Grand Bassa
We rose at four-fifteen, but the new carriers and Tommie delayed us and we did not leave King Peter’s Town till six. I wasn’t quite so cheerful then, the Bassa men persisted that it was twelve hours to Harlingsville, five hours first to a Seventh Day Adventist mission, where they wanted us to spend the night. But the smash-and-grab raid was nearly over; it was only later that I could separate the physical tiredness which was caused by the long fast trek from the actual circumstances of the primitive life; I thought then that it was the interior I was weary of, when it was only the march, the forest, the inadequate resources of my own brain. I wasn’t going to waste another day in the interior if we had to walk the clock round to avoid it. As it might be a very long trek I avoided using the hammock until the very end, though if it hadn’t been for the strain on the carriers, there would have been an almost unalloyed delight in the swinging motion and the long stare upwards, the sight of the blue cracks moving through the great fan of leaves between the tapering grey boles, the sense of being carried south with no more exertion, back to the life I began to think I cared for more than I had known.
To my relief the Bassa men proved, as usual, to be liars. The first of us reached the mission after only three and a half hours. It was a Saturday and a bell was ringing for church in a cluster of white buildings on a hill-top. The missionary came down to the path and brought us in, a German living there with his wife, trying to convert the Bassa tribe to a belief in the millennium and the sacred distinction between the Sabbath and the Sunday. They fed us on real German ginger cake and gave us iced grape juice to drink, and talked about wireless sets in throaty English, and the touch of iced drink on the lips was like the end of everything, so that already I began to look back on Kpangblamai and Nicoboozu as something gone out of my life for ever. Grand Bassa, they said, was only eight hours away and Harlingsville six hours, but when I mentioned the lorry that I hoped would meet us there, they had bad news. There was only one car in Grand Bassa and that had broken down some months before, and they doubted whether it had been repaired. I wished then that I had not told my servants and the carriers of the lorry. The thought that when I got them to Harlingsville they would still be faced with another two hours’ trek worried me as much as the growing suspicion that another eight hours of walking would be too much for me.
We came out of the forest altogether a few hours later on to a broad grassy path across long rolling downs, which seemed to indicate the sea was near. We had been in the forest now almost uninterruptedly since the day we crossed the border on the other side of Liberia. It was like breathing again to leave it. At every crest now we hoped to see the Atlantic. After lunch Tommie overtook us, tipsy and singing some unintelligible song the carriers took up and handed down their line till it faded over the crests. That encouraged me, for if Harlingsville was far off, our guide would have stayed behind to drink and rob. More and more people came up the path from the direction of the sea, and of each Tommie asked if there was a car in Harlingsville, but they all said there was no car. We passed an unfinished concrete bridge marking where the road had once reached, for this road had gone backward. Then a few seedy houses appeared, definitely houses now and not huts, with a first floor and tin roofs but without glass in the windows, with the air of old-fashioned chicken coops magnified to take men. Through a window I saw a group of half-castes playing cards round a bottle of cane juice. It was the familiar Africa of the films, of semi-Parisian revues and Leicester Square. Sometimes there were chickens or a goat or an allotment. This was civilization; we had seen it last in Freetown.
And then at three o’clock unexpectedly we were in Harlingsville, the wooden houses rising to two floors, with outside staircases, a smell of human ordure drawn up by the sun, a Post Office marked in chalk letters, men and women in trousers and shirts leaning over fences, and as the path bent, there at the beginning of a wider road a motor-lorry stood. I wanted to laugh and shout and cry; it was the end, the end of the worst boredom I had ever experienced, the worst fear and the worst exhaustion. If I had not been so tired (it was March the second, we had been walking for exactly four weeks and covered about three hundred and fifty miles), civilization might not have seemed quite so desirable in comparison with what I was leaving: the complete simplicity on the edge of subsistence, the little groves of rice-birds, the graves of the chiefs, the tiny fires at sundown, the torchlight, the devils and the dancing. But civilization, for the moment, I was ready to swallow whole, even the tin roofs, the stinking lurching lorry from which the natives on the way from market in Grand Bassa drew back with the same dread as their fellows had shown on the road to Kailahun, hiding their faces against the banks as the monstrosity ground by. The journey had begun and ended in a lorry in the stink of petrol.
Civilization, of course, even at the Grand Bassa level, offered a little more than that; it offered iced beer in the home of the PZ manager over the store which was just closing down from want of trade, fresh Liberian beef of unbelievable toughness, a straggling row of wooden houses ending on the clean wide beach with the surf breaking beyond, for the surf had saved Grand Bassa, like all other Liberian trading stations, from quays and docks; it offered a selection of hideous churches, one of which woke me early next morning with the sound of what must have been a gramophone record, repeating over and over again, ‘Come to church. Come to church. Come to church.’
It offered, too, a wooden police station with a little group of uniformed figures avidly watching my carriers collect in the courtyard of the store to be paid off. In a way I was glad to see the last of them, but as I listened to the manager warning them to be gone as quickly as possible from Grand Bassa, for the police would be after their money, I felt sorry for the end of something which was unlikely ever to happen again. One was never likely to live for long in a company so simple and uncorrupted; they had none of them before seen so many stores, the sea, a motor-lorry; their eyes were full of excitement and wonder at Grand Bassa, and they didn’t even know the way back. Nobody here could tell them, and when Vande suggested that they might make their way along the beach to Monrovia and there get in touch again with the Holy Cross Mission, the manager warned them that none of his own men went that way unless they carried guns. The beach is the most dangerous road in all Liberia to travellers, because its people have been touched by civilization, have learnt to steal and lie and kill.
They drifted away out of the courtyard one by one, with nothing to do, conscious of their native clothes among the trousered Bassa. They didn’t take the warning to get clear away out of town with their money, for that night I lay in bed listening to the drunken singing and shouts of Vande and Amah under the wall. Cane juice was the only cheap thing in Grand Bassa, and I could tell the difference between their drunkenness now and the happy sleepy mellow state the palm wine had put them in. This was crude spirit and a crude coastal drunkenness.
The Seedy Level
One was back, or, if you will, one had advanced again, to the seedy level. This journey, if it had done nothing else, had reinforced a sense of disappointment with what man had made out of the primitive, what he had made out of childhood. Oh, one wanted to protest, one doesn’t believe, of course, in ‘the visionary gleam’, in the trailing glory, but there was something in that early terror and the bareness of one’s needs, a harp strumming behind a hut, a witch on the nursery landing, a handful of kola nuts, a masked dancer, the poisoned flowers. The sense of taste was finer, the sense of pleasure keener, the sense of terror deeper and purer. It isn’t a gain to have turned the witch or the masked secret dancer, the sense of supernatural evil, into the small human viciousness of the thin distinguished military grey head in Kensington Gardens with the soft lips and the eye which dwelt with dull lustre on girls and boys of a certain age.
He was an Old Etonian. He had an estate in the Highlands. He said, ‘Do they cane at your school?’ looking out over the wide flat grass, the nursemaids and the children, with furtive alertness. He said,
‘You must come up and stay with me in Scotland. Do you know of any girls’ school where they still – you know –’ He began to make confidences, and then, suddenly taking a grip of the poor sliding brain, he rose and moved away with stiff military back, the Old Etonian tie, the iron-grey hair, a bachelor belonging to the right clubs, over the green plain among the nursemaids and the babies wetting their napkins.
I could hear a policeman talking to Vande under the wall, and suddenly I remembered (though I told myself still that I was dead sick of Africa) the devil’s servant at Zigita waving away the lightning and the rain with an elephant-hair fan, the empty silent town after the drums had beaten the devil’s warning. There was cruelty enough in the interior, but had we done wisely exchanging the supernatural cruelty for our own?
I was looking out of the window of the day nursery when the aeroplane fell. I could see it crash out of sight on to the playing fields at the top of the hill. The airman had dived, playing the fool before his younger brother and the other boys, he had miscalculated the height and struck the ground and was dead before he reached hospital. His small brother never looked, never waited to hear if he were alive, but walked steadily away down the hill to the school and shut himself tearlessly in a lavatory. Someone went and found him there, there were no locks on any lavatory doors, nowhere where you could be alone.
The lorries drove up and down the day of the General Strike loaded with armed men. The café had been turned into a dressing station and a squad of Garde Mobile moved down the wide boulevard that runs from Combat to Menilmontant searching everyone on the pavement for arms. The whole of Paris was packed with troops; every corner, every high building sheltered a troop, they clustered along the walls in their blue steel helmets like woodlice. The road of the Revolution from Vincennes to the Place de la Concorde was lined with guns and cavalry. No breaking out here, no return to something earlier, something communal, something primitive.
More police were coming up to get their pickings beneath the wall. Vande and Amah were being persuaded towards the wooden station. I thought of Vande in the dark urging the carriers over the long gaping swaying bridge at Duogobmai; I remembered they had never had the goat to guard them from the elephants. It wouldn’t have been any use now. We were all of us back in the hands of adolescence, and I thought rebelliously: I am glad, for here is iced beer and a wireless set which will pick up the Empire programme from Daventry, and after all it is home, in the sense that we have been taught to know home, where we will soon forget the finer taste, the finer pleasure, the finer terror on which we might have built.
* It is the pride of the Vai people that they have the only written language in Africa, but the Bassa are imitating them, and I found a piece of their script stuck, perhaps as a charm in the roof of my hut.
Chapter 5
POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA
A Boatload of Politicians
My host woke me early to say that if I cared to catch it a Liberian motor-launch was leaving that morning for Monrovia. If I missed it, I might have to wait a week for a Dutch cargo-boat, but he advised me all the same to stay.
The boat was making its maiden voyage down the coast from Cape Palmas to Monrovia. It cannot have been more than thirty feet long, not that I was able to pace it when we scrambled on board from the surf boat, for it was packed – packed with black politicians. There were a hundred and fifty of them on board, and if the owner of the boat had not been with us we should not have been allowed to embark. They shouted that there was no room, that we should sink the boat, they implored the captain not to let us on board, they were scared, for most of them had never been at sea before and the previous evening they had run on a rock and narrowly escaped off Sinoe. The launch tilted with their fear, first one way, then the other. But the owner got us on board, he even found us enough room to set up chairs and sit down, though we couldn’t, once settled there, stir a foot.
The launch, the owner told me, had been bought second-hand for £18 and repaired for £25. It hadn’t even got marine engines. He had installed two second-hand automobile engines, a Dodge and a Studebaker, and except for the rock off Sinoe, it had done well. We slid farther away from the yellow sandy strip of Africa, from the fringe of dark green forest behind the tin shacks of Grand Bassa. The captain, a great fat Kru man in a wide-brimmed hat and a singlet, stood in a little glass shelter and shouted orders down a telephone to the engine-room just beneath his feet, the sun came blindingly up over the thin Japanese cotton awning, a black Methodist minister went to sleep on my shoulder, and the politicians temporarily ceased arguing about the election and began to argue with the captain.
‘Say, captain,’ they protested in their formless nasal American negro voices, ‘you don’t wanta use both engines yet. You gotta put out farther before you use both engines,’ and the captain argued with them and presently gave way. He couldn’t issue any order without setting the passengers arguing with him.
It was sixty miles to Monrovia and the launch took seven and a half hours, lurching with incredible slowness across the flat scorching African sea with the rocking motion of the hundred and fifty politicians. It was an Opposition boat and the presence of a white man on board seemed to the politicians to have deep significance. Before we reached Monrovia every delegate was convinced that England was behind them. There was to be a Convention in Monrovia of the Unit True Whig Party to elect a Presidential Candidate to oppose President Barclay and the True Whig Party. All is fair during a Liberian election and the Government agent at Cape Palmas had tried to arrest the owner of the boat and hold it up till the Convention was over. Some of the delegates were supporters of a Mr Cooper, some of ex-President King, so though they all belonged to the same party, they had plenty to argue about, and the arguments got fiercer after midday, after the tin basins of cassava roots had been handed round (for meals were included in the tariff) and the bottles of cane juice. The cane juice in the midday heat worked quickly; almost immediately half the hundred and fifty politicians were roaring drunk. They couldn’t do anything about it, because if they moved more than a foot the boat heeled over, and once there was a panic on board at a loud crash which reminded them of the rock they had hit the night before. Some tried to stand up and others shouted to them to be still as the boat heeled towards the glassy sea and the captain was heard shouting that he would put any man who moved in irons. I couldn’t move because the Methodist minister was asleep on my shoulder, and the panic soon subsided. We hadn’t hit a rock, somebody had passed out under the cane juice and his head had hit the deck.
The owner of the boat said to me, ‘These men: they are quiet and gentle now, but you wait till they get ashore. They are thirsting for blood. They would rather kill Barclay than see him elected.’
An old man without any teeth suddenly said, ‘Do you know in Monrovia they have a map of the whole of Liberia? I am going to go and see it. It is in the possession of a family called Anderson. They have had it for years. Everyone who goes to Monrovia goes to see the map. Sinoe is marked on it, and Grand Bassa and Cape Palmas.’ Then a lot of people tried to trap me into saying whether I was financing Mr Cooper or Mr King. I might have made history that day, for I am sure if I had said I was financing Mr Cooper, no one would have voted for Mr King. And all the while behind the frieze of black heads, five hundred yards away, the yellow African beach slid unchangingly by without a sign of human occupation. Somebody was fishing from the end of the boat and with tiresome regularity catching a large fish. It might have been the same fish, just as it might have been the same patch of sand, but every time the captain left the wheel, trod over the sprawl of limbs into the bow and presently announced in a loud commanding voice, as if he were ordering somebody to be clamped into irons, ‘A fish!’ and entered the fact in a logbook. There would be a momentary break in the babble until a voice began again, ‘Mishter Cooper ish, ish a young man.’ ‘Ex – Presh – Pres – Presh, Mishter King has exshper, exper-ish . . .’
The Nonconformist minister had
n’t drunk anything. He woke up suddenly and without removing his head from my shoulder said, ‘We shall never go straight in Liberia until we let God into our conventions. We must let God choose.’
I said, ‘I agree, of course, but how will you know which candidate God wants to choose?’
He said, ‘God made pencils, but man made india-rubber.’
The old man without any teeth said, ‘That’s a true word.’
The minister said, ‘They’ll give us cards when we go to the Convention and we shall have to put a mark against a name. But pencil can be rubbed out with india-rubber. If we want God to have a chance in this Convention we must take our pencils and push the point right through one of the names, tear it right out, then they won’t be able to do anything with india-rubber.’