‘That my hut,’ the fat man said, pointing past a black bull. ‘Yes’m. And that. And that. And that. Yes’m. And that,’ marking out half the town with his plump finger. Next day, the terrified Laminah, who remembered how his bargaining had angered the stranger, learnt that he was the headman of the devil.
The sales continued until late: all the finest swords and spears were bought last by men who slipped quietly in behind the lowered reed screens which at mosquito-time made the verandah into a little private room. One owner, at the chief’s command, unwillingly brought a lovely sword in a worked leather sheath, with a hilt of ivory and brass. He didn’t want to sell; he loved the sword; it had been his father’s. It was pathetic to watch the struggle in his mind between his love for it and the wealth he was offered. I raised my bid to twenty-two shillings and the man nearly gave way. That sum of money would have fed him, and fed him well, for more than three months. He lifted up the screen and ran from temptation, back down the hill into the village, carrying the sword. The carriers laughed at him as they lay sprawling on the verandah.
For we led a partriarchal life on trek. Only the places in which we slept were free from intrusion. If the hut had a verandah or a room to eat in, it belonged to the carriers too. They sat round, on the floor, in the hammocks; they slept in corners. It was assumed that I would always be glad to see them there, to attend to their wants even in the middle of a meal, giving them iodine or Epsom salts. At Zigita a leprous man from the town came, with the sellers, to be healed, standing dumbly, holding out his rotting hands. Passive misery had been stamped on his face for a long while, but he had seen the carriers take medicine from me and one could tell that behind the misery a spark of belief had been struck in miracles. It was no good destroying hope and admitting there was nothing I could do. I gave him a few tablets of boric acid to dissolve and bathe his hands with.
At half-past six when the leper and the men with swords to sell had all gone home, the mosquito-screen was lifted and a stranger slipped in. We were drinking whisky and lime; the hurricane lamp was turned low to save oil; we couldn’t understand what the man wanted when he spoke urgently to us from the shadows. We called Mark to translate. It was a command from the devil in the town that no one should go outside; no one must even look through a window, for the devil proposed to leave his hut. The servants came in from the cookhouse and listened; the man slipped away again into the dark and left them scared. I tried to sound the servants; it was disquieting to see how grave and frightened Laminah had become, although the longest march never stilled his tongue for long. He stood there silent and gloomy in his shorts, his little white waiter’s jacket which the forest had torn, his woollen cap with the red bobble. He believed, one could not doubt it, that if we so much as saw the devil through a window we would go blind. The warning reached the carriers who were gathered in the cookhouse, and suddenly all the voices were turned low like lamp flames. One could hear the silence welling up the hill from Zigita into the compound. I looked from under the mosquito-screen; the compound was quite empty; the sentry who usually guarded the gateway had disappeared; the screens were down in the clerk’s house and the windows shauttered.
I said: ‘But if we go outside, do you really think that anything . . . ?’
They watched me carefully, trying to make out if I were serious. Mark was a Christian boy, he wouldn’t answer directly, he was ashamed of his fear, but he said he thought we oughtn’t to go. Amedoo broke in excitedly with a story it was difficult to follow about what had happened in 1923 at dinner one night at a District Commissioner’s in Sierra Leone: ‘The DC he sit here, his wife she sat there, Mr Trout he sat here, Mrs Trout she sat there and the devil passed through.’ He said that if we went and saw the devil, the devil would put a medicine on the town and there would be no white man after we had gone with better medicine. The boys went into the two rooms and drew the mosquito-screens over the windows; after they had cleared dinner they sat with the carriers in the cookhouse with the blinds pulled down; we could see the lamp shining on the floor through the slats and the shadows of the silent figures.
But the needs of the body had to be satisfied, and taking our electric torches we went out through the compound to the edge of the forest. The town of over two thousand inhabitants might have been deserted; the pale sickle of a new moon, a sky luminous with stars, circle after circle of shuttered huts. The place had an eerie air after Nicoboozu and Duogobmai, where music and dancing, laughter and cries went on till midnight, for it was not yet nine. But as we returned up the path out of the forest and flashed our torches on the town, we lit up two human figures who were standing silently outside the devil’s hut. Perhaps the devil had set a watch on Zigita to see who moved or peeped, because for some time after we returned to the rest-house we could hear feet moving in the compound, lightly stirring in the dust outside. As we undressed the devil’s music began in Zigita, the pulse of a drum. We turned out the lamps and lifted the screen from the window which faced the town, but there was nothing to be seen from the direction of the devil’s hut; no lights moved. ‘When once,’ Saki wrote, ‘you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.’ We had the creeps that night; there were no doors and anyone could slip into the house under the mosquito-screens. I very nearly took the automatic out of the money-box to load it; only self-consciousness prevented me.
I had expected the atmosphere in the morning to clear. This was the day of rest which the carriers had looked forward to, but they showed no sign of enjoying it. They lingered in the rest-house, avoided the town. Mark said it was a bad place where they fought with poison and not swords, and I remembered uneasily how simple it would be for the devil to poison the carriers’ food and teach the sceptical whites a lesson. Thunder kept wandering along the hills; two carriers complained of their heads and one of his belly, and I sent off a messenger to the Lutheran mission at Zorzor warning them of our coming next day, although I had meant to stay another day at Zigita. All the morning the building of the fence round the new hut went on, a line of women carrying pails of water up and down the hill from the river to loosen the soil. The noise was like that of a distant rugger match; every now and then there were screams of delight as if a try had been scored. Once the headman arrived on the verandah and asked for some oil, and if I had not stopped him, Laminah would have given him the greater part of our supply.
Again a warning was brought to the compound that the devil was leaving his hut. After the drums had sounded, no one was to go outside. The fat baleful man appeared with a him at the gateway of the compound. He had with him a little old man with a white goatee beard who wanted us to buy some crude leather pouch. ‘Yes’m,’ and ‘No’m,’ the fat man said at intervals. ‘And this devil,’ I said, ‘why can’t I see him?’ He laughed evasively and Laminah plucked at my sleeve. He knew who the fat man was and he was scared. The fat man turned and saw him. He became boisterously funny, but without any humour showing in his little sunk eyes. He said, ‘You want to see devil, eh?’ gripping Laminah’s arm, and he began to talk to him in his own tongue.
When Laminah got away he was stammering with his fear. The fat man, he said, was the devil’s headman and the old man with the goatee beard his medicine man. The headman had frightened him badly in revenge for his bargaining over the sword; he had told him that he would be carried away into lot of trash to sell, and I, not knowing then who he was, chaffed the bush for seven years and forcibly initiated into the Bush Society. The thunder rumbled round the hills and the clouds broke up. Amedoo joined us. He said, ‘England good place. You have one God and no devils. I have one God too but plenty devils.’ He was a Mohammedan. He began all over again the story about the English DC. He wanted to prove that it wasn’t safe to laugh in private at a Big Bush Devil. They could make themselves invisible; they could hear everything.
Then the rain came washing down, a vertical wall of water, while the thunder rumbled. We ran for shelter. Mark met us
on the verandah, anxious to impress us, too, with how bad a place it was. The DC, Amedoo began to tell us all over again, had been having dinner. ‘Mrs DC sat here, Mr Trout there.’ The DC had laughed and said that he would like to see the devil, and immediately the devil had passed invisibly through the dinner-table splitting it in half. Through a window we could see a man standing outside the devil’s hut in the pouring rain fanning the thunderstorm away with a switch of elephant hair, fanning it away from the devil’s hut towards the compound and the hills. He stood there for more than two hours in the rain, fanning.
The storm continued all the evening and well into the night. It certainly kept away from Zigita; the hills and the huts leapt up in green light; the thunder travelled all the way along the rim, the lightning screwing down into the forest. There was no sound from the devil’s hut. The stage was magnificently set for a supernatural act. I had promised the boys we would not look outside, but we kept watch on the hut through a crack in the shutter. It leapt and receded before the green flames; something should have happened to crown the wild night, but nothing did. The devil never stirred and the great natural preparation went on too long without a climax; the storm became a bore.
That night the rats came leaping into my room like large cats; they knocked things over; they made too much noise for me to sleep, though they always evaded the eye of the torch. A tin went crashing over; once I could have sworn that the lamp itself had gone. But curiously, when daylight came, nothing was out of order; even the biscuit-tin I had heard fall was in its usual place.
There was certainly something bad about Zigita. I never felt quite well again until I reached the Coast. It was not that I believed in the devil’s power so much as in the power of my own mind. The suggestion of malice and evil here was so great that I could imagine it influencing my mind until I half believed, and a half-belief can be strong enough to affect the health.
So in a way I was just as glad to leave Zigita as the carriers were. They broke into song as soon as they got beyond its boundaries, and made fast time on the wide treeless track south to Zorzor. We couldn’t see twenty yards ahead at first because of the deep wet fog which dropped softly round us, but when the sun had sucked it up, we experienced the real ferocity of Africa on the shadeless road. It staggered and sickened me even through a sun-helmet. Once a beautiful little green snake moved across the path, upright, without hurry, bearing her bust proudly forward into the grasses like a hostess painted by Sargent, poisonous with gentility, a Fabergé jewel.
At lunch in the only shade the wide gorge provided the messenger arrived from Zorzor with a note to tell me that I could have a house in the compound of the Lutheran mission.
Kindness in a Corner
I had expected something better of a mission than this parched playground on a hill-top opposite Zorzor: the deserted houses, nobody about, the dusty plants, and at last the fat American woman trailing forward through the afternoon heat in a green-flowered dress, the pattern tightly expanded across the hips, a white topee. She whined at us dismally that this was the house: the dusty rambling shuttered house stuffy with the smell of vermin, torn mosquito-wire across the windows. She couldn’t find the keys and gazing through the windows I could see stacks of missionary literature on wobbly tables and piles of broken filters against the peeling walls. ‘You see, I’m all alone here,’ the American woman wailed, trailing around the building looking for the keys, but she checked herself, when she had taken another look at my dirty shorts, my dirty face and unshaven skin, and when a little later I insisted, ‘Are you really quite alone?’ she wouldn’t answer the question, scared, I suppose, for her goods and her honour.
If Duogobmai was the dirtiest place in the Republic, Zorzor was the most desolate. It hadn’t been left to itself; the whites had intruded, had not advanced, had simply stuck and withered there, leaving their pile of papers, relics of a religious impulse, sentimental, naive, destined to failure. Mrs Croup’s husband had been drowned at Monrovia: the other man in the mission had gone off his head. Mrs Croup had been alone now for six months. I heard her voice whining away across the compound, as I hypocritically called after her some expression of my pleasure at sleeping in a house after the native huts, ‘Well, I guess we try to keep it free of bugs.’
But she was a kind woman, and her whine had its excuse. I found next day that I was whining too. It was the heat. One hadn’t the energy to finish forming words; the voice trailed out, like bad handwriting, after the first syllable. She was kind, courageous, practical and a little bizarre. She sold me a cracked lamp from the mission stores at a great deal more than its value, and she kept a black baby in her house and a cobra in her garden. The cobra she fed with a live chicken every day; she had always meant to watch it as it swallowed the chicken, but somehow, though she guessed it would be interesting, she had never thought to watch through the lid of the hutch at the right time. She said enigmatically, ‘I’d have sent you an invite to dinner, but I’m going home in six months,’ an excuse which became even more difficult to understand when later in the evening, learning that we were leaving next day, she said: ‘Oh, if I’d known you were going that soon, I’d have sent you an invite.’
That evening I had a conference at her house. She had advised me to cut across the corner of French Guinea to Ganta, making my first stay at Bamakama. As usual the carriers said it was too far. So I took Amah down to her, as the spokesman of the men, and Vande slid in at the door with a dour silent carrier who always trailed at his heels. They sat on stools and the baby crawled about their feet and Mrs Croup stoked up a roaring fire in the tiny stuffy tropic room lined with photographs in Oxford frames.
But as Mrs Croup talked, I became more and more doubtful whether she really knew anything about the route. She always travelled in a hammock specially made to carry her weight, with eighteen hammock-carriers. She drove them hard: a ten-hour trek was nothing to her. She sent out for a man who knew the route, but he had never been farther than Bamakama and then he had taken two days over the journey; he believed there was a short way by Jbaiay, but he wasn’t sure whether it was passable, whether the chiefs had mended the bridges since the last rains. I could see the carriers’ doubts growing; they were thinking that again I was going to force them into too long a trek. So I told them that we would go next day to Jbaiay and there discover the road to Bamakama; if it was too far we would spend the night at Jbaiay. They assented to the plan with suspicious alacrity . . .
There were no rats that night: only cockroaches, ready to eat anything available. They lay there, while the light was on, flattened like large blood blisters against the wall, but when it was extinguished they flashed faster than lizards on the hunt. Sir Harry Johnston, who knew only the coast districts of Liberia, never penetrating, I believe, much farther inland than his rubber plantation at Mount Barclay outside Monrovia, speaks of these cockroaches as ‘obviously harboured and bred in the heaps of refuse which accumulate’ in the Americo-Liberian settlements. But really they can be found everywhere in the Republic. ‘These insects,’ he wrote, ‘do not hesitate at night to attack human beings who are asleep. They creep to the corners of the mouth of the sleeping person to suck the saliva. They eat the toe-nails down to the quick, and above all, they gnaw at any sore place or ulcer on the skin. . . . Dr Büttikofer relates that he only saved his body from attack at one time by placing bowls of rice and sugar in his bedroom as a counter-attraction. . . . The present writer has been attacked in a somewhat similar way, but on board dirty and uncomfortable steamers on the West Coast a good many years ago. In the bunks of these steamers cockroaches swarmed, and there were of course no mosquito curtains to shield the unfortunate passenger, who would wake in the dead of night, in black darkness, to find two or three large cockroaches clinging to his lips.’
This, as I grew more tired and my health a little failed, seemed to be what I would chiefly remember as Africa: cockroaches eating our clothes, rats on the floor, dust in the throat, jiggers under the nails, ants f
astening on the flesh. But in retrospect even the cockroaches seem only the badge of an un-conquered virginity, ‘never sacked, turned, nor wrought’. In Sierra Leone, in the bright electric Hill Station, one was conscious under the fans beside the iced drinks of how the land had been subdued; but even in the capital town of Liberia one was aware only of a settlement, a very chancy settlement that might be wiped out at any time by yellow fever. White and black, they were living here for a short while on the surface of the land, but Africa had the last say, and it said it in the form of rats and ants, of the forest swallowing up the little pits the Dutch prospectors had made and abandoned. There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love it when one finds it.
* Perhaps town rats are bolder. In Freetown in 1942 I would lie awake under my mosquito-net and watch them scamper across my dressing table and swing upon my black-out curtains. (1946)
Chapter 4
BLACK MONTPARNASSE
The Carriers’ Strike
NEXT morning we entered France: so the colony was known among the natives of the Republic. One of the men reported sick before we started, was paid off and left behind. The number of carriers had now almost reached a minimum. My cousin used a hammock and needed four carriers, but I reduced my hammock-men to three: I hadn’t used the hammock yet and unless I went sick I saw no reason why I should ever need to use it.
The country was stamped as French from the first village we stayed in, which was neither Bamakama nor Jbaiay as I had intended: French in its commercial sense, in its baits which I should have believed to be intended for tourists, if there had been any hope of tourists. It was astonishing what a difference the invisible boundary made. You could not have mistaken this land for Liberia. Tourists would have been quite at home here among the round huts and the scarlet fezes of the Mandingo traders. For these traders were indistinguishable, except that their dignity was less tarnished, from the men who sell carpets in the Dôme and the Rotonde. The only difference was we had followed them home. It was as if we had shadowed them all the way from the Boule Miche, sitting in third-class carriages, travelling steerage, riding up the long way from Conakry on horseback.
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