In ‘France’ the trouble with the carriers came to a head. Their complaints, the phrase ‘too far’, ‘too far’, had got on my nerves. To be deserted altogether, I began to think, might be preferable to this recurrent bickering, this pressure to go more slowly than I could afford. The trouble was I did not know the extent of my authority and I did not know which of them I could trust. Vande I suspected; the headman was a cheerful rogue with his pipe and his cloth cap and his rattle; but it sometimes seemed to me that he let the carriers have their own way too often. I trusted Amah, because Amah was unpopular with the other men; I trusted Babu, the Buzie, and his friend Guawa; I thought I could trust my hammock-man, Kolieva, who went ahead with me on each day’s march.
But it was Kolieva who led me effectually astray the first day in France. We took the wrong path from the first: the carriers had evidently talked in Zorzor with the inhabitants and decided that the way to Bamakama by Jbaiay was too long and rough. No one ever knew the name of the town we reached about two hours later, across the upper reach of the St Paul. It sounded like Koinya. It was distinguished from the Liberian villages by a kind of town-planning. The huts of the chief and his wives were enclosed by a high wall in the centre, round which the town circled. The whole place was rather like an encampment of traders on the road.
When Amah arrived he interpreted what the chief had to say: that Bamakama was a full day’s trek away and that he was uncertain whether the paths between had been cleared or the bridges opened after the last rains. He was a man of great dignity, a little below the average Mandingo height with a black beard and a scarlet fez and a country robe and that Semitic expression in the dark eyes above the hooked nose of being open to the commercial chance. The men in the village had their hair curiously cut into patterns and tufts: I had seen nothing of the kind in Liberia. Their heads were often completely shaved except for two tufts, at the crown and the nape; they looked like poodles, and a poodle of course is a French dog. The women in French Guinea, too, lived up to the standard of a country which provides the handsomest whores and the most elegant brothels; their hair was gummed into complicated ringlets like watch-springs round the ears, they were sometimes painted on the face with blue and ochre, as well as the usual white stripes, and this gave them the thick rather unfinished look of a modern portrait.
It was no good going on after what the chief had said. He promised a guide for the next day and had the only square hut in the village swept out. This was another peculiarity of the French colony, that every town had to supply a rest-house for travellers. The idea would have been a better one if travellers had been more frequent, but these rest-houses (usually, though not in Koinya, a little outside the towns in a compound of their own) had almost always fallen to decay with spiders building across the doors, the thatch dropped in and the cookhouse a ruin over the ashes of old fires. In Koinya, perhaps, the inhabitants were far enough from the route of any French Commissioner to use the rest-house themselves, with the result that it was clean and well cared for.
No sooner were we settled in the hut than trade began. Everything was for sale. There was no such thing as dashing here. The dash, though it has become a convenient method of extorting money, must have originated in a gesture of courtesy and hospitality, in a generosity rather alien to the modern Mandingo mind. All the junk of civilization had been washed up in the village like the last line of seaweed on a beach. One could get porcelain pans and pails, knives crudely decorated with silver alloy and brass to catch a stranger’s jackdaw eye; even the common curved cutlass for hacking a path through the bush was offered gaudily got up, its handle covered with the alloy from Napoleonic coins, the blade as blunt as wood. It must have been the pure spirit of commerce which led them to manufacture these objects (they could not have encountered white tourists here twice in ten years), or perhaps this was the obscure factory from which the gimcrackery on sale in Conakry and Dakar, in Paris itself, came; we had stumbled on an industrial centre in the furthest corner of one of the least known of the French colonies. Perhaps even the cannibals on the Ivory Coast were now chiefly occupied in manufacturing baits for tourists.
The carriers had only marched for half a day, but they had eaten before they left Zorzor and there was trouble in the air. They kept sulkily apart from my hut, all except Babu and Amah, talking in high angry voices. I was no longer a patriarch among my retainers; I was the unjust employer; there was bad blood somewhere which had to be let out. It worked a little on the nerves not knowing what complaint they would make or when they would bring it me; and the worst of it was that I could not lose my temper, I must remain cheerful and good-humoured, I had to laugh at them however much I wanted to curse them.
In the afternoon I lay down, but I couldn’t sleep. A little while before sundown, when I was sponging myself in my tin bath, Amedoo came into the hut. He said, ‘The labourers say they want more money. Massa say no.’ He was the perfect manservant; he advised me how to meet a mutiny with the calmness and firmness of Jeeves advising Bertie Wooster on the choice of a tie. But it was sometimes a strain to live up to him: his loyalty, his honesty and his complete reliability demanded so much in return: a master, too, who was reliable as he understood reliability, in the imperial manner. He had lived with District Commissioners; he completely failed to understand any other than the official attitude of a man to his carriers. It was a relief to me when in the last week of the trek even Amedoo’s morale began to weaken.
I lingered as long as I could in my bath; it was embarrassing to know that Amedoo would judge me by my conduct now; it would have been so disgracefully easy to have given way. For, after all, the carriers were disgracefully underpaid. At last I had to go outside, sit down, pretend to write my diary. I was aware of them watching me, judging the moment to strike. I felt like a fly on a wall and they held the whisk. Then Kolieva came forward, and about fifteen carriers drifted up in a close group behind him. I hadn’t expected Kolieva to be one of them. He was embarrassed and that helped me; he was exaggeratedly sullen and falsely dignified, his heavy lip drooped, he beat at his toes with a stick and spoke thickly. He was the only one of the mutineers who knew a few words of English. It occurred to me as I counted the number of the strikers that I could never reach my objective without them, paying at every town for new carriers at the Government rate. If they remained firm and took their pay and left us, we should have to cut straight through the forest towards Monrovia. I wasn’t sure that my money would last even then. If they had only known it, they had all the aces in their hand.
Kolieva said they wanted to talk to me. They wanted more money. I pretended not to understand him. I said I was willing to lend anyone a little money on his wages. Vande had already borrowed sixpence at Zigita. How much would they like? Kolieva grew more embarrassed; he said the Government wage for a carrier was a shilling a day. He was quite right of course; the proper wage was a shilling, though I believe it was legal to contract over a period at a smaller rate, and actually no one in Liberia, except a few unfortunate travellers taking carriers from town to town, ever pays the proper wage. Certainly not Government officials, who can generally get carriers for no payment at all.
I said that the Government wage didn’t include food, and I was paying for their food. They could not tell that their food only came to about twopence a head; but they stood in a surly circle, not really listening to anything. It was no good arguing the merits of the case. Besides, the merits were all on their side. I was exploiting them like all their other masters, and it would have been no comfort to them to know that I could not afford not to exploit them and that I was a little ashamed of it. I pretended to be puzzled, to understand nothing of what they meant; they had contracted . . . I told somebody to fetch Vande and when he came I asked him what it was they were arguing about; I had understood from him that they had agreed to work for three shillings a week.
Then I bluffed. There was nothing else to do. They had me on the spot. Babu and Amah were on my side and of course my s
ervants; Vande, too, I thought, from the way he spoke to them, though I couldn’t understand a word of Bande. I said, ‘Tell them they can go home. I’ll give them their pay, but they won’t get any dash, I’ll take new carriers here.’ He talked to them, they shouted things at him, after what seemed a long while he smiled. He said, ‘They no want to go.’ It was the moment to strike harder. Kolieva seemed to be the ringleader; I told him to go. I’d pay him off. I thought to myself all the while: if I can keep them together for a fortnight more they will be in a country as strange to them as to me; they won’t want to leave. There was a tribe, about a week ahead, which was still supposed to practise cannibalism on strangers; they wouldn’t want to be paid off there. But I had won: Kolieva explained it was all a mistake, grinning with shame; and a moment later they were laughing and joking as if there had been no disagreement; they were like children who have tried to get an extra holiday but bear no grudge because they have never really believed they would succeed. The dispute had let out most of the bad blood; for two more days there were to be continual arguments, which wore my temper to threads, and then quite suddenly they began to work together happily and smoothly.
Vande asked whether they could kill the kid I had been given in Kpangblamai, and it seemed the right moment for conciliation. I said ‘yes’, not expecting the immediate slaughter there in front of the hut: the little kid held down on the ground by its legs like a crucified child, the knife across the throat and the screams through the flow of blood. The kid took a long time dying, the blood welling out across the earth, gathering in pools on the baked unporous ground, as the light went and someone in the chief’s enclosure began to shake a rattle. And it was good to know that one had not been deserted.
Bamakama
The next day wasn’t so good. We were out on the trail with a guide from Koinya by seven, but the paths were very rough for the carriers, and they and my cousin fell a long way behind. There was a multiplicity of little paths and the country was slowly changing from the Liberian hills and forest to a plateau covered with tall elephant grass twice the height of a man, a plateau which I suppose stretches northward to what Mungo Park called the Mountains of Kong, and then on again to the Niger. On one of these tiny paths I saw the only horse, with the exception of the bony mare in Freetown, I saw in West Africa; an old Mandingo with a white beard and a turban sat it and watched us go by through the grass. A boy carried all their gear upon his head. He may have come from very far away, perhaps from the Sahara.
After three and a half hours’ march we reached the St Paul River again, or the Diani as this upper reach is called. On either side the forest followed it, a slow shadowed river, seventy yards across, under the huge trees. It was only at the watersides that nature was ever beautiful: away from the rivers it was too dry and shrivelled and lifeless for beauty. But her there was faint movement, depth and gleam: refreshment, too, in the thought that the great slow stream was moving down to our destination, though by a quicker route, and would come out two hundred miles or so farther, past the great central forest, into the flats and mangrove swamps of Monrovia.
A ferry took us to the other side, a raft built of the trunks of trees lashed together and pulled across on a creeper rope. Amedoo was with me and Amah and about ten of the carriers; the others were somewhere behind with my cousin. After half an hour I was anxious, but my anxiety was small compared with Amedoo’s. He had been ordered in Sierra Leone by Daddy to take care of us and never to show his face again in Freetown without us, and the responsibility weighed on him. He walked restlessly up and down the high bank above the river, shouting, but the sound died out a few yards away among the trees. There was nothing we could do if they had lost their way, and my cousin’s lot really would have been happier than mine. My cousin had Laminah and the cook and Vande, the beds and mosquito-nets, and most of the food and more than half the carriers. I tried to make up my mind what I should do; it would be no use chasing each other all over French Guinea. I decided to go on, just as my cousin, I learnt later, had decided to go back.
But at last when I was on the point of giving the order to march, for fear we should be caught by darkness in the bush, an answer did come, from between the big trees, from across the water, and presently a tired angry band rejoined us. Among the many paths which had to be closed with sprays, one had been left open and they had taken it. The path had narrowed into nearly nothing at all, but they went on, Laminah cutting a way for them with the sword he wore, until they reached a closed wall of greenery and knew they were lost. In such densely overgrown country it was easy enough to be lost completely within a mile of a village and for all they knew they might be ten miles from any other human beings. If it had not been for the river I should have gone straight on to Bamakama without knowing that they were lost, and if Laminah had not found a man who guided them to the St Paul, a piece of luck they couldn’t have expected when once they had strayed off the main path, we should have been permanently separated, for my cousin had no idea of the route I intended to follow the other side of the St Paul.
Another four hours’ marching along narrow winding trails through thick elephant grass brought us to Bamakama. Here there was a rest-house for travellers outside the village in a small rotting compound, but it was so long since any white man had used it that it was in a horrible state of decay, the hut was full of bugs, and suddenly as we drank our tea an army of flies descended on the compound, settling all over our faces and the food. The monkey sat in a corner moaning like a child, and as the sun declined and the flies left us, the cockchafers came, detonating against the wall. A rat had died under the floor, and the smell of decay settled over the compound. This was the second place where there was nothing to do but get drunk. We looked across the wall with envy towards the airy village. We were enclosed like lepers with the dead rat and the cockchafers.
And again there was the inevitable palaver. That night it was the water-carriers who caused the bother. The water for our washing and for the filter had to be carried up every day from the nearest stream in basins. Kolieva headed a deputation. I couldn’t make out clearly what it was about; a tribal dispute seemed to have split the carriers into hostile groups. They complained, I think, that Amah, the second headman, favoured the Bande carriers; they didn’t do their share of the water-carrying. They asked that Amah should cease to be second headman. The fight went on a long while and I was glad to be a little drunk. But I slept badly; what Daddy had told me in Sierra Leone came back now when my nerves were tired with the marches and the squabble. I imagined all night that leeches were falling on my face. It was really the plaster ceiling of the pretentious rest-house which the rats were demolishing. I was too drunk to remember that the mosquito-net protected me.
Galaye
The smell of the dead rat, the cockroaches which had got at our clothes and eaten them into holes, drove us away early. I was anxious above everything to get to Ganta. Mrs Croup had spoken of it as three days away, but the chief at Bamakama seemed to think it was at least another three days off. It seemed to recede rather than approach; nobody at Bamakama really knew the way, because Ganta was in Liberia, another country, and though the Mandingo traders recognize no boundaries, their country stretching from Timbuctoo to the Coast and Paris, across desert and forest, the ordinary tribesman has seldom moved more than a day’s march from his town. The boundaries between country and country, as between tribe and tribe, might be no more than a tiny stream the carriers waded through beneath a shower of butterflies, but they could not have been more definite if all the European display of barbed wire and Customs sheds had been visible on either bank.
The chief strapped on a sword and acted as guide. I was glad that he set so smart a pace: if we were ever to reach Ganta, I thought, the men had got to be raced through the villages between. I had promised them a short march of three hours; but I was afraid my temper would give way altogether if I had to argue them on at every village. So we raced ahead, the chief and I and Kolieva, and left my co
usin and the men to follow; I knew the carriers hadn’t the resolution to stop behind without me.
It took exactly three hours to get to Galaye, a populous little town with the remains of old mud walls at the back like pieces of abandoned scenery. The rest-house here was in such a state of decay that I wouldn’t use it and chose a hut in the village instead. It was a hospitable place; few of the younger people had seen a white face before and they stood all day in the doorway. There was nothing you could do without their noticing it; to draw a handkerchief from the pocket caused a craning of necks. It worked a little on the nerves, this constant stare; but you had to recognize the superiority of their attitude over the white man’s to something strange. We were as good as a circus; they had no wish to stuff us or skin us or put us in cages. The carriers, after one more dispute over the water-carrying, were very cheerful, but I knew better by now than to expect their happiness to last. Their mood changed more rapidly than April weather. They, too, were appreciating something genuinely Gallic, for the girls of Galaye had an air of greater freedom towards strangers than I saw in any other tribe: one girl in particular who, when dark fell and the drums and harps were taken out, joined in the carriers’ dances, a stamping and thrusting out of the elbows and buttocks, a caricature of sexuality. When they approved of a dancer, the others crowded round and stroked his arms and forehead, a curious intimate tactile applause.
Journey Without Maps Page 16
