Journey Without Maps

WESTERN LIBERIA

The Forest Edge

It was midday. We followed the Customs man into a thatched shelter, sat on high uncomfortable drawing-room chairs and smoked: the little yellow man sat opposite us in a hammock and smoked too, swinging back and forth. I smiled at him and he smiled back; they were surface smiles; there was no friendliness anywhere. The man was thinking how much he could exact, I with how little loss I could escape. A woman brought in a child to see the white people and it screamed and screamed uncontrollably. The men of the Frontier Force lounged and spat in the vertical sunrays, and one could almost see the brown earth cracking. I began a second cigarette.

Then Laminah burst in, a small detonating bomb of fury in the stillness, the doing nothing. He was like a Pekinese who has been insulted by an Alsatian. Somebody had told him he must pay duty on his white barber’s jacket which had a rubber lining. The Customs officer surrendered the point with courtesy, but it seemed to be the signal for the fun to start. I produced my invoices, the German opened a small suitcase and paid half a crown; the officer was in a hurry to get on to bigger game, and the Germanlittle passed out of the frontier station bobbing above #e heads of his carriers. The officer settled to the invoices and the soldiers spat and grinned and passed remarks and I wiped off the sweat.

“This will take all day,” the Customs man said. “Everything here except the tin of Epsom salts, the quinine and the iodine has got to pay duty.” He explained that he would let me go through to Bolahun if I left a deposit; any change would be sent after me; he calculated that four pounds ten would be sufficient guarantee. I extracted a bag of sixpenny-bits from the moneybox without disclosing the automatic. But it wasn’t quite the end. I had to pay two cents each for the eight forms on which my dutiable goods were to be set down in detail. I had to pay for two Revenue stamps, and I had to sign my name at the bottom of the eight blank sheets saying that the items listed above were correct. I was completely in their power; they could fill up anything they liked on the forms. The alternative was to stay where I was for the night and have all my bags and bales opened. As it was I didn’t escape so easily. The next day he sent a soldier over to Bolahun demanding another six pounds ten, and when the soldier went back empty-handed, he came himself, borne in a hammock the long rough path from Foya with four carriers and a couple of soldiers, a dirty white topee on his head and a ragged cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He swaggered across the verandah, a little sour, mean, avaricious figure, grinning and friendly and furious and determined. He got his money, drank two glasses of whisky, smoked two cigarettes; there was nothing one could do about it; it was impossible to bribe an official who probably took a lion’s “share anyway of what he exacted.

I enjoyed the first day’s trek into the Republic because everything was new : the sense of racing the dark, even the taste of warm boiled water, the smell of the carriers; it wasn’t an unpleasant smell, sweet or sour; it was bitter, and reminded me of a breakfast food I had as a child after pleurisy, something vigorous and body-building which I disliked. This bitter taint was mixed with the rich plummy smell of the kola nuts the carriers picked from the ground and chewed, with an occasional flower scent one couldn’t trace in the thick untidy greenery. All the smells were drawn out, as the heat increased, like vapour from moist ground. The carriers walked naked except for loin-cloths, the sweat leaving marks like snails on their black polished skins. They didn’t look strong, they hadn’t the ugly muscular development of a boxer; their legs were as thin as a woman’s, but they ended in typical carrier’s feet, flat like enormous empty gloves, spreading on the earth pancake-wise as if die weights they carried had pressed them out in a peine forte et dure. Even their arms were childishly thin, and when they raised the fifty-pound cases a few inches to ease their skulls, the muscles hardly swelled, were no thicker than whipcord.

We were on the edge of the immense forest which covers the Republic to within a few miles of the coast; we climbed steeply from the frontier post at Foya and from the first village we came to we could see the bush below the huts, falling away, a ragged cascade, towards the sea, lifting and falling and swelling into green plains; hundreds of miles of them, the palms sticking out above the rest like the fartteite of chimney sweeps. The huts here, and in Bande territory, were circular with a pointed thatched roof overhanging the parti-coloured mud walls, whitewashed halfway up. There was one door and sometimes a window; in the middle of the floor were the ashes of a fire which would be lit again at sunset from a communal ember and fill the single room with smoke; the fumes kept out mosquitoes, kept out, to some extent, the fleas and bugs and cockroaches, but not the rats. They were all much alike, these villages, built on a hilltop on several levels like medieval towns; the path one had followed through the bush would drop steeply to a stream where the villagers came to wash their clothes and bathe, then rise abruptly up a wide beaten track out of the shade to a silhouette of pointed huts against the midday glare. The ground in the villages was scarred by the dry beds of streams. In the centre was the palaver-house and at the limit of the village the blacksmith’s forge, both open huts without walls.

But though nearly all the villages at which I stayed had these common properties-a hill, stream, palaver-house and forge, the burning ember carried round at dark, the cows and goats standing between the huts, the little grove of banana-trees like clusters of tall green feathers gathering dust-not one was quite the same. However tired I became of the seven-hour trek through the untidy and unbeautiful forest, I never wearied of the villages in which I spent the night: the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits-love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where die rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature. Love, it has been said, was invented in Europe by the troubadours, but it existed here without the trappings of civilisation. They were tender towards their children (I seldom heard a crying child, unless at the sight of a white face, and never saw one beaten), they were tender towards each other in a gentle muffled way; they didn’t scream or ‘rag’; they never revealed the rasped nerves of the European poor in shrill speech or sudden blows. One was aware the whole time of a standard of courtesy to which it was one’s responsibility to conform.

And these were the people one had been told by the twisters, the commercial agents, on the Coast that one couldn’t trust. ‘A black will always do you down’. It was no good protesting later that one had not come across a single example of dishonesty from the boys, from the carriers, from the natives in the interior: only gentleness, kindness, an honesty which one would not have found, or at least dared to assume was there, in Europe. It astonished me that I was able to travel through an unpoliced country with twenty-five men who knew that my moneybox contained what to them was a fortune in silver. We were not in British or French territory now: it wouldn’t have mattered to the black Government on the Coast if we had disappeared and they could have done little about it anyway. We couldn’t even count as armed; the automatic was hidden in the moneybox, never loaded, never seen; it would have been easy when we were crossing one of the fibre bridges to stage an accident; it would have been easy, less drastically, simply to mislay the moneybox or to lose us in the bush.

But “poor fool”, one could tell the Coast whites were thinking, “he just didn’t know how he was being done”. But I wasn’t ‘done’; there wasn’t an instance of even the most petty theft, though in every village the natives swarmed into the hut where all day my tilings were lying about, soap (to them very precious), razor, brushes. “You can have a boy for ten years,” they’d say, “and he’ll do you at the end of it,” and laying down their empty glasses they’d go out into the glaring street and down to the store to see whom they could ‘do’ in the proper understood commercial way that morning. “No affection,” they’d say, “after fifteen yearslittle Not a scrap of real affection,” expecting always to get from these people more than what they had paid for. They had paid for service and they expected love thrown in.

I had hoped to reach the mission at five o’clock; but five o’clock brought us only to another hill, another group of huts and stones, and the forest thick below. The balls of cotton were laid outside the huts to dry and a small tree ruffled a pale pink blossom against the sky. Somebody pointed out the mission, a white building which the low sun picked out of the forest. It was at least two hours away, and the journey became more than ever a race against the dark, which the dark nearly won. It came down on us just as we left the forest and wound through the banana plantation at the foot of Mosambolahun, and it was quite dark and cold as we passed between the huts, the old cook flitting ahead in his long white Mohammedan robe, carrying a trussed chicken. All the fires had been lit in the huts and the smoke blew across the narrow paths stinging the eye; but the little flames were like home; they were the African equivalent of the lights behind red blinds in English villages. There must have been nearly two hundred huts on Mosambolahun, packed together on a thimble of rock,- and it stood apart in its remote pagan dirt from the neat Christianised garden village of Bolahun in the cleared plain below. A wide flattened path ran down across the plain to Bolahun and a swaying hammock came up it and a little noisy group of men. The hammock stopped at my side and an old, old man in a robe of native cloth with a long white beard put out a hand. It was the chief of Mosambolahun; ninety years old he quivered and shook and smiled while his people chattered round him. He couldn’t speak any English, but a boy with a gun whom I found at my side told me that the chief was on his way home from Tailahun, where a brother chief had died. He was swept away again by his impatient hammock-bearers, waving his dried old hand, smiling gently, curiously, quizzically. He was the explanation, I later learnt, of Mosambolahun’s dirt; he “was a puppet of the younger men, without authority. He had about two hundred wives, but they would sell him the same wife over and over again; he was too old to keep count. He knew that he was too old, he wanted to retire for a younger man, but it didn’t suit his lawless village to lose their puppet. When he became importunate they told him they had made him a bishop, and that pleased and quieted him.

It was a two-mile walk up to the mission through the village of Bolahun, through the deep barking of the frogs. The mission belonged to the Order of the Holy Cross, a monastic order of the American Episcopal Church. I dumped my loads outside the long bungalow and waited for the priests to come out from Benediction. I could hear the low murmur of Latin inside; in the darkness only the white eyeballs of my carriers were visible, where they squatted silent on the verandah; everyone was too tired to talk. But the sound of the Latin represented a better civilisation than the tin shacks of the English port, better than anything I had seen in Sierra Leone; and when the priests came out and one led the way to the rest-house, his white robe stirring in the cold hill wind, I was for the first time unashamed by the comparison between white and black. There was something in this corner of a republic said to be a byword for corruption and slavery that at least wasn’t commercial. One couldn’t put it higher than this : that the little group of priests and nuns had a standard of gentleness and honesty equal to the native standard. Whether what they brought with them in the shape of a crucified God was superior to the local fetish worship had to be the subject of future speculation.

That night, as the filter dripped and dripped in the rest-house living-room, after the carriers had been paid off and the case of whisky opened, I went outside to find the sick C.’s partner, Van Gogh. For the prospector’s tent was just outside and a hurricane lamp was burning. “Van Gogh,” the priest had said, “you’ll like Van Gogh,” and seeing a syphon standing on the boxes by the tent, I thought that I would invite him to bring his soda over for a drink. I raised the flap and there Van Gogh was, lying wrapped in blankets on his camp-bed; I thought he was asleep, but when he turned his head I saw that he was sweating; the pale golden stubble of his chin was drenched in sweat. Five hours before he had gone down with fever, and all that night the German doctor attached to the mission sat up with him. He was bad, very bad; he had spent a lifetime in the tropics, but nine months in the Republic had got him down. Next day they took him to the little mission hospital in our hammock; the boys from his gold-camp in the Gola forest came and packed up his tent and goods and carried him down, sick and swaying under the blazing sun.

Sunday in Bolahun

It was Sunday in Bolahun, unmistakably Sunday. A herd 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 recognise 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 Fort-num 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 Christianised 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 to 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 Hmp uselessness had taken a knife and cut it off at the elbow.)

A Chiefs 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 local “devil”, Landow from Mosambolahόn 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 laterlittle 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 recognise 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 easygoing, 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 raffiia 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 closed 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.

The devil was paying his respects to the chief and to the strangers, so the interpreter explained in Bande, and was ready to dance for them. There was an uneasy pause while I wondered with the embarrassment of a man in a strange restaurant whether I had enough in my pocket. But a dash of a shilling was sufficient and the devil danced. It was not so accomplished a dance as we saw later by a devil belonging to a woman’s society in Buzie country; the lack of religious enthusiasm in the Bande tribe, if it allows them to lead an easier life, less under the fear of poisoning, diminishes their artistic talent. Vitality was about the only quality one could allow Landow; he lashed a small whip; he twirled like a top; he ran up and down between the huts with long sliding steps, his skirts raising the dust and giving his progress an appearance of immense speed. His interpreter did his best to keep up with him, brushing him when he was within reach. The spirit was definitely carnival; no one above the age of childhood was really scared of Landow; they had all passed through his school, and one suspected that the blacksmith of Mosambolahun, the slack grimy town, had not maintained very carefully his unmasked authority. He was a ‘good fellow’, one felt, and like so many good fellows he went on much too long : he would sit on the ground and mutter, then run up and down a bit and sit down again. He was a bore as he played on and on in the blistering afternoon sun, hoping for another dash, which I simply hadn’t got with me. One woman ran up and flung down two irons and ran away again, and he cracked his whip and raced and turned and spun. The villagers stood in the background smiling discreetly; it was a carnival, but it wasn’t a carnival in the vulgar sense of Nice and the Battle of Flowers; it wasn’t secular and skittish; like the dancing in the Spanish cathedral at Easter, it had its religious value.

I remembered a Jack-in-the-Green I had seen when I was four years old, quite covered except for his face in leaves, wearing a kind of diving-suit of leaves and twirling round and round at a country crossroads, far from any village, with only a little knot of attendants and a few bicyclists to watch him. That as late as the ninth century in England had religious significance, the dance was part of the rites celebrating the death of winter and the return of spring, and here in Liberia again and again one caught hints of what it was we had developed from. It wasn’t so alien to us, this masked dance (in England too there was δ time when men dressed as animals and danced), any more than the cross and the pagan emblems on the grave were alien. One had the sensation of having come home, for here one was finding associations with a personal and a racial childhood, one was being scared by the same old witches. They brought a screaming child up to the devil and thrust him under the devil’s muzzle, under the dusty raffia mane; he stiffened and screamed and tried to escape and the devil mouthed him. The older generation were playing the same old joke they had played for centuries, of frightening the child with what had frightened them. I went away but looking back I saw a young girl dancing before Landow, dancing with the sad erotic infinite appeal of projecting buttoθki and moving belly; she at least didn’t know it was the blacksmith of Mosambolahun as she danced like a-Europa before the bull, and the old black wooden muzzle rested on the earth and the eyes of the blacksmith watched her through the flat painted rims.

Music at Night

That night Gissi, a Buzie man, came up to play the harp. A row of black heads lined the verandah, while he sat with dangling legs picking out of the palm fibres light melancholy monotonous music, beautifully superficial music which just tickled the surface of the mind, didn’t tiresomely claim any deep emotion whether of grief or exaltation, the claim which fixes strained masks on the faces in a concert hall. This was the music of a cigarette-box; it was sad, but it didn’t really care, everything would always be the same. The little recurring notes plucked with four nails died out and began again unvaried against the night, the black faces, the hurricane lamp and the moths that drove by in swarms to shrivel their wings against it. Mark shovelled them from the table in handfuls, and Gissi didn’t watch his harp or his fingers or his friends; he looked away smiling gently at the hopping wingless moths. He was not a handsome man, he was beautiful as a woman can be beautiful, without effeminacy. His round skull and tiny ears, projecting lower lip and long curling eyelashes had nothing in common with the buck negro type, who represents Africa to the European, lounging round the bars off Leicester Square, beating the piano in dance orchestras. His chin was very gently moulded, his hair fitted his head like a skullcap; he was more Grecian than African, early Grecian before the decadence. He wore an elephant-hide bracelet and a silver ring.

The goat-herd came and danced, stamping and flinging out his arms, and one by one the men came out of the dark on to the verandah, into the lamplight, hurling themselves this way and that, sending the shadows flying from their arms and legs. Their faces were strange but soon they were to become familiar, for these” were the labourers whom Vande, my newly-appointed headman, had found for me, to carry fifty-pound weights for four weeks on end, for three shillings a week and their food. It sounded to a stranger next door to slave labour, but these were not slaves stamping up and down with a controlled wildness and an unconscious grace. There was Amah, my second headman, a tall sullen humourless Mandingo with a shaven head in a long blue and white robe; there was Babu, a Buzie man like Gissi with the same delicate cultured features, the features of a tribe sensitive to art and fear, weavers of exquisite cloth, in touch more than any tribe with the supernatural, makers of lightning, poisoners; Fadai, a gentle-mannered boy from Sierra Leone with soft sad eyes, infected with yaws; there was one-eyed shaven shifty Vande Two.

They didn’t speak a word as they swayed and stamped; each improvised, dancing alone with no reference to the others; it was only the music and the shadows which lent them unity. I was to see these improvised dances again and again during the long trek. The slightest hint of a tune would set them off; if there was no music someone would tap a twig on an empty tin. They were more easy to appreciate than the communal dances. They had obvious dramatic qualities and one could see hidden under the personal idiosyncrasies the germ of the Charleston. But to the native, I suppose, the communal dance was on a higher, more subtle level; only one hadn’t oneself got a clue to their appreciation. I saw such a dance in the village. A band of youths with drums chanted an air, while about seven boys shuffled in a small circle with their hands at their sides, one foot forward, the other brought up beside it, then forward again. Presently three girls joined them and the circle became smaller than ever: a girl’s nipples bulged against the back in front, her buttocks were pressed by the girl behind. Round and round they went to the monotonous beat, a snake eating its own tail.

That night of dancing on the verandah was specially memorable because it was the last at Bolahun. The next day the real journey was going to begin. Amedoo had returned from hospital; even Van Gogh, pale as a ghost under his bleached gold stubble, a curiously intellectual sensitive face for a prospector (he treated the natives with a harsh lack of consideration one would never have guessed existed behind the horn-rimmed glasses), had staggered over for a cup of tea. Long study of the manuscript maps the Dutch prospectors had made of the Western province, consultations with the German linguist, had decided us to take a different and longer route. I wanted to deliver my letter to Chief Nimley, and so I planned to walk down to Sinoe and Nana Kru, first striking along the northern border to Ganta, where an American medical missionary, Dr. Harley, might be expected to know something of the route. Nobody in Bolahun had been so far as Ganta, but the German doctor at the hospital had been to Zigita, and there one might expect to get more information. The fathers with a saintly trust in human nature cashed my cheque for little40 in small silver on a trading firm in Monrovia and sold me two hammocks which could be carried by two men apiece. With these light hammocks I hoped to economise in men and time.

The first stop, so at first it was decided, was to be Pandemai, and I sent off two carriers ahead to warn the chief, but as we talked at tea, the distance to Pandemai seemed to increase while the kindness one might look for from the chief in Kpangblamai became more desirable. The truth was, I couldn’t help being a little scared. I wanted to break the strangeness and wildness gently.

Mark I had decided to add to the company as interpreter, jester and gossip. I hadn’t been able to resist the letter he thrust on me one day over the verandah.

Sir In honour to ask you that I am willingly to go with you down Monrovia please kindly I beg you. Because you love me so dearly I don’t want you must live me here again, and More over I am too little to take a load. I will be assisting the hammock till we reach. Me and the headman. Please sir don’t live me here again. I was fearing to tell you last night please Master, good master and good servant. I am yours ever friend Mark.

It proved always possible, however tired and vexed and sick I felt, to gain a little of the old zest at second-hand through Mark, for Mark had never seen the sea nor a ship nor a brick house. It was the greatest adventure he was ever likely to have and he was still only a schoolboy. One could see in his avid gaze at new people and new customs the dramatising instinct at work : he was going to have stories to tell when he got back to school.

Now on the verandah, with the dancers, apprehensions gathered. This was the last rest-house we would occupy for a long while. It was to be native huts after this. I remembered what the sisters had said of the rats which swarmed in every native hut. You couldn’t, they said, keep them off your bed; the mosquito net was useless; once a sister had woken to find a rat sitting, on her pillow savouring the oil on her hair. But you soon got used to rats, they said. They were right, but I didn’t believe them. I had never got used to mice in the wainscot, I was afraid of moths. It was an inherited fear, I shared my mother’s terror of birds, couldn’t touch them, couldn’t bear the feel of their hearts beating in my palm. I avoided them as I avoided ideas I didn’t like, the idea of eternal life and damnation. But in Africa one couldn’t avoid them any more than one could avoid the supernatural. The method of psychoanalysis is to bring the patient back to the idea which he is repressing: a long journey backwards without maps, catching a clue here and a clue there, as I caught the names of villages from this man and that, until one has to face the general idea, the pain or the memory. This is what you have feared, Africa may be imagined as saying, you can’t avoid it, there it is creeping round the wall, flying in at the door, rustling the grass, you can’t turn your back, you can’t forget it, so you may as well take a long look.

A dog ran whining across the verandah, between the dancers’ legs, and off down the path to the convent. Some instinct told it to keep moving; it slathered and whined and ran; it had been bitten by a snake. The sisters had called in a medicine man who had poured medicine down its throat and tied sticky charms to its legs, but these the sisters had removed when the man had gone. It was still alive, but it had to keep on running.

It wasn’t so good when the dancers went. Neither of us felt too happy; I couldn’t help remembering C. and Van Gogh. My cousin had been bitten all over (if by mosquitoes, then malaria might easily find us less than halfway through the forest). I had a rash over my back and arms like the rash of chicken-pox. I didn’t feel so well : perhaps I had drunk too much whisky. There did seem to be an air of sickness about the prospect; Amedoo’s lung and Van Gogh’s fever contributed to it. After dinner I went out to the last pail-closet I should see before Monrovia; the wooden seat, of course, was swarming with ants, but I realised by this time that it was luxury to have a closet at all. We had discovered we hadn’t enough lamps with us. The boys needed both lamps while they were washing up the dinner things, which meant that we must sit in the waning light of our two electric torches. The mosquito-netting over the windows and door was broken and anything came in, large horseflies, cockroaches, beetles, cockchafers, and moths. Now and then to save light we sat in darkness. It was a grim evening and our nerves were rather strained. Big spiders dashed up and down the wall, the filter in the corner slowly and regularly dripped, a tomtom was beating somewhere some message, probably about the President’s coming, and a big black moth the size of a bat flapped against the walls. The only thing to do was to go to bed early and sleep well.

But that was impossible; a great storm of rain beat upon the roof and afterwards it was too cold to sleep properly, just as in the day it had been too hot to walk. I dreamed uneasily I was present at the assassination of the President. It took place in Bolahun close to one of the green leafy arches they had raised in case he passed that way, between the borders of the path where the pineapple plants were sprinkled with white powder which meant “There is joy in our hearts at your coming.” He was shot in a carriage by one of the drummers I saw at Tailahun and I tried in vain to send the story to a newspaper. At four I woke and got out of bed, without putting on my shoes, and found my vest, it was so cold. I knew some days later that I had caught a jigger by my carelessness, the small insect which burrows into the toe under the skin and lays its eggs and goes on multiplying until it is cut out. I slept again and had more restless dreams : that there was a case of yellow fever in Bolahun and I was put in quarantine and my diary was burnt; I woke weeping with fury. I began more than ever to wish I hadn’t got to go at dawn. The process of psychoanalysis may be salutary, but it is not at first happy. This place was luxury, it was civilised in a way that I was used to and could understand. It was foolish to be dissatisfied, to want to penetrate any further. People had made their home here. I thought of the five sisters who had come from Malvern; I thought of the young German doctor with his duelling scars and his portrait of Hitler. He was the best kind of Nazi; he had been given the strength and the enthusiasm and the hope, and he hadn’t been in Germany to see the dirty work done. His wife, dark and thin and lovely in a fierce tired way, had borne her first child at the mission three weeks before. Bolahun in the early morning of the last day seemed a lovely place, where oranges were twelve a penny and mangoes three for a farthing and bananas so cheap that one hadn’t time to eat them before the ants and flies got into them. These were what I remembered most clearly through the monotony of the forest: the lovely swooping flight of the small bright rice-birds, the fragile yellow cotton flowers growing with no stalk directly out of the canes, something like a wild rose, transparent primrose petals with a small red centre and a black stamen; butterflies, palms, goats and rocks and great straight silver cotton trees, and through the canes the graceful walking women with baskets on their heads. This was what I carried with me into new country, an instinctive simplicity, a thoughtless idealism. It was the first time, moving on from one place to another, that I hadn’t expected something better of the new country than I had found in the old, that I was prepared for disappointment. It was the first time, too, that I was not disappointed.

New Country

Coming into Riga three years before, I had deceived myself into thinking I was on the verge of a relationship with something new and lovely and happy as the train came out from the Lithuanian flats, where the peasants were ploughing in bathing-slips, pushing the wooden plough through the stiff dry earth, into the shining evening light beside the Latvian river. I had left Berlin in the hard wooden carriage at midnight; I hadn’t slept and I’d eaten nothing all day. There was a Polish Jew in the carriage who had been turned out of Germany; he couldn’t speak any English and I could speak no German, but a little stout Esthonian girl who had been a servant in London could speak both. She was an Esthonian patriot, she hadn’t a good word for Riga, she regarded the grey spires beyond the river with firm peasant contempt.

And there was something decayed, Tarisian’, rather shocking in an old-fashioned way about the place. One could see why someone so fresh and unspoiled was disgusted. The old bearded droshky drivers and their bony haggard horses at the station were like the illustrations to a very early translation of Anna Karenina; they were like crude and foxed wood engravings. They must have dated back to the days when Riga was a pleasure resort for Grand Dukes, a kind of aristocratic Brighton to which one slipped away from a duchess’s bed with someone from the theatre, someone to be described in terms of flowers and pink ribbons, chocolates and champagne in the slipper, of black silk stockings and corsets. All the lights in Riga were dimmed by ten : the public gardens were quite dark and full of whispers, giggles from hidden seats, excited rustles in the bushes. One had the sensation of a whole town on the tiles. It was fascinating, it appealed immensely to the historical imagination, but it certainly wasn’t something new, lovely and happy.

Even the street women were period. They were not, poor creatures, young enough to be brazen under what little light there was, though they had a depraved air of false youth as if they knew their only hope was to appeal to the very old. Their manners too, one felt, dated back to the Grand Dukes. Their allure was concentrated in an ankle, a garter, which they would bend down to adjust with a dreadfully passι gesture of allurement. Their street manners were infinitely more elegant than the street manners of London, but they weren’t in the picture any longer. There were no more Grand Dukes on the spree to be attracted by their immature girlish legs, their corseted waists, their slipping garters, their black silk stockings; unless perhaps one of the old droshky drivers was a Grand Duke. It was not improbable. At Tallinn a Baron carried luggage at the air-port. And there could be no more suitable ending of an evening than for a street-walker to go home with the droshky driver; the garter with the long grey Franz Josef whiskers.

You couldn’t really pity them. They belonged so completely to a different world. A war and a revolution came between, left you on one side with the little stout Esthonian peasant girl who spoke English and German and didn’t trouble to flirt, and them with the ikons in the second-hand shops, the Orthodox priest selling pictures on the pavement, a wilderness of empty champagne bottles… .

It was a late winter evening when I drove through into the Nottingham suburb from the station, round streets quite as dark as Riga’s, down and down below the castle rock and the municipal art gallery with the rain breaking on the windows. I had a job, it excited and scared me, I was twenty-one, and you couldn’t talk of darkest Africa with any conviction when you had known Nottingham well: the dog sick on the mat, the tinned salmon for tea and the hot potato chips for supper carried into the sub editor’s room ready-salted in strips of newspaper (if you had won the football sweep you paid for the lot). The fog came down in the morning and stayed till night. It wasn’t a disagreeable fog; it lay heavy and black between the sun and the earth; there was no light but the air was clear. The municipal ‘tart’ paced up and down by the largest cinema, old and haggard and unused. Her trade was spoilt; there were too many girls about who hadn’t a proper sense of values, who would give you a good time in return for a fish tea. The trams creaked round the goose market, and day after day the one bookshop displayed a card in the window printed with Mr, Sassoon’s poem :

Have you forgotten yet? … Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you’ll never forget.

Somebody must have put it in the window for Armistice Day, and there is stayed, like the Poppy Day posters in Freetown, through the winter months, black sooty dripping months.

In Nottingham I was instructed in Catholicism, travelling here and there by tram into new country with the fat priest who had once been an actor. (It was one of his greatest sacrifices to be unable to see a play.) The tram clattered by the Post Office: “Now we come to the Immaculate Conception”; past the cinema: “Our Lady”; the theatre: a sad slanting look towards The Private Secretary (it was Christmas time). The cathedral was a dark place full of inferior statues. I was baptised one foggy afternoon about four o’clock. I couldn’t think of any names I particularly wanted, so I kept my old name. I was alone with the fat priest; it was all very quickly and formally done, while someone at a children’s service muttered in another chapel. Then we shook hands and I went off to a salmon tea, the dog which had been sick again on the mat. Before that I had made a general confession to another priest: it was like a life photographed as it came to mind, without any order, full of gaps, giving at best a general impression. I couldn’t help feeling all the way to the newspaper office, past the Post Office, the Moroccan cafι, the ancient whore, that I had got somewhere new by way of memories I hadn’t known I possessed. I had taken up the thread of life from very far back, from so far back as innocence.