In one village the charred remains of six children were found after the departure of the troops . . .
In this connection it may be mentioned that a man who had been a political prisoner at New Sasstown stated that he had heard soldiers boasting of having cut children down with cutlasses and thrown them into burning huts . . .
And when I learnt that Colonel Davis had fought with Tiempoh, who are my children and make farm for me, and had caught Payetaye men and women and ill-treated them, I and all my people were afraid . . .
As far as is known, the principal diseases in the interior include elephantiasis, leprosy, yaws, malaria, hookworm, schistosomiasis, dysentery, smallpox and nutritional conditions. In the whole country there are only: two doctors in Monrovia, both foreign and both engaged in private practice, a medical officer on the Firestone Plantations, and three or four missionary doctors working in the interior . . .
In Monrovia itself malaria is practically universal . . .
In other places the producer sets the prices for his goods, but in this country the buyer enforces the price to suit his convenience . . .
The Government can kill all the people of Sasstown and all the tribes of the Kru Coast before we surrender to the Government. We will not return to the coast or surrender until we hear from the British Consul in Monrovia that there will be no more war. Then we will return to Old Sasstown . . .
There was something satisfyingly complete about this picture. It really seemed as though you couldn’t go deeper than that; the agony was piled on in the British Government Blue Book with a real effect of grandeur; the little injustices of Kenya became shoddy and suburban beside it.
And it was saved from melodrama by its irony, by the fact that the Republic was founded as an example to all Africa of a Christian and self-governing state. An American philanthropic society at the beginning of the nineteenth century (many of its directors, it is said, were slave-owners who found it convenient thus to get rid of their illegitimate children) began to ship released slaves to the Grain Coast of Africa. Land was bought from the native rulers and a settlement established at Monrovia. ‘The love of liberty brought us here,’ but one can hardly blame these first half-caste settlers when they found that love of their own liberty was not consistent with the liberty of the native tribes. The history of the Republic was very little different from the history of neighbouring white colonies: it included the same broken contracts, the same resort to arms, the same gradual encroachment, even the same heroism among the early settlers, the peculiarly Protestant characteristic of combining martyrdom with absurdity. There were, for example, the black Quakers from Pennsylvania, teetotallers and pacifists, who when they were attacked by Spanish slavers depended on prayer and were massacred. Only a hundred and twenty escaped and settled in Grand Bassa.
From the first these American half-caste slaves were idealists in the American manner. Their Declaration of Independence, when the Republic was declared, had the glossy white marble effect of the American. The year was 1847, but the phrases were eighteenth century; they belonged to Washington; they had the rhetoric of an expensive tomb. The inalienable rights of life and liberty gravely led off the scroll; but then one passed to ‘the right to acquire, possess, enjoy, and defend property’. Today the ‘ideals’ are still American, something a little like the American of Tammany Hall; the descendants of the slaves have taken to politics with the enthusiasm of practised crap players.
‘If you desire the prosperity of your people, the independence of your Government, a place of honour for the Lone Star among the flags of all nations, you will support the reelection of President Barclay in this campaign . . .’
This too attracted me. There seemed to be a seediness about the place you couldn’t get to the same extent elsewhere, and seediness has a very deep appeal: even the seediness of civilization, of the sky-signs in Leicester Square, the tarts in Bond Street, the smell of cooking greens off Tottenham Court Road, the motor salesmen in Great Portland Street. It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back.
Streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
But there are times of impatience, when one is less content to rest at the urban stage, when one is willing to suffer some discomfort for the chance of finding – there are a thousand names for it, King Solomon’s Mines, the ‘heart of darkness’ if one is romantically inclined, or more simply, as Herr Heuser puts it in his African novel, The Inner Journey, one’s place in time, based on a knowledge not only of one’s present but of the past from which one has emerged. There are others, of course, who prefer to look a stage ahead, for whom Intourist provides cheap tickets into a plausible future, but my journey represented a distrust of any future based on what we are.
The motive of a journey deserves a little attention. It is not the fully conscious mind which chooses West Africa in preference to Switzerland. The psychoanalyst, who takes the images of a dream one by one – ‘You dreamed you were asleep in a forest. What is your first association to forest?’ – finds that some images have immediate associations; to others the patient can bring out nothing at all; his brain is like a cinema in which the warning ‘Fire’ has been cried; the exits are jammed with too many people trying to escape, and when I say that to me Africa has always seemed an important image, I suppose that is what I mean, that it has represented more than I could say. ‘You dreamed you were in Africa. Of what do you think first when I say the word Africa?’ and a crowd of words and images, witches and death, unhappiness and the Gare St Lazare, the huge smoky viaduct over a Paris slum, crowd together and block the way to full consciousness.
But to the words ‘South Africa’ my reaction, I find, is immediate: Rhodes and the British Empire and an ugly building in Oxford and Trafalgar Square. After ‘Kenya’ there is no hesitation: ‘gentleman farmers, aristocracy in exile and the gossip columns’. ‘Rhodesia’ produces: ‘failure, Empire Tobacco’, and ‘failure’ again.
It is not then any part of Africa which acts so strongly on this unconscious mind; certainly no part where the white settler has been most successful in reproducing the conditions of his country, its morals and its popular art. A quality of darkness is needed, of the inexplicable. This Africa may take the form of an unexplained brutality as when Conrad noted in his Congo diary: ‘Thursday, 3rd July . . . Met an offer of the State inspecting. A few minutes afterwards saw at a camp place the dead body of a Backongo. Shot? Horrid smell’; or a sense of despair as when M. Céline writes: ‘Hidden away in all this flowering forest of twisted vegetation, a few decimated tribes of natives squatted among fleas and flies, crushed by taboos and eating nothing all the time but rotten tapioca.’ The old man whom I saw beaten with a club outside the poky little prison at Tapee-Ta, the naked widows at Tailahun covered with yellow clay squatting in a hole, the wooden-toothed devil swaying his raffia skirts between the huts seem like the images in a dream to stand for something of importance to myself.
Today our world seems peculiarly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral. We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and these half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay for ever at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.
Via Liverpool
But none the less I was a little scared at the prospect of going back by way of Africa alone; I feel very grateful to my cousin Barbara, who was willing to accompany me, to share the journey, for which no maps were to be bought, fro
m its start in the restaurant car of the 6.5 from Euston, as we sat before the little pieces of damp white fish. A headline told me that there was another clue in a trunk murder case; a man on the dole had killed himself; while along the line the smaller stations were dashed out like so many torches plunged in water.
The huge Liverpool hotel had been designed without aesthetic taste but with the right ideas about comfort and a genuine idea of magnificence. It could probably house as many passengers as an Atlantic liner; passengers, because no one goes to Liverpool for pleasure, to the little cramped square and the low sky-signs which can almost be touched with the hand, where all the bars and the cinemas close at ten. But there was a character hidden in this hotel; it wasn’t chic, it wasn’t bright, it wasn’t international; there remained somewhere hidden, among its long muffled corridors, beneath the huge clifflike fall of its walls, the idea of an English inn; one didn’t mind asking for muffins or a pint of bitter, while the boats hooted in the Mersey and the luggage littered the hall; there was quite probably a Boots. Anyway enough remained for me to understand the surprise of Henry James when he landed in England, that England should be as English as, for my entertainment, she took the trouble to be’.
The natural native seediness had not been lost in the glitter of chromium plate; the muffin had been overwhelmingly, perhaps rather nauseatingly, enlarged. If the hotel were silly, it was only because magnificence is almost always a little silly. The magnificent gesture seldom quite comes off. When on rare occasions beauty and magnificence do coincide, one gets a sense of the theatre or the films, it is ‘too good to be true’. I find myself always torn between two beliefs: the belief that life should be better than it is and the belief that when it appears better it is really worse. But in the huge lounge at Liverpool, like the lounge of a country inn fifty times magnified, one was at home on the vast expanse of deep dark carpet, only one business man asleep with his mouth open; at home as one would certainly not have been if the Hollywood imagination had run riot. One was protectively coloured, one was seedy too.
Next morning, in the public house near the Prince’s Stage, four middle-aged women sat drinking with an old dirty man of eighty-four. Three had the dustbin look; they carried about them the air of tenements, of lean cats and shared washhouses; the fourth had risen a little way in the world, she was the old man’s daughter over from America for Christmas. ‘Have another drink, Father?’ He was seeing her off. Their relationship was intimate and merry; the whole party had an air of slightly disreputable revelry. To one the party didn’t really matter; she had caught the American accent. To the other women, who must return to the dustbin, it was perilous, precarious, breath-taking; they were happy and aghast when the old man drew out a pound note and stood a round himself. ‘Well, why shouldn’t he?’ the daughter asked them, asked Jackie boy, the bar-tender, the beer advertisements, the smutty air, the man who came in selling safety-razor blades, half a dozen for threepence, ‘it’s better than spending it on a crowd of strange dames.’
The Liverpool waterside at least had not changed since James’s day: ‘The black steamers knocking about in the yellow Mersey, under a sky so low that they seemed to touch it with their funnels, and in the thickest, windiest light’; – even the colour was the same, ‘the grey mildness, shading away into black at every pretext’.
The cargo ship lay right outside the Mersey in the Irish Sea; a cold January wind blew across the tender; people sat crammed together below deck saying good-bye, bored, embarrassed and bonhomous, like parents at a railway station the first day of term, while England slipped away from the port-hole, a stone stage, a tarred side, a slap of grey water against the glass.
Chapter 2
THE CARGO SHIP
Madeira
MY cousin and I had five fellow passengers in the cargo ship: two shipping agents, a traveller for an engineering firm, a doctor on his way to the Coast with anti-yellow-fever serum, and a woman joining her husband at Bathurst. All except the woman and the traveller knew the Coast; they knew the same people; they had a common technique of living enforced by common conditions. The daily dose of quinine, mosquito-netting over all the port-holes: these to them were as natural as the table-cloth at meals.
It is a condition favourable to the growth of legend. Legend belongs naturally to primitive communities where minds are so little differentiated, by work or play or education, that a story can move quickly from brain to brain uncriticized. But sometimes these conditions arise artificially. A common danger, purpose or way of life can very nearly destroy differences of intellect and class; then you get the angels of Mons and the miracles at a shrine.
‘Yes,’ they were saying in the smoking-room, ‘you won’t find a tougher man than Captain W.’ They all knew of him because they all belonged to the Coast: the captain, the doctor, the shipper.
‘If he ran into a broken bottle,’ the doctor said, ‘his face wouldn’t look any different.’
‘He’d take a tug round the world as soon as look at you.’
‘He doesn’t insure his cargo. He bears the risk himself. That’s why his freight-rates are so cheap.’
‘Will people take the risk?’
‘His word’s as good as an insurance company’s.’
‘But when he loses a cargo?’
‘He hasn’t lost one yet.’
In the wireless room on a Saturday night the young agent waited hour after hour for the League results. He and the wireless officer shared an esoteric gossip of the sea: how this or that man had quarrelled with the Old Man and joined another line. The bulbs flickered overhead; tubes hummed in the little cabin with its rows of discs and bulbs, as mechanized as was the engine-room below, a great black polished cliff, pipes tied up at the joints in blue, yellow or scarlet bags like hot-water bottles, a solitary Negro with a polishing rag in all the glittering desert of brass and iron.
Coming in from the bulbs and gossip and the dusk I overheard the Captain talking to the doctor in the smoking-room. ‘Four hundred and sixteen people at Dakar,’ he was saying. The subject came up again at breakfast: plague at Dakar, yellow fever at Bathurst, outbreaks hushed up on the French coast, never reported on the Liberian: one was seldom allowed to escape the subject of fever. One could begin a conversation with religion, politics, books; it always ended with malaria, plague, yellow fever. As long as one was at sea it was a joke, like somebody else’s vicious wife; when one was on land it was like a grim story intended to make the flesh creep, but one became conscious then of people who wouldn’t play, who preferred something comforting.
Something like A Village in a Valley by Mr Beverley Nichols, which was in the small library. One reads strange books in a ship, books one would never dream of reading at home: like Lady Eleanor Smith’s Tzigane, and the novels of Warwick Deeping and W. B. Maxwell: a lot of books, written without truth, without compulsion, one dull word following another, books to read while you wait for the bus, while you strap-hang, in between the Boss’s dictations, while you eat your A. B. C. lunch; a whole industry founded on a want of leisure and a want of happiness.
At Madeira it was raining. The touts were out at ten in the morning in the shabby notorious town. One drank sweet wine at the Golden Gates, and the rain dripped off the curious phallic hats hanging outside the shops. The touts wore straw hats with Cambridge ribbons; they kept at one’s elbow all the way round Funchal; they weren’t a bit discouraged because it was raining, because it was only just after breakfast. ‘Luxe,’ they kept on saying, and ‘Sex’ and something about dancing girls. Their industry, like Mr Beverley Nichols’s, was founded on a want of leisure and a want of happiness. Quick, quick, you are only on shore for half an hour, you are only vigorous for a few more years, have another girl before it’s too late, you aren’t happy with the one you’ve got, try another. The women sold violets and lilies and roses in the rain, the phallic hats dripped, the touts couldn’t understand that one didn’t want a girl just after breakfast on a wet day. There were other ways of
filling up time, one could drink sweet wine at the Golden Gates, one could go back on board and read Lady Eleanor Smith or Mr Beverley Nichols.
A young German artist and his wife came on board at Funchal as deck passengers and were given the little hospital to sleep in. He was a thick spotty man in a velvet jacket; he had known D. H. Lawrence at Taos and Mabel Dodge Luhan. It hadn’t made any difference, he wasn’t going to write a book about it. In the little hospital he put out his canvases, crude realistic landscapes and the baked faces of Mexican Indians; it grew dark; and everyone drank bad Madeira out of the bottle and he talked about Art and Sport and the Body Beautiful, and his wife, small and curved and lovely and complaisant, was quiet and seasick. He believed in Hitler and Nationalism and swimming and love, he liked the pictures of Orpen and de Laszlo, but Munch’s pictures left him dissatisfied. They left out the Soul, he said, they were materialist; not that he disbelieved in the Body, the Body Beautiful and in physical Love. He agreed to come to Africa too, and illustrate this book; an artist was at home anywhere – but after dinner he changed his mind; and his sweet complaisant nubile wife said, Yes, she wouldn’t mind coming to Africa, and after dinner she changed her mind too. He was a bad artist, but he wasn’t a bogus one. He lived on almost nothing; he believed in himself and in his hazy Teutonic ideas; and there was a sensual beauty in their relationship. The two lived in a kind of continuous intimacy, she had no ideas but his, no vitality but his; he supplied all the life for both of them and she supplied a warm friendly sensual death; they shared the universe between them. All the time, in the cabin, at dinner, at a café table, they gave the impression of having only just risen from bed.