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 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 it 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 train 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 baptized 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, and 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 café, 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 as far back as innocence.
Chapter 2
HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT
‘Boss of the Whole Show’
MARK called me at five in the morning, scrabbling against the mosquito-wire. I was sending him ahead with the Mandingo Amah to warn the chief at Kpangblamai of our arrival, of my need of a hut and food for about thirty men, and to ask him to send a messenger to the chief at Pandemai to warn him that I should not be coming after all. I packed my Revelation suitcase and Amah took it, striding off down the path into the village. He wouldn’t be home for weeks, but all his belongings were tied up in a rag the size of a workman’s handkerchief.
It was seven-thirty before I followed. The long column of carriers slipped down from the mission hill into the mist. Vande, the headman, left the column for a few minutes and disappeared between the huts to say good-bye to his wife. He had a cloth cap, a loose shirt and shorts; he carried no load, taking with him for a few days his young brother to carry his bundle; he was very like an English foreman, cheerful, un-exacting, a pipe-smoker. When he wasn’t smoking he was shaking a rattle made of two tiny gourds filled with seeds. He kept to the tail of the column staying behind with any man who needed a rest.
For the first mile along the wide beaten way towards Kolahun a piccaninny followed at a jog-trot. He was about two feet high; he carried an empty sausage tin and an empty Ideal milk tin, one in each hand. Men turned and told him to go back, but he wouldn’t obey; he had to run to keep up, but he kept up. He wanted to go with his father. The men laughed and shouted up the line and presently his father turned back and ordered him home. The line passed them and went on: they stood there, the tiny child sullen and unhappy and obstinate, the father telling him to go back as one says ‘Home’ to a dog. At last he left him there, stubbornly planted.
The broad red clay road had been improved for the President’s coming, the trees had been cut down on either side and the trunks tipped into the great palmy ravines. The heavy mist lay low between the hills; one couldn’t see how close one was to the great forest. A deer sprang across the road, a little brown deer which might have belonged to an English park, not the royal antelope which lucky travellers may still see in the Republic, no larger than a rabbit, except for its slim legs, ten inches high with horns of less than an inch. The road was all right so long as the mist held, but all the shade had been cut away, and I hurried to leave it behind before the sun had reached the middle sky. It was half-past nine when the road came to an end in Kolahun, the headquarters of Mr Reeves.
It occurred to me that though I had been told that the President had gone, and Mr Reeves presumably with him, it would be wise at least to inquire for the Commissioner. The town seemed empty, the green triumphal arches for the President were dusty and wrinkled with heat; a two-storeyed concrete house stood apart from the huts in a compound where the star and stripes dangled from a post. This was the house built, according to the natives of Bolahun, with forced labour. That extra storey gave it a formidable air; it stood there above the town as if it watched and knew all that happened; it would be unwise to pass it by with such a long caravan of men; it couldn’t help noticing.
Everything was very still, very Sabbath; nobody left the huts to see us come in, which was odd (the town might have been sacked), but I noticed when we were nearer that there were about a dozen soldiers, in the scarlet caps with the gold star, marching up and down in the compound. At the other end of the town on a hill was a kind of garden shelter and I could see the scarlet cap there too. A small yellow-faced half-caste in a black fez came down from the compound and waited for me. Yes, he said, the Commissioner was there, and immediately led the way back into the compound between the sentries, leaving the carriers and the servants outside. I had the impression that we had been expected; and how could we not have been if it were anyone’s duty to watch the road from the first storey?
A gramophone was playing, and Miss Josephine Baker’s voice drifted across the compound with an amusing and sophisticated melancholy. It made everything for the moment rather unreal: the carriers sitting in the dust, the quiet drift of huts, the forest edging up over the horizon became no more than a backcloth for a lovely unclothed cabaret figure. One couldn’t really believe in Mr Reeves, who appeared in a sinister melodramatic way from behind some curtains dressed in a scarlet fez and a long native robe; his heavy black Victorian side-whiskers, his thick grey skin, his voluptuous mouth were just part of the Paris revue. But somebody turned the gramophone off upstairs, and we were removed at once from the dour company of Mr Reeves by a smart miniature black officer with glittering gaiters. He said, ‘Won’t you come upstairs? The President will see you in a moment.’
It was quite unexpected. I hadn’t asked to see the President, I had believed that the President was in another part of the country, and I was a little taken aback. I was in a shirt and shorts with a water-bottle at my side; I was very conscious of the dust I had collected on the way, and I remembered all the stories I had heard of the Liberian rulers, how they liked to keep a white man waiting and demanded that he should always be suitably clothed for an interview.
We sat down in a tiny upper room and a soldier with a revolver holster changed the record. Miss Edith Olivier’s Dwarf’s Blood lay on the table. The black officer was very neat, very gentle, very attentive; he was like a china figure which has been kept carefully dusted. Presently a young woman came in; she wore European dress: she
looked more Chinese than African. She had slanting eyes and a quality of deep repose. She didn’t speak a word, though the officer presented her as ‘one of the President’s entourage’, but sitting down beside the gramophone she took up a pack of cards and began to shuffle them. Her father, I learnt later, had been made a justice of the supreme court: there is a distinctly Stuart air about the civilization of the Liberian Coast.
She was the loveliest thing I saw in Liberia; I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I wanted to talk to her, somehow to express the pleasure the sight of her gave in the empty sun-cracked place. Josephine Baker’s voice couldn’t compete with her, whining out at the end of the record before the soldier could change it. It was as if suddenly one saw what Africa might be if she were left to herself to choose from Europe only what would beautify her; she promised more than the frozen rhetoric in the declaration of independence. I never spoke a word to her (‘Very hot marching in this weather,’ the little shining officer said politely, making small talk), I only saw her once again from a distance when she stood on the President’s balcony in Monrovia watching the Krus demonstrate their loyalty below, but she remains the kind of vivid memory which draws one back to a place, even after many years.
Then the President came in: a middle-aged man called Barclay with curly greying hair in a thick dark suit, a pinned and pinched old school tie and a cheap striped shirt. Africa, lovely, vivid and composed, slipped away, and one was left with the West Indies, an affable manner, and rhetoric, lots of rhetoric. But there was a lot of energy, too: he was a politician in the Tammany Hall manner, but I never saw any reason to change my opinion that he was something new on the Coast. He might be out to play his own game, but he was going to play it with unexampled vigour and the Republic would at least pick up some chips from his table. I asked him whether his authority was much the same as the American President’s. He said it was more complete. ‘Once elected,’ he said, ‘and in charge of the machine’ – words ran away with him; something candid and childlike and excited continually peeped through the politician’s dignified phrases – ‘why then, I’m boss of the whole show.’
Liberian politics were like a crap game played with loaded dice. But in the past it had been the custom to give the other fellow a chance with the dice. There was a kind of unwritten law that the President could take two terms of office and then he had to let another man in to pick the spoils. It was a question of letting, for, as Mr Barclay said, the President was boss of the whole show; the newspapers were his; most important of all, he printed and distributed the ballot papers. When Mr King was returned in 1928 he had a majority over his opponent, Mr Faulkner, of 600,000, although the whole electoral roll amounted to less than 15,000. But Barclay was altering that; he wasn’t playing fair in his opponent’s eyes; he was treating politics seriously and he has some claim to be known as the Republic’s first dictator. the term of office had hitherto been four years, but Mr Barclay was to hold a plebiscite at the same time as the presidential election and increase the term to eight years. He could use the same means to put that through as he could put through a fabulous majority: he had the printing press. He had, too, the Civil Service. He explained to me, beaming with gold-rimmed benevolence, how he had cleaned it up and removed it from political influence, had instituted examinations in place of nominations. What he failed to mention was the small string he kept in his fingers. When candidates of equal merit were presented – and that was very easy to arrange – the president himself had the right of choice.
But one had to admit that this man had energy and courage; he was worth a dozen Kings, and his hands were comparatively clean. He had been Mr King’s secretary of state, but the League of Nations commission, which had found the President personally responsible for shipping forced labour to the little dreadful Spanish island, Fernando Po, and for countenancing the mild form of slavery that enabled a man to pawn his children, had exonerated Barclay. The only real blot in the eyes of the outside world on his administration was the Kru campaign described in the Blue Book from which I have quoted, and for that the man on the spot was chiefly responsible, Colonel Elwood Davis, the black mercenary from North America. No President before Barclay had dared to tour the interior. Mr King had travelled rapidly down from the Sierra Leone border with two hundred soldiers, but the President now had with him only thirty men. I could see almost the whole lot of them marching up and down the compound. The tribes, of course, since Mr King’s day, had been disarmed by Colonel Davis, they had no more than a few guns in every town, but they had swords and spears and cutlasses.
The President, it is true, didn’t linger. He travelled very rapidly, forcing the pace, up paths he was not expected to use, and his inquiries were very brief. I have said that the natives in Bolahun had no hopes that Mr Reeves would be ever brought to book. Their doubts were justified, for I heard later that when the President arrived, the chiefs, who had been bribed or intimidated, had no complaints to make. He was able to return as rapidly to Monrovia as he had come. He said that everywhere the population had been enthusiastic but dances are easily arranged and it is not much trouble to build triumphal arches of greenery and sprinkle white powder. I never came across a single native in the interior who had a good word for the politicians in Monrovia. If they preferred one ruler to another it was simply because they were happier under one Commissioner than another. Everywhere in the north I found myself welcomed because I was a white, because they hoped all the time that a white nation would take the country over.
This attitude is unreasonable, but their minds do not move on the level of reason. To accept a black overlord offended some deep communal instinct which was unaffected by the fact that under the worst black Commissioner they had not suffered what the natives in French West Africa had suffered under white Commissioners. They did not take into account at all from what they had been saved by the nominal nature of black rule. In that rough, unmapped country, if they were twenty miles from a Commissioner’s headquarters, they were fifty years away. They were left alone to their devils and secret societies and private terrors, to the paternal oppression of their chiefs. They weren’t interfered with as they would certainly have been interfered with in a white colony, and one was thankful for their lack of education, when one compared them as they were in Buzie country, striding along the narrow forest paths, the straight back, the sword with an ivory handle swinging against the long native robe, with the anglicized ‘educated’ blacks of Sierra Leone, the drill suits and the striped shirts and the dirty sun-helmets. Every head of a family in this tribe had his sword and wore it when he left his village, every young man had his dagger, and even the tool of the men working on the farms, the broad-bladed cutlass in its beautifully-worked leather sheath, had an air of chivalry, of an older civilization than the tin shacks on the Coast. Even the poorer tribes beyond the Buzie country, the Gios and the Manos, with their loin-cloths and sores, were not more neglected than were the natives of a Protectorate under the care of a single sanitary inspector.
Hospitality in Kpangblamai
His Excellence the President talked for more than an hour in the little room above the Sunday-stricken town. He was very courteous, and it went against the grain to deceive him and give the impression that Zigita was the farthest extent of the journey I intended to take. The Commissioners in the Western Province had been warned of my coming, and I wanted as quickly as possible to slip over into a province where I was not expected. As quickly as possible . . . but it was not easy to stem the rolling tide of the President’s hopes, the roads, the aeroplanes, the motor-cars. It was a paradoxical situation; a black preaching progress to a sceptical white, but the white had come out of the busy bustling progressive scene and he had noticed there nothing more lovely than the Buzie cloths the President spread for his inspection. There was nothing crudely peasant, nothing art and crafty, nothing to remind one of stalls at bazaars and dear ladies with pale-blue bulbous eyes, about these cloths: they were sophisticated in their design, but the s
ophistication had a different source from ours. It sprang directly from a deeper level; it wasn’t tinged by the artistic self-consciousness of centuries.
There was a world of difference between these cloths and the Mandingo cloths from French Guinea, one of which I had bought in the market at Bolahun and which can be bought, too, at double the price, on the Coast, at Freetown and Monrovia. The Mandingo is a trader, his line of country is immense when it is computed less in mileage than in difficulty: in forest, swamp, river and flood. One finds him in the ports, one finds him five hundred miles in the interior in places where no white man has been seen in living memory. He is unmistakable: his height and shaven head, his Semitic features, his air in his scarlet fez and his long robe, a verse of the Koran hung round the neck, of a long trading lineage. He rides the only horses to be seen in the interior, but more often he does the journey on foot. In French Guinea I met a Mandingo who could tell me the whole route to the Coast at Cape Palmas or Grand Bassa. He made the wild four weeks’ journey as regularly as a traveller in silk stockings who catches the Brighton Belle once a week. But the cloths, the swords and knives they carry with them are not superior to the peasant arts of Central Europe; they have the same crude tourist stamp; lozenges of bright crude colours on the heavy cloth. And this is interesting when one considers that there are no tourists in French Guinea, and few white men at all in the far corner of the colony which touches Liberia. The trade goods have to be carried through hundreds of miles of forest to reach the kind of public which enjoys the bogus gaudy article.
It was all against the proper White House etiquette, I felt, but it was I who had to make the move to end the interview, for I began to fear that it would be dark before I reached Kpangblamai. I was still following roughly the route which Sir Alfred Sharpe took in his journey through Liberia in 1919. All the way along this northern border the ground is high, generally about sixteen hundred feet, and the ground broken. Sir Alfred Sharpe wrote after his journey that he had never been in any part of Africa where the going was so bad, but at least it isn’t monotonous like the way through the central forest, where there is no variation in the narrow paths, the dull tangled greenery, where there is nothing to see for hours on end but the carrier’s feet and the tree-roots. Here, between Kolahun and Kpangblamai, there were hills to scramble over, the Mano River to cross on a wide bridge of twisted creeper, the great swallow-tailed butterflies swarming at the watercourses, tiny winged primroses resting on the damp sand and rising in clouds round our waists, and once a little ferny, brackeny glade, warm and sweet like an English summer.