View of the World

by Norman Lewis

  Chairs were fetched, and the couple took their seats facing the fire, which was now burning briskly. They sat a few feet apart, stolidly oblivious of each other, like bored life-partners awaiting the serving of an uninspiring meal. The mystical man pulled out the iron, tested it with his spittle, and pushed it back into the fire. There was a short wait, and at a nod from the witch-doctor the girl put out her tongue. He bent over her and there was a faint sizzle. The witch-doctor went closer, peering at the girl’s mouth like a conscientious dentist. He dabbed again with the iron. Nothing moved in the girl’s face. Her husband looked glumly into space. The witch-doctor picked up a mug that stood ready, containing water, handed it to the girl, who filled her mouth, rinsed the water round, spat it out, and thrust out her tongue again for inspection. The witch-doctor, the clerk and the soldier then examined it closely for condemnatory traces of burning. ‘Not guilty,’ said the clerk in a flat voice. He took the pencil out of his hair, wrote something in a notebook, and the whole party, their boredom in no apparent way relieved, began to move off. Justice had been done.

  The bush society which may well have taken a surreptitious hand in these proceedings is probably the feature of Liberian life which has most impressed – or appalled – foreigners who have visited the hinterland. African tribal life from the southern limits of the Sahara Desert to the borders of the Union of South Africa is dominated more or less by secret societies, but it is in Liberia, where European influence has been least felt, and the original fabric of tribal life therefore best preserved, that the secret societies are most strongly entrenched. There is a society for the men called the Poro, and one for the women, the Sande. These are in session alternately, each for several years. Every member of the tribe must enter the society and the prestige of the society is so great that, outside the control exercised by government officials, it is the de facto ruler of the country, with the grand-master of the society as a kind of undercover opposite number of the government-appointed district commissioner. When the women’s society – the Sande – takes over from the Poro for its normal session of three years, actual power passes to the women. All major decisions relating to tribal life are decided by them, and it is customary for men to dress in symbolical homage as women, and in this guise to apply for admission to the Sande – which is of course refused.

  Exact information about African secret societies is extremely difficult to obtain, even by anthropologists, but it is clear that their real purpose is to perpetuate the tribe’s highly complex way of life, by the communal education of its youth, which at the same time is physically and mentally prepared for the hard life of savannah and jungle. Both societies impose a Spartan, even terrifying, discipline on their initiates. The boys must in theory – even if the practice has fallen into disuse – be transformed into warriors, must learn to defend themselves against savage animals, to take part in successful raiding parties, and to frustrate the attacks of tribal enemies. To achieve this result they are subjected to a more than military discipline; starved, flogged, made to sleep in the rain, to take part in gladiatorial combats, attacked and wounded superficially by human beings disguised as wild beasts, finally ‘swallowed’ by the totemic animal of the tribe, after which they are ‘reborn’ – in theory with no memory of their past lives – as fully initiated tribal members. The training of the girls is less arduous, but may be even more painful since it includes processes of beautifying by cicatrising, tattooing, and sometimes actually carving the flesh with knives, and finally that scourge of nearly all African women: clitoridectomy – performed with crude surgery, and without anaesthetics.

  All the African races seem to have decided that only supernatural sanctions can induce human beings to submit to such a course of self-improvement: so teachers in the bush schools are masked and regarded by their pupils as spirits. These are the celebrated ‘bush-devils’ of Liberia, who vary in their importance according to their function, and who are presided over by a kind of super-devil who is a combination of headmaster, sergeant-major and ghost – as well sometimes as judge, and even executioner – and who projects a power so devastating that merely to catch sight of him as he walks in the moonlight is death to an African. Not all this aroma of terror is consciously a disciplinary device. The devils, who are high-ranking members of the bush society, are believed by adepts to be controlled at certain times by powerful spirits, including the tribal ancestors – a belief which may well be shared by the devils themselves. Anthropologists in neighbouring French Guinea, where such aspects of tribal life are more easily observed than in Liberia, believe that masked dancers often pass into a kind of trance, on ceremonial occasions – or sometimes as soon as they put on their masks, which in themselves are supposed to possess a kind of separate life, and to require ‘feeding’ with blood.

  Remarkably enough, the life of the bush-school is popular with Africans. After initiation – which corresponds to graduation in the West – people frequently return to the bush on a voluntary basis to take further courses, and success in these ‘postgraduate courses’ is recognised as a stepping-stone to advancement in the hierarchy of the secret societies, and carries with it at the same time much social prestige.

  African art is seen at its best in the production of cult objects and masks for the Poro and the Sande, and Liberia is one of the last strongholds of vigorous, untainted African art. As the masks worn by the principal bush-devils possess a kind of sanctity, it is not easy for a foreigner even to inspect one, let alone purchase one. The men who carve the sacred masks – who are usually high-ranking adepts of the Poro – say that they do so only when under the influence of an inspirational dream. While I was staying in one of the villages in the bush with an American anthropologist I shall call Warren, the local tribe’s best carver dropped in to pay one of the formal calls which are a part of the complex social ritual of African village life. The carver came in smiling, shook hands, with the characteristic Liberian snap of thumb and finger, accepted a glass of cold beer, and picked up an illustrated book on African art that had just arrived from the United States. ‘Why you no come before, man?’ Warren asked him. ‘I’m vexed with you because you no come.’ The mask-carver said he hadn’t been able to dream for weeks, and as his inspiration seemed to have dried up, he’d gone off to look for diamonds – a popular occupation at present in the area adjoining the Sierra Leone frontier. Warren was relieved. He was afraid that he had unwittingly offended the man in some way. The elaboration of Liberian tribal etiquette makes it quite bewildering to a white man, and although Africans will make intelligent allowances for a foreigner’s ignorance of good manners, it is sometimes difficult to avoid giving offence.

  The mask-carver turned over the pages of the book, giggling slightly, and Warren asked him what he found funny. It was the African’s turn to tread warily now. He’d probably done a six-months course in the bush-school, learning, the hard way, how to avoid hurting people’s feelings, and he clearly didn’t want to tell Warren that he found this collection of masterpieces chosen from the whole African continent pretty poor stuff. In the end Warren got him to express his objection – the mask-carver by the way had picked up a fair amount of English, working on the plantations. ‘I no see the use for these things.’ Non-Liberian African art, in fact, was as extravagant – as grotesque even – to him, as African art as a whole tends to appear to the average untutored Westerner. He just couldn’t see what purpose these distorted objects could serve. The idea of art for art’s sake was completely foreign to him. He flipped over the pages of the book, making a well-bred effort to disguise his contempt. None of these objects could be used in his own tribal ceremonies, so they were useless – and ugly. He was like a die-hard admirer of representational painting asked to comment on the work of, say, Braque. The point was that his own work, which both Warren and I readily accepted as great African art, was as exaggerated and distorted in its own way as were all the rest in this book: except of course that all these diversions from purely representational
portraiture had some quasi-sacred meaning for him. Warren had managed to buy a single mask from this man. He had made it to be worn by a woman leader of society, who for some reason had not taken delivery. The mask was kept out of sight, covered with a cloth. It was dangerous because it was sacrilegious to have it in the house, and it was destined for an American museum unless the Liberian Government suddenly decided to clamp down on the export of works of art – which this certainly was.

  The village of the mask-carver was the cleanest ‘native’ village I have ever seen in any part of the world, as well as being very much cleaner than the average village of southern Europe. Silver sand had been laid between the neatly woven huts, and there were receptacles into which litter – including even fallen leaves – had to be put. While I was there, a tremendous hullabaloo arose because a stranger from another village had relieved himself in a nearby plantation instead of taking the trouble to go to the proper latrine creek in the bush. This was an exceedingly grave offence by Liberian country standards. The man was haled before the town chief, and as he had no money and therefore couldn’t be fined on the spot, he was sentenced to ignominious expulsion from the village – a sentence which was carried out by a concourse of jeering children.

  It was in this village too that I heard the eerie sound of the head woman bush-devil coming out of the sacred bush for a rare public appearance. We could hear the cries of her female attendants, first faint and then coming closer, as she came down the jungle path leading to the village, and a neighbour popped in to tell us that she was on her way to supervise the clearing of a creek by the women’s society. Then something happened and she failed to appear. Perhaps she had been informed of the insalubrious presence of a stranger in the village, and we heard the warning cries of her attendants grow fainter again, and then stop. The men pretended to be relieved. The devil’s attendants acted as female lectors, and administer mild beatings to anyone who happens to cross their path.

  It was while I was in Liberia that an economic use in the modern scheme of things was found for the bush-devil, and the sophisticates of Monrovia were as happy as if they had hit upon a method of extracting cash from some previously discarded industrial by-product.

  Liberia possesses two predominant flourishing industries: rubber, and the mining of the extremely high-grade iron ore. Business heads on the look-out for further sources of national income recently thought of the tourist trade, which has been the economic salvation of far less viable countries than Liberia, and there was some talk even of developing tourism as a third industry. Accordingly plans were laid, and in March this year Monrovia received its first visit from a cruising liner, the Bergensfjord, a luxury Norwegian ship carrying 350 passengers, most of whom appeared from the passenger list to be presidents of US banks and insurance companies, and their womenfolk.

  Unfortunately the Bergensfjord docked on a Sunday, which in Monrovia is surrendered to a zealous nonconformist inactivity, the silence only disturbed by the chanting of hymns and the nostalgic quaver of harmoniums in mission halls. The town was shut up – ‘like a clam’, as the Listener put it. Liberia’s new industry was in danger of dying stillborn, when someone thought of the bush-devils, and a few fairly tame and unimportant ones were hastily sent for. Even when the tourists finally landed, the situation was in the balance. Although they had already been given handbills describing the traditional Liberian entertainment that awaited them, they found their path barred by a large and determined matron in a picture hat who was determined to protect them from such pagan spectacles as they had been promised. When asked where the devil-dancing was to take place, she smiled indulgently and said, ‘In Liberia we do not dance on Sunday. We remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.’ She would then recommend various places of interest which might be visited by taxi, such as the Capitol building, the lighthouse, the nearby Spriggs Payne airfield, and the Trinity Pro-cathedral.

  Most of the passengers succeeded in escaping the clutches of this well-intentioned lady, and led by an organiser of the Bureau of Folklore in a jeep, they were taken in a taxi-caravan to the vacant lot behind a garage, where the dancing was to take place. There were half a dozen assorted devils in not very good masks and all-concealing mantles of raffia, and three little bare-breasted girls who had just finished their initiation and who, despite the presence of a mob of camera-brandishing tourists, were still plainly timid of the devils. It all went off very well. The little girls did a rapid, sprightly dance, and the devils whirled and somersaulted diabolically in their manes and skirts of flying raffia. When the dancers stopped, the tourists clapped enthusiastically. They lined the girls up, took close-up portraits of them with miniature cameras, asked them their ages, shook hands, and gave them silver coins.

  Next morning the Liberian Press wallowed in its usual self-criticism. Hadn’t the town’s lights failed and the telephone system gone dead last time a distinguished party of foreigners headed by none other than Vice-President Nixon, had visited Monrovia? There were stories of tourists being carried off on enormous purposeless drives by taxi-drivers who didn’t understand English and who charged them extortionate fares, and of others stuck in the City Hotel’s Spanish lift. ‘We did it again,’ wailed the Listener. ‘… Here was a chance to impress some of these big business tycoons and draw their capital here some day – but we did it again.’

  In the paper’s next edition, however, the situation wasn’t looking quite so black. The wife of a president of a Boston safe deposit and trust company was reported to have said she loved the country and wanted to come back. Liberia’s latest industry had got off to a hesitant start perhaps, but at least it was on the move.

  9

  Goa

  SOON AFTER DAWN the Goa shore lifts itself out of the sea, a horizon of purplish rocks and palms sabred by the dark sails of dhows. The Indian trippers who came aboard at Bombay, fashionably scarfed, in tweeds and corduroys, have accepted a mood of southern lassitude, and now gather in pyjama-clad groups to gaze respectfully shorewards. As the ship swings into a river-mouth, the shores close in, a red watch-tower on every headland, and baroque chapels gleaming through the greenery. Over the starboard-bow Nova Goa is painted brilliantly on the sky, a hubbub of colour with bells chiming in the churches built on its high places. A few minutes later the gangplank goes down, and as the passengers are released into the smiling apathy of the water-front, a flock of mynahs settle on the ship’s rigging. A line of golden omnibuses wait to bear the voyagers away to distant parts of the territory. The town itself is served by calashes of skeletal elegance, drawn by ponies who, even while dozing in the shafts, are unable to relax their straining posture. For foreigners there are taxis of reputable old Continental make, such as De Dion Bouton. They are decorated with brass-work and advertisements for German beer. Although their owners are usually Christians, Hindu gods, considered as more effective in purely routine matters of protection than, say, St Christopher, squat amongst the artificial flowers over the dashboards.

  The quayside, which is really the heart of the town, is presided over by a statue, not – as one would have expected – of the great Albuquerque, founder of the colony, but of one José Custodio Faria, who, the inscription relates, ‘discovered the doctrine of hypnotic suggestion’. Faria, who is not mentioned in short textbooks on the subject, is dressed in a wicked squire’s cloak of the Wuthering Heights period, and is shown strikingly in action. His subject – or victim – a young lady with a Grecian hairstyle, has been caught in the moment of failing, one trim foot in the air, left hip about to strike the ground, while Faria leans over her, fingers potently extended. Her expression is rapt; his intense, perhaps demoniacal. The background to this petrified drama is a row of shops and taverns, coloured like the wings of tropical birds and decorated with white plaster scrollwork, seemingly squeezed out of a tube.

  A stranger, newly landed, is whisked quickly beyond the range of Faria’s ardent gaze. Ahead of him strides the porter, carrying on his shoulder the luggage which seve
ral small boys, running on either side, reach up to touch with their fingertips, as if it contained relics of extraordinary curative virtue. This attendance entitles them to claim a reward of one anna apiece. The baggage is then placed in the taxi, and the newcomer is driven to the Hotel Central, because it is a long way from the centre of the town and therefore a worthwhile taxi-fare. All this happens to be to the good. The Central is a precious repository of the atmosphere of Goa, and worthy of mention not on account of its advertised attraction – the small tiled dungeon, called a bathroom, available with every room – but of many less tangible charms unappreciated by the management. The fine old Portuguese colonial building growing naturally from the red earth of Goa is the colour of Spanish oxide, with its main façade covered in green tiles and a white make-believe balcony moulded on one wall. Coconuts and frangipani blossoms float down a jade-green stream at the back of the house, and burnished bright-eyed crows come hopping into the front rooms and try to fly away with the guests’ sunglasses. The beach is just across the road, and you can sit and watch Goans prowling about it in search of the nacreous discs with which they repair their old-fashioned mother-of-pearl windows. A cab-driver sleeps on his seat under a banyan tree just outside the dining-room, and when any guest wants to go, the waiter leans out and wakes him up by pulling the end of his whip.