Chasing the Devil

by Tim Butcher

  To begin with, David felt like a stranger but as we picked our way through Lofa County my attitude changed. He was no stranger. He was me as a younger man.

  We were both graduates of Oxford University, where we had studied degrees that were not vocational, but rather had bought us time to decide what to do in life – theology for him a couple of years ago; politics, philosophy and economics for me twenty years earlier. We had both enjoyed a good education by winning scholarships to top private schools, although our parents had to make significant sacrifices to pay fees not covered by the awards. The choice of schooling exposed us both to a peer group that it would be difficult to keep up with later in life, sons of families so wealthy they would never face financial worries.

  Curiosity and an eagerness to learn drew me towards journalism but David was still working out where his career should take him. To join me on the trip he had walked away from a lucrative banking job in London, a move few would have been brave enough to make. We were in the midst of a recession and credit crisis which left bankers jobless every day but he had willingly given it up. As we walked he talked about possibly joining the army or applying for the Foreign Office, conventional jobs that, I felt, would have received the approval of his father, Joe, my old contact from reporting days. But the thing that really drove David was travel, curiosity about what lies over the horizon, and it was this that had brought him on our trek. Later he would confide that back at his rented digs in London, on the wall of his room, he hung for inspiration a copy of a German oil painting entitled Wanderer above the Sea Fog. It shows a man staring out over a mysterious but tantalising wilderness of fog-bound crags. I teased him about it looking like an album cover from a 1980s New Romantic band but he remained firm and said he loved it. In many ways his journey with me was about finding what he wanted later in life, his own venture out into the wilderness.

  His tolerance for hunger and discomfort were impressive but what I really valued was the way he knew when to keep his mouth shut. A footslog as exhausting as ours was bound to fray tempers. Indeed, the Greenes fell out so seriously towards the end of the trip that they would sit in consensual silence each evening. But somehow David and I managed to avoid this, largely because he had the invaluable knack of keeping quiet at the right moment. And he kept the promise he had made back in Freetown, allowing me to play the Alpha Male role as chief planner, organiser and leader, offering to help wherever he could but taking care not to appear competitive.

  There were also times, especially on the longer, tougher stretches of the walk, where talk was called for just to pass the time. Then he would keep me going with his impressively comprehensive recall of quotes from the cult film Withnail and I. And I enjoyed probing his knowledge of religion, asking clumsy questions about the great schisms of Islam or the known provenance of the Gospels in the New Testament. I remember being so tired that I entered that half-awake world of international air travel, when you can consciously watch an in-flight movie only to completely blank it from memory seconds after it has finished. The content of what David said to me during these stretches became unimportant, its value being more in the fact he was saying something, distracting my mind from the effort of the hike.

  But the thing that really endeared him to me was his clear pride in the whole adventure. The hunger, thirst, blisters, health threats and security risk would have made many fold, but David was not just determined to finish, he was proud of what we were doing. After one of our midday rests on the trackside, David gleefully relayed a conversation he had just overheard between Johnson and a local. Johnson did not know the local tribal language so they spoke in Liberian English that David could follow.

  ‘The villager is suspicious about us so he asked Johnson what we are really up to. Johnson said we are walking across Liberia and the villager sounded sceptical so Johnson replied, “Believe me. These people have walked all the way from the border with Sierra Leone. Every step of the way, they have walked. They are crazy but they are honest. All they want to do is walk. Come along for a few hours and you will see for yourself.” ’

  The story prompted an enthusiastic smile on David’s unshaven, sweat-stained, haggard face, a smile that I shan’t forget.

  The walk to Kpangbalamai established the routine for those that followed: breakfast of reheated remnants of the previous night’s dinner; load rucksacks onto Mr Omaru’s bike; start walking as early as possible; hire local guides to help Johnson with the navigation; eke out five litres of clean water carried by each of us in a daypack; arrive thirsty, hungry and footsore in village before dusk for rendezvous with Mr Omaru; wash, eat, talk to the villagers and community leaders; try to sleep.

  The assessment in 1919 by the frustrated cyclist, Sir Alfred Sharpe, of the physical demands of trekking through Liberia felt in no way exaggerated but we had modern medicines and good water purification equipment to help us cope. And we had no need to rush so we could spend as long as we liked resting and planning in villages before slipping back into the jungle. With my Global Positioning System device it was possible to establish our exact location as long we were in an open area clear of trees where the GPS could ‘see’ the satellites it needed to make its calculation.

  However, projecting that information onto my map, one produced by UN cartographers, was not particularly helpful, as the modern map was not much of an improvement on those complained about by Graham Greene. Before setting out for Liberia he had found two maps, one published by the British government and the other by the United States War Department. Just like mine, his maps marked plenty of named places down on the coast but in the interior they grew steadily more blank.

  Some of my earlier concerns vanished. Of the army worms, the pests that had supposedly inundated Lofa County just a few weeks earlier, we found no trace. I became steadily more acclimatised to the physical demands of the journey. My feet hardened, my weight dropped and my tolerance for putting on filthy clothes stiff with the previous day’s grime improved. With the help of lifts on Mr Omaru’s bike, Johnson’s feet recovered and he was able to rejoin us on the trail, while David proved to be as strong and uncomplaining as his father had promised.

  The nightly diet – invariably unsalted rice and chicken – meant food was always a major concern for us, as the physical effort of the trek was so considerable. Taking in enough to keep going was a constant struggle because our route was so remote we passed few villages big enough to have stalls where we could buy supplies like biscuits, canned drinks or tinned goods. Out in the jungle we would occasionally come across pineapples, beautiful things sprouting singly from a corona of sharp, blade-shaped fronds. The first time I saw one I took out my penknife and prepared to hack the fruit off its stem but Johnson shouted at me to stop. In the Liberian forest, I learned, consumables do not grow wild – from somewhere, someone had come to tend them and it was bad forest form to start scrumping. Whenever we reached a village Johnson would ask politely if there were any bananas, pineapples or other fruit to be traded but it was disappointing how rarely we actually found any.

  On the morning before a particularly long hilly stretch, I remember with some horror the breakfast I forced down – stale crackers and a tin, allegedly, of luncheon meat acquired by Mr Omaru from some dusty roadside stall. The rectangular block of wet matter slid out of the tin with a shluck sound accompanied by a fragrance of off offal. It was all I could do to overcome my gag reflex but, without any other source of energy, I forced it down.

  Throughout the walk we touched on some of the most remote parts of Lofa County, often finding ourselves on ancient tracks that had been used for centuries. The Greenes would have recognised the trails, save for one new feature – the litter. There was not much of it but every so often I would spot empty wrappers from the alcoholic popsicles I had seen back in Sierra Leone. I started to collect them and noted down their odd names: Old Soldier Herbal Bitters, 43% proof; Black Horse Gin, 42% proof; Pegapak Gin, 40 % proof.

  On the fifth day of the trek, whi
le walking between Duogomai and Nekebozu, we crossed a river known as the Lawa, using what the locals called a monkey bridge – an ancient and wonderfully intricate web design of knotted vines and rattan cords, elegantly suspended from high treetops on long cables made from twists of ivy. I could not see a single modern component in the entire structure; it was made entirely from material found in the jungle but quite who made it was a point of some debate.

  In some parts of Liberia only senior members of the bush societies are allowed to take part in the construction of monkey bridges. The legend goes that while the society members twist the ropes and chords, it is a devil who magically flies backwards and forwards across the river to weave the structure. Unauthorised people who approach the crossing and try to catch sight of the devil are punished with death.

  The bridge we crossed was identical to those described by the Greenes, although the name they used for them was hammock bridges. The one over the Lawa spanned a 40-foot gap and would have taken humans weeks to assemble. As I stepped along the split bamboo lengths laid along its floor the whole structure creaked and swung like a pendulum, making me clutch at its fibrous balustrades, but it delivered me safely enough to the other side.

  ‘With monkey bridges like this you have to be careful how old they are,’ Johnson explained. ‘They only last one or two rainy seasons before they begin to rot and become unsafe.’

  Five days later we would come across a monkey bridge spanning an even wider river, the Ulé. The design was finer and more elaborate than the one over the Lawa but we were told that this bridge had ‘passed its time’. It looked sound enough to my eye but the locals insisted a little too forcefully it was dangerous to use and, instead, we were ferried underneath its graceful outline by dugout canoe. The angry way they reacted when I said I was willing to risk a crossing made me think that maybe there was some other mysterious force involved. Local reluctance to outsiders using monkey bridges was not new. When passing this same area Graham Greene noted in his diary that he and his cousin were also forbidden from using a bridge on the grounds it was ‘not in repair’.

  In the more remote jungle hamlets many of the huts were circular with low walls and steep, thatched roofs as tall and pointed as witches’ hats. Invariably they were built on high ground, not so much as a defence mechanism against human attack but more as a way to survive seasonal rains. My visit to Liberia in 2003 had shown me just how formidable the wet season is in this part of West Africa where it is not uncommon for a deluge to last days without a moment’s let-up. Building your village on a hilltop at least allows the rain to wash away and saves you from being swamped.

  The huts are where villagers pass the night, doors locked, windows closed, but during daylight hours they spend little time indoors. As I spent time in the communities, I witnessed how time-consuming jungle survival is. There is always some chore that needs doing out in the ragged rice fields or back in the village. All cooking is done by women in separate ‘kitchens’, set some distance away from the huts in a vain attempt to keep rats from the sleeping quarters. The kitchens consist of a charcoal fire laid on the bare earth often under little more than a thatched shade supported by bare wooden poles. Without power for refrigeration or cold storage, cooking is a never-ending process. No sooner has one meal been eaten than preparations begin for the next, starting with the retrieval of water from a river, stream or, if the community is very fortunate, well. The extent of post-war development in Liberia can in large part be measured by the presence of a well in any particular village. With their concrete covers and depth, they provide an important leg-up for rural communities as they reduce considerably the risk of water pollution.

  Near to the kitchen there would be a ‘rice attic’, a more substantial structure made up of a low, walled, thatched compartment, where the precious staple is stored, raised six or seven feet off the ground on lengths of timber stripped of all bark to defeat rats. Some villagers sprinkle pepper around the feet of the attic legs to deter weevils. Often the only other manmade structure in the village centre is a shrine to dead chiefs, flagstones arranged in a rough pattern, sometimes scoured with the names of the dead. The details of these remote communities are identical to those described by Graham Greene, Lady Dorothy Mills, Sir Alfred Sharpe and the other pioneers who first reached this region a hundred years or so ago.

  There were some grim moments during those days in Lofa County. Shortly after hiking out of Kpangbalamai we found ourselves in an area of jungle infested by tsetse fly. They are as big as horse-flies with a bite to match but it is the sleeping-sickness and river-blindness they carry that makes them so dangerous. David was the first to be bitten, the insect’s jaws cutting straight through his shirt as if it was not there, and within seconds all of us were jigging around, swatting them from our necks, arms and exposed areas of skin, momentarily forgetting our blisters and sprinting down the trail to get away from them. I was taking an antibiotic against malaria each morning and the following day I doubled my dose.

  We had to learn from some silly beginners’ mistakes. The hike to Duogomai had been so exhausting we decided to catch up on rest by sleeping in the next morning, confident that the map showed the following day’s trail to Nekebozu as relatively short. But this meant we missed the comfortable cool around dawn and set out when the late-morning heat had already built up. It was almost suicidal. We had to walk only four hours that day but it was one of the most miserable days of the trip, as our walking hours coincided with the fiercest heat. Since the temperature difference between early morning and midday in rural Liberia is so huge, we resolved that the best way to deal with the climate was by starting early and then stopping at around 11 a.m., to find a shaded spot in which to lie down in for an hour or two. I have never been the lightest sleeper but during those midday breaks my internal computer would completely crash, allowing me to fall deeply asleep on the dirt floor, oblivious to the flies swarming greedily around the sweat rings on my clothes.

  It was during one of these midday crashes that I was woken by what sounded like the crying of a tormented child. We had made it to a small village called Barziwen, about halfway between Duogomai and Nekebozu, and I stirred to find the screams were coming from an animal inside a homemade cage being poked with a stick by a little boy. After coming round, I walked over and looked inside to find a wretched-looking infant chimpanzee, clearly the survivor of a hunting trip on which its parents had been shot for the pot. I thought of Bala Amarasekaran and Bruno back in Sierra Leone, but when I later emailed Bala to ask him if there was anything he could do to help the animal I had seen, he explained that in Liberia there is no chimp sanctuary or government authority responsible for their protection.

  ‘Unfortunately I am still attending to our local mess with the chimp situation and not authorised to accept chimps from other countries,’ he wrote.

  After a few miserable rat-disturbed nights inside crowded, stuffy huts, sharing single mattresses with David, I could not face another and decided to sleep outside. It meant more room inside for my three companions, as from then on I slept on the bare ground inside a small insect-proof tent I had bought specially for the trip. It consisted of a single, sealed chamber with walls of mosquito netting that would not keep out the rain. But I was happy to take my chances with the weather if only to get away from the vermin and the heat.

  After an initial surge of interest from villagers who would gather round whenever I put the tent up, they would drift away as darkness fell and I would zip closed the door and make myself as comfortable as possible on the ground sheet. Its gauze walls allowed me to see out quite clearly, so from my voyeuristic capsule I would watch the day’s end: mothers singing lullabies to nursing infants, little girls playing with dolls made of bamboo blocks planted with human hair, goatherds bringing their flocks back in from the jungle, teenagers joshing over mugs of palm wine, moonrise through the palm trees. The fresh night air was wonderful after the mugginess of the huts, although there were numerous occasions when a
stray animal would disturb me in the small hours. One night I was woken by a domestic duck that was doing its best to roost on my head.

  Whenever we reached a new village we found the locals curious about us and, for the most part, hospitable. I kept Johnson topped up with Liberian dollars and he took charge of all negotiations for food, water, shelter and guides, offering up appropriate ‘dashes’ whenever required. But what I found interesting was the varying power of the village chiefs, some of whom clearly commanded the respect of all in their charge while some were figures of mockery to be ignored, even abused, by their people. When the chief was weak it became a challenge to find the person in the village with the necessary authority to deal with our visit.

  The chief of Nekebozu was named Forkpa Duolar and he was clearly in control. A solid man in his fifties he had tribal markings on his chest – scars cut in a traditional design during his initiation by the Poro bush society when he was a youngster. He carried a mobile telephone, even though it was not much use in Nekebozu where there was no signal, and he clearly had had experience of living beyond the confines of the village. The moment we arrived he called for buckets of hot water and I spent a very happy hour sitting next to Johnson as we both bathed our blistered feet, watched closely by a swarm of children who, quite understandably, found the sight of two topless men sitting with their feet in buckets comical. When we explained our mission, Chief Duolar said he was familiar with Graham Greene’s trip and had even heard of Journey Without Maps.