These first few days of trekking had a beauty that later one completely missed: everything was new, the villages with the women pounding rice, the cluster of stones where the chiefs were buried, the cows rubbing their horns along the huts; the taste of warm, boiled and filtered water in the dried mouth; the sense, above all, that one was getting somewhere, that one was going deeper. It made me walk fast, faster than my carriers and my companion. A march, this first week, was a dash; my hammock-men, as I didn’t use my hammock, kept my pace, and an evasive half-relationship developed from shared oranges, the rests at the water-courses, where they drank out of the empty meat tins they carefully preserved and I from my bottle . . .
Babu was one of these men, the Buzie: he played the harp tentatively when we rested; he couldn’t speak a word of English, but he had amused friendly reliable ways of showing that he was on your side in the arguments which soon came thick and fast. He was one of the few carriers who smoked a pipe, a small clay pipe, and one could imagine him a season-ticket-holder, the reliable support of his mother and sisters in a remote sad suburb. For there was an undertone of sadness which grew as the trek went on; he wasn’t strong enough for the work; he didn’t complain, he was completely reliable until he was simply too sick to go farther. He was at first the only Buzie man with us; he didn’t mix easily but sat apart with his pipe, sometimes coming up to the door of my hut to smile his good wishes and go away again.
The other man on the first day who went ahead with me was Alfred. Alfred was another type altogether, in his cloth cap and shorts. He had learnt to read and write, he knew English; he thought he was out for a jaunt. Plump and sweaty and horribly ingratiating, he managed to be the one who carried the harp and not the empty hammock. He pointed out everything which he considered of interest, he hung around; but among the men he was the focus of discontent; he always knew that a town was ‘too far’, I could hear his fat grumble doing its work whenever a group gathered together to voice their complaints, and a moment later there he would be, back at my side, doing me a little service, oily and friendly and proud of his English.
Kpangblamai was about four and a half hours’ march from Kolahun. It appeared quite unexpectedly towards the end of the worst heat on the usual hilltop, and there was Mark running dramatically down to meet us at the stream. He had a school friend with him, Peter, the chief’s son, and he said he had ‘plenty plenty fine house’ covered with pictures. So it was: rectangular, like a small stable with two stalls and a verandah. The stalls were bedrooms, containing native beds, platforms of beaten earth spread with matting. The walls were papered thickly with old advertisements and photographs out of illustrated papers, most of them German or American. Over a chair made out of an old packing-case was an article by General Pershing on Youth; beautiful women showed their teeth brushed with Chlorodone, handsome men displayed their ready-made suitings, somebody wondered why she wasn’t a social success, and a man in uniform denounced a clause of the Treaty of Versailles. It was a really fine house, the only one like it in the town; we didn’t have another lodging in a native town so good before Monrovia.
The chief at Kpangblamai was overpoweringly hospitable. I hadn’t time to sit down and rest and take a drink before the old man arrived, wizened and reserved, in a turban and a kind of liberty robe which was like the tea-gowns worn at Edwardian literary teas. He brought with him his headman, who wore a robe of the ordinary blue and white striped native cloth and a battered bowler hat. He was even older than the chief, they neither could speak a word of English, but while from the chief’s manner I gathered an impression of a rather sad tired benevolence, the headman was full of shrewdness, satire, salacious humour. He giggled in a sly way; he had, I felt sure, the low-down on the whole town; he wasn’t, like the chief, an idealist; if he had belonged to another race, he would have been one of those elderly men who pinch girls’ bottoms on buses in a friendly, harmless way. Chief and headman were inseparable; they went everywhere together like the higher and the lower nature.
Now they had brought with them a basin full of eggs (every one of which proved to be bad), a huge basket of oranges, and three gourds of palm wine. For the first time I was thirsty enough to enjoy palm wine; I drank one gourdful not realizing the danger of dysentery if it wasn’t fresh or the gourd was dirty; it was the colour of stone ginger beer and had a soft flat taste like barley water. The chief and the headman sat down on the native bed and I gave them cigarettes. Nobody spoke. Presently they got up and went away, but a minute later the chief returned with a chicken. That first day I didn’t know the right etiquette; I dashed back for each present when it arrived; and the presents multiplied rapidly. Later I learnt from Amedoo that I should dash once only at the end of my stay.
I was longing for a wash and I hadn’t had time to shave before I left Bolahun, but the hospitable chief kept me on the run. No sooner had he gone after presenting the chicken than his son came in to say that the devil would dance for the visitors: so with the chief and the headman we sat out in the blazing sun and waited for the devil to appear. This time it was a devil belonging to a woman’s society, a devil from Pandemai in Buzie country, who was travelling to Kolahun to dance before the President.
It came out between the last huts at the end of the wide little whitewashed town, then swayed and simpered forward in a country robe, swinging a great raffia bustle, nodding its black mask. The bustle swung up and showed huge pantaloons of fibre, like a caricature of a Victorian dress. One remembered Miss Tilly Losch in a Cochran revue hesitating before a pillar-box with just this air of coyness, the sophisticated copy of something young and artless. This devil seemed to a European to have a mock female, mock modest manner, which was curiously and interestingly gross when combined with the long cruel mask, the slanting eyes, the heavy mouth. It turned and turned, swinging the bustle above the pantaloons, and the interpreter ran round and round carrying a small whip. There was something about it of the witch of one’s childhood; perhaps because it remained so feminine even while it was unrecognizable as a woman; perhaps because of its curious head-gear; the tall tufted pole taking the place of the sugar-loaf hat. It sank on to the ground and recited its greetings on a low gushing note. It was a far more accomplished dancer than Landow. To compare Landow’s wild rushes, matching the great crude muzzle, with the simpering silly sinister gait of this woman’s devil was like comparing brutality with cruelty. It may have been a tribal difference: no Bande craftsman could have made this mask. Landow’s was a mask of childish fancy running in the vein of nightmare: this was a work of conscious art in the service of a belief.
After the dance the chief’s son, Peter Bonoh, said that his father wished to show the visitors his town. The whole length of Kpangblamai cannot have exceeded a hundred and fifty yards, but before we had seen all the activities of that small settlement, I felt much as a member of the royal family must feel after a tour of an industrial fair. I had been allowed no rest after the march, the palm wine was lying heavy in my stomach, there was no air on the baked plateau, and I thought that I was going to faint before I reached the end. Five weavers were at work, each under his own little shelter of palm branches; a man was cutting leather sheaths for daggers; and in the smithy they were making blades, one man working a great leather bellows, another beating out the white-hot blade (I would have paid them more attention if I had known then the importance of the smith, how frequently he is the local devil and his word more powerful than the chief’s). In front of another hut two women were spinning a kind of top upon a plate, working the thread out of a mass of cotton. In a little wooden enclosure a woman was boiling the leaves of a forest plant in a great cauldron to make a dark-blue dye. The smell of the cauldron, the pressure of the crowd fingering my sleeves and the cloth of my trousers, the necessity of keeping my face fixed in a bright cheerful interested mask made me feel weak and ill. There seemed no end to the parade of industry. It was a tiny plateau, not much larger than the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens; wherever I looked
, between the shoulders of the crowd, I saw the huts give way to trees, and above the trees the high forested ridge of the Pandemai hills; but in the hot stuffy evening it seemed as endless as a maze of which one doesn’t know the clue.
Two women sat on the ground smoothing out cotton as it came from the pods; a group of women were extracting the thick yellow oil out of the palm nuts; another weaver. . . . At last we were back at our hut; the chairs and tables were out; and another present arrived from the chief – a kid; it escaped and led a howling chase between the huts before it was brought back and tethered. My cousin went to bed, she couldn’t stand the thought of food, and I had my very English meal from our stores alone, sardines on toast, a steaming hot steak and kidney pudding, a sweet omelette washed down with whisky and orange. I was only half-way through the second course when Peter Bonoh put his head through the screen to say his father was outside, and there the old chief was sitting in his chair at the entrance in his tea-gown and turban. He had brought an orchestra with him and all through dinner they played their monotonous tinkling tunes. The chief hadn’t anything to say; he sat there quite proud and happy and ignored, while the headman giggled salaciously somewhere in the dark near by, until at last he slipped away into the moonless night carrying his chair.
But there was one thing I had to know before I went to bed – where to go next. The doctor at the mission had spoken of an easy day’s march to a place he called Dagomai, a long march the day after to Nicoboozu, and then Zigita. That was as far as he had been on the way to Ganta, but south of Zigita, at Zorzor, there was a Lutheran mission where someone might know something of the way beyond, The maps of the Dutch prospectors didn’t cover the ground so far east.
The trouble was, no one had heard of Dagomai. Peter Bonoh hadn’t heard of it, neither had his father or the old headman. The only town they could suggest between Kpangblamai and Zigita was Pandemai. But that wasn’t far enough for a day’s march, and besides I didn’t expect too friendly a reception from the chief there, who had been expecting me that night. Dagomai, Dagomai, I kept on repeating in the hope that somebody would have heard of the place. Presently ‘Duogobmai,’ the chief said doubtfully. It sounded very nearly right, it was on the way to Nicoboozu, and I decided that it must be the place the doctor had meant. ‘Too far,’ Alfred said, joining in, ‘too far’; the carriers clustered round and he whispered to them how far it was; they hadn’t begun to work together yet, they were full of jealousy and suspicion; he had the right material to his hand. But I didn’t believe him; even the doctor’s wife had done the march to Dagomai; and now I quite firmly believed that Duogobmai and Dagomai were the same place. It wouldn’t pay me not to believe it; time was money, and it wouldn’t do to lose myself my first day loose in the Liberian interior.
For hours as I lay in bed I heard the faint music of the harps, the low sound of Alfred talking to the carriers; I wondered what I’d do if they refused to obey me. I suppose it is the thought which strikes every new prefect at school, but I had never been a prefect; I had never before so abjectly depended on other people’s obedience. I was glad afterwards that I hadn’t for a moment imagined that Alfred, oily, smart, ingratiating, mutinous Alfred, might be right.
It was the first time I had slept in a native hut, and foolishly, for the sake of privacy, I kept the door closed, as the natives do themselves for fear of wild animals from the forest. I had never before experienced such heat; it was like a blanket over the face, even the thin muslin mosquito-net took the breath. But at any rate there were not yet rats; only a few rustles in the roof, and in the end I fell asleep in spite of Alfred’s whisper, the music and the heat and the strangeness.
The Primitive
I was called at five by Mark and Amah, whom I again sent on ahead to warn the chief at Duogobmai. It was just as well to get Amah out of the way; Vande had chosen him as second headman, but already I could tell how unpopular he was. He was the only Mandingo among the carriers, and for the first week of the march tribal differences caused almost continuous trouble. He was strong, reliable, the best-looking man of a rather weedy set, but he had no sense of humour and they teased him mercilessly until he got into a sullen rage.
Mark and Amah had nearly three hours’ start, for the chief’s hospitality was by no means over. He gave my cousin a hideous leather satchel made in the village in the bright crude colours of Italian leather work, and his son gave me a bundle of knives from the smithy. Unfortunately his hospitality included the carriers and he provided them with a large meal before they started.
The character of a carrier is childlike. He enjoys the moment. He cannot connect cause and effect. He is used to one meal in the day at evening, he lives on the edge of subsistence, and it would be a hard master who grudged him the unexpected pleasure of an extra meal. The chief’s kindness made them for a few minutes gloriously happy, and when almost immediately they suffered from walking with heavy loads on a full stomach, they didn’t connect their suffering with their pleasure. They simply felt with minds clouded with indigestion that somebody was treating them badly. It was always the same throughout the four weeks of marching; whenever they had a breakfast they worked badly, grumbled and made palavers; when food became scarce they worked well and were happy. On one occasion they spent nearly forty-eight hours without food and at the end of that time they were fresher than they had ever been.
I had been warned of this; I knew what to expect; the food hadn’t been in their bellies five minutes before rebellion stirred. But they could be distracted, too, as easily as children, and when a man presented me with a small grey monkey on a string they were temporarily happy again. They liked something to torment. They poked it with sticks. They turned it upside down. They dragged it head first in the dust. They tickled its private parts, and the little brute screamed at them and tried to bite and turned its bloodshot eyes this way and that for an escape. When they left it in peace for a moment it sat with its head in its wrinkled hands as if it were weeping. Laminah and Alfred were its chief tormentors, they were like bullies at school with a new boy who couldn’t hit back; the other men were amused and tormented it occasionally when they were bored, but sometimes they were kind to it, offering it pieces of banana or kola nuts, and after a while they forgot it. Even Laminah gave up teasing it in the end, and Mark became its companion. After the first four days it went everywhere with him; it sat on his shoulder all the way through the forest until at Ganta it escaped; it rested its hands on his head and searched his hair for insects. It never tried to bite him; he never talked to it; they accepted each other in silence.
It was eight o’clock before the men had finished eating and were ready to start. They were very slow and quarrelsome, and I went on ahead with my two spare hammock-men. Alfred walked in front dangling the monkey, and Babu walked behind carrying two harps. Almost immediately we were in the forest, but it was only the edge of the great waste of bush which covers the Republic to within sight of the sea. I felt rather absurd with my two companions, climbing up out of the forest, over the crest of a small cracked hill covered with round huts while the natives came to the door and stared at the sight of the first white man they’d seen for months. One really needed to be a minor prophet to emerge suddenly like this, almost unaccompanied, with two harps and a monkey . . .
On a narrow path we met three men with long curved cutlasses cutting away the bush; Alfred spoke to them; they came from Pandemai. They said the chief had expected the white man the night before; he had swept a hut and cooked food for thirty men. Alfred suggested it would be a good thing to spend the night with the chief. He would be offended otherwise. Duogobmai was too far, too far. . . . He asked the men about it. They shook their heads. He said that it was more than a day’s march from Pandemai. But I couldn’t speak the language, and Babu, whom I trusted, couldn’t speak any English, and Alfred I believed to be a liar. But liars sometimes speak the truth.
A little later a tiny stream, a patch of sand, a cloud of butterflies, marked th
e boundary between Bande country and Buzie country, and soon after we came out into a broad sun-drenched clearing below Pandemai. A concrete house was being built beside the path with a fence and a garden gate, and a black man in a European suit with an old white topee came out to meet me and laughed and lifted his hat and laughed again. He was a middle-aged man with a hard mean face which he had covered defensively for the occasion with an expression of silliness and subservience. He said, ‘Mr Greene, we were expecting you last night.’ He had the name pat, he laughed in a nervous servile way after every sentence, and there was something unmistakably clerical about his manner. One felt the Sermon on the Mount was somewhere about, though it had gone sour. He was a missionary from Monrovia, and now he was engaged in building his new mission. Like Mr Reeves he believed in concrete and like Mr Reeves he kept his brother blacks well in hand.
He said, ‘The chief had everything prepared for you last night,’ and again he laughed as much as to say, ‘I know I’m laughable, I’m only a black and you are a white, you are laughing at me, but you needn’t think I don’t laugh too.’ He led the way up to Pandemai, laughing and complaining all the way, not taking himself seriously, with a bitter humility which didn’t really disguise the hardness and meanness below it. I wanted to go straight through; I was afraid of trouble with the carriers if they once put down their loads, but the missionary was too ready to accept my refusal as one more sign that he was despised. I couldn’t give him that excuse, and now that my cousin had joined us, I let the missionary lead the way to his two-roomed hut in the town. The place was bug-ridden; we had only sat on the porch for a minute, while we ate the bananas he brought in a wooden bowl, before we realized that.
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