotic songs from older countries. To a stranger, I think, coming from a European colony, Monrovia and coastal Liberia would be genuinely impressive. He would find a simplicity, a pathos about the place which would redeem it from the complete seediness of a colony like Sierra Leone : planted without resources on this unhealthy strip of land they have held out; if they have brought with them the corruption of American politics, they have nurtured at the same time a sentiment, a patriotism, even a starveling culture. It is something, after all, to have a President who writes verses, however bad, and music, however banal. I could not be quite fair to them, coming as I did from an interior where there was a greater simplicity, an older more natural culture, and traditions of honesty and hospitality. After a trek of more than three hundred miles through dense deserted forest, after the little villages and the communal ember, the great silver anklets, the masked devil swaying between the huts, it was less easy to appreciate this civilisation of the coast. It seemed to me that they, almost as much as oneself, had lost touch with the true primitive source. It was not their fault. Two hundred years of American servitude separated them from Africa”; gave” them their politics: their education at Liberia College : their Press : gave them this :

The Press