Chasing the Devil

by Tim Butcher

  I entered that footsore zone of tiredness where all energy is focused simply on keeping going. The green screen of forest rolled by as I clambered over fallen tree-trunks, splashed through streambeds and, on slopes, picked my way down natural staircases formed by webs of exposed roots, all the time struggling to keep the sweat out of my eyes. Amah said nothing, concentrating hard on remembering the route, pausing now and then to orientate himself. To my eye there were no distinguishing landmarks under the never-ending tree cover but somehow Amah kept going in the right direction, an impressive display of bush navigation.

  He had promised us ‘two hours’ to our destination. My watch-face had steamed up with a moisture cocktail of sweat and jungle humidity, but I could still see the hands sweep past the 120-minute mark with no sign of the village. I started to peer ahead through the forest, pathetically trying to convince myself I had seen a dip in the treetop canopy that might mean a village clearing. Without my specs, my eyes began to play tricks. I would swear I could see wood smoke in the distance, another sign of a village, but the smoke would vanish as we got closer and the trail would spin on and on.

  Finally Amah paused, staring intensely downwards at the verge. He was looking for a thicket so memorable he would be able to find it again when he returned home that evening. When he found a suitable spot he discreetly slid his cutlass under cover, dusted off his shirt and walked on.

  ‘It is rude for a stranger to arrive armed in a village,’ whispered Johnson.

  We turned a corner and there was Kpangbalamai.

  *

  The similarity between the village described by the Greenes and the one I saw now was unsettling. It was as if the Greenes had visited days ahead of us, not seventy-four years. The same mud huts, albeit with the occasional rusty corrugated-iron roof rather than thatch, were gathered around a large palaver house, an open-sided structure where visitors were met. Next to the palaver house was a tree and in its branches the same yellow-breasted rice birds gathering noisily to weave the same coconut-sized nests that hung from bare branches. And all around was the same dusty industriousness of African villagers caught up in the daily struggle for survival.

  We had arrived unannounced but the village chief, Patrick M. Kollie, was welcoming, albeit in a perfunctory, dutiful way. He offered us shade in the palaver house, ordered rooms be made ready for us to sleep in and then began a long and quiet discussion with Johnson. For visitors like us there was no system of purchasing goods as there were no shops. Instead, a more indirect process of exchanging gifts, known as ‘dashes’, took place so that chicken and rice were given to us in the full and certain knowledge that we would dash something in return – money in our case, knives, watches and sewing-kits in the case of the Greenes.

  Graham Greene describes the village as being roughly the same circular shape and size as the Round Pond, the ornamental lake in London’s Kensington Gardens. The dimensions had not changed. After catching my breath I walked around the dusty edge of the village where it pressed up against a cliff of advancing jungle vegetation – a green barrier of banana trees at ground level overhung by branches from statuesque cotton trees. I saw the same busy level of activity both Greenes remarked on – villagers occupied with crushing palm kernels, smoking river shrimp, knotting rattan tree-climbing belts, spinning cotton, weaving fishing nets and so forth.

  The setting sun was behind me as a man swinging a cutlass walked slowly into the village. He could not see me to begin with so he made no effort to conceal his tiredness, flecks of leaf pasted by runnels of sweat to the sinews standing proud of his neck, thin shins sloshing around inside tatty wellington boots. I thought of my father reciting his most cherished poem, Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, with its romanticised view of rural life in eighteenth-century England where every evening ‘the plowman homeward plods his weary way’.

  I introduced myself to Sheraton Jallah, who turned out to be a visitor from Monrovia, and as we talked it soon became clear there was little romantic about life as a subsistence farmer in Liberia.

  ‘I live in the city but life is hard and it is difficult to make enough money to survive, so every harvest season I come home to my birthplace to work the rice fields. It is not easy but rice is our only source of staple food so back we come, year after year, cutting back the jungle and trying to make enough to live on through the rainy season. We have no chainsaws, no tractors, no equipment. It is just us and a cutlass taking on the forest.’

  I asked him about his boots. They looked horribly uncomfortable in the dry-season heat.

  ‘I wear them because of the snakes. You never know when you will meet one. Each time you move a branch or a rock there is a chance one will be under it.’

  I made a mental note to keep my falloe’s stick close by.

  We walked through the village together and I asked him about the Greenes. He was forty-seven and had never heard of them, but he mentioned that one of his ancestors, Komowalla Jallah, had been village chief back in the 1930s. Graham Greene had written about the ‘overpoweringly hospitable’ chief of Kpangbalamai but Sheraton shook his head when I asked if, by some miracle, the man was still alive. He led me to a simple cement grave and headstone planted right in the middle of the village among the mud huts, a prized position only given to village chiefs. Into the cement someone had scoured a legend that was still legible: ‘Here Lies Komowalla Jallah, died May 8 1954, lived about 100 yrs’.

  Nearby was a building, once a school but now abandoned, and on one of its walls was a blast mark I recognised from my time as a war reporter. It had been made by a rocket-propelled grenade or a mortar strike. I asked Sheraton how Kpangbalamai had fared during Liberia’s fighting.

  ‘You know it came and went around here for so long I do not remember exactly what happened. We all fled to Guinea in the 1990s and when we came back we found our houses burned down. We built them anew, the same simple houses of wood, mud and thatch, and then the war began again in 2002 when a new set of rebels came through, the LURD who eventually got rid of Taylor. We had to flee again and when we came back Taylor’s soldiers arrived and accused us of helping LURD. They killed my father, Myhango, and raped my mother, Komasar. We never found their bodies and when we came back for the final time again the houses were destroyed. We had to rebuild everything.’

  Like Johnson’s story about the women being burnt in the container near Kolahun, Sheraton’s made me think about the lack of closure in Liberia following the war. Sheraton knew his parents had been murdered in appalling circumstances; how could he truly ‘rebuild everything’ without a meaningful attempt being made to hold those responsible to account? I could follow the logic of diplomats and politicians desperate to end the war in Liberia when they focused on the importance of bringing peace in the short term. But the decision to withhold justice made me worried that in the longer term that peace might vanish in retribution and retaliation.

  Back at the palaver house Mr Omaru had arrived with his motorbike and our rucksacks. He might have been the silent type but he was clearly very efficient. Johnson, now limping quite badly because of his blisters, said two rooms had been made ready in a hut for all four of us to sleep in. After retrieving my towel I went to the communal washroom, an open area of flagstones laid on the dirt behind a drystone wall, and did my best to wash off the day’s grime with a bucket of stream water that had been heated over a fire. Dinner of rice, chicken and pumpkin appeared shortly after sundown and all four of us sat chewing silently, picking out the bone, gristle and claw. I did not mind the stringy meat and watery squash. It was the lack of salt that I struggled with.

  I felt too tired to talk, preferring instead to watch the cycle of day’s end in the village. The water that the women had used for cooking was not wasted but used again to wash dishes and then to bathe numerous children. A cupful would be poured over their heads, followed by a scrub with fingertips dipped in palm oil, a quick rub with a cloth and then the process was repeated on the next chi
ld. It was done with assembly-line efficiency without enough time for the children to play up, as if they already accepted life was a series of chores that everyone has to take part in. Graham Greene writes that in all his time in Liberia he never heard a child whine. Bath time at home for my young children is never a quiet or efficient process and I watched with envy to see if I could pick up tips.

  Like all villages we were to pass through in Liberia Kpangbalamai had no power, so we sat in the gathering darkness and talked about our plan for the next day. After leaving here the Greenes had reached the village of Duogomai on one of the toughest days of walking on the whole trip. That day’s journey was made worse as both had fallen ill in Kpangbalamai, victims of their cook’s misguided attempt to bake bread using palm wine instead of yeast. I had known Johnson for only three days but I was already relying on his enthusiasm and initiative. While I had been washing he had hunted out the best local information about our route for the next day.

  ‘Nobody from this village has walked as far as Duogomai in years,’ he said. ‘It is a long way and they say it is much easier to use taxis or motorbikes along the jeep road that goes on a longer loop through Lofa County. But I have found a boy who will guide us tomorrow for a few hours to the village of Kpademai, which is in the direction of Duogomai, and from there we will find other directions.’

  Out of the darkness a shape loomed. It was Sheraton, the rice farmer I had met earlier. I flicked on my headtorch and offered him a place on the bamboo bench I was sitting on. He too had washed and was dressed in a smart collarless shirt embroidered with gold thread.

  After Sheraton introduced himself to Johnson, David and Mr Omaru we sat in companionable silence for a few moments before he spoke.

  ‘Why are you doing this, Mr Tim?’ he asked. ‘It does not make any sense when there are roads and vehicles. What is the real reason you are walking here? Are you looking for gold? Is it diamonds you are after? Are you investigating somebody after the war?’

  I tried to reassure him, repeating what I had told him earlier about the Greenes. Under torchlight David got out his visual aids, the maps from Graham Greene’s book showing the route that passed through Kpangbalamai. Sheraton looked at the book, listening closely to what we had to say, but as he wished us goodnight I could see he was not convinced. He had good reason to be sceptical: during decades of turmoil in Liberia outsiders had for the most part played the role of exploiters and profiteers.

  In the darkness I got a strong feeling Mr Omaru shared Sheraton’s doubts so I tried to win his confidence by talking to him properly for the first time. It was not easy. He was a man comfortable with silence.

  ‘How was the ride today?’ I asked. ‘What was the road like?’

  ‘There were no concerns for me. The road was long and the bike was heavy so I used a lot of fuel but from the main Lofa County road I was told where to turn off for Kpangbalamai. I got here in good time before sunset. It is important to arrive before it gets dark.’

  I asked him why.

  ‘It is not safe for you to go out on roads after dark. That is the time heartmen come out, killers who will take your heart. Only a fool goes out at night in Liberia.’

  Rats. Every westerner who has slept in villages in rural Liberia makes mention of rats and the Greenes were no exception, referring often to the nightly appearance of the vermin. A nun at Bolahun memorably told the Greenes how she woke one night to find a rat sitting on her face licking the oil off strands of her hair. Barbara’s own hair was to go un-brushed for the duration of the trek because on the first night in a hut the bristles of her hairbrush were chewed away by rats.

  As soon as David and I settled into the single mud-walled room we had been given by the Kpangbalamai chief, the scurrying began. The floor was bare beaten earth and the roof an open structure of branches supporting banana-leaf thatch but, in spite of the lack of hiding places, my eyes were nowhere near sharp enough to spot the creatures. An old mosquito net, originally light blue in colour, had been strung over the homemade wooden bed I would be using with its mattress of straw covered by a blanket. On the net the beam of my headtorch picked up faded orange streaks of rat urine.

  We tried in vain to spot the little blighters. We lay in the dark as the scratching and scurrying sounds grew louder, hoping to lull them into false confidence out in the open. But when we flicked on our torches, arms cocked to throw a boot, there would be nothing there. On top of the rats, the hut had trapped the day’s heat like a slow cooker so, while the sun had long since set, the windowless room was stifling. I passed a clammy, vermin-disturbed night nose down, thinking of lassa fever and praying no rat urine would land on my face. I dreamed fitfully of my three-year-old son, Kit, a horrible dream where no matter what I said he kept asking me forlornly, ‘Why are you not coming home, Daddy?’ And no sooner had I finally fallen asleep than Cock Idol opened up outside, a cacophony of pre-dawn crowing by all the village cocks, all apparently trying to compete with one another for the loudest, longest delivery. Where I am from a single bird would crow once or twice to mark the start of the day and that would be it. In Liberian villages, the din went on for ever. I got up feeling utterly wretched.

  That day’s trek to Duogomai was for us, as it had been for the Greenes, one of the toughest of the entire journey. By jungle trail Duogomai lies 25 miles east of Kpangbalamai so we made sure we started early, leaving the village before sun-up. Following such a bad night’s sleep, the day had a slightly dreamlike quality, as if I had just arrived after an intercontinental overnight flight. Sheraton had provided a teenager to guide Johnson, David and me through the first jungle section out of Kpangbalamai but all I can remember of the young man was the bling T-shirt he was wearing with Get Rich or Die Tryin’ emblazoned across the front. America remains the dominant cultural reference point for Liberia, just as Britain is for Sierra Leone, and in both cases the original historic flow of people into these two West African experiments in post-slavery rehabilitation has long since been reversed. Today the most commonly held aspiration for young Liberians, even those living in jungle villages, is an American passport and the chance of a new life on the other side of the Atlantic.

  It was during the trek to Duogomai that Johnson’s blisters got so bad he had to stop, jumping up behind Mr Omaru on the motorbike and entrusting David and me to the care of a stranger for the only time during our whole trip. This was the moment when, tired, confused and wired by Mr Omaru’s warnings about heartmen, I convinced myself I was in very real danger and started to leave a trail of broken branches in the forest in case I had to flee. David, I later discovered, was having exactly the same fears but we were too tired or, perhaps, too coy to discuss it at the time. Unknown to me, he was leaving a trail of coins at strategic junctions in the track to help us if we had to make a run for it.

  Our fears were unfounded and we made it tired but safe to Duogomai, relieved to see Johnson, Mr Omaru and our bags again. As before, we found a village largely unchanged from the time of the Greenes’ visit, with the same huts arranged in tight alleys on a bare hilltop with steep sides. It was dark by the time we arrived and the chief was the only villager with a torch. When he started to lead me to the wash area I noticed it was a novelty version so I asked him to stand still for a moment and point the torch at the flat wall of a hut. There in the middle of the faint circle of light the image of a man’s face was projected. The face had long light brown hair and for a second I thought it might be Jesus but then I looked properly. It was an image of Lionel Messi, a football superstar from Argentina.

  Graham Greene had risked rebellion among his porters by insisting on completing the 25-mile march all the way to Duogomai in one day. By evening the cousins had made it but the rest of the column was spread out behind them, split into groups of stragglers dispersed along the same jungle trails we used. It meant crucial parts of their gear, such as their campbeds, mosquito nets and water filter, had not arrived by nightfall so they tried to fall asleep upright in chairs, parc
hed with thirst and sweltering under blankets wrapped round themselves to deter biting insects. Little wonder Graham Greene called Duogomai ‘The Horrible Village’ and tried to blank it out with alcohol. But even that turned out to be far from easy.

  …there was nothing else to do but drink. The difficulty was to get drunk; the spirit ran out in sweat almost as quickly as one drank it. The race between the night and drunkenness became furious as darkness fell. For I still feared the rats: I wanted something to make me sleep; but drink was quite useless for that purpose and most of the night I lay awake listening to the vermin cascading down the walls, racing over the boxes.

  After my own rat-disturbed night in a cramped, filthy, sweltering hut in Duogomai I was introduced to the oldest villager, Mulbah Obelee. He did not know his date of birth but his eyebrows, whiskers and hair were frosted with age and he could only just walk, relying heavily on a stick. He started to tell me a story that soon banished all thoughts of discomfort from my mind.

  ‘I remember the day a white man and white woman came to our village,’ he said. I had a rush of excitement as I did the arithmetic in my head. The Greenes had been here seventy-four years before. If Mulbah was now in his mid-eighties, he could well have childhood memories of them.

  ‘They stayed a day. I remember that. And he drank a lot of whisky. When they left, the bottle was taken by one of our people who put a spell in it, a message to the spirit world, and then took it out into the jungle and buried it.’

  CHAPTER 8

  Screams in the Jungle

  Traditional wall decoration in rural Liberian villages with, top left, wartime graffiti

  The trek through Lofa County covered 120 miles and took, including our rests, ten days. From the start, our target was the town of Zorzor way over on the eastern side of the county, where an aid worker contact had promised to put us up. It was close to where the Greenes had crossed from Liberia into Guinea and I thought it a good place to regroup and plan how to cross the frontier. But to get there we had to find a way through some of the toughest and most remote jungle terrain I have ever experienced. It took a bit of effort, but by consulting locals whenever we stopped, Johnson was able to find the places referred to by the Greenes, albeit with slight differences in the spelling. It meant we were able to follow exactly the rhythm of their journey, staying in the same villages and walking the same distances, even taking similar rest days after the longer and more difficult stretches. One by one, places I had imagined during my research became real – Bolahun, Kpangbalamai, Duogomai, Nekebozu, Zigida and Zorzor.