View of the World

by Norman Lewis

  The main problem confronting these concessionaries is Liberia’s acute shortage of unskilled labour. The Liberian tribesman has always been accustomed to gain the mere necessities of life with a minimum of effort. At the most he will consent to clear and burn a little virgin bush, and then leave it to the womenfolk to plant the ‘dry’ rice and cassava forming the basic diet. Even the women’s agricultural work is very light. No hoeing, weeding or watering is done. The family simply waits for the crop to come up, and supplements its diet by harvesting a few tropical fruits. The Liberian countryman will eat anything. There are no sizeable wild animals left in the country to hunt, but the chance windfall of a serpent or a giant snail, the seasonal manna of flying ants, and palm grubs – all are joyfully accepted for the cooking-pot. The result of this catholicity of appetite is a well-balanced diet and a good physique. The amount of leisure enjoyed by a Liberian villager – especially a man of substance with a full quota of three wives to wait on him hand and foot – is quite beyond the comprehension of modern civilised man. It is natural enough that such a villager is extremely reluctant to exchange this lotus-eating existence for that of a plantation labourer working up to twelve hours a day for a wage of thirty cents, and what are called ‘fringe benefits’, i.e. free housing, medical supervision, and so on. When, indeed, he is driven by force of circumstances into the plantations, he will sometimes pathetically attempt to emphasise the transitory and separate nature of his life as a labourer by adopting a temporary name which often recalls the brighter side of plantation life, such as Dinner Pail, T-shirt, Pay Day, or Christmas. In these circumstances, labour is simply obtained by a system of bonuses paid to local chiefs – whose word is more than law. There is nothing furtive or shamefaced about this procedure, and the amounts paid duly figure in company balance sheets submitted for stockholders’ approval.

  Firestone, which controls a labour force of 25,000 men to operate its million-acre concession, and which sets the pace in these matters, pays $1.50 per man, per annum, and its 1955 balance sheet discloses a total of $90,000 expended in this way. ‘In addition [I quote from Case Study of Firestone Operation in Liberia, published in the Nation Planning Association series] a regular scale of non-monetary gifts from Firestone to the paramount, clan, and occasionally town chiefs, has also evolved.’ This regular scale of non-monetary gifts for the supply of labour goes under the dignified title of the ‘Paramount Chiefs Assistance Plan’, and it was developed, we are assured, with the full knowledge and consent of the Liberian Government, and has also been adopted by other foreign companies.

  I learned, by the way, that it was considered highly unethical to outbid one’s competitors in this extremely restricted labour market. Just as a successful tradesman may consider it a good thing to contribute occasionally to the local police benevolent fund, foreign companies operating in Liberia are also notably generous in their support of charitable, educational, cultural and religious institutions in Liberia.

  The minimum wage of thirty cents a day, which is between one-third and one-fifth of wages paid for equivalent labour in the adjacent colonies of the British Sierra Leone and the French Ivory Coast, is explained in the publication already quoted, as a device for keeping inflation in check. More cogently it is argued that Liberian employers of labour could not afford substantial pay increases. Liberians have been quick, in fact, to convert themselves into plantation owners, and as soon as a new road is completed it is lined on both sides with the plantations of prominent Liberians who act as small subsidiaries of Firestone. These native plantation operators obtain free seedlings from Firestone, and as long as their labour costs remain cheap, and their land can be obtained under ‘advantageous’ terms from tribal communities who have never heard of title deeds, they seem to be on a very good thing. Occasionally in the current scramble for land, someone oversteps the mark, and there is a rumpus in the Liberian Press. While I was in Liberia, a tribe actually dared to take a foreign company to court for the illegal enclosure of its tribal land, and no one was more astounded than the tribesmen themselves when they won their case.

  Considering the subservience of the Liberian Press, it is extraordinary how much self-criticism can be found in its pages, combined with extreme sensibility to adverse comment from anyone outside the True Whig Party family – especially foreigners. All the private scandals of Liberian government: the corruption in the judiciary, the oppression of tribal people by district commissioners, the bribe-taking by persons in high places (with the exact amount of the bribe), are ruthlessly exposed to the foreign eye. Some of these revelations, in fact, such as the account published in the Listener of May 14th 1957, of organised highway robbery on one of Liberia’s two main roads – which had then been in progress for over two months, and had the backing, the paper thought, of ‘top interior officials’ – make almost incredible reading. Yet the same papers explode with indignation on the slightest foreign comment that might be taken as injurious to national pride. Such outbursts are sometimes lacking in a sense of proportion. Recently the Listener came out with banner headlines: ‘Stamp Dealer Says Liberia Owns Savage Cannibal Tribes’. About one quarter of the space normally allotted to news was devoted to mulling over this slander, and there was a further orgy of wound-licking in a long editorial headed ‘Please Treat Us Kindly Next Time’. It turned out that an obscure stamp dealer in Boston had had the enterprising notion of printing a little geographical information on the packets he sent out. Naturally this was highly coloured stuff intended to excite the interest of the children whom one presumes would be his principal customers; but to the Liberian inflamed sensitivity it was a monstrous calumny that overshadowed any international crises, such as that of the Suez Canal, that happened to be about at the time.

  There are of course no ‘cannibalistic tribes’ anywhere in Africa but the fact that cannibalistic practices do exist in Liberia is abundantly clear to anyone who reads the very uninhibited Liberian Press. Cases of ‘medicine’ murders by ‘Human Elephant Men’, ‘Snake People’, ‘Water People’, an organisation with the macabre official title of the Negee Aquatic Cannibalistic Society, and various other criminal secret groups, are regularly reported in the newspapers. These often contain gruesome anatomical details, and are sometimes accompanied by a journalistic-reactionary demand for the reinstitution of trial by Sassywood – which in its pure form means that the suspect drinks deadly poison, brewed from the bark of the sassy tree, Erythrophloeum guineense, from which he is supposed to recover if innocent. Here is an example extracted from the editorial published in the Liberian Age of April 30th, 1956, which incidentally explains the motive behind ritual murders.

  TRIAL BY ORDEAL

  In the last few weeks the Liberian Age reported that two men and a child have been murdered to make medicine. One was to invoke the blessings of the gods so that there will be a plentiful harvest in the rice season and the others were for reasons far more dubious.

  The Government might do well in the circumstances to put a check to these unwholesome and superstitious practices by reinstating trial by ordeal, commonly known as trial by Sassywood.

  Admittedly, Sassywood is a pagan cult and in a Christian State pagan cults should be frowned upon and eliminated. But the fact remains that in order to check these pagan practices we must employ the one method in which practitioners of paganism have an abiding faith, namely, the Sassywood trial.

  In the Revised Statutes and in the Administrative Regulations trial by ordeal is forbidden except in minor matters and under licence of the Interior Department.

  But the Constitution also provides that government should use every possible method to protect the life of the citizen and to punish the guilty of wilful murder. In such cases where life is endangered, the Government would be perfectly justified in using any legitimate method in bringing to account persons with pagan proclivities who are in the habit of so destroying life for foolish ends. The case for trial by ordeal even becomes stronger when the ordinary process of law becom
es powerless in finding the guilty, due to the fact that persons who normally engage in such practices belong to some society or the other which gives them protection.

  The ‘medicine’ referred to in this article is sometimes called ‘borfina’. It is manufactured from the organs of a murdered person, and as well as being employed in the ancient magical ceremonies common to primeval humanity to promote rainfall and to influence the growth of crops, it is in brisk demand by those who dabble in witchcraft for their own ends. Borfina is in common use, not only in Liberia, but in most of West Africa, and it is reported that rich men will offer as much as one hundred dollars for a scent bottle full of the grisly stuff. In Liberia it is obtained by professional ‘heart-men’ who usually work at night and prefer women and children for their victims. It is a sinister fact that the ‘heart-men’ are more active at the period of the Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter, when they are believed to invade even the capital itself in search of their prey. At these times Liberian countrymen go armed and in pairs along the jungle paths, and the women working in the fields keep in touch by calling to each other at frequent intervals. It is practically unknown for a white man to be the victim of a medicine murder, as it is believed that medicine obtained from a white man is of little or no value.

  Trial by ordeal, I soon discovered, although not practised by colonial regions of Africa, is an everyday occurrence in Liberia, and I had only been in the country about a week before I had the opportunity of seeing how it worked. Wanting to learn as much as I could of the interior – a little of which had become accessible in the last few years by the completion of new roads – I hired a taxi in Monrovia and drove across country to the frontier of French Guinea and back, a journey taking three days. I carried with me a letter of introduction to Mr Charles Williams, District Commissioner of Bgarnba, where I hoped to stay the first night, and it was at Bgarnba that I encountered this survival of medieval justice.

  Mr Williams was in court when I arrived. I sent in my letter, and in a few minutes the commissioner came out to welcome me. He was a tall handsome man, with a reserved, almost melancholic expression. He mentioned that he still had a large number of cases to try, and asked whether I would be interested in seeing the district court in operation. I was naturally more than interested. As we strolled back to the courthouse Mr Williams softly whistled a bar or two of ‘Through the Night of Doubt and Sorrow’. I later discovered that he was a devout Episcopalian, with a great affection for Hymns Ancient and Modern.

  The court was held in a large circular hut. About fifty members of the public were present, seated on rows of benches. The atmosphere was relaxed and informal. Most of the women had their babies with them, which they fed intermittently at the breast. The soldiers who brought in petty offenders from time to time hung about in wilting attitudes until they were dismissed. A pair of counsels, nattily dressed in sports clothes, kept up a crossfire of legal repartee. Seated behind his desk Mr Williams looked mildly judicial and perhaps a trifle sardonic. Once in a while he picked up his mallet and brought it down with a crash, sometimes to restore order, sometimes to deal with a tsetse fly that had alighted on his desk. Most of the complainants and defendants did not speak English, and as Mr Williams was a member of the Liberian ruling class and therefore spoke nothing but English, the services of an interpreter were often necessary. The interpreter translated from the tribal languages into a kind of Liberian pidgin, which I found completely impossible to understand. Even Mr Williams was often in difficulties, and called on the interpreter to repeat a sentence.

  The examination of witnesses began with the routine question put by the commissioner, ‘Do you hear English?’ – followed, if the witness did in fact hear English by a second question, ‘You Christian man?’ Three out of four of those appearing before the court were not Christian men, and in these cases Mr Williams ordered the administering of an oath by ‘carfoo’ – a liquid concoction, or medicine, prepared by a witch-doctor, which although normally innocuous, is supposed to be fatal to the pagan perjurer. Although restrained in his manner at most times, Mr Williams seemed unable sometimes to control an outburst of genial contempt when he noticed a tendency on a witness’s part to hang back at this moment of the oath-taking. ‘Come, drink carfoo and lie, so that you may die tonight,’ was a typical invitation roared at a minor chief who showed some reluctance when the witches’ brew was put into his hands. When a Christian witness avoided touching the Bible with his lips, the commissioner leapt to his feet and pushed the book into his face. ‘Come on, man. Kiss the holy book, unless you are determined to lie.’

  Most of the civil cases arose out of what is known in Liberia as ‘woman palaver’. Mr Williams explained to me that no man of standing would have fewer than three wives, each having been purchased for the standard bride-price of forty dollars, paid to the girl’s father. A rich man bought wives as an investment. They worked his land for him without expecting to be paid, and they produced valuable children into the bargain. The local paramount chief, he mentioned, had a hundred wives, each one decently housed in her separate hut in his compound. Unfortunately the tendency was for a man’s wives to increase in number as he himself advanced in years, and – well – you knew what it was – the women sometimes found themselves with a fair amount of time on their hands. This meant that they were inclined to get into hot water, and although most possessors of large harems took a pretty civilised view of wives forming subsidiary friendships, there were a few narrow-minded and litigious husbands who went to court, particularly to sue for the return of the forty dollars paid, when a wife ran off with some other man. In dealing with these ‘woman palaver’ cases, one of Mr Williams’s chief difficulties was his evident distaste for coarse language. When a man complained that his wife refused to sleep with him, Mr Williams winced and put this blunt statement into the more elegant and evasive English of Monrovia. ‘Your husband alleges that you refused to accord him the privilege of meeting with you,’ was how he reworded this delicate circumstance, when cross-examining the wife. The only European to appear in court that day was the Italian overseer in charge of a gang of labourers working on a bridge-construction project nearby. His offence was that in dismissing one of his men for malingering he had referred in a burst of anger – as Italians will – to the man’s wife, using at the same time a four-letter word. This was a grave matter indeed in a country where a European can be heavily fined and deported for calling a man a ‘nigger’, and all work on the bridge stopped while the whole gang of workmen were brought to the court to testify. Mr Williams, after first ordering English-hearing women to leave the court, asked for the actual word complained of to be repeated. It was spoken in a stunned silence. The Italian spread his palms and smiled apologetically. One English word was like another to him. He genuinely didn’t understand what the fuss was about. In the end Mr Williams read him a long lecture on vulgarity and let him off with a caution, and the Italian went away still mystified, shaking his head.

  Shortly after this a woman was brought in by her husband, who charged her with infidelity. She had confessed to five lovers – or as Mr Williams put it, to granting intimate favours to five men other than her lawful husband – and in accordance with Liberian law the husband had been awarded damages of ten dollars against each man. The trouble was that he now claimed that the names of other lovers had been concealed. Witnesses and counter-witnesses were produced, there were charges of perjury, and it was quite clear that this had all the makings of a lengthy and endlessly complicated case, when the woman agreed to submit to trial by ordeal. With evident relief Mr Williams ordered this to take place next morning immediately after dawn.

  I slept the night in the commissioner’s house, and at the appointed hour next morning I went over to the local lock-up, outside which the trial was to be staged. I found the calabozo of Bgarnba to consist of a long thatched hut, on the veranda of which several female prisoners, faces plastered with white cosmetic clay, were reclining in hammocks, under the a
pathetic guard of a soldier of about sixteen years of age. A witch-doctor – previously referred to by Mr Williams as ‘a mystical man’ – had arrived, and was lighting a small fire of twigs. He was a foxy-looking old fellow dressed in a fairground mountebank’s purple robe. Mr Williams was not present.

  As soon as the fire was well alight, the mystical man produced from the folds of his robe a metal object like a large flattened spoon, engraved with Arabic characters, and put this to heat in the heart of the fire. This was to be a version of the ordeal by the burning iron. In another variant of this type of ordeal, a heated sabre is brought into contact with one of the limbs. Other ordeals in common use involve the insertion of small pebbles under the eyelids, or the thrusting of needles into the flesh.

  A few minutes later the wronged husband and the errant wife came on the scene. Both had dressed very carefully for the occasion – the man in a sort of yellow toga and the girl in a bright cotton frock printed with a pineapple design. They were accompanied by the clerk of the court, who wore a sports blazer with a crest on the breast pocket, and had a pencil stuck in his thick, woolly hair. A young soldier carrying a rifle trailed behind them. No one spoke or showed the slightest interest in the preparations. Liberians, other than the citizens of Monrovia, are trained by their long and rigorous years of initiation in the bush to maintain an attitude of formal unconcern in the face of all such crises. Later, I discovered that the woman had not been held in custody overnight, and may have had the opportunity to visit the head of the local women’s secret society, the Sande, then in session, who might have prepared her with some ‘bush-medicine’ for what she had to face, or even have induced a protective hypnotic state.