by Tim Butcher
The style of his writing is very academic but the subject matter is chilling. The ceremonies he described are predicated on fear, on keeping the Poro initiates and members to heel through terror. A tray of fingers and toes was kept on show, supposedly taken from people executed for breaking the taboo surrounding the society. And to scare away strangers, a bull-roarer was used in the ceremonies, a voice-distorter that delivered a bloodcurdling stream of unintelligible sounds in a rolling falsetto. It was made of a tube with holes cut into the sides over which were spread discs of membrane cut from the egg sacs of a particular type of spider. When a person spoke into the tube, the membranes would resonate, creating a strange, unnerving sound that made the ceremonies even more terrifying.
He explained that while it was common for visitors to see dancing devils, such as the one I came across in Bolahun, these were lowly figures at the bottom of a complex hierarchy. The name ‘zo’ was given to more senior figures with special powers and atop the pile was a ‘zo of zoes’ to whom all others deferred. A zo would preside over the main elements of the initiation process in the bush society, although Dr Harley admits he had been unable to find out anything meaningful about how a member of the Poro reached the level of zo. He chose, however, an interesting term to describe the skills the senior figures attained. He calls these dark arts ‘frightfulness’.
There was, perhaps, one redeeming feature in Dr Harley’s account. In 1941 he wrote that the more cruel ceremonies, especially those involving human sacrifice, no longer occurred in the region. Dave Waines disagreed.
‘Unfortunately Harley was very wrong. For most it is a taboo subject but newspapers, human rights groups and other sources have documented many, many cases of human sacrifice each and every year since I arrived in 1986 and right up to today.’
In my rucksack I had a copy of a Freetown newspaper, the Independent Observer, which was published the day I flew into Sierra Leone at the start of this trip. I had kept the paper not just because it reported the recent murder of a village girl, named as Mointeeyae, but because the killing was not deemed shocking enough to make it to the front page. The girl had been decapitated and had her womb ritualistically removed.
We were still sitting in his jeep near the village of Gbuyee when Dave embarked on his own assessment of the Poro and, importantly, its power today.
‘I have been in Liberia at a time when outside influences have in some ways had a greater impact than ever before, with foreign investors in the 1980s and, more recently, UN peacekeepers and mobile phone technology. But no matter how strong these modern things are, they come up against the Poro,’ he said.
‘We were living out here one time in Gbuyee when five friends we knew in the village said they wanted to become Christian, to be baptised. We worried this could cause them some problems but we gave them all our support and help, until the evening before the baptism when we heard this terrible noise coming from the village.
‘I was with some other friends visiting from overseas and we were walking home at the time as it was after dark. The noise came from the bull-roarer and it seemed to follow us, growing louder and louder. I knew it was something to do with Poro and our Christian friends in the village but to begin with I did not know what to do. I was scared.’
For effect, he cupped his hands around his mouth and made a series of salivary screeches that he said imitated perfectly the scream of the bull-roarer. As a terror tool it worked perfectly on me.
‘We stopped on the track and we joined hands and we prayed. It was a great moment. Suddenly, my fear was gone and I knew what we should do. We would go back into the village and help our friends.’
Turning around, they then strode into Gbuyee and found a crowd of people mobbing the hut where their friends lived.
‘We came round the corner and something – somebody even – moved really quickly. It was so fast I felt sure it was not human and I did not get a good look. All I saw was a presence, a shape, and the speed it moved at convinced me it was not human. It was a devil, a senior Poro figure, inside a raffia costume and behind a mask of wood and he did not want to be seen by us. Then the crowd, wearing cloaks and black coverings over their heads, turned from us and walked slowly away.’
He paused and looked out into the dark almost as if he had lost the thread. Then he spoke again.
‘You have to understand, Tim, Dr Harley’s writing contains one deliberate inaccuracy. The Poro has not gone away and the methods it uses today can be as cruel as those he described, involving sacrifice and ritual murder. The reason Dr Harley wrote like that was survival. He could not have gone on living here in Ganta, among the Poro believers, unless he pretended their cruel practices were finished.
‘That night in the village we helped our friends by staying with them until dawn but eventually they had to leave their homes. You cannot take on the Poro and continue to live in these villages. That is the reality of Liberia.’
I asked about the current power of the Poro and if the local authorities do anything to challenge it.
‘Last year we had a case in a village east of Ganta where a young man called Hastings Tokpa had also decided to become a Christian. The problem was his father is a zo, and for the Poro Hastings’ choice was the worst insult.
‘It took ages to find out what happened but eventually witnesses came forward to say a Poro mob had grabbed Hastings and told him he had to be initiated, he had to join Poro. He refused and refused and they argued and argued. So they cut off his head.
‘The body was thrown in the river, never found, but the head was buried and when it was finally discovered a case could be built. The local police don’t like to take on the Poro killings but in this case the local church took up the case, and we helped all we could. Eventually enough witnesses came forward that a case could be built and, after weeks and weeks on the run, the ringleader was tracked down and arrested. Do you know his name? He was called “Don’t Fool The Man”.
‘The case came to court and we were thrilled because it convicted all five suspects. This was historic, the first major Poro killing conviction since the war. But then what? All five were freed a few weeks back on appeal. The witnesses have gone into hiding.’
Thinking about the apparently unbeatable power of the Poro seemed to get Dave down and his voice faded as we drove back into the unlit town centre of Ganta. He said he was certain ritual murder continued today and his assessment was that hundreds if not thousands of executions take place every year. The reason you don’t often hear about them, he said, is that ‘the police are either unwilling or incapable of investigating them’. In all of Nimba County the police force, which itself is full of Poro members, has only one jeep and much of the county is reachable only by footpaths.
We pulled up outside Abuja, one of the two functioning restaurants in the town centre, and took our places at plastic picnic tables arranged on the veranda, faintly lit by low-power light bulbs. One by one we went through items on the menu and one by one the waitress said they were not available. Instead, we each made do with a large bottle of Club beer. It was one of the first chilled drinks I had had since Freetown so I wiped the lip of the bottleneck eagerly and joined Dave in taking a deep gulp. It seemed to revive him a little.
‘You know, we must not give up, Tim. No matter how strong the Poro might be in Liberia there is a way we can take on these people but you know how we are going to do it? We are going to chase the devil back to hell through prayer.’
Johnson and Mr Omaru were delighted when the time finally came to leave Ganta. They had been rather subdued ever since we arrived, a mood that was only worsened by the unpleasant encounter over the waterfall with Emma Konnah. Johnson later confided in me.
‘Those Manos have a bad reputation, you know,’ he whispered one day. ‘I have never been here before but when I got through to my wife on the phone to say we were here she got really scared.’
Dave Waines and his colleagues at Equip Liberia had been good hosts, allowing us to rest a
nd prepare for the final trek to the coast. One day I had limped into the house in obvious discomfort as my trousers had become shredded where my legs rubbed together and the chafing had left me tender. One of the nurses did not even blink, tossing me a memorably named tube of ointment from Canada where mothers use it for their babies’ nappy rash. It was called Boudreaux’s Butt Paste and was wonderfully effective.
We ate well in Ganta thanks mostly to a Guinean immigrant who had recently built a basic oven in town that churned out small baguettes, a rather pleasant hangover from the French colonial project. Another Equip Liberia staff member allowed David and me to raid his precious supply of olive oil and fresh salt, so we would sit in the shade of the veranda of the group’s headquarters, mopping up oil and salt from a china plate with the chunks of bread as if we were in a smart West London brasserie. David’s appetite was prodigious, although he stopped eating in shock one night when I started playing with one of the bigger blisters on my right foot, nicking it slightly and sending a needle of high-pressure blister juice jetting across the cement floor.
After five nights at the house the time came to get back out on to the trail. There was no way around the waterfall issue so we would simply have to miss it out and hope to pick up the Greenes’ route further on. It was disappointing but Dave convinced me there was no point going to the local authorities again as they were powerless over the Poro. He had lived in Ganta for a long time and had never been allowed anywhere near the waterfall.
Looking at the map showed we were embarking on the final part of the trek. For almost 200 miles we had been walking mostly east but from Ganta we would start to swing back on ourselves, picking up a trail running south-west straight to the Atlantic and the end of the walk. By the time the Greenes left Dr Harley’s hospitality, they were both fed up with sleeping in vermin-infested villages and trekking day after day through the closed-in, sweaty jungle. The thought of finally leaving the forest and reaching the coast, with its promise of a boat to Monrovia and then home to Britain, became an obsession for Graham Greene. In the words of his cousin, he talked incessantly about the coastal village they were aiming for ‘as if it was going to turn out to be a heaven on earth’ and his desire to arrive at the sea was like ‘a pilgrim craving to get to a holy city’.
David also started to fantasise about the end of the walk, talking enthusiastically about what he began to call ‘the victory march’ onto the beach. But before we got there we would have to cross the area of jungle where illness almost claimed Graham Greene’s life.
CHAPTER 11
Daventry Calling
Mr Omaru
After all the talk about the spirit world in Ganta, it felt somehow appropriate to leave under cover of night. By the light of our headtorches we slipped out of town before dawn, picking our way through the grid of unlit, uneven roads to begin the last part of the trek. All was quiet, except for the regular sound of my falloe’s stick striking the ground, and dark, apart from a self-sufficient UN military base glowing on the town’s southern approaches. The arrival in 2003 of the peacekeeping mission, one of the largest ever deployed by the UN,helped end the conflict in Liberia, as the foreign troops made the country whole again by reopening roads and setting up bases in territory long since given up to rebels. But by the time of our hike, the impetus of the mission had been spent and the three UN bases we passed during the trip all had a forlorn air about them, places where peacekeepers were holed up, passing the time until they could go home for good. Diplomats back at UN headquarters in New York bickered over the cost of the mission and the manning levels but pretty much the one thing they agreed on was that a UN peacekeeping mission was still needed in Liberia. Without it, conflict would almost certainly return.
Mr Omaru had mentioned his fear of heartmen several times during the trip, and from Ganta onwards he became increasingly jumpy. Over the years such murders have been reported by numerous witnesses, including Dr Junge, the German medic who gained rare access to bush societies in the early 1930s. He helped to investigate the murder of a little girl whose liver had been removed and body mutilated by killers using blades designed to resemble a leopard’s claw. The killing was later shown to be the work of members of the Leopard Society, a small but sinister offshoot of the bush society culture. The Greenes themselves came across a case of ritualistic murder just before they entered Liberia, when a district commissioner in Sierra Leone reported the killing of a child by members of a group calling itself the Gorilla Society. The victim’s body had also been disfigured with what Graham Greene describes as ‘a gorilla knife with curved prongs to make the rough clawing wounds’.
Mr Omaru’s anxiety was so acute that it was a struggle to persuade him to venture out on his motorbike in the half-light before dawn. And this became impossible a few days after leaving Ganta when news reached us of a motorcyclist killed in a nearby town called Gbarnga. Reports said two attackers had struck under cover of darkness but what they did not say was what had happened to the body. Dave Waines told me over the phone that he had sent his medical officer to check the corpse and he found the victim’s brain had been removed by the killers. Hearing that, Mr Omaru said he would only move during daylight hours.
Mr Omaru’s state of mind was not helped when, early on the second morning out of Ganta, he fell heavily from his motorbike as he tried to pick his way past a tree felled across the track in one of the increasingly frequent overnight storms. He was one of the most meticulous riders I have ever seen and this was the only mishap in our entire journey, but it was quite a spill. It scoured the fuel tank, skewed the handlebars and squashed the clutch lever out of shape. More importantly, it left Mr Omaru with a right shoulder so bruised and painful he could no longer pick up his bike, let alone ride it.
We managed to get him to the nearby village of Duo, a rather unfortunate choice of place to regroup. Back in Ganta, a nurse had warned me of an outbreak of lassa fever in Duo which had just killed two people and infected several others. With Mr Omaru in obvious pain I decided not to fuss too much about lassa contamination, and helped him towards a fire that had just been lit by some Duo women on the threshold of a hut. David gave him some painkilling spray but he also wanted to use local methods.
‘I need chalk,’ Mr Omaru kept saying as he took off his jacket and shirt. ‘I need chalk.’
The village medicine man was roused and within half an hour or so, Mr Omaru’s right shoulder and upper torso had been painted with a pale clay-like substance that had the appearance of chalk. I have no idea what ingredients went into the balm but it was enough to comfort Mr Omaru and, after settling down in the glow of the fire, he stopped groaning.
He was one of the most sober men I have ever come across, scrupulously efficient and free of anything hinting at frivolity and, oftentimes, emotion. But I knew from a recent conversation how pained he would be by the damage to his motorbike, one of his most prized possessions.
It had taken me until this last stage of the trek to get past his very private, taciturn exterior but slowly he opened up about the tough rural Liberian life he had endured, made tougher by war. Although only forty-three, two years older than me, he had the mature even stately air of a village elder. Educated into his late teens at the Bolahun mission school, he had barely begun working at the iron ore mine at Bong, one of Liberia’s few meaningful industrial programmes, when Taylor’s force invaded in 1989, sparking civil unrest that would soon lead to the mine, along with other commercial projects in rural Liberia, being abandoned as workers fled for their lives. After making it northwards to his home at Bolahun, Mr Omaru, like much of the civilian population of Lofa County, soon had to flee once more, spending many of the next thirteen years as a refugee across the border in Sierra Leone. He clearly had presence, as he rose to the elected position of chairman of the Liberian community within his camp, and was later taken on by the Red Cross to help reconnect Liberian families divided by the war. When he eventually ventured home to Bolahun in the late 1990s fighting er
upted again and his first wife did something he could never forgive.
It was not a subject he would readily talk about, but over three weeks of travelling and living together he saw from the questions I asked of the villagers we met that I was trying to understand life in rural Liberia and, importantly, why the war had festered for so long and so brutally in this region. When he told me the story of his wife, I felt it might have been his own attempt to help me understand.
‘Her name was Kpanna and we had three children together but when the rebels came that last time to Bolahun she told them I had a motorbike.’ As ever, Mr Omaru spoke quietly but the bitterness was strong in his voice.
‘You could get killed for owning a plate back then. They stole everything and, to make sure there would never be any follow-up, they were willing to kill the owner as well. It was anarchy. So to tell them about my motorbike was to endanger my life – they could have killed me for the bike as easily as anything. I could never forgive her.
‘She ran away soon after with one of the rebel leaders and we got a divorce, so I am married again, with another child. I hope life will be better for us now because I earned enough from the Red Cross to plan a little for the future. I bought land and planted four hundred palm trees. It takes about five or six years before they begin to fruit so we must be patient.’
I asked him why Kpanna did what she did and he thought for several moments before replying.
‘We had known each other for years and loved each other as man and wife. But she grew jealous of something, maybe my job with the Red Cross, my money, my travelling. She never said what it was but in Africa jealousy can be a terrible thing. Even between loved ones, people can become so jealous they don’t just bring each other down, they destroy everything.’