Journey Without Maps

MISSION STATION

The Lowlands

MR. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, I suppose, has done more than anyone to stamp the idea of the repressed prudish man of God on the popular imagination. There was an earlier time when Stevenson’s Open Letter allowed us to recall Father Damien; Rain has impressed the image of Mr. Davidson over the missionary field: the Mr. Davidson who said of his work in the Pacific Islands, “When we went there they had no sense of sin at all. They broke the commandments one after the other and never knew they were doing wrong. And I think that was the most difficult part of my work, to instil into the natives the sense of sin” : the Mr. Davidson who slept with the prostitute, Sadie Thompson, and then killed himself.

I remember at school finding it a little hard to reconcile the popular idea of missionaries with the thin tired men who used to stand on a platform rapping with a small stick while the starved-looking bodies of black children slid across the screen. They seemed to be less Biblical than Mr. Davidson; they seemed to be more concerned with raising a few shillings for the support of the hideous tin church which was projected as a grim climax onto the sheet than with the sense of sin. The sense of sin lay far deeper across the altar steps of our own school chapel. Her was all the prudery and pornography one needed. These visitors from Africa, I felt, were not only innocent beside our own masters, they were innocent among the blacks they taught. There they stood, in their ruined health and their worn simplicity, begging for our shillings for a new altar cloth, a silver cruet stand; I couldn’t believe they had done much harm among the alligator societies, the human leopards, nor corrupted very effectively those men whose secret ritual it is to sacrifice a child once a year to the great python.

In Liberia I discovered another kind of missionary, I do not imagine Dr. Harley, the Methodist medical missionary, is unique in Africa : a man with a body and nerves worn threadbare by ten yearslittle unselfish work, cutting away the pus from the huge swollen genitals, injecting for yaws, anointing for craw-craw, injecting two hundred natives a week for venereal disease. He had made his home in this corner of Liberia with his wife and two children, curious little elderly yellow-faced boys; he had lost one child, who was buried at the mission.little

All the way along the Liberian border I had heard of him; he was the man in Liberia who knew most about the bush societies; the little time that the long hopeless fight against disease allowed him was devoted to these investigations. But he did not care to talk about them before his servants for fear of poison.

We had been lent a house a hundred yards from the mission, a luxurious little house it seemed to us by this time, for it was built of wood with a tin roof, the floor raised to escape the ants. At one end was a dispensary, and just outside was the open hospital building, long wooden benches under a roof of thatch. The forest came up at the back, like a small private wood. Ganta scared me : there was a smell of chemicals, of sickness and death about the place. Quite suddenly we had dropped down from the highlands, and the air had changed. It was heavy and damp. There were palms about and a sense of drenched ground, flies and ordure. I would never have believed that a climate could so completely change in the course of a day’s march. It had an immediate effect on the health: all energy left me: that night it was difficult to walk as far as the mission house for dinner; my stomach quite suddenly ceased to function.

I remember a rather grim dinner. Dr. Harley had been out all day and was tired and ready to fall asleep where he sat; it was the dead boy’s birthday. When he heard that I had walked from the Sierra Leone border without using a hammock, he said I was mad to do it; he had just sent a man-Dr. D.- home dead who had made the comparatively short trek from Monrovia on his feet. Nobody could walk long distances in this climate without danger. I tried to turn the conversation to the bush societies, but he sheered away from them. He said that Sinoe, which we had planned to reach, was at least four weeks away. The pain I had been feeling for some days now in my stomach seemed to get worse at the news. I could have been happy enough settled in one place for months, but the thought of four more weeks of physical exertion, of rising before dawn and walking for six or seven hours through the dreadful monotony of the forest, I could not bear.

On the way back to our house I remembered we hadn’t taken our quinine for two days. The rats had been at the hair-brushes and gnawed the bristles. They ran along between the wall and the roof in my room without even waiting for me to put out the light. I took a handful of Epsom in the warm boiled water from the filter which was dripping regularly in the corner and watched them scamper along the narrow crack above my head. I didn’t care a damn about the rats any longer, the sisters at Bolahun were right; I was scared in the same way as I had been in England when I suddenly found that my plans had gone too far for me to back out of the Liberian journey; I could remember reading the British Blue Book and thinking, “In three weeks I shall be there? ‘there’ meaning the long list of diseases and of Colonel Davis’s atrocities. I got no thrill at all; I was just scared. I comforted myself, “I shan’t try for Sinoe,” but I knew I hadn’t the moral courage to make straight for Monrovia. The rats jumped down when I turned out the lantern, but I wasn’t any longer afraid of rats. I was discovering in myself a thing I thought I had never possessed : a love of life.

Liberian Commissioner

Of course by daylight I felt better; it is difficult to believe in death before sunset. But a four weekslittle longer trek to Sinoe was beyond me, especially as I hadn’t enough men with me now to use the hammock. There was one other excuse, too; no money, I had no means of getting more money at Sinoe and I should not have enough to pay the carriers after the longer trek.

We thought it politic to walk up through Ganta to call on the D.C. He wore a well-cut tropical suit, a small military moustache, his skin was slightly yellow; he looked more Latin than African. He had a reputation for fairness, honesty and efficiency. Now he was engaged in driving the Sanoquelleh-Ganta road south. Once again we were encountering Liberian patriotism. This time it was of a more European brand. There was not a carrier who would not have welcomed white intervention; patriotism in their minds had nothing to do with who ruled them, it was love of a certain territory. But Commissioner Dunbar was one of the rulers, His patriotism was like a European’s; to him the thought of white interference was hateful and because England’s attitude to the Kru rebellion suggested a danger to Liberian independence, he suspected and disliked the English. He was courteous and reserved and it was hopeless to try to convince him that our journey had no political motive. I felt our amicable expressions becoming shrill in the effort to convince, beating hopelessly against the hard courteous surface of his mind. There was no need to convince him; but he was a man with such admirable qualities that one wanted to leave him with a good impression. But the more we struggled to leave that good impression, the more our voices sounded in our own ears false and hypocritical. I tried to make him express some of his suspicions by mentioning the town on the forbidden coast-line, but he contented himself with saying that it would probably take us another five weeks to reach Sinoe. Should we have to wait long for a boat to Monrovia? Perhaps a month, he said, leaning back in his wicker chair, the blazing sun over the compound behind giving his yellow handsome face a blurred black outline. It was a politic inaccuracy, because, as we learnt later, there was a weekly launch. I suggested Grand Bassa as an alternative and he encouraged the idea: we could do it in ten days, he informed us, but that was an exaggeration. He didn’t know the road himself, it was used only by the Mandingo traders; impassable in the rains, it would be a very rough way through the biggest bush, but ten days should see us on the Coast.

The Commissioner had other reasons than patriotism to distrust the white man. There was a Catholic priest at Sanoquelleh, his headquarters, and the previous Commissioner had been married to a Catholic. The priest had resented the difference between Dunbar and his predecessor; Dunbar had stood strictly to the letter of the law, allowing the priest no privileges. The priest tried to get rid of him, writing letters to the President in Monrovia; and the heat: and desolation worked on both men. The priest saw his chance when one of the men working on the roads fell sick. He took him into the mission and the man died there. Immediately the priest wrote a letter accusing Dunbar of having starved his workers and beaten one to the point of death. Dunbar acted with admirable promptitude; he arrived at the mission with a squad of soldiers before the man was buried and carried both the body and the priest over the eighteen miles to Ganta, where he asked the American doctor to examine the body. Dr. Harley exonerated him and the priest was expelled from the Republic. As for Dunbar, he had been made to realise that whites were not only hypocritical in their attitude to the Republic, they could be crooked in their dealings with individuals.

The Secret Societies

That afternoon the doctor came in to talk about the bush societies. His investigations were the only enthusiasm he had kept after ten years, but he wanted to be sure that my boys were out of the house. I went and looked in the kitchen where they slept. It was empty. Laminab was sitting in the shade of the hospital looking sick. The doctor had drawn a tooth of his in the morning: I had heard the painful dog-like howls through the wooden wall: and now he was afraid that he was going to die because the gum still bled. He was too sophisticated to paint himself with native medicine, but he had brought a pot of cold cream with him from Freetown and was smearing it all over his face and neck and scalp.

I am not an anthropologist and I cannot pretend to remember very much of what Dr. Harley told me : a pity, for no white man is closer to that particular “heart of darkness”, the secret societies being more firmly rooted in Liberia than in any other country on the West Coast. The Government have put up the feeblest of resistances : though Colonel Davis, so he told me later, had court-martialled and shot fifty members of the Leopard Society in a village near Grand Bassa. Indeed, they could not properly resist because they believed. President King himself was rumoured to have been a member of the Alligator Society. When the League of Nations Commission was appointed to inquire into Liberian conditions, Mr. King and several members of his cabinet-so it was believed in Monrovia-had sacrificed a goat After the sacrifice, which should traditionally have been a human one, a boatload of young Krus had been drowned close to the beach at Monrovia, and it was generally felt that the alligator was dissatisfied with the goat.

It is a grim world, this of the societies, of the four men who, Dr. Harley said, came to Ganta a year or two back from the north looking for a victim. Everyone in Ganta knew they were there, with their ritual need of the heart, the palms of the hands, the skin of the forehead, but no one knew who they were. The Frontier Force were active, searching for strangers. Presently the fear passed. The Manos round Ganta knew what the men were seeking, for they have their own cannibalistic societies, and though I had said nothing of this to my boys and there were no Manos among the carriers, Laminat and Amedoo knew all about it. Laminah said to me one day, “These people bad, they chop men,” and they were happy to leave the Manos behind. This is the territory the United States map marks so vaguely and excitingly as “Cannibal”.

The Terrapin Society of the women and the Snake Society of the men, of course, are not peculiar to the Manos. There is the ordinary snake society, a kind of post-graduate course in handling snakes, in curing their bites and dancing the snake dance, and the secret society which does actually worship a python, to which one baby should be sacrificed each year by the fully initiated. This was a common terror once : we came across the memory of what I suppose was a related cult at the sacred waterfall beyond Ganta; now only in Liberia, where the secret societies are so immune from interference, do cases of child murder or disappearance occur with any frequency.

Dr. Harley was particularly pleased with having discovered the nature of one devil, the most sacred in the women’s eyes, whom it is death for a woman to see. He found it was not an individual at all, but a circle of young warriors who had entered bush school at the same time as the chiefs son. The women were warned by drums that the great devil was out, and the young men danced fully armed beating the ground with staffs.

Among all these devils, Dr. Harley said, there was one supreme devil, whose fiat ran the length of the Coast and who had the power to stop war between tribe and tribe. He could appear simultaneously in places far apart: he was known by his distinctive mask and robes. These were probably stored in every place of importance along the Coast, above the palaver-house or in the blacksmith’s hut. For the blacksmith of Mosambolahun, it appeared, was not peculiar in being the local devil. Dr. Harley was inclined to believe that the craft of blacksmith was always linked with the status of devil.

It is a curiously Kafka-like situation : headmasters who wear masks and turn out to be the local blacksmith … One reaches the village at the foot of the Schloss, to discover that almost anyone may tie the master of the Schloss; his agents are everywhere … there is an atmosphere of force and terror . . occasionally beauty … ‘meaning behind meaning, form behind form’. I can imagine that after seven years of investigating this formal but Protean religion, one may still despair of an interpretation. Olga in Kafka’s novel, it will be remembered, tried to construct “out of glimpses and rumours and through various distorting factors” an image of Klamm. “He’s reported as having one appearance when he comes into the village and another on leaving it, after having his beer he looks different from what he does before it, when he’s awake he’s different from when he’s asleep, when he’s alone he’s different from when he’s talking to people, and-what is comprehensible after all that-he’s almost another person up in the Castle.” Take the case of the rich and sinister headman at Zigita : for all anyone knew he might be the devil himself … or was the devil the blacksmith? or was there a devil in the sense of an individual at all, any more than the group of young warriors had been a devil, was it perhaps a fraud practised by the initiates? But it was a mistake to suggest that the young warriors were frauds : in their composite form they were the devil.

Then take the masks. I had asked Mark whether he feared Landow when Jie was out of his mask and just the blacksmith of Mosambolahun; and it was obvious that he feared him less, but that even then the blacksmith retained an aura of something not quite human. Did the supernatural rest in the mask? No, one person would say, it was in the combination of the two, but on the other hand old disused masks were often retained as charms and ‘fed’, and there were masks, even apart from the man who wore them, which it was fatal to a woman to see : fatal presumably because the devil’s agents would exact retribution, with the knife or with poison, but to what extent was this human punishment also supernatural?

‘Devil’, of course, is a word used by the English-speaking native to describe something unknown in our theology: it has nothing to do with evil. One might equally call these big bush devils angels-for they have the angelic properties of alacrity and invisibility-if that word contained no element of ‘good’. In a Christian land we have grown so accustomed to the idea of a spiritual war, of God and Satan, that this supernatural world, which is neither good nor evil but simply Power, is almost beyond sympathetic comprehension. Not quite: for those witches which haunted our childhood were neither good nor evil. They terrified us with their power, but we knew all the time that we must not escape them. They simply demanded recognition: flight was a weakness.

That night Dr. Harley showed us a grotesquely horrible collection of devils’ masks. Each one had obviously been made by a conscious artist. No effect was accidental. Here were the two-faced masks of a woman’s society; here male masks which women were forbidden to see. These were different from the masks worn by the dancing devils. Those had been part human, part animal, these were modelled closely on human features. There was one with a thin beard made of chicken’s feathers, and another, the oldest (it looked at least three hundred years old), had the thin nose, the high brow of a European. It was quite different from any other mask I saw. It might have been modelled on the features of some Portuguese sailor wrecked or marooned on the West Coast, or it may have gone back no further than a slave-trader at the beginning of the last century, a man like Canot whose autobiography is set on this Liberian coast, a hanger-on perhaps of his Portuguese employer, Don Pedro Blanco, who built his extraordinary palace on the debated marshy land between Liberia and Sierra Leone, near Sherbro, where the cargo steamers of Elder Dempster still sometimes call, to their crew’s discomfort, a palace with separate islands for his seraglio, with billiard rooms and all the advantages of both European and African civilisation. The man on whom the mask was modelled, of course, was as dead as Canot, as the Liberian forest which some urgent motive had caused him to penetrate-perhaps the desire for gold or slaves : but all the power of Ms motive had gone into the mask. I do not think it was greed : it was a fanatical Curiosity which leant out of the empty eyeballs.

A Sacred Waterfall

Before we left Ganta I learned of a sacred waterfall in the forest near the village of Zugbei. If we made a detour on the way to Sakripie, our next big town, we would pass the village. One of Harley’s pupils at the mission school was chief there, and though the existence of the waterfall had been kept secret from Dr. Harley for many years, his pupil had lately shown signs of willingness to guide him to it Human sacrifice had once been offered at the falls, but now the paths were no longer kept open.

Next morning, as we were about to start along Dunbar’s new road north-east to Zuluyi, I heard that Babu could go no further, he was sick. He had been one of the few men, though he spoke no word of English, with whom I thought I had some contact. I had known him to be completely dependable; he had not joined with the carriers who had struck for more pay. I think he was genuinely sick; he had been given heavy loads the last few days and he was not strong, and none of the carriers would have chosen by this time to stay behind alone among a strange tribe, at least ten days’ trek away from his own people. I should have liked to dismiss him with a handsome present, but it would only have encouraged others to go sick. I had to pretend anger and pay him off with a very small dash. I felt guilty of a meanness; he had no friends among the carriers, except Guawa, the other Buzie, and they taunted him. I would have lost any of them more willingly.

But it was awkward to lose any man when I was beginning to feel that I might soon need a hammock badly. There were not enough men now to carry even an empty hammock. I had to tell them to take the heavy pole out and leave it behind and add the hammock to one of the lighter loads. I could see the doctor watching me, critically; he didn’t have to tell me what he was thinking.

It was about two hours’ walk to Zuluyi. The chief there had been one of Harley’s pupils and came to guide us to Zugbei. We passed through a thick steep forest country, up the slopes of what the natives believed to be a holy hill. Tiny fairy people, the chief said, had lived on this hill and they used to come down and help the Manos in war. Harley was interested; it was the first he had heard of any pygmy traditions in Liberia. There might be remains … I think he was picturing to himself reports, excavations, wall paintings, and the only kind of glory his altruistic spirit could appreciate. There was a big hole, the chief said, pointing up a path which disappeared a few feet away into the trees and underbrush, where the small people used to live. Boys used to go once a year with gifts into the hole. The last boy who had gone to the hole was still alive, an old man, in Zugbei. He had had his head shaved, but when he came out his hair was dressed in ringlets. Now no one went into the hole any more, but gifts were still brought.

We reached Zugbei, a tiny village, in the fiercest heat of the day : a worse heat than we had had in the highlands; the air was already saturated with the coming rains. The villages were no longer perched on thimbles of rock above the forest. One came straight into them from the bush; they were like little dried-up airless pools.

The chief led us to the waterfall. None of us expected to see more than a thin trickle of water over a few boulders, for some of the large rivers were so low that the carriers could wade through them and the dug-out canoes lay on the banks cracking for want of use” We walked straight into the thickest wall of forest. The chief and another man led, clearing a path with cutlasses. It was impossible to tell how they knew the way. They walked along fallen trees, scrambled down slopes at an angle of forty-five degrees, cutting all the time; there was no sign of a path. Then suddenly at the bottom of the steepest hill we came out into a dell full of the sound of water, which streamed under feathers of foam over a fall sixty feet deep. AU the slopes became alive with people, girls with the pretty horn-shaped breasts of the Manos, men with cutlasses. The whole village seemed to have come with us, but the forest had been so thick we had seen only the chief and his companion. They sat on the slopes staring at the incredible bounty of water. Within the young chiefs memory there had been human sacrifices at the fall, the feeding of a slave at the end of each dry season to a snake, a hundred feet long, who had lain below the fall. It was the myth of the rainbow snake which one finds as far afield as Australia: the materialisation of the rainbow shimmer in the falling water. The sacrifice had ended when the present chief was a child. The slave, though his hands were tied behind him, had grasped the chiefs robe and carried him over the edge of the fall. That had been the end of the sacrifice and the snake had gone down the river to the St. John and lived now in a pool, very close to where we crossed, between Ganta and Djiecke. We said goodbye to Dr. Harley in Zugbei. We could have slept there, but I couldn’t bear the thought that we had not yet turned south. I wanted at least the sensation of moving, however short a distance, towards the coast. So we went on for half an hour due south to a dull village of which I couldn’t learn the name. It sounded like Mombei. The chief would have no chop cooked for the men, but he dashed me a hamper of rice and they cooked their own. As ! usual there was no peace when we arrived. I was feeling sick and tired. The scramble in the heat to and from the waterfall had exhausted me more than a long trek, and it angered me that, directly I sat down, a carrier called Siafa came to show me his venereal sore. He had had it for three years, he hadn’t shown it to the doctor, who could have injected him, and I felt he might have kept it for a few more weeks untended. But there was one thing I couldn’t afford to do, show my impatience or my lack of knowledge. Daily after that I went through the farce of dressing the sore. Afterwards I dosed myself heavily with Epsom and went to bed; suddenly I felt hopelessly tired of rats; we were no longer short of kerosene, so I left my lamp burning, but it made no difference. There were always shadows for them to play in. The Epsom brought me out of my bed in the night to the edge of the forest. It was almost full moon and the huts stood out in a bright greenish daylight. It was absolutely quiet: not a sound from the dark dead forest. Every door was closed and the goats were the only living things in sight, as they wandered sleeplessly between the huts. I thought even then that the scene was beautiful, but the thought did not alter my impatience to be gone. The spell would only work after many months; now all I wanted was medicine, a bath, iced drinks, and something other than this bush lavatory of trees and dead leaves where at any moment I might crouch upon a snake in the darkness.