Journey Without Maps

Preface To Second Edition

SIX years after this book was written I found myself living in Sierra Leone-a writer should be careful where he goes for pleasure in peacetime, for in wartime he is only too likely to return there to work. It was odd flying up from Lagos, following from the sky the line of surf along the Liberian coast, seeing the huddle of tiny shacks which called itself Grand Bassa, where I had dismissed my carriers, passing over the small white isolated building which was the British Consulate at Monrovia. It was odd too retracing my steps from Freetown to Kailahun, travelling in the same tiny lamp-lit train, staying in the same rest-houses,

I can look back now with a certain regret at the hard words I used about Freetown, for Freetown is now one of the homes I have lived and worked in through all the seasons. I have been able to recognise in myself after a year’s sojourn the inertia which as a tourist I condemned so harshly in other people. But if there are fallacies into which the passing visitor falls, there are fallacies too which come from a close acquaintance. After a little while there is so much one ceases to notice, and if I were writing of Freetown now, how unnaturally rosy would my picture be, for I begin to remember mainly the sunsets when all the laterite paths turned suddenly for a few minutes the colour of a rose, the old slavers’ fort with the cannon lying in the grass, the abandoned railway track with the chickens pecking in and out of the little empty rotting station, the taste of the first pink gin at six o’clock. I have begun to forget what the visitor noticed so clearly-the squalor and the unhappiness and the involuntary injustices of tired men. But as that picture is true too, I let it stand.

London, November 1946

PART I, CHAPTER ONE, THE WAY TO AFRICA

Harvest Festival

THE tall black door in the narrow city street remained closed. I rang and knocked and rang again. I could not hear the bell ringing; to ring it again and again was simply an act of faith or despair, and later sitting before a hut in French Guinea, where I never meant to find myself, I remembered this first going astray, the buses passing at the corner and the pale autumn sun.

An errand boy came to my help, asking me whether I wanted the Consul, and when I said yes, that was what I wanted, the boy led me straight to the entrance of St. Dunstan’s Church and up the steps and into the vestry. It wasn’t the sort of beginning I’d expected when I was accumulating the tent I never used, the hypodermic syringe I left behind, the automatic pistol which remained hidden underneath boots and shoes and bags of silver in the moneybox. They were preparing for the harvest festival; the vestry was crowded with large dressy yellow blooms and litters of vegetable marrow; I couldn’t see the Consul anywhere. The errand boy peered among the flowers in the dim light and at last pointed to a little intent woman bent above the blooms. “There she is,” he said, “that’s her. She’ll tell you.”

I felt very selfconscious, making my way among the vegetables in St. Dunstan’s, asking : “Could you by any chance tell me? Is the Liberian Consul?”

But she knew and I left that street for another.

It was three o’clock and lunch at the Consulate was just over. Three men, I could not distinguish their nationality, overcrowded the tiny room which was deeply buried in the huge new glittering office block. The window-sill was lined with old telephone directories, school textbooks of chemistry. One man was washing up lunch into a basin stuck in the top of a waste-paper basket. Unidentifiable yellow threads like bast floated in the greasy water. The man poured a kettle of boiling water from a gas jet over a plate which he held above the basket; then he wiped the plate with a cloth. The table was littered with bursting parcels of what looked like stones, and the lift porter kept on putting his head in at the door and flinging down more parcels on the floor. The room was like a shabby caravan held up for a moment in a smart bright street. One doubted whether, returning in a few hours’ time to the gleaming mechanised block, one would still find it there; it would almost certainly have moved on.

But everyone was very kind. It all came down to a question of paying money; no one asked me why I wanted to go, although I had been told by many authorities on Africa that the Republic of Liberia resented intruders. In the Consulate they had little guttural family jokes among themselves. “Before the war,” a large man said, “you didn’t need passports. Such a fuss. Only to the Argentine,” and he looked across at the man who was making out my papers. “If you wanted to get to the Argentine you even had to give your finger-prints a month ahead, so that Scotland Yard and Buenos Aires could get together. All the scoundrels in the world went to the Argentine.”

I examined the usual blank map upon the wall, a few towns along the coast, a few villages along the border.” Have you been to Liberia?” I asked.

“No, no,” the large man said. “We let them come to us.”

The other man stuck a round red seal on my passport; it bore the National Mark, a three-masted ship, a palm tree, a dove flying overhead, and the legend “The love of liberty brought us here”. Above the same red seal I had to sign the “Declaration of an Alien about to depart for die Republic of Liberia.”

I have informed myself of the provisions under the Immigration Law, and am convinced that I am eligible for admission into the Republic thereunder.

I realise that if I am one of a class prohibited by law from admission, I will be deported or detained in confinement.

I solemnly swear that the above statements are true to the best of my knowledge and that I fully intend when in the Republic to obey and support the laws and constituted authorities thereof.

The only thing which I knew of the law was that it forbade a white man to enter the country except through the recognised ports unless he had paid a large sum for an explorer’s licence. I intended to enter the country from the British border and make his goods, but in this country the buyer enforces the price to suit his convenience.

The Government can kill all the people of Sasstown and all the tribes of the Kru Coast before we surrender to the Government. We will not return to the coast or surrender until we hear from the British Consul in Monrovia that there will be no more war. Then we will return to Old Sasstown… .

There was something satisfyingly complete about this picture. It really seemed as though you couldn’t go deeper than that; the agony was piled on in the British Government Blue Book with a real effect of grandeur; the little injustices of Kenya became shoddy and suburban beside it.

And it was saved from melodrama by its irony, by the fact that the Republic was founded as an example to all Africa of a Christian and self-governing state. An American philanthropic society at the beginning of the nineteenth century (many of its directors, it is said, were slave-owners who found it convenient thus to get rid of their illegitimate children) began to ship released slaves to the Grain Coast of Africa. Land was bought from the native rulers and a settlement established at Monrovia. “The love of liberty brought us here,” but one can hardly blame these first half-caste settlers when they found that love of their own liberty was not consistent with the liberty of the native tribes. The history of the Republic was very little different from the history of neighbouring white colonies: it included the same broken contracts, the same resort to arms, the same gradual encroachment, even the same heroism among die early settlers, the peculiarly Protestant characteristic of combining martyrdom with absurdity. There were, for example, the black Quakers from Pennsylvania, teetotallers and pacifists, who when they were attacked by Spanish slavers depended on prayer and were massacred. Only a hundred and twenty escaped and settled in Grand Bassa.

From the first these American half-caste slaves were idealists in the American manner. Their Declaration of Independence, when the Republic was declared, had the glossy white marble effect of the American. The-year was 1847, but the phrases were eighteenth century; they belonged to Washington; they had the rhetoric of an expensive tomb. The inalienable rights of life and liberty gravely led off the scroll; but then one passed to “the right to acquire, possess, enjoy, and defend property”. To-day the ‘ideals’ are still American, something a little like the American of Tammany Hall; the descendants of the slaves have taken to politics with the enthusiasm of practised crap players.

“If you desire the prosperity of your people, the independence of your Government, a place of honour for the Lone Star among the flags of all nations, you will support the re-election of President Barclay in this campaign… .”

This too attracted me. There seemed to be a seediness about the place you couldn’t get to the same extent elsewhere, and seediness has a very deep appeal : even the seediness of civilisation, of the sky-signs in Leicester Square, the ‘tarts’ in Bond Street, the smell of cooking greens off Tottenham Court Road, the motor salesmen in Great Portland Street. It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back.

Streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question …

But there are times of impatience, when one is less content to rest at the urban stage, when one is willing to suffer some discomfort for the chance of finding-there are a thousand names for it, King Solomon’s Mines, the “heart of darkness” if one is romantically inclined, or more simply, as Herr Heuser puts it in his African novel, The Inner Journey, one’s place in time, based on a knowledge not only of one’s present but of the past from which one has emerged. There are others, of course, who prefer to look a stage ahead, for whom Intourist provides cheap tickets into a plausible future, but my journey represented a distrust of any future based on what we are.

The motive of a journey deserves a little attention. It is not the fully conscious mind which chooses West Africa in preference to Switzerland. The psychoanalyst, who takes the images of a dream one by one-“You dreamed you were asleep in a forest. What is your first association to forest?”-finds that some images have immediate associations; to others the patient can bring out nothing at all; his brain is like a cinema in which the warning “Tire” has been cried; the exits are jammed with too many people trying to escape, and when I say that to me Africa has always seemed an important image, I suppose that is what I mean, that it has represented more than I could say, “You dreamed you were in Africa. Of what do you think first when I say the word Africa?” and a crowd of words and images, witches and death, unhappiness and the Gare St. Lazare, the huge smoky viaduct over a Paris slum, crowd together and block the way to full consciousness.

But to the words ‘South Africalittle my reaction, I find, is immediate: Rhodes and the British Empire and an ugly building in Oxford and Trafalgar Square. After ‘Kenya’ there is no hesitation : ‘gentleman farmers, aristocracy r& exile and the gossip columns’. ‘Rhodesia’ produces: ‘failure, Empire Tobacco’, and ‘failure’ again.

It is not then any part of Africa which acts so strongly on this unconscious mind; certainly no part where the white settler has been most successful in reproducing the conditions of his country, its morals and its popular art. A quality of darkness is needed, of the inexplicable. This Africa may take the form of an unexplained brutality as when Conrad noted in his Congo diary: “Thursday, 3rd July … Met an off ” of the State inspecting. A few minutes afterwards saw at a camp place the dead body of a Backongo. Shot? Horrid smell”; or a sense of despair as when M. Celine writes: “Hidden away in all this flowering forest of twisted vegetation, a few decimated tribes of natives squatted among fleas and flies, crushed by taboos and eating nothing all the time but rotten tapioca.” The old man whom I saw beaten with a club outside the poky little prison at Tapec-Ta, the naked widows at Tailahun covered with yellow clay squatting in a hole, the wooden-toothed devil swaying his raffia skirts between the huts seem like the images in a dream to stand for something of importance to myself.

To-day our world seems peculiarly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral. We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and these half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay for ever at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.

Via Liverpool

But none the less I was a little scared at the prospect of going back by way of Africa alone; I feel very grateful to my cousin, who was willing to accompany me, to share the journey, for which no maps were to be bought, from its start in the restaurant car of the 6.$ from Euston, as we sat before the little pieces of damp white fish. A headline told me that there was another clue in a trunk murder case; a man on the dole had killed himself; while along the line the smaller stations were dashed out like so many torches plunged in water.

The huge Liverpool hotel had been designed without aesthetic taste but with the right ideas about comfort and a genuine idea of magnificence. It could probably house as many passengers as an Atlantic liner; passengers, because no one goes to Liverpool for pleasure, to the little cramped square and the low sky-signs which can almost be touched with the hand, where all the bars and the cinemas close at ten. But there was a character hidden in this hotel; it wasn’t chic, it wasn’t bright, it wasn’t international; there remained somewhere hidden, among its long muffled corridors, beneath the huge cliff-like fall of its walls, the idea of an English inn; one didn’t mind asking for muffins or a pint of bitter, while the boats hooted in the Mersey and the luggage littered the hall; there was quite probably a boots. Anyway enough remained for me to understand the surprise of Henry James when he landed in England, “that England should be as English as, for my entertainment, she took the trouble to be.”

The natural native seediness had not been lost in the glitter of chromium plate; the muffin had been overwhelmingly, perhaps rather nauseatingly, enlarged. If the hotel were silly, it was only because magnificence is almost always a little silly. The magnificent gesture seldom quite comes off. When on rare occasions beauty and magnificence do coincide, one gets a sense of the theatre or the films, it is “too good to be true”. I find myself always torn between two beliefs : the belief that life should be better than it is and the belief that when it appears better it is really worse. But in the huge lounge at Liverpool, like the lounge of a country inn fifty times magnified, one was at home on the vast expanse of deep dark carpet, only one business man asleep with his mouth open; at home as one would certainly not have been if the Hollywood imagination had run riot. One was protectively coloured, one was seedy too.

Next morning, in the public-house near the Prince’s Stage, four middle-aged women sat drinking with an old dirty man of eighty-four. Three had the dustbin look; they carried about them the air of tenements, of lean cats and shared wash-houses; the fourth had risen a little way in the world, she was the old man’s daughter over from America for Christmas. ‘Have another drink, Father?” He was seeing her off. Their relationship was intimate and merry; the whole party had an air of slightly disreputable revelry. To one the party didn’t really matter; she had caught the American accent. To the other women, who must return to the dustbin, it was perilous, precarious, breath-taking; they were happy and aghast when the old man drew out a pound note and stood a round himself. “Well, why shouldn’t he?” the daughter asked them, asked Jackie boy, the bar-tender, the beer advertisements, the smutty air, the man who came in selling safety-razor blades, half a dozen for threepence, “it’s better than spending it on a crowd of strange dames.”

The Liverpool waterside at least had not changed since James’s day: “The black steamers knocking about in the yellow Mersey, under a sky so low that they seemed to touch it with their funnels, and in the thickest, windiest light”;-even the colour was the same, “the grey mildness, shading away into black at every pretext “