by Tim Butcher
Then in 2004 I made a journey through another troubled region in Africa, the Congo, along a trail blazed by the nineteenth-century chancer, Henry Morton Stanley. With Stanley’s writings acting as a fixed reference point I felt better able to chart the turbulent evolution, through time, not just of the Congo but of its people, and it showed me that travelling through a region offered me the best way to gain the understanding, even the closure, that I sought. That trip became the subject of my first book, Blood River, and several years later I began to think in terms of another journey, this time through Sierra Leone and Liberia, a journey that would deal once and for all with the stone in my shoe.
I wanted a route that would take me through the remote back-country of both countries, an area that during recent wars had been largely too dangerous for outsiders to visit, and to bring me in contact with the people living there. These remote communities were key not only because they were forced to endure the worst of the recent violence, but also because it was among them that rebel forces had survived for so long.
I began to read as much as I could about the history of both countries, including accounts of early expeditions into the interior, and discovered that European explorers largely ignored what we now call Liberia until relatively late in the timeline of African exploration. For centuries they got no further than the shoreline, which they dubbed the Grain Coast because it was a rich source of a type of ginger spice, aframomum melegueta, so prized in Europe as a flavouring that it became known as the ‘Grains of Paradise’.
But for hundreds of years what lay behind the coastline was passed over by foreign explorers. In 1906, Sir Harry Johnston, a British geographer, described the interior of Liberia as ‘still the least known part of Africa’, although the first decades of the twentieth century saw a series of expeditions inland. They were often led by doughty British gentlemen, including Sir Harry himself, a dentist called Dr Cuthbert Christy and another titled geographer, Sir Alfred Sharpe. But perhaps my favourite early Liberian explorer was an adventurous aristocratic Englishwoman, Lady Dorothy Mills, who completed an impressively arduous trek in the mid-1920s, described in her book Through Liberia. It is full of the effortless insouciance of the early white outsider in Africa.
‘The climate of Liberia is … quite healthy as long as you have a well proofed and ventilated house, and do not go out in the heat of the day, and do not take a stroke of unnecessary exercise except in the very early morning maybe, or during the hour before sundown to give you zest for your cocktail and cold bath,’ she wrote after being carried in a hammock for hundreds of miles through the jungle.
In spite of this occasional gaucheness, she was clearly a formidable traveller. She lost her last cigarette papers in a swamp and took to rolling her tobacco in pages torn from her notebook, making roll-ups that would burn so fast they singed her lips. When she ran out of dried biscuit, she ate foie gras with banana, and when she irreparably damaged her sun umbrella by bashing one of her hammock bearers over the head, she took to stuffing the back of her blouse with banana leaf fronds that were so large they would reach above her head to cast shade.
But the expedition that came to fascinate me was made a little later by Graham Greene. He was only thirty when he set out by ship from Liverpool on a chill January morning in 1935 for his first venture beyond Europe, one that would take him across Sierra Leone by train and truck, and then through Liberia on an epic overland trek. His account of the trip, Journey Without Maps, is, rather like its author, darkly multi-layered.
Mystery has always clung to the motivation for Greene’s trip if only because Liberia was so rarely visited by outsiders. Speculation about a possible secret dimension to his trip arose in part because years later, during the Second World War, Greene served with MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, in the same region, training in Nigeria and then deploying to Sierra Leone between 1942 and 1943. Some observers, such as the authors Michael Shelden, Paul Fussell and W. J. West, have wondered if Greene’s service with MI6 extended far beyond just the wartime years. Might Greene even have been working for the British government in 1935, sent to investigate Germany’s covert courting of the bankrupt government of Liberia?
Publicly, Greene always described the 1935 trip as little more than a flight of fancy, an adventure inspired by his personal belief in the magnetism of Africa, an innate connection he suggested we all have with the continent if we look deep enough inside ourselves. That may have been part of his motivation but there was also a more prosaic element – money. Although relatively successful as a writer, with one of his novels, Stamboul Train, already made into a film, he was living at the time in rented accommodation in Oxford with his young family and desperately wanted a break from fiction. An adventurous travel book was potentially lucrative, especially after he persuaded his publishers, William Heinemann, to pay £350 upfront to cover the trip’s expenses, and the newspaper he had worked for in the 1920s, The Times, had given a vague – and never to be fulfilled – promise to publish articles on anything he found of interest in Sierra Leone and Liberia. But it became clear as I researched his journey that Greene did have an ulterior motive, although not as an agent of the British government.
By 1935 Sierra Leone was regarded as having been largely tamed by British colonial development so the true focus of Greene’s project was Liberia, which he referred to simply as the Republic. The title, Journey Without Maps, gives a sense of the isolation of inland Liberia in the mid–1930s. Little meaningful mapping of the area had been done and one of the two maps he used had the word ‘cannibals’ plastered across the otherwise blank interior. But while it might have been remote, Liberia in the late 1920s and early 1930s also represented one of the international community’s most acute foreign policy issues. The country’s ruling elite, descendants mostly of freed black slaves from America who founded the country in the mid-nineteenth century, had been caught systematically selling into slavery their compatriots from the hinterland – freed slaves had become slavers.
France and Britain led the attack on Liberia over slavery although for opportunistic reasons, hoping to carve up the territory of Liberia and add it to their existing colonial assets nearby. But in the end the League of Nations, recently formed and with little experience at settling international disputes, took over the problem, convening in 1930 a commission of inquiry with three members. It sat for just a few months but the report it published in September 1930 was devastating. It found that the government of Liberia had overseen years of systemic slavery, allowing large numbers of native Liberians to be rounded up at gunpoint by government forces, loaded on to ships and taken out into the Atlantic to work on plantations on a Spanish island colony called Fernando Po.
The report created a surge of political pressure that forced the Liberian head of state, President Charles King, to resign in December 1930 – an important early victory for human rights campaigners across the world. But after the hubbub died down following his departure, new fears emerged that slavery had returned to Liberia. Years after the president’s resignation, the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, the leading abolitionist group in London, still viewed Liberia as ‘one of our most difficult and anxious problems’. What the society needed was up-to-date information, and Greene, a young writer who had already worked for several years as a journalist, would make the perfect snoop.
The papers of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society are today held at Rhodes House in Oxford, within walking distance of the Woodstock Road flat Greene was renting at the time of his departure for Africa. Among the bundles of carbon paper, I found clear evidence that the society was the force behind his trip. It may have been Greene who dreamed of going to Africa, but it was the society that pressured him into going first to Sierra Leone and then to Liberia.
‘Our Committee is of the opinion that you would like to know that it has been arranged for Mr Graham Greene, a young author, (British subject) to visit Liberia and prepare a book upon the whole Li
berian question,’ Sir John Harris, the group’s parliamentary secretary, wrote in a private letter to the Foreign Office in London.
‘Certain members of our Committee have formed a very high opinion of Mr. Graham Greene, and they are hoping it may be possible for the Foreign Office to give to him a simple introduction to the British Consul at Monrovia, expressing to him the hope that any assistance it may be proper to render to Mr. Graham Greene should be forthcoming.’
In another letter, this time to the Colonial Office, Sir John took credit for suggesting Greene travel through Sierra Leone en route to Liberia. He wrote, ‘I have strongly urged him to see a properly governed colony before he goes to Liberia, and he is now making arrangements, at my suggestion, to visit first Sierra Leone, travel through the interior, witness the well-ordered and progressive administration on the British side of the border, then enter Liberia and travel down to Monrovia.’
Many commentators, including Norman Sherry, Greene’s authorised biographer, have identified a link between Greene and the anti-slavery society but I feel they failed to reflect its significance. From the extent and tone of the documents I found, it is my view that Greene was in effect working as an agent for the anti-slavery society. As a student he had played at ‘spying’ on trips to Ireland and Germany but Liberia was a more serious undertaking, a full dress rehearsal for his later MI6 service. Speaking in 1931, Dr Christy, chairman of the League of Nations inquiry into Liberia’s slavery allegations, said the authorities in Monrovia had deliberately banned all freelance travel upcountry by outsiders, the implication being that the government had something to hide, most likely the continued existence of slavery. Throughout Greene’s books he repeatedly refers to dodging government control in Liberia, first by entering the country incognito and then by completing his journey without government minders. ‘If there was anything to hide in the Republic I wanted to surprise it,’ he writes.
There was tidy historical resonance in Greene’s role as agent for the anti-slavery campaigners, perhaps even a sense of payback, as the Greene family fortune had partly been made from sugar estates on the Caribbean island of St Kitts, properties that relied heavily on African slave labour. If he had been born in an earlier age Greene would have been expected to follow other family members out to St Kitts to oversee the slave-dependent business. He never knew his paternal grandfather because, after sailing to the Caribbean on sugar business in the 1880s, he died there from a tropical fever.
Continuing my research at Rhodes House I discovered a tantalising reference that hinted the British government was not just aware of Greene’s trip but might even have supported it. Sent by the anti-slavery society, the four-line note thanked a mandarin at the Foreign Office for offering to meet Greene. In research terms this was exciting stuff, proof of a British government link to his trip. Maybe those who had suspected Greene was sent to Liberia as a British spy were right after all.
But to establish the nature of the British government’s involvement in the 1935 trip I would need to see more, starting with the official’s letter, receipt of which the anti-slavery society note acknowledged. I leafed through the file of correspondence several times only to be disappointed. The original was lost.
Research is a time-consuming process with long hours of mining through valueless slag punctuated by occasional moments when nuggets of fact are discovered. Finding the note was one of those highs but then failing to find the corresponding letter was a frustrating low. Feeling deflated, I left Rhodes House with one last lead to go on. The acknowledgement note included the Foreign Office registry code for the correspondence, a ‘J’ followed by a sequence of ten digits. After failing to find the letter in the files of the recipient, maybe I could find it at the other end, in the files of the sender, the Foreign Office. I took a careful note of the code and drove down to the National Archives in West London, where British government documents are kept.
The archives’ index room alone is the size of a concert hall, permanently crowded with researchers ranging from members of the public tracking family genealogy to highbrow academics. As a new-comer I found it a little overwhelming, not least because the first librarian I asked had no idea what the J-sequence might mean. But she passed me on to a colleague who specialised in Foreign Office matters and he was able to help. He led me across the hall between various filing cabinets and bookshelves, and navigated expertly through a number of cross-referencing indexes until I finally had in my hands the original Foreign Office file on Greene’s trip. It was my own modest eureka moment.
Between stiff cardboard covers the planning for the trip was laid out in full, with original letters from Greene – one handwritten, the others typed and all bearing his distinctive symmetrical signature – as well as correspondence from the anti-slavery society. There were memos, draft letters and official telegrams prepared by the Foreign Office, authentically marked with the hieroglyphic marginalia of long-retired mandarins.
These papers proved that while Greene was not officially working for the British government, the Foreign Office knew of the trip, supported it and expected information in return. From central London the Foreign Office cabled its people in Freetown and Monrovia, ordering them to help Greene. Furthermore, it obliged Greene to provide a full debrief if he managed to complete the trip.
In his first letter to the Foreign Office, Greene mentions his uncle, Sir Graham Greene, a senior civil servant who had already informally asked acquaintances in the Foreign Office to assist his nephew. In another he spells out his planned itinerary and hints at how unhelpful it would be if the government in Liberia got to hear about his journey from the British representatives cabled in Monrovia.
Its very good of you to take so much trouble on my behalf. I very much hope that the Liberian government being informed of my plan to go through the hinterland will not enable them to forbid the journey. I am nervous on this point as the cost of the journey is being paid by my publishers and naturally I’ve got to get the material.
But the note that really stands out from the file is an internal memo written by a civil servant. It was for Foreign Office eyes only, meaning Greene would never have seen it, probably a good thing given how strongly it disparages the author and his plan.
I think you may be interested in glancing through the attached draft telegram to Monrovia and letter to Mr Graham Greene, who is shortly proceeding on a visit to Liberia..… His expenses are being paid by his publishers, and the Anti-Slavery Society are much interested in Mr Greene’s plans.
Mr Greene called on me the other day and I undertook that we would do everything possible to ease his path. He is a young man and unfortunately does not give the appearance of being of particularly robust health. Quite frankly, I think he is running a considerable risk in making this journey … I don’t imagine that Mr Greene has any experience whatsoever of the tropics. There is, however, nothing we can do to prevent him going on this journey if he is determined to do so.
The Foreign Office wrote a disclaimer to Greene saying it could accept no official responsibility for his journey although, in the typically mealy-mouthed way of government officials, the diplomat then added he would be most interested in hearing about the trip when he got back. Graham Greene handwrote a cheery response, which was sent just days before sailing:
I don’t think you need worry about my wanderings in the hinterland; I’ve already taken expert medical advice and am going out fully set up with hypodermic syringes, serums and the rest. I should like to come and see you when I get back.
The more I read about Greene’s trip, the more convinced I became an attempt to follow his route was the challenge I was looking for in Sierra Leone and Liberia. It would give me not just a smell but a taste of the region I still found so fascinating yet unsettling. It was also intriguing on a different level. As a reader of some of his novels, those that dealt with spiritual issues often drawn from Catholicism, my view of Graham Greene was framed in terms of his literary prowess. To learn about a differ
ent more earthy side to him, that of the pioneer-adventurer, would add a richer tone to my mental image of the author.
I was curious to learn Greene had taken along a younger relative on the trip. Ten weeks before leaving London he had light-heartedly invited his twenty-seven-year-old socialite cousin, Barbara Greene, to join him and, rather to his surprise, she had said yes. There was an air of frivolity to her involvement as the invitation was made at a wedding reception that was, by their common admission, well fuelled by champagne, but she was to turn out a very wise choice of travelling companion.
I had a wealth of reading material at my disposal. Journey Without Maps contains plenty of helpful details about the trip, especially in the first edition, a book that is difficult to find today as, shortly after publication in 1936, it was withdrawn from sale and pulped because of a libel action. Most editions available today include changes made by Graham Greene ten years later, so, to make sure I did not miss anything, I went in search of an original. My hunt took me to a second-hand bookshop in Johannesburg where I found a first edition that had evaded the pulpers because it was shipped out to southern Africa before ending up on the shelves of Bulawayo Public Library. Barbara Greene also published a book about the trip, Land Benighted (later reprinted as Too Late to Turn Back), and as my research continued I discovered the Greenes had left a trail of letters, papers and other material connected to their journey.
Close reading showed the Greenes had made several errors in their published accounts. In Graham Greene’s account he is sloppy on dates; he writes that they reached Freetown by 15 January when, in fact, they arrived on the 19th, and at the end of the book he describes making it back to Britain on a cold April morning when, in fact, the ship docked in Dover on 25 March. In their books both Greenes recorded an incorrect version of the national anthem of Liberia, muddling up the line ‘we’ll shout the freedom of a race benighted’ with a wrong version, ‘we’ll shout the freedom of a land benighted’. In spite of the mistakes, I felt certain that if I could follow the same route, their observations from the 1930s would provide a strong reference point against which to chart how the region had developed.
