A Kind of Homecoming

by Braithwaite, E. R. ;

  From the hill we dropped down along the broad main avenue towards Government Square, where most of the ministries were located, passing the executive mansion and its adjoining garden, which, I was told, was the special interest of the President’s wife, and the place where she annually conducted a Christmas party for the children of the city. Hotels, banks and imposing residences, bright with clean paint and oozing prosperity.

  Now and then my companion would point to a building and say, “That’s the President’s.”

  At first I became somewhat confused, thinking that he was referring to State residences, then he explained that they were buildings owned by the President and now rented by him to the State as temporary accommodations for one government office or another. It seemed that the Old Man was a very important landowner, among other things.

  Further along the scene changed. We drove through busy Camp Johnson Street, flanked on both sides with shops of every description, and rendered somewhat down-at-heel and dingy by the sleazy apartments which surmounted them, festooned with strings of drying laundry. Our progress was slow because of the casual crowd of shoppers and idlers, and together with the heat there was the overpowering stench of drying fish.

  At the end of Camp Johnson Street the road widened and turned up towards Camp Johnson Point, past the low buildings of the University of Liberia, which, in the shade of overhanging mango and palm trees, looked more like a quiet residential hotel than a seat of learning. Farther on I could see the domed mass of the Capitol Building, which I was told had cost three-quarters of a million pounds. As we drove I was getting a quick brief on the important places of Monrovia, but much of their importance seemed to be related to their structural cost. Not many details were forthcoming about their purpose or productiveness.

  I was shown the site for the new law courts, and that of the new executive mansion, where a huge skeletal structure was gradually taking shape. If the old mansion cost three-quarters of a million pounds, this mammoth new structure would probably cost several times that amount.

  “Where does the money come from for all this?” I asked.

  “We’re a rich country,” was all the answer I got.

  Farther out we drove into Sinkor, an area being developed as an important residential section of the city. I gasped in admiration and wonder at the beautiful ultra-modern bungalows and two- or three-storied houses, each one sheltered and fondled by palms or other shady trees. There was plenty of space between the buildings, so that one could see them individually and admire not only the house, but its personal setting also. The churches, too, were of modern design, contributing to the atmosphere of comfort and wealth.

  “Nice, eh?” he said. “All owned by Liberians, but many of them rented out to Europeans and Americans. Many of our ministers and other high government officials live here. You know something, some of these new houses were designed and built by two of our own architects. That’s one over there.” He pointed to a new, low-lying bungalow in which elegant lines were combined with a tasteful use of glass, wood and concrete to a degree that one felt that the building was designed right there, on the spot, to harmonize and conform with the trees which surrounded it and the earth from which it rose like a beautiful, natural growth.

  “Wonderful,” I agreed.

  “Those two boys studied in Europe, and we’re very proud of them. Won’t be long before they’ll take over some of the big contracts which are going to foreign contractors.”

  Standing in front of the houses were big, shiny American cars, resplendent and very imposing.

  “Let’s go visit a friend of mine,” my companion suggested, and without waiting for my reply, swung into a wide driveway and on to a charming villa.

  In reply to our ring, the door was opened by a handsome young woman, who smiled in welcome and invited us into a large well-appointed room. After the introductions she invited us to take some refreshment with her, then left us for a few moments. Much of the furniture was beautiful and evidently expensive, and all the fabric-covered units, even the cushions, were further protected by the same kind of thick plastic covering which permitted me to appreciate the beauty and costliness of the piece, but greatly reduced the comfort which such elegance promised.

  This was the home of an important government official, to whom my companion was rather vaguely related. Soon Mrs. Brown, our hostess, returned, followed by a houseboy, who carried a tray laden with drinks and a bucket of crushed ice, which he set on a small table. Then he quietly departed. Mrs. Brown was an excellent hostess and interesting conversationalist, with a very fine wit and easy good humour. It was obvious that she was accustomed to her role of charming hostess. She apologized for her husband’s absence—he was attending to some urgent matter of State.

  While chatting with her a small, chubby child entered the room. She laughingly presented him as her eighth and was quite amused at my amazement, for neither her smooth face nor girlish figure suggested motherhood, let alone eight children, three of whom were at school somewhere in Europe. Presently the houseboy returned with a pitcher containing the milk and the pulp of green coconuts. This she served with brandy and ice, a most refreshing mixture, and as I drank I remembered that this was also a favourite drink in Guinea.

  After this pleasant interlude we turned back towards town to be on time for my appointment with the President. We were directed to a waiting-room one floor above the reception room where we had waited during the morning. Although we arrived on time, several men were already there, including the new appointee, who wished to express his thanks to the President. Much of the conversation I overheard related to concern about the price of latex, the raw material from which rubber products are manufactured, and I readily concluded that the men were rubber-planters. When I said this to Mr. Baker, he corrected me, and explained that most of the men were state officials, but each of them operated rubber plantations or farms, which provided a considerable source of revenue to them.

  Apart from rubber, the conversations were about recently purchased American or German cars, trips abroad, and the prospects of “getting in on the ground floor” of new industrial projects. Apparently the President had requested some of them to see him that evening, for there was quite a bit of speculation about what he would say and do. Mr. Baker told me who some of the men were, and again I learned of the concentric rings of relationship operating within the Government. I tried to discuss this with my companion but he parried every lead I made, leaving me with the suspicion that he too was involved in the pattern.

  “How is it that these men are public servants and rubber-planters­ at the same time? Either of those interests would require full-time attention, it seems to me.”

  “Oh, they need not clash,” he replied. “Our office hours are from eight or eight-thirty in the morning to two-thirty in the afternoon, with a short lunch interval. That leaves lots of time to do something else. Most of the wealthy planters leave town on Friday afternoon and spend the week-end up-country on their farms, where they have nice houses with all modern conveniences.”

  “Do they operate co-operatives?” I asked.

  “No, they grow the rubber trees and sell the latex to the Fire­stone Company, which operates its own large plantations but buys the produce of the farmers.”

  Other gentlemen arrived, and gradually the waiting-room filled up. By seven-fifteen I was becoming increasingly irritable at the prospect of another long wait, and impatient with my companion’s attempts at reassurance. As was the case during the morning, a few persons were called into an inner room, while the rest of us waited and hoped. At seven-thirty or thereabouts, the President entered the room, looking refreshed and cool, and as before he apologized for the long delay but regretted that he could see no one else. As he spoke he caught sight of someone he recognized, and, addressing him by name, advised him not to worry about certain attacks made upon him by others.

  “Nobody can harm yo
u while I’m President,” he promised, at which the old man beamed and cried his thanks.

  We had all stood when the President entered the room, and now he shook hands in dismissal. When he came to me he again graciously apologized for whatever inconvenience I had been caused through waiting, and asked how long I would be in Liberia and what my plans were. I told him I wished to visit as much of the interior as possible and hoped to spend about two or three weeks in the country. Turning to my companion, he said, “Baker, see to it that our visitor is given every facility while he’s with us. If he needs transport, arrange it through one of the departments. If anyone queries it, tell them to refer to me.” With that he wished me a pleasant visit and withdrew.

  I was delighted, but my friend was positively enraptured, and kept repeating, “See what I mean? He’d been thinking about you all the time. Suppose you had left before he appeared, eh? What then? Tomorrow we’ll go to one of the ministries and get you fixed up with a car and chauffeur.”

  “Oh, I won’t need a chauffeur,” I protested.

  “Yes, you will,” he insisted. “Especially in the interior. You’ll need someone with you who knows the people and their customs. In any case, it means a job for somebody, so why not?”

  I couldn’t argue on any of those points.

  On the way to my hotel I asked, “Do you know what the President meant by his remark to that elderly man?”

  “Yes, he works in one of the ministries—been there for years but some of the younger men have been making things difficult for him, that’s why he was at the mansion to see the President. But the Old Man already knew about it, as you saw for yourself. Nobody knows how he knows or who tells him things, but there’s very little which happens anywhere about which he doesn’t know.”

  Maybe this was the reason why the President saw anybody, any time. It might be tiring and sometimes inconvenient for him, but if he thus was able to keep his finger firmly on the country’s pulse, it was probably worth it.

  Early the next morning I went with Mr. Baker to one of the ministries, and with the President’s name as our magic talisman, I received authorization for a car and driver from the largest taxi service in town. The driver proved to be an eager young man who claimed to know his way about the hinterland as well as he knew Monrovia. I liked the look of him and arranged for him to call for me at the hotel at six o’clock the next morning for our trip up-country. I explained to the owner of the taxi service that I expected to be in the hinterland three or four days, travelling most of the time, and asked that the car be checked for road-worthiness and made fully dependable. My plans for an early start were due to the lesson I had learned in Sierra Leone. I wanted to see all I could, yet be as comfortable as possible.

  After these arrangements were completed, Mr. Baker left me to return to his duties, and I wandered around. Down by the waterside, where the Lebanese and other business houses crowded each other, the street was clogged with vehicular and pedestrian traffic in spite of the herculean efforts of two whistle-blowing policemen to keep the traffic moving.

  Though there were many idlers sitting around, I could feel the dynamism, the thrust, the movement, expressed in everything the people did—their carriage, their strong laughter, even the attitude of the idlers, who looked as though in a moment they could move to productive effort. Passing one shop I saw a comfortable-­looking pair of sandals, which I imagined would be fine for up-country, so I went in to inquire about the price. A young African was sweeping the floor, while behind the counter, at some distance from the doorway, a Lebanese man sat reading a newspaper.

  “What you want?” The Liberian leaned against the broom, which he held as a prop, and placed himself in front of me, barring my progress beyond him.

  “I’m interested in some sandals I saw in the show-window,” I replied.

  “Four pounds,” he said, in a flat decisive voice.

  I felt both affronted and irritated by his casual impoliteness, and the fact that he did not even ask which pair of sandals I meant.

  “What do you mean, four pounds!” I countered. “You don’t even know which pair I want.”

  “Anything in that window, four pounds,” he insisted.

  Any moment now I would say something rude to him, so I pushed past and walked over towards the Lebanese, who had put away his paper and was approaching us.

  “Tell me something, please,” I said to him. “To whom does this shop belong?—to him or to you?”

  “I own it,” he replied with a smile, “but he behaves as if it is his.”

  “In that case you should insist that he be a little more polite to customers,” I told him.

  “I insist. Always I insist, but it make no difference,” he replied.

  “Then why don’t you fire him?” I could not understand his attitude.

  “So I fire him, and tomorrow I employ another one just like him, only I don’t know the other one. Better I keep this one that I know. Did you want something? Shoes, shirt, perhaps?”

  I explained about the sandals, but unfortunately a pair in my size was not available. The young Liberian grinned at me as I left. Perhaps, as someone had told me, Africans do not respect Africans, and he thought me an African, even a Liberian. As my irritation subsided I realized that I was being treated as one of them and not liking all of it. I would have to learn to forget myself sufficiently to realize that it was, in its own way, a kind of compliment that the young man felt he could be casual with me. Perhaps one day he would understand a little more about human dignity and be able to be more tactful and courteous.

  I climbed a steep incline to another roadway and was attracted by a group of men and women standing before a two-storied building from which there was a great deal of coming and going. Someone told me that it was a courthouse, and that the court was now in session. Yes, anyone could go in and sit. I went up two flights of stairs and entered a narrow, elongated room, at the far end of which a man sat behind a high desk on a raised platform; in his right hand he held a gavel, which he occasionally banged on the top of the desk before making some remark or other. At floor level, before him, two other men sat at a desk facing each other; near them was the dock—a raised platform railed on three sides. Behind this platform were several wooden benches, on which sat a score or more persons, probably interested observers.

  My entry seemed to have attracted some attention, for everyone turned to look at me, their expressions temporarily frozen like the “stills” from a film. I had the feeling that I had somehow committed a breach of protocol, and, in an attempt to correct this, walked towards the judge (for such he was) and apologized for blundering into his courtroom, excusing myself by the fact that I was a stranger and merely wanted to see what was going on. With a smile, the judge, an apparently very young man, accepted my apology and invited me to take a seat nearby and see “How we dispense justice here.”

  The case seemed simple enough. Someone had been found in possession of an article which was not his, but denied stealing it. The owner of the article had seen the accused in the immediate vicinity of the article shortly before its disappearance and presumed theft. It was interesting and rather entertaining to watch the main protagonists in this case, who were not the accuser and accused, but their lawyers, who indulged in such objections and counter-objections that the judge was finally moved to ask. “Who’s objecting about what this time?”

  The proceedings may have been of serious concern to the man in the dock, for he stood in jeopardy of his freedom, but to me and probably others present, it was like a small comic scene from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, a kind of parody on jurisprudence, with the judge’s gavel a recurrent punctuation. There was an informality similar to that of American courts, but the little dignity was further lessened by the judge’s occasional humorous asides to the lawyers, one of whom would have looked all the better for a shave and a clean shirt, and by the conduct of the lawyers
themselves. Neither of them seemed to fully understand even the unnecessarily long words he used, as these were often incorrectly used and badly juxtaposed.

  I wondered where these men were trained, and how many poor souls were similarly dependent on their unskilled direction. Before the case ended, I took advantage of a lull in the proceedings to thank the judge for his courtesy in permitting me to visit with him, then hurried away. If time and opportunity permitted I’d try to visit the high court on my return from the hinterland.

  I needed a map of Liberia in order to plan my itinerary but could not obtain one at the book shop. I went to the HQ of the Ministry of the Interior and drew a blank there, also. Someone suggested that I try the office of the International Co-operation Administration. I went there and was given four excellent maps of Liberia. Odd, that!

  Back at my hotel I planned my route, prepared my gear and paid my hotel bill so that I would be free to move in the early morning. I went to bed early and was up, ready and waiting at six. At seven o’clock the car had not appeared and I was by now quite angry and worried, in my mind running through the hundred and one unpleasant things which might have delayed the chauffeur.

  He arrived at seven-thirty, bright-eyed and cheerful and genuinely surprised at my cold greeting. I told him he was one and a half hours late and asked if he did not realize it. Didn’t he notice the time? His reply was simple and completely disarming; he could not read, nor write, nor tell time.

  So simple a thing, but it shocked me. I have encountered illiteracy in many ways and thought that none of its forms would surprise me. But I had never linked it with so everyday a thing as reading the face of a clock. It really shook me. Then when we were rolling smoothly along the highway, out of Monrovia, I had a sudden thought, and asked him how fast we were travelling. The speedometer showed sixty m.p.h. He looked at it and merely said, “Not fast.”