As we walked back to the mission house Brother Frank said there was to be a football match that afternoon between the school team from Bolahun and another from the nearby village of Tailahun. He asked if I would accept the honour of starting the match with the first kick.
‘We do not get many visitors here any more and it would be good for the children to see that outsiders are still interested in our work,’ he said.
Kick-off was scheduled for the relative cool of late afternoon so I spent the middle of the day resting and trying to get sugar back into my bloodstream. In the absence of any Fortnum & Mason goodies, I made do by gorging on a series of pineapples Johnson bought in the village at a market stall. Since the government’s State of Emergency over the plague of army worms poisoning water sources in northern Liberia, David and I had been on our guard about dirty water, but nobody in Bolahun had ever heard of these worms. The mission’s well and a filtration pump brought by David meant we had, for the time being at least, no problems with lack of drinking water.
As kick-off approached Johnson came back up to the mission house with some news.
‘I have found an old friend who has a motorbike and will be happy to help us carry our luggages,’ he said solemnly. (We would go on to spend weeks together but, in spite of my polite urgings, Johnson doggedly stuck to the word ‘luggages’.)
I thanked him and confirmed the biker would, like Johnson, come with us for at least a few days, perhaps even to the border with Guinea over on the far side of Lofa County. Then, almost as an afterthought, Johnson said something that really got my attention.
‘And the devil is ready to dance for you after the game if you want.’
A crowd of a few hundred drawn from people living in nearby villages had gathered at the pitch near St Mary’s. I kicked the ball onto the threadbare grass and the game began, but the crowd seemed more interested in a young madman who howled and screeched his way through the game, charging up and down the far touchline and hurling himself into the elephant grass that surrounded the pitch amid hoots of amusement from onlookers. He wore an Arsenal shirt.
Thoughts of an imminent encounter with a Liberian devil distracted me from the game. I chatted to a number of people in the crowd but as the match reached its end I was happy to see Johnson trying to catch my eye.
‘It is time we went. The devil will be dancing soon and you do not want to keep him waiting,’ he urged.
As full time blew on a 2–1 defeat for the home team, David and I followed Johnson down onto the dirt road that runs through Bolahun and began to walk north out of town.
‘I have been told the devil will come somewhere along this road and there will be people with him making music. We must just walk until we meet them.’
We walked slowly and in silence. Twilight was approaching and with it a looming sense of menace. All of the buildings fronting the road bore damage from war and neglect. On one wall some wartime graffiti remained, announcing in large black letters the onetime presence of ‘young col Black Gina’ and promising ‘No Die, No Rest, Blood Sprots in Lofa’.
After sundown the jungle has the effect of hurrying on the arrival of darkness with the tree cover making the shadows seem inkier and faster at massing. It was just at the point when I was struggling to see into the distance that the sound of the devil dance reached us. First, I heard drums and rattles, then voices chanting a chorus. Out of the gloom came a small group of people, huddled together as if for safety, and in front of them a swirling, shaking blur.
Cloaked in raffia, the devil was capped by an ancient-looking headpiece carved from a single piece of jet-black wood. There was a shrunken, human-like head with carp lips and oversized ears on an extended, twisted alien neck sticking out high from the baseplate of the headpiece. It was difficult to tell quite how large the being was below. One moment it crouched motionless, close to the ground, the head no higher than my waist and the grass tresses of its coat hanging limply, and then, with an explosion of dust and screeching, it span and shook, the mask now above my head, the raffia startled with energy.
The musicians followed the performance closely. As the devil slowed and shrank so their music faded, but when he started to spin and gyrate, so their chanting and drumming grew in throbbing, repetitive turns. All eyes were focused on the performance of the costumed figure as the dust rose and the darkness gathered.
As well as the devil’s musical entourage there was another attendant, a young man who fussed over the raffia coating, combing it flat in between spins to make sure nothing of what was underneath could be seen. Everyone in Liberia knows that under every devil costume is the body of a man but quite what has happened to that body when taking on the costume, what spiritual power has been assumed, remains an important and powerful mystery. The young man I saw flattening the raffia tendrils was simply protecting the spiritual illusion, doing something that the Greenes had also seen in Bolahun when they saw their first dancing devil. Graham Greene’s description would have worked perfectly for what I saw seventy-four years later:
The devil’s 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 energy of the dance was powerful and the setting amidst the darkness and war damage had a hint of menace but I was struck by the lack of threat in the devil’s display. A few young children stared wide-eyed at his dance but on the faces of the adults there were smiles and looks of mild amusement. A dancing performance by the devil such as this was, above all, an entertainment. The devil was playing the role more of minstrel than magician, an entertainer rather than an enchanter. It was a very different performance from that when the same devil appears at initiation schools in the forest.
After his routine, when the devil had disappeared into the night, the musicians gathered round me expectantly and Johnson whispered something about me offering to pay. I proffered a bundle of grubby Liberian dollar notes and the comber, the young man responsible for keeping the raffia costume in order, clasped both his hands round mine and thanked me solemnly. His hands were cold.
As we walked back through the unlit hovels of Bolahun, I listened closely to Johnson’s thoughts.
‘You see the devil plays an important role in all our village societies here in Liberia. Sometimes he can be bad but most times he is a person who entertains us, who helps us at important times like funerals and village ceremonies, with dances such as the one you have just seen.
‘The devil you saw dancing here is the good devil. I only hope you never meet the bad devil.’
Bolahun felt like a barometer for attempts to develop rural Liberia. Founded in a rush of Christian zeal in the 1920s, the remnants of its buildings are an archaeological record of the country’s troubled history. There was the original church of St Mary’s, the one seen by the Greenes. Constructed by Father Sturges and his fellow missionaries, it was relatively modest but still standing, albeit battered by climate and time. The hospital where the Nazi doctor had worked was the next to be built, but had fallen into ruin as the money ran out in the late 1930s. Then in the 1950s a newer, larger St Mary’s had been consecrated with new money sloshing into Liberia in the post-war boom years when the local rubber industry was taking off, and this was followed by the construction of new schoolrooms in the 1970s.
But conflict and chaos had ultimately prevailed over the missionary project. The school had limped on for some years after the foreign missionaries from the Order of the Holy Cross pulled out but the government had proved too corrupt and ineffective to run it properly. The decay was compounded when the war began, with various waves of rebels sweeping through Bolahun, plundering, looting and killing, and since the war attempts to reinvigorate the school had stalled. The strongest sense I got was of the power of African tradition prevailing over imported Christianity. The missionaries might have gone but the devil danced on.
I walked back up to the mission house in the darkness and found Brother
Frank and a few other novitiates gathered in a room. It was lit by a single feeble bulb drawing power from an old solar battery and they were sitting in silence reading scripture. Brother Frank still dreamed of a better Christian future but I could not help thinking of a comment made by Father Joseph in an interview shortly before he died when he hinted at how little impact the work of the mission had truly had on life in this part of rural Liberia. Father Joseph had arrived at Bolahun in 1934 – he was the one who played tennis with Barbara Greene the following year – and he lasted fifty-four years at this remote outstation but this was his assessment of the impact of the missionaries: ‘They think things are accomplished here, but they are not.’
CHAPTER 7
Message in a Bottle
Above: Masked Liberian devil rests during a dance, as photographed by the Greenes, February 1935
Below: Dancing devil in Liberia, as photographed by the author, March 2010
Dawn mist hid the mission buildings when we left Bolahun just as it had for the Greenes. Brother Frank insisted on saying a few words of blessing before we set out, so David, Johnson and I gathered solemnly, eyes lowered, in the murky half-light as he opened his service book and read us ‘Prayer Before a Journey’. His delivery was monotone but these lines stood out:
The Lord shall preserve you from all evil;
It is he who shall keep you safe.
By the time they left here, the Greenes’ entourage had grown to twenty-six bearers and four servants. As well as the two valets and one cook hired in Freetown, the Greenes took on another personal attendant at Bolahun, an irrepressible teenager called Mark who acted, in the words of Graham Greene, as ‘interpreter, jester and gossip’. The Greenes sat outside the mission house at the top of the hill eating a leisurely breakfast of freshly baked rolls and watched as their slow-moving column set off, snaked slowly down the slope and disappeared into the gloom.
Johnson’s local contact with a motorbike had turned up promptly, a very sober even sombre individual. After agreeing terms, he shook my hand and introduced himself formally as ‘Mr Omaru’.
‘And your first name?’ I asked chattily. He made as if he had not heard me, walked off and set about loading the two rucksacks on his bike.
Brother Frank joined us for the first half mile or so as we walked past houses branded by war. As well as the sinister graffiti there were bullet-holes and, in the mucky roadside gutter, the occasional spent shell casing. When I pointed them out Brother Frank shrugged his shoulders, unable to remember from which of the many armed attacks on Bolahun they came. Once he was happy we were heading in the right direction, he wished us well one final time, shook our hands warmly and turned for home.
Ahead stretched a jungle trail reaching all the way across Liberia to the Atlantic coast, a route I knew only from the writings of Graham and Barbara Greene. I had no idea if the villages they described, or the forest trails in between, still existed. For a few moments I was taken back to my first true travel experience when, at the age of seventeen, I was sent across the world to spend a year in New Zealand. After arriving I remember looking at a calendar and crying. The year ahead, spread across the columns and pages, reached way beyond the limits of my teenage experience. I had never spent more than a few weeks away from home and yet there, in front of me, stretched twelve long months in four even longer, upside-down austral seasons. I remember recovering my composure after a few moments and resolving to take each day as it came. The months could look after themselves.
The same thought went through my mind as Johnson cut away decisively from the jeep track and led David and me onto a forest trail gorgeously cool with dew. The beauty of a trek is that every step taken is progress in itself so I simply put aside all macro worries about how we might keep to the Greenes’ route, whether we would be able to follow them across the border into post-coup Guinea, how we would explain to the Liberian border authorities the lack of entry stamps in our passports, how we would cross back into Liberia, what to do about army worms and a whole matrix of security worries drawn from Liberia’s systemic lawlessness.
Instead, I focused on dealing with the immediate concerns of keeping one foot landing safely in front of the other and finding the track to Kpangbalamai, a small jungle village the Greenes described reaching after a seven hour-walk almost due east from Bolahun. In all my research I had not been able to establish if the village had survived the conflict that had ravaged Liberia for so long.
Liberia’s slide into chaos began in 1980 when more than a hundred years of control by the Americo-Liberian elite came to a bloody end. Riots the previous year over price rises for rice had shaken the country’s image of sleepy stability but few would have forecast the brutality with which native Liberians, country people, took power for the first time.
Under cover of darkness early on Saturday 12 April seventeen soldiers staged a coup. Senior positions in the armed forces remained the exclusive preserve of Americo-Liberians so the plotters, all country people, were privates or non-commissioned officers. They struck, simultaneously, at strategic targets around Monrovia but the key was neutralising the head of state, President William Tolbert. This was achieved in spectacularly bloody fashion. A small gang, led by a twenty-eight-year-old master sergeant called Samuel Doe, stormed the Executive Mansion – a 1960s tower block overlooking the Atlantic beachfront in central Monrovia – and found the president there asleep. He was killed still wearing his pyjamas, shot in the head several times, then disembowelled.
The coup sparked a ferocious cycle of killing, looting and score settling. Thirteen members of Tolbert’s cabinet were dragged down to the beach in front of a howling mob and executed on the sand. Firing squad feels too dignified a description for what happened as drunken soldiers, egged on by the crowd, emptied magazine after magazine into already lifeless corpses. Elsewhere decades of resentment by country people spilled out into attacks on wealthy Americo-Liberians. A book published in 2008, The House at Sugar Beach, by American journalist Helene Cooper, captures powerfully both the affluent dominance of the Americo-Liberian elite in the 1970s and the moment it came shuddering to a halt. Cooper describes how her own mother sacrificed herself by persuading marauding soldiers to rape her and not her daughters. Like many Americo-Liberians, Cooper left on the first available flight for a new life overseas.
Any hope that the coup would lead to more enlightened government in Liberia vanished promptly as the plotters fell out with each other. Their claim of having taken power in the name of all down-trodden country people rang hollow as they unleashed inter-tribal violence on a scale never seen before in Liberia. Doe, a member of the small Krahn ethnic group from the south of the country, outfoxed his rivals to secure the presidency, and then used the power of the position to launch bloody purges of his enemies, often members of the much larger Mano and Gio tribes whose traditional home is Nimba County in the centre of Liberia. Many people from Nimba County remember the 1980s as a period of creeping civil war. The tension between country people and Americo-Liberians had effectively been used as a cover for a power grab by a small gang of ruthless, corrupt thugs who set about settling ethnic scores. Low-level tribal friction had long been a feature of life in rural Liberia but only under Doe did it reach the level of national crisis.
In the ten years of Doe’s chaotic rule the already weak state of Liberia began to fail. His end was inevitable but the tipping point only came after an invasion on Christmas Eve 1989 led by a former friend, turned enemy. Charles Taylor had mixed ancestry – a mother who was an indigenous Liberian from the Gola ethnic group, and a father descended from foreign settlers – but he carefully exploited the hatred of Doe in Nimba County. It was Nimba County that his rebel force first invaded from neighbouring Ivory Coast and, although he started with only a few dozen armed supporters, within weeks he had recruited thousands of Mano and Gio gunmen looking to settle scores with President Doe.
After months of fighting, during which Taylor’s force split into warring factions,
Doe was captured by rebels in Monrovia on Sunday 9 September 1990. Stripped to his underpants and bleeding from gunshot wounds in his lower legs, he was tortured by his captors. Among other abuses they sliced off his ears, a grisly display of African regime change that was caught on video. The cameraman missed the finale, the moment when Doe actually died, but by the following morning his corpse was being paraded in a wheelbarrow through the streets of Monrovia by jubilant gunmen. Doe had often used sorcery as a source of power throughout his rule and his killers made a point of displaying his body to convince the public that he had not magically escaped.
Once again, any hopes of a better future for Liberia emerging from its president’s demise were ill-founded. Taylor’s forces were not strong enough to secure the entire country so fighting dragged on for years between Doe loyalists, Taylor’s troops, regional peacekeepers, mainly from Nigeria, and a shifting cast of rival rebel groups. It was a war of notoriously anarchic brutality as unaccountable, feral gunmen on all sides killed and plundered, and national institutions collapsed so badly that in many places the state effectively ceased to function. The darker side of African spiritualism was prominent in the conflict, with fetish-worshipping gunmen ritually eating their enemies’ body parts in the belief that it would make them stronger in battle. Child soldiers, sometimes traumatised by the murder of their parents, swarmed through the country acting out a nightmarish vision of Lord of the Flies armed with Kalashnikovs. Checkpoints on roads out of Monrovia are remembered with particular horror. One consisted of a human intestine strung across the carriageway, and at another a monkey would decide on life or death. If touched by the monkey you were killed. Civilians fleeing as refugees were not safe. Incensed by Ghana’s deployment of peacekeeping troops to Liberia, Taylor’s gunmen executed scores of Ghanaian civilians who had lived in fishing communities on the coast for generations. Atrocity blurred into atrocity, cruelty into cruelty, reprisal into reprisal.