The railway journey began before eight and finished some time after five; the first stage of the journey ended at Bo; here the train and passengers stayed the night. At some point during the day one had emerged from the Colony into the Protectorate. The change was more than a matter of geography or administration, it was a change of manner. The Englishmen here didn’t talk about the ‘bloody blacks’ nor did they patronize or laugh at them; they had to deal with the real natives and not the Creole, and the real native was someone to love and admire. One didn’t have to condescend; one knew more about some things, but they knew more about others. And on the whole the things they knew were more important. One couldn’t make lightning like they could, one’s gun was only an improvement on their poisoned spear, and unless one was a doctor, one had less chance of curing a snake-bite than they. The Englishmen here were of a finer, subtler type than on the Coast; they were patriots in the sense that they cared for something in their country other than its externals; they couldn’t build their English corner with a few tin roofs and peeling posters and drinks at the bar.
It might be thought that these men were more fortunate, that their ‘corner’, just because it was less material, demanded less effort to construct. But one cannot carry a country’s art in one’s head, and in the climate of West Africa books rot, pianos go out of tune, and even a gramophone record buckles.
Beside the line Sergeant Penny Carlyle, DCs messenger, swagger-stick under arm, waited for us. Bare-legged and barefooted, with a cap like a Victorian messenger boy’s perched on one side, a row of medals on his tunic, he had the smartness and efficiency of an NCO in the Guards. He marshalled his carriers, led the way to the rest-house, squashed a beetle under his toes, clicked his bare heels and dismissed. There were egrets everywhere, like thin snow-white ducks with yellow beaks. They provided, in their slender Oriental beauty, the final contrast to Freetown; there wasn’t a vulture to be seen, and suddenly, inexplicably, I felt happy in the rest-house, the square squat bungalow built on cement piles to keep out the white ants, as the hurricane lamps were lit and the remains of the tough, dry, tasteless coast chicken were laid out. There was a cockroach larger than a black beetle in the bathroom, there were no mosquito rods with the camp beds, my medical outfit, which had cost me four pounds ten at Burroughs Wellcome, had been left behind, a native stood outside the rest-house all the evening complaining of something with folded hands; but I was happy; it was as if I had left something I distrusted behind.
On the lawn outside the headmaster’s house, beside a tree covered with wax blossoms like magnolia, we sat and drank gin and lime-juice; it was warm and quiet; they talked of the Republic. I carried an introduction to C, a young Dutchman who was said to be somewhere in the Republic looking for diamonds. The traffic superintendent had heard of him; C had slipped over the frontier somewhere near Pepdembu and rumours had come back that he had found the stones. He was alone, working for some small Dutch company outside the Great Trust. But the Trust, so the story went, had been frightened by the rumours; if diamonds were mined on a large scale in the Republic, the Trust could no longer control the price.
They had sent spies over to trace C, slipped them across from Sierra Leone, from French Guinea and from the Ivory Coast; they had to discover the truth; the price of diamonds and their own existence depended on it. It was a good story to hear there in the dark, near the borders of a country of which no one in Sierra Leone had been able to tell me anything. It was a good story because it didn’t go too far and tell too much, because it had not merely a plot but a subject; it cast a light in so many directions, the satiric, the social, the psychological; one only had to wait for one’s own experience to add colour and facts, though I was almost afraid to find C, lest the vivid outline should be marred by detail.
It was useless in Sierra Leone to ask for information about the Republic. No one had been across; any traffic there was came from the other side. President King, who had been forced to resign soon afterwards by the disclosures of the League of Nations Commission of Inquiry, had visited Sierra Leone a few years back. He was received with royal honours; there were banquets and receptions, guns were fired the royal number of rounds. What the President never knew was that he had been used as a dummy for the Prince of Wales, who visited the Colony soon afterwards; the salutes had been rehearsed, the committees had tried out their arrangements on him. Later he came up to Bo on his way home. He had planned to go back by land from the boundary, escorted by his troops; it wasn’t safe for a President to make his way through the tribes he ruled without two hundred soldiers to guard him. There was a dinner in his honour; it went well to the end; there were the usual toasts; but when the President rose there was an interruption. The Colonel Commandant of the Republic’s Frontier Force was having a good time. ‘Sit down, Mr President,’ he said. ‘I want some more brandies and sodas.’
A few days later his host got tired of the President and had him escorted with proper ceremony to the border, but at the wrong place. The Frontier Force had marched to meet him at Foya and here he was at Kabawana. The Presidential party sat on the ground and waited and hoped; they were very frightened; the British platoon marched off and left them there.
Border Town
As it turned out I had no cause to fear a meeting with the diamond prospector. The story was left vague, unverified, suggestive. Six months in the Republic had been too much for C’s health; he had gone home. This I learnt the next afternoon at Pendembu, at the small German store where I had been told to inquire for him. The train left Bo soon after nine and arrived in the late afternoon. All my food was still in bond, but I bought tinned food at the PZ store in Bo. One could buy everything there, drinks and tinned foods and clothes and ironware and cures for gonorrhoea. (PZ have branches all down the coast, even in the Republic; they are a Manchester firm, a kind of West African Selfridge, and in towns where there is no accommodation for white men, the PZ store can always be depended on for hospitality.)
At Pendembu another court messenger was waiting for us, and a lorry to take us to Kailahun, to the Government rest-house, but I called first at the Deutsche Kamerun Gesellschaft to inquire for C. ‘You’ll find his partner, Mr Van Gogh,’ the German manager said, ‘somewhere near Bolahun.’ Mr Van Gogh was looking for gold as well as for diamonds. He had been out there for nine months. He would be at Bolahun or somewhere in the forest. They couldn’t say more. The Paramount Chief was waiting by the lorry; he was a small man in a robe of native cloth with a cocky little woollen cap; we had nothing to say to each other, we shook hands and smiled, and then the lorry drove away.
The old engine boiled, and the metal of the footboard burnt through my shoes; the driver was bare-footed. We drove wildly up- and down-hill for an hour on a road like a farm track, but the impression of reckless speed was deceptive, formed by the bumps, the reeling landscape, the smell of petrol and the heat; the lorry couldn’t have gone more than twenty miles an hour. Cars are still rare in that corner of Sierra Leone, men scrambled up the banks, women fled into the bush or crouched against the bank with their faces hidden, as civilization went terrifyingly by them in a fume of evil smoke.
In Kailahun at the time when we arrived there were only two white men, the District Commissioner and a Scottish engineer who was building a bridge, but a third man, a stranger, drifted in during the evening in a singlet and dirty ducks, with a little black beard and shaven monkish head. The Commissioner had arrived by the same train; he had been down the line to Segbwana to investigate a Gorilla Society murder. A child had been carried off and killed, and a woman had sworn she had seen the gorilla and that he wore trousers. A man confessed, but none of the Commissioners believed that he was the real murderer. He had in his possession a gorilla knife with curved prongs to make the rough clawing wounds, and possession of the knife was alone sufficient to earn him fourteen years’ imprisonment. The Commissioner was small, dark, lively, subtle and sensitive; he was new to the place; something had happened to three of his
predecessors. There had been a boundary dispute in the district for years between two chiefs, a suspicion of ‘medicine’ in the food, and in a month’s time he would be alone again (the engineer gone). Books came out to him from the Times Book Club, he read them and then they rotted on the shelves.
The engineer sat and smoked in silence. He didn’t read books; he had no conversation; he was white-haired, rocky, slow; he might have been sixty and it was a shock to hear that he was in his early forties. He didn’t mind the loneliness, he said, he was happier here than in England, it suited him. But he had more nerves than he cared to admit.
‘There’s a Liberian messenger waiting here for you,’ the DC said. It was what I had feared, that the authorities would send a guide to keep us to the route they had suggested. The DC sent a man into the village to find him, and soon afterwards the stranger turned up in his dirty trousers and singlet. Everyone took him to be the Liberian messenger, nobody got up or offered him a drink; he was the Enemy with his shaven head and his curious black tuft of beard. He had nothing to say for himself, standing there patiently while he was told what he had to do. ‘You are going to show this gentleman the way to Bolahun. He will start the day after tomorrow. You know the way to the Holy Cross Mission?’
Yes, he said, he had come from there.
It was a long while before anyone thought of asking whether he was the Liberian messenger. He wasn’t, the messenger had disappeared from Kailahun, the stranger was a German. He wanted a bed; he had dropped in to Kailahun as casually as if it were a German village where he would be sure to find an inn. He had a bland secretive innocence; he had come from the Republic and he was going back to the Republic; he gave no indication of why he had come or why he was going or what he was doing in Africa at all.
I took him for a prospector, but it turned out later that he was concerned with nothing so material as gold or diamonds. He was just learning. He sat back in his chair, seeming to pay no attention to anyone; when he was asked a question, he gave a tiny laugh (you thought: I have asked something very foolish, very superficial), and gave no answer until later, when you had forgotten the question. He was young in spite of his beard; he had an aristocratic air in spite of his beachcomber’s dress, and he was wiser than any of us. He was the only one who knew exactly what it was he wished to learn, who knew the exact extent of his ignorance. He could speak Mende; he was picking up Buzie; and he had a few words of Pelle: it took time. He had been only two years in West Africa.
I discovered this very gradually; it took longer than the breakfast to which he came next day, more aristocratic than ever in a clean shirt and a pair of fawn trousers, with an ivory-headed stick, a round white topee, a long cigarette-holder in the corner of his mouth. It was a formal courtesy, but he wasn’t interested in anyone; he was only interested in learning what he wanted to know, and he could tell at once that from us he could learn nothing at all. We asked him questions and he retired more than ever into his reserve of secrecy. Had he ever been to Africa before he came out to the Republic two years ago? No, never. Hadn’t he found things difficult? No, he said with a tiny smile, it had all been very simple. Would one have trouble with the Customs at the frontier? Well, of course, it was possible; he himself had no trouble, but they knew him. Should one bribe them? That was one of the questions he didn’t answer, putting it aside, smiling gently, tipping the ash off his cigarette on to the beaten earth of the floor. The cockchafers buzzed in and out and he sat with lowered head, smoking. No, he wouldn’t have another biscuit. Only after a time he exerted himself to give one piece of information; teaching tired him as much as learning invigorated him. It would be as well, he said, while we were at the Holy Cross to visit the Liberian Commissioner at Kolahun. The Commissioner was a scoundrel; he could make things very unpleasant; besides, it was necessary to take out a permit of residence before one had been in the Republic a week. Then he walked briskly away, twirling his ivory-headed stick, his topee sloped at a smart angle, looking around, learning things. One day (it took a week to discover so much) he was going to write a thesis for Berlin University (he came from Hamburg, but Dr Westermann was at Berlin and he hoped to win the approval of that great African scholar). The thesis was an end, but the collection of material for the thesis had no end. The thesis was as evasive as the Castle in Kafka’s religious parable.
We met him again in the long flat village. The chief’s new house stood up above the huts, an absurd concrete skyscraper with row on row of stained-glass windows not made to open; in one corner, tucked away, an unpainted door and a flight of splintery steps. This was the house of Momno Kpanyan, one of the richest chiefs in the Protectorate. In the market we got small change; the penny was too large a sum for marketing, and the currency most in use was irons. Their price varied; one could speculate in irons: the rate that day was twenty for fourpence. They were flat strips of iron about fourteen inches long, like blunt arrows; the points must be undamaged and the tails unchipped (this was as good a way as a milled edge to ensure that the currency was not debased); men were coming in to the market with bundles of several hundred irons on their heads.
Kailahun, in memory, has become a clean village, one of the cleanest we stayed in, but what impressed me at the time was the dirt and disease, the children with protuberant navels relieving themselves in the dust among the goats and chickens, the pock-marked women smeared about the face and legs and breasts with some white ointment they squeezed from a plant in the bush and used for beauty and for medicine. They used it for smallpox, for fever, for toothache, for indigestion; for every ailment under their bleak sun; when they were young it soothed their headaches; when they were older they smeared it on their big bellies to bring them ease in their confinement; when they were dying it lay like a sediment of salt on their dried-up breasts and in their pitted thighs. Here you could measure what civilization was worth; looking back later to Kailahun from the villages of the Republic, where civilization stopped within fifty miles of the Coast, I could see no great difference.
‘Workers of the World Unite’: I thought of the wide shallow slogans of political parties, as the thin bodies, every rib showing with dangling swollen elbows or pock-marked skin, went by me to the market; why should we pretend to talk in terms of the world when we mean only Europe or the white races? Neither ILP nor Communist Party urges a strike in England because the platelayers in Sierra Leone are paid sixpence a day without their food. Civilization here remained exploitation; we had hardly, it seemed to me, improved the natives’ lot at all, they were as worn out with fever as before the white man came, we had introduced new diseases and weakened their resistance to the old, they still drank from polluted water and suffered from the same worms, they were still at the mercy of their chiefs, for what could a District Commissioner really know, shifted from district to district, picking up only a few words of the language, dependent on an interpreter? Civilization so far as Sierra Leone was concerned was the railway to Pendembu, the increased export of palm-nuts; civilization, too, was Lever Brothers and the price they controlled; civilization was the long bar in the Grand, the sixpenny wages. It was not civilization as we think of it, a civilization of Suffolk churches and Cotswold manors, of Crome and Vaughan. The District Commissioner’s work was to a great extent the protection of the native from the civilization he represented. The ‘noble savage’ no longer exists; perhaps he never existed, though in the very young (among the few who are not disfigured by navel hernia) you seem to see behind the present to something lovely, happy and un-enslaved, something like the girl who came up the hill that morning, a piece of bright cloth twisted above her hips, the sunlight falling between the palms on her dark hanging breasts, her great silver anklets, the yellow pot she carried on her head.
Freedom to Travel
Kailahun is on the border of French Guinea; that presumably is why the District Commissioner’s office was transferred there from Pendembu at the railhead. At Kailahun there is no railway and no telegraph: to communicate with Fr
eetown the Commissioner must send a messenger the eighteen miles to Pendembu. It is difficult to understand what control he has over the border; natives pass freely to and fro; indeed with a little care it would be possible to travel all down West Africa without showing papers from the moment of landing. There is something very attractive in this great patch of ‘freedom to travel’; absconding financiers might do worse than take to the African bush. They could be buried there for a lifetime, and they could carry all the money they needed with them in a country where oranges are fifteen a penny, chickens sixpence each, and wages, if you go deep enough, three shillings a week; where you can feed thirty men, as I found, on thirty shillings a week.
That afternoon we went for a walk into French Guinea with the engineer. The border is the Moa River, about twice the width of the Thames at Westminster. We crossed in a dug-out canoe, standing and balancing with the roll. It was quite easy, only a little frightening because there were alligators in the Moa. The curious thing about these boundaries, a line of river in a waste of bush, no passports, no Customs, no barriers to wandering tribesmen, is that they are as distinct as a European boundary; stepping out of the canoe one was in a different country. Even nature had changed; instead of forest and a rough winding road down which a car could, with some difficulty, go, a narrow path ran straight forward for mile after mile through tall treeless elephant grass. Along the hot wrinkled surface lay the skins of snakes. Natives came stooping up the path, bowed under green hammocks of palm-nuts; they looked like grasshoppers in a Silly Symphony. We walked for an hour and a half without coming to a village and at last turned back to Sierra Leone. The engineer said the path went straight down to the Coast by Conakry, and again one felt the happy sense of being free; one had only to follow a path far enough and one could cross a continent. Sweating in the hot dry day and growing cool again, one found it hard to believe that this part of Africa should have so unhealthy a reputation; one forgot C’s sickness and the diseased villagers. I had not so much as heard a mosquito and the daily five grains of quinine seemed a waste of medicine.