Chasing the Devil

by Tim Butcher

  Graham Greene’s dreams according to his diary, often turned to his wife, Vivien, and their infant daughter, Lucy Caroline, and he writes repeatedly about how much he was missing them. In 1935 their marriage was strong and in the diary Graham Greene describes ‘longing inexpressibly for V’. The entry on the day after he almost died includes a letter to her in which he says ‘I’ve never never loved you more dearly and more longingly and deeply than on this silly trip’. When the first edition of Journey Without Maps came out in 1936 it was dedicated ‘To My Wife’ with a William Plomer quotation saying ‘I carry you like a passport everywhere’. Their marriage would fail in the 1940s meaning the dedication would be removed from later editions.

  For the first time in the trip David had started to have serious problems. His left shin, low down and just above the boot, was really troubling him. He would start the day well enough, pumped full of painkillers, but as the day progressed he would fall some distance behind me. I would wait for him from time to time but when he finally caught up his limp would be noticeable. He is a determined young man and he refused to give up the chance of the victory march into Buchanan.

  On the fourth day, we reached a village called Siahn and after washing and making ready for bed I had an unsettling exchange with Mr Omaru. That day had been the first when he was well enough to ride his bike again after his fall and towards the end of the day he had done something rather odd. We had just passed three men on the trail carrying cutlasses and walking in the same direction as us and, for some reason, Mr Omaru had all of a sudden appeared on his motorbike from nowhere and taken up position right behind us, separating us from the three men, the engine just ticking over as he kept our, by then, slow pace.

  After darkness had fallen Mr Omaru asked me quietly if I remembered anything odd about the three men. I said no.

  ‘They were going to embarrass you, Mr Tim.’

  At first I did not know what he meant by ‘embarrass’.

  ‘I heard them talking and they had decided to attack you and steal your things. I followed you closely to protect you.’

  Impossible to verify, the story sounded plausible enough, if only because Mr Omaru was not one for hyperbole. I went to bed feeling as if I had another reason to want the trek over.

  Graham Greene might have been sick on those last days but his journalistic luck – the luck that has you in the right place at the right time – did not desert him. His diary shows how lucky he and his cousin were from the outset as a yellow fever outbreak struck Freetown shortly after they left on the train. Had it been discovered just a day earlier the Greenes would not have been allowed to travel because of quarantine rules. Luck had played a part in their meeting the president in Lofa County, and it returned once more on this final leg of their trip as they ran into another important Liberian figure, Colonel Elwood Davis. To meet Col. Davis was the equivalent of bumping into Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander and wanted war criminal, in the Balkans. Col. Davis was one of the most controversial figures in the entire country, centrally involved in atrocities allegedly committed by Barclay’s government in its attempt to subjugate the native country people of Liberia. In British government papers he was accused of killing women and children during a campaign against the Kru tribe, so time spent with Col. Davis would be of considerable help to Graham Greene’s mission to build up the human rights picture of Liberia for the anti-slavery society. From his description of the meeting, Graham Greene appeared to rather fall for Col. Davis, an American who had served as a junior soldier in the US army before crossing the Atlantic and being made commander-in-chief of Liberia’s armed forces. The pair of them drank their way through a substantial part of the Greenes’ dwindling stock of whisky.

  I met no Liberian military commander but on our last morning of walking I did stumble across a sad relic of the war, a dreadlocked madman staggering down the track firing an ‘air machine gun’ into the forest. He was unshod and wearing rags, with the same eye tics I saw in the Harlequin we had encountered back on the walk into Bolahun. The noise of his pretend gun – ‘digga-dig, digga-dig, digga-dig’ – picked up as we got closer and not once did he stop aiming into the trees. That was where his imaginary enemies were hiding and his body language and glances over his shoulder suggested he was protecting us as allies. Johnson was not convinced, however, and he urged us to walk on by as quickly as possible.

  Graham Greene’s luck struck again a day’s walk from the coast when, in the middle of the bush, he came across the only working truck in the area. It meant an end to what had become, for the Greenes and their entourage, an ordeal. He writes:

  I wanted to laugh and shout and cry; it was the end, the end to the worst boredom I had ever experienced, the worst fear and the worst exhaustion.

  All the trekkers – the Greenes, the three servants taken on in Freetown, the teenage jester hired in Bolahun and the twenty-four remaining bearers – squeezed on board and set off shrieking with glee in a cloud of stinking exhaust fumes. After so many footsore miles, Barbara Greene describes the sensation of being driven as ‘one of the most utterly satisfying experiences I have ever had’.

  With their trek nearing the end, Graham Greene could have picked from numerous yardsticks to measure his return to civilisation but, for me, his choice felt like synchronicity. He writes how he would know his venture into the unknown was over when he would be able to listen on a radio to ‘the Empire programme from Daventry’. Daventry, a modest town in Northamptonshire, rarely makes it into works by great literary figures. I know this because it is five miles from the village where I was brought up, and over many childhood years of reading I looked out keenly for mentions of my local town. The best I ever found was an entry in The Guinness Book of Records from the mid 1970s, categorising, if I recall correctly, the town’s car-part distribution centre, as ‘the largest, single-storey building in Europe’.

  During my research for the trip through West Africa I can remember how special it felt to spot Greene’s reference to Dav, as we locals know it. The BBC Empire Service, the precursor to today’s BBC World Service, was first broadcast in 1932 from radio masts erected on hills near to the town, and for many early listeners the first words they heard when tuning in would have been the announcement ‘Daventry Calling’. Graham Greene’s mention gave me a strange sense of connection with his expedition, a reassuring omen for my risky adventure.

  The last stretch to Buchanan ended with a prayer, a suitable bookend for a trek that had started back in Bolahun with Brother Frank’s ‘Prayer Before a Journey’. The coastal plain of Grand Bassa County was flat and the LAMCO signboards had petered out so I had no idea quite how close we were to the coast when, a little before midday on Sunday 1 March 2009, we reached a junction in a dirt road. There had been no trees around for the past few hours so we had no alternative other than to walk in increasingly hot, open country, and when we got to the turning all I was interested in was getting under the shade of a thatched roadside stall. There I found a woman who was selling packets of biscuits covered in a thick coating of road dust.

  ‘Please ask the lady how far we have to go to Buchanan,’ I mumbled to Johnson as I stretched out gratefully on a rough plank balanced on two rocks.

  But Nyonkondo Gbor understood me and she said something that had me jumping back up with excitement.

  ‘What do you mean “how far to Buchanan”? – This is Buchanan; you are here already.’

  I looked around. To the north-east was the open country we had walked through and to the south-west all I could see was the flat horizon along a low tree-line.

  ‘Behind those trees is the town and then there is the sea. It is just a short walk from here.’

  When Johnson explained to her that we had come all the way from the border with Sierra Leone on foot, she uttered a long ‘eeesh’ in astonishment before composing herself and formally offering to say a prayer. So David, Johnson, Mr Omaru and I all stood up and bowed our heads under the thatch as she began t
o speak. She spoke in Bassa so none of us, including Johnson and Mr Omaru whose linguistic skills were focused around their homes back in Lofa County, could understand what she was saying. But her reverential tone and solemn body language felt appropriate enough and she finished with words that even I understood – ‘tanks to God’.

  David and I were thrilled but Mr Omaru’s mood suddenly changed things. As practical and inscrutable as ever, he formally demanded payment so he could set off for his journey home.

  ‘But don’t you want to finish the last few miles with us? Don’t you want to celebrate?’ I asked, not really appreciating how serious he was.

  ‘No, thank you. I do not know this place and once you have given me my money I will be a target for robbers. I want to leave now and ride to Monrovia where I know people.’

  As ever, Mr Omaru was being both cautious and wise. When the Greenes paid off their bearers here, the men frittered most of their month’s earnings on a night of revelry much lubricated by local palm wine and sugar cane spirit, while corrupt Liberian government officials lay in wait to squeeze them for backhanders. Johnson looked forlorn. He was much more interested in reaching the bitter end of the trek and celebrating but he knew that if Mr Omaru left he would have to go with him as a passenger. Mr Omaru’s bike was his best bet for starting the long journey home to Lofa County.

  It meant a brutally truncated end to our shared adventure. The others looked to one side as I fished my dollar bundle out from where I had secreted it in my daypack and started to pay both Mr Omaru and Johnson. For what had basically been three weeks’ work they each received dollars worth well over £700, a sum representing about forty times what they would expect to earn normally in a month.

  ‘You are a good man, Mr Tim,’ Mr Omaru said formally. ‘You do what you say you are going to do. You said you would walk across Liberia and you did that. And you said you would pay me this money and you did that. Now, I must go.’

  Johnson was genuinely upset. I arranged some group photographs outside the roadside stall. In them Mr Omaru and Johnson have taken off their team baseball caps and while Mr Omaru looks content enough poor Johnson’s cheerful default setting is deflated. He had suffered through the trip, not just from the terrible blisters back in the first days, but from the worry of feeling responsible for two foreigners as we ventured into parts of Liberia and Guinea he himself had never been to. After sorting out our ‘luggages’ one last time, he put on a forced smile, hugged David and me warmly and mounted up behind Mr Omaru. Over the roar of the Yamaha’s engine I heard him shout, ‘I will see you again, falloe’.

  There was one final thing we had to do to complete our mission. Breaking our rule of avoiding the midday sun, we emerged from the shade of the thatched stall and started walking one last time, David doing his best to conceal his limp. Those last few miles felt a little strange without Johnson and Mr Omaru, but by then I was focused on just one thing: reaching the beach. The track took us through the old LAMCO compound, built at the terminal of the iron ore railway, where we saw rusting hulks of abandoned machinery, the only equipment left by looters back in the 1990s. It passed the tents of UN peacekeepers deployed to Buchanan, the only meaningful port in Liberia outside Monrovia. And it skirted old villas recently refurbished for ArcelorMittal employees.

  The terrain could not have been flatter and, against a wide, low horizon of reed thickets and long grass, it was a struggle to believe we were making any progress. Finally, we emerged through yet another patch of low scrub and there in front of us was a manmade wall of huge boulders, the breakwater of the old LAMCO harbour, looming above head height. The rocks were hot to the touch as we clambered up, lizards skittering away at our approach, my falloe’s stick helping me one last time to keep my balance.

  Then with one final heave, we reached the top and there in front of us was the true end of our trek, the Atlantic Ocean, which we had last seen under the baobabs at Cape Sierra in Freetown. For what felt like the first time in weeks I felt a breeze, a lung-venting, sweat-lifting, shirt-flapping breeze. It was heaven.

  Dropping down onto the soft sand, I unlaced my boots, stripped and ran into the waves. My forearms were creosote brown from the sun, the rest of my body pastier and thinner than I recognised. Giddy with glee, I did not feel the burn of the saltwater under the torn flaps of skin on my feet, plunging myself time after time into the water. The walk was finished – da wok don don.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Devil’s Last Dance

  Map depicting the Greenes’ 1935 route, believed to have been drawn by Barbara Greene

  After the thrill of completing the overland hike our adventure had one final act, a 60-mile sea journey from Buchanan to Monrovia. During the planning stage I had imagined it would be the easiest part of the whole trip but, on journeys into the unknown, expectation and reality rarely marry. While it took the Greenes only a few hours before they found a boat, by 2009 sea travel along the coast of Liberia had dwindled almost to nothing because a jungle road had been built to the capital city offering an easier, albeit bumpier, means of travel. Without a ferry service, our only hope was to persuade a fisherman to take us.

  Buchanan had once been a thriving port but war had left little of the town intact. The main road leading to the beach was pockmarked with potholes and its once grand houses were reduced to occasional patches of rubble roughly defined by the moss-covered stubs of collapsed walls no higher than my waist. In what passed as the town centre it was possible to spot a few recently refurbished buildings, such as a general trading store owned by a Lebanese businessman. Immigrants from the Levant have thrived not just in Sierra Leone but across much of West Africa, nowhere more so than in Liberia. I retained fond memories of the Lebanese owner of the Mamba Point Hotel in Monrovia occasionally providing mezze back in 2003, during lulls in the rebel attack on the city. Inside the shop, members of the owner’s family busied themselves stacking slabs of imported beer and checking stock levels for the tinned fish, batteries and basic dry goods piled on the shelves. A quiver of cheap, Chinese-made umbrellas stood next to the till, ready for the imminent rainy season. Looting remained such a threat that the shop was set up a little bit like a fortress, with crudely cut lengths of metal welded over the windows and security guards manning the front door, policing a gaggle of beggars who milled around outside and hassled the few foreign aid workers and ArcelorMittal employees wealthy enough to shop there.

  I noticed that some churches had also reopened. Their newly painted walls and noticeboards, fluttering with evangelising messages, suggested they enjoyed good local support. A portentous poster from the Church of Pentecost caught my eye with its promise of a national crusade under the theme ‘Oh! Pharaoh, Let My People Go’. Nearby, a billboard announced the post-war relaunch of the Liberian postal service with a jaunty motto of ‘Rain or Shine, Mail Must Go’. Back in 2003 I had visited the central post office in Monrovia and remembered it as a symbol of how dysfunctional the nation had become under Taylor’s regime. The plate-glass windows of the 1970s building had been shot out and airlines had stopped taking bags of airmail letters because they were owed so much in arrears. I try to write to my godchildren whenever I travel overseas no matter how turbulent the country, but the post worker in Monrovia told me not to bother. The thought that the postal system had come back on stream was comforting.

  On our first morning in Buchanan I heard what could have been gunshots as we headed to the town-centre beach, so when I stepped from under a screen of coconut palms onto the sand I did so rather gingerly. Hand-painted flags streamed in the onshore breeze from the bows of dozens of beached fishing canoes. Made from rough, sunbleached lengths of timber, at a distance the armada could be mistaken for flotsam from some biblical flood, an image reinforced by the religious messages borne by the flags. They were quotations from Christian scripture, imploring God to look benevolently on each small vessel and its crew. Every so often the wind would gust, making the bigger flags crack as loudly as bullwhips. Aft
er the close confinement of the jungle, the colour, movement, sound and open-ocean backdrop were giddying, so for several moments I stood motionless in the shade of a time-tilted palm and recalibrated my sense of horizon.

  ‘Please sit down,’ said a boat-owner I was introduced to in the warren of shanties erected just up from the surfline. They were little more than shacks with planking walls planted straight on the sand, topped with plastic sheeting. They had the same temporary air that I last saw in the fishermen’s grass huts on the banks of the river frontier between Liberia and Guinea.

  Sea-fishing is a notoriously itinerant business in West Africa. Not only do the fishermen face fluctuations from Mother Nature, such as seasonal movements of their quarry, changes in feeding patterns and the like, they also face manmade crises such as war and instability.

  Almost all the fishermen I met in Buchanan were originally from Ghana, two countries along the coast from Liberia, but overfishing in their homewaters had forced them to move a generation or so earlier. The older ones had been in Liberia for decades and they remembered how, when fighting reached here in the 1990s, they simply put out to sea, turned their banana boats east and moved, temporarily, to the beaches of neighbouring Ivory Coast. The wandering life meant the fishing industry is never much more than artisanal – small canoes, modest nets, limited catches, temporary dwellings, shifting sands – and it was never powerful enough to compete with the huge, unregulated foreign trawlers that since the 1980s have been plundering the waters off West Africa, driving down fish stocks and changing annual migration patterns.