by Tim Butcher
It seemed odd to be climbing the stairs to the office of the superintendent, the Honourable Robert Kamei, in Sanniquellie, a town that was terribly damaged by the conflict in Liberia and which has barely been touched by reconstruction efforts since the war ended in 2003. Those stairs were the first I had used in almost 200 miles of walking and it felt like I was using a new set of muscles in my legs as I climbed. Mr Kamei kindly made time to meet us and offered to help, sending us to his secretary where a letter of introduction would be prepared. His secretary was not in the next-door office but about a mile away in a room adjacent to the local UN military base. The government headquarters where Mr Kamei was located had no electricity so all secretarial matters were dealt with on a computer that drew power from a UN generator.
The secretary was almost entirely computer illiterate and it took him an hour to produce the short letter. The computer had to be rebooted several times as he managed to do things that made the software freeze but, eventually, he handed it over and we headed back to Ganta. I was confident that the letter would see us back on the Greenes’ trail the following day, searching through the forest for the waterfall, but I had not factored in the possibility that Mrs Konnah might completely ignore the orders of her superior. Clearly something was up, some other authority was in control over and above the hierarchy of Liberian local government.
It was only after we got back to our lodgings at the Equip Liberia headquarters in Ganta that I learned what this might be from our host, a remarkable Canadian aid worker called Dave Waines. For twenty-three years, a span that included the most violent spasms of the civil war, Dave had made his home in Liberia. But not for him the relative comfort of Monrovia; he had preferred to live up in Nimba County, the crucible of the original uprising led by Taylor and an area overrun countless times by violent militia.
Dave listened closely to my account of our failed attempts to reach the waterfall and, when I finished, he smiled, nodded his head gently and spoke.
‘That is the power of the Poro,’ he said. ‘The waterfall is being used by them and they clearly don’t want strangers dropping by. All the government letters in the world are not going to get round the power of the Poro.’
Spending time in Ganta with Dave felt like a re-run of the days the Greenes passed there with Dr Harley. Their trek had made them curious about the spirit world of Liberia and it was Dr Harley who sought to decode it for them. Seven decades later Dave Waines did the same for us.
He was a large man in both body and character. Even though he was not physically there on the evening we walked up from the Guinean border to his charity’s base, Dave’s spirit filled the place. After coming to Liberia in 1986 when he was twenty-seven, he had been the founding force behind Equip Liberia and all its subsequent achievements – pupils put through school, healthcare provided in remote areas, support given to the development of the rule-of-law – were mostly down to him. He had designed and built the modest head-quarters on a hilltop to the east of the centre of Ganta, a single-storey structure a bit like a school with an open hall off which ran a few basic bedrooms and a washroom. When word came on the third night of our stay that he was driving up from Monrovia the next morning, I watched as the staff cleaned the place from top to bottom, but I was sure their hard work stemmed more from love than fear.
A robust Christian, his faith had an earthiness about it that made it admirably accessible. He asked about my children and I told him how much I was missing three-year-old Kit and Tess, only eighteen months old, and how they kept coming to me in my dreams.
‘When all is said and done, there is nothing that comes close in life to the children that we bring up,’ he said. ‘They are the ones that open our horizons, who make us believe we can make a difference.’
Getting him to talk about the bush societies was not particularly easy and he preferred instead to start by discussing the work of his predecessor, Dr Harley. The drive from Monrovia had taken him much of the day but there was still enough daylight for a tour so we jumped into his jeep with Dave at the wheel. The road was bumpy but short and we were soon in the grounds of the nearby Ganta United Methodist Mission, a remarkably impressive complex dating mostly from the 1940s that spread over a wide area. It was made up of stonebuilt clinics, classrooms, sport halls and administration blocks arranged around a central avenue shaded by two carefully aligned rows of tall palm trees. Some of the buildings were a bit tatty, with windows broken and fittings missing, but compared to the rest of Ganta it looked as if the war had passed this place by. It could have been the campus of a university in Britain, an image helped by the presence of a weathered stone building with Norman windows and a bell niche on its roof. Limited funding and more pressing demands to build a dispensary, clinic and school meant it would take Dr Harley and his family thirty years to complete the Miller McAllister Memorial church. It was eventually finished in 1956, just four years before he and his wife retired and moved home to America. On his death in 1966, Dr Harley’s ashes would be sent to Ganta and buried next to the cornerstone of the church.
‘He really was the most amazing man, George Way Harley,’ Dave said. ‘He was responsible for building pretty much everything you see. He taught the locals how to quarry stone, how to fire bricks, how to make roof tiles, how to shape roof beams from timber – everything that was needed to build a school and a hospital that has lasted more than half a century.
‘When he got here there was not a single road in the interior of Liberia, let alone a car, so you know what he did? He arranged for a mile-long road to be cut through the bush here in Ganta and set about bringing in a car. First he had a Model A Ford shipped over from America to Monrovia, and then he had it broken down into components and carried here through the jungle piece by piece. That’s a trip of more than 150 miles. It took weeks and weeks, especially the heavy engine block, which had to be carried by an entire crew of four men, but eventually it all arrived and he reassembled the car and fired up the engine. That must have been some moment when an engine sounded in the forest for the first time and he drove down his road.’
Dave said the doctor soon earned a reputation for driving flat out, engine straining and tyres pounding over the uneven road surface, locals wide-eyed in astonishment.
Originally Dr Harley had come here with his wife, Winifred, to work as a physician, but something happened in 1932 to undermine his faith in medicine. By then the couple had had three boys, all born in Ganta, and the family had grown used to dealing with the health problems associated with living in the tropics. In the early hours of Saturday 5 March, the oldest boy, Robert, aged five, had developed a slight fever and Mrs Harley had gone to him several times, dosing him with quinine. Tragically, she left the bottle of tablets on a table in the boy’s bedroom and at daybreak, as she rested from her disturbed night, her middle son, Charles, aged four, found the bottle and swallowed its entire contents. Effective in small quantities to fight malaria, quinine can be highly toxic in large doses.
‘It took the boy ten hours to die,’ Dave said. ‘The fact that in all that time his medical knowledge could not save his child meant from then on Dr Harley had a huge loss of confidence and within a few years he had stopped practising medicine altogether. Instead, he devoted his time to anthropology, education and technical training.’
When the Greenes reached Ganta in February 1935 they noted the Harley family was still in mourning, an air of melancholy made more acute because their visit coincided with the birthday of the dead child. Barbara Greene describes Dr Harley’s ‘deep mournful eyes’ and Mrs Harley as an ethereal figure ‘all soul and no flesh…I began to wonder if she were really there, or if I was the only one that was seeing an apparition’.
During my research I uncovered a letter written in March 1935 by Mrs Harley that showed she was very much there during the Greenes’ visit. Indeed, from her perspective it was the apparent frailty of Graham Greene, by that time already ill, that was worth commenting on.
The next week �
� we had two English people here, a Mr Graham Greene – writer – rather thin and anemic but ‘game’, and his cousin, Miss Barbara Greene … They descended with only an hour’s notice but Miss Hooks had left the day before so we could give them her quarters and not worry much … They were surprisingly agreeable and unopinionated, and we enjoyed their stay very much.
Her son’s grave is still there on the campus near where the Harleys’ original wooden home stood, although it is difficult to find in the long grass. The house was burned down by raiders during the war. Dave pointed it out but the light was failing and he was anxious to take us on to the leper colony where he first worked on arriving in Ganta as a volunteer. The sight of his jeep prompted greetings and waves on all sides as we drove in.
‘You know, this was one of the few places the rebels left alone during the war,’ he said with a smile. ‘There are not many times being a leper feels like a good thing but the war in Liberia was one of them.’
It was now so dark he flicked on the jeep’s lights, making a woman shy away from the glare. She blinked extravagantly but her face broke into a smile when Dave greeted her through the open window. Behind her a boy of about six years of age, slick with soapy water, stood upright in a tin bucket and when he recognised Dave’s voice he jumped out and ran towards the jeep.
‘How are you, little Dave Waines?’ said Dave, extravagantly lifting the boy in the air and spinning him round. ‘Not so little any more.’
He could see I was confused.
‘His father is a leper and we have been friends for years. They did me the great honour of naming their son after me, Dave Waines.’
‘Come here, Dave Waines,’ the grinning mother cried and both meekly obeyed.
Our evening tour had one more destination, the village of Gbuyee, over on the other western side of Ganta, where Dave wanted us to see the house he lived in when he moved out of the leper colony. The road was narrow and pitted but after ten minutes or so the headlights picked up a few huts and then, on another open section of track, the shadowy figure of a man. He had a piece of string tied round his head under which a torch had been tucked so its beam would point onto the ground in front of him. In his hand he had a long, thin staff on the end of which had been attached three pieces of wire to make a primitive trident. ‘Frog hunting,’ said Dave, before winding down the window and chatting for a few seconds to the hunter, an old acquaintance called Aaron. He was in late middle-age, thin and with sinewy muscles like lengths of cord. Over his torso he wore a T-shirt so threadbare its cloth had the texture of a teabag.
We got to Dave’s old turret-like house, now abandoned and rather time-worn, next to a school which was in bad need of repair. It was pitch black but the headlights picked out the torn mosquito netting over the windows and a door hanging off its hinges. Dave reminisced about a powerful dream he had had on a Christian retreat back home in Canada in the mid 1980s. It began with visions of suffering and death in Africa, acts of cruelty by people he did not recognise. But slowly the dream’s atmosphere changed as the people began to work together, building wells and fighting disease. By the time he woke he did not want the dream to ever end.
He was drawn to East Africa to begin with but when he eventually reached Liberia he recognised snapshots from the dream: people, both good and bad; events, both terrifying and uplifting. As much as anything else it was the dream that persuaded him to make his home in the Liberian hinterland, a fateful choice that gave him a ringside seat for the war. Ganta is the largest town in Nimba County, the part of Liberia first invaded by Taylor and his small rebel force when they slipped across the border from Ivory Coast on Christmas Eve 1989. Dave witnessed much of the subsequent fighting and he also had a close-up view of the power of the Poro.
‘You know, until you live out here in a bush village all the talk of the Poro society and the devils really does not mean much. It’s only when you get to know a rural community in Liberia, and I mean really get to know a village, that you see the strength of the Poro and how deep it reaches into the communities. It’s like a contract, a secret contract that everyone is involved with in some way or other.’
When Dr Harley spoke to the Greenes about the Poro, he took no chances. Such was the power of the taboo around the bush societies that he waited until all the local staff were outside the house and there was no risk of being overheard. Since arriving in Ganta he had come to know as much about the Poro as any non-initiate, although he freely admitted this did not mean he understood everything. The code of secrecy was observed so intensely and policed so fiercely that Dr Harley’s understanding was assembled only piecemeal from snippets of information gleaned over the years from a variety of individuals, often medical patients, with whom he had been able to build slowly a bond of trust.
Asking questions about the Poro in Liberia was a dangerous business both for Dr Harley and for his informants. It was said the three men who gave him most help were found out by the society elders and punished by being poisoned to death. Barbara Greene describes how terribly on-edge Dr Harley appeared when he spoke about the Poro, forever throwing the door open suddenly to check if someone was eavesdropping.
They were after him, he said. His boys thought that he knew too much. One day they would kill him. He expected it all the time … just a little poison in the food … a sudden stab in the dark. Soon they would get him.
Her description made me wonder about the death threat placed on me by Taylor when I had written in the Telegraph, all those years ago, about the growing use of cannibalistic ritualism by the warlord and his inner circle. Perhaps my report had done nothing more than challenge the same taboos taken on by Dr Harley.
Dr Harley waited until after dark to let the Greenes in on the more sinister side of his discoveries, taking them to the locked room where he kept his prized collection of wooden masks, the ones worn by devils and senior figures within the bush societies. Masks are key to West African bush societies, both the source of spiritual power and the store where it resides to be passed down through the generations, and Dr Harley had gone to great lengths and not inconsiderable personal risk, to acquire them. His collection would eventually number more than four hundred, all individually carved, some with purely human characteristics, some more animalistic. Dr Harley had built up the collection over the years, gleaning as much information as possible about the symbolic meaning and religious role of each one. It was an unsettling encounter for Barbara Greene.
Cruel faces grinned at us, and others, ugly and grotesque, seemed almost alive. We were surrounded by them, and they were hideous, though carved with great skill … One I saw was not intended for the eyes of women. It was a wicked thing, roughly carved, but strong and evil in expression. I could find no beauty in any of them…
Dr Harley’s mask collection and the details surrounding their function formed the centrepiece of the papers that he wrote and published in the 1940s and 1950s on behalf of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology. The papers remain among the most important published sources on the Poro and Sande, as well as wider spiritualism in Liberia.
In them, Dr Harley admits from the outset that in spite of his years living in Ganta he had built up only a partial understanding of the topic. He also makes the point that while secret societies led by masked figures operate in much of Liberia, the name Poro is used only by some of them, with the others having their own nomenclature. Based in Ganta he was living among the Mano tribe, one of the most prolific followers of the Poro, so he focused much of his writing on Mano traditions. It was an interesting choice. Among all of Liberia’s tribes, the Mano have perhaps the worst reputation for ritual cannibalism, a reputation that spread far and wide. Laminah, Barbara Greene’s attendant, came from Sierra Leone but he was fully aware of the notorious Mano tribe. ‘These people bad, they chop men,’ he said to Graham Greene. In Krio to chop is to eat.
Dr Harley showed no squeamishness in his account of how ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism l
ay at the centre of the Poro. According to him, before a group of young initiates could be taken out into the bush for training in the society’s ways, a human sacrifice had to be made by the society elders. Normally the victim was a slave boy but for some rituals senior Poro members were obliged to make a more personal sacrifice, offering up their own sons to be put to death. He wrote that it was crucial the victim did not cry out so he was numbed with a drug that silenced his screams as his heart or liver was removed. The organs would then be cooked and eaten by senior Poro figures, including masked devils. Special body parts like the skin of the fore-head and the palms of the hands were removed and cooked in potions used to anoint sacred items like fetishes and celts, whetstones passed down between generations. In some ceremonies no blood was allowed to drip on the floor so it was carefully collected and later drunk by the senior society members or used to ‘feed’ one of the fetishes. The penis of the sacrificial victim might be used by a senior priest to hunt down youngsters who had tried to hide and avoid being taken out into the bush school. The penis acted like a diviner, supposedly twitching to indicate where the fugitive was hiding.
The doctor gave away some of the tricks used by the Poro, such as a stunt used to symbolise the death and rebirth of the initiate. He described how in some communities young men were shown to be stabbed with a spear and then tossed over a curtain screen where they would be heard to land with a thud, supposedly dead, then to be reborn through the magic of the Poro. Dr Harley wrote that this was often a piece of carefully constructed theatre, with the victims protected by a wad of plantain stalk worn under their clothes. This would protect them from the spear while at the same time a small bladder of chicken blood was burst to make the stabbing look authentic.