How happy I had thought I should be, while I was struggling down to Grand Bassa, back in my world. The bar took the prow and lifted it out of the water, one wave curled beneath us and broke along the beach of Kru Town, the second line broke above us, stinging the face, washing along the boards of the wide shallow boat, and there we were beyond, looking back at the bar and behind it Africa. A mammy chair came rattling down from the tarred English side. Of course I was happy, I told myself, opening the bathroom door, examining again a real water-closet, studying the menu at lunch, while out of the port-hole Cape Mount slid away, Liberia slid away, with Abyssinia the only part of Africa where white men do not rule. One had been scared and sick and one was well again, in the world to which one belonged.
But what had astonished me about Africa was that it had never been really strange. Gibraltar and Tangier – those extended just parted hands – seemed more than ever to represent an unnatural breach. The ‘heart of darkness’ was common to us both. Freud has made us conscious as we have never been before of those ancestral threads which still exist in our unconscious minds to lead us back. The need, of course, has always been felt, to go back and begin again. Mungo Park, Livingstone, Stanley, Rimbaud, Conrad represented only another method to Freud’s, a more costly, less easy method, calling for physical as well as mental strength. The writers, Rimbaud and Conrad, were conscious of this purpose, but one is not certain how far the explorers knew the nature of the fascination which worked on them in the dirt, the disease, the barbarity and the familiarity of Africa.
The captain leant over the rail, old and dissatisfied, complaining of his men: ‘Boil the whole bloody lot of the men in the ship together and you wouldn’t make an ordinary seaman’; he was looking back – to the age of sail. At Freetown guests came on board and we drank ourselves free from Africa. An officer came and eyed me like an enemy across the table in the smoking-room. ‘I’d send my ticket to the Board of Trade, my dear friend, and tell them to – I tell you, my dear friend . . .’ The captain stuck his fingers down his throat, brought up his drink and was dead sober again, and the ship went out of harbour, out of Africa. But their dissatisfaction was like a navel-string that tied them to its coast.
For there are times when the nearest the European has ever got to the interior, to the communal life with its terror and its gentleness, seems to be the Coast; Major Grant ringing up the brothel in Savile Row, the Old Etonian in Kensington Gardens, the Nottingham ‘tart’ and the droshky-drivers of Riga dwell on that rim of land which is known all the world over as the Coast, the one and only coast. They are not, after all, so far from the central darkness: Miss Kilvane listening to the ghost of Joanna just as the circle of blacks in Tailahun listened to the enigmatic speech of Landow; the Catholic priest saying, ‘And now the Immaculate Conception’ as the bus drove through the market, the tangle of stalls and overhead wires, the neo-Gothic hotels under the black overhead Midland fog. This may explain the deep appeal of the seedy. It is nearer the beginning; like Monrovia its building has begun wrong, but at least it has only begun; it hasn’t reached so far away as the smart, the new, the chic, the cerebral.
It isn’t that one wants to stay in Africa: I have no yearning for a mindless sensuality, even it it were to be found there: it is only that when one has appreciated such a beginning, its terrors as well as its placidity, the power as well as the gentleness, the pity for what we have done with ourselves is driven more forcibly home.
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.
After the blinding sunlight on the sand beyond the bar, after the long push of the Atlantic sea, the lights of Dover burning at four in the morning, a cold April mist coming out from shore with the tender. A child was crying in a tenement not far from the Lord Warden, the wail of a child too young to speak, too young to have learnt what the dark may conceal in the way of lust and murder, crying for no intelligible reason but because it still possessed the ancestral fear, the devil was dancing in its sleep. There, I thought, standing in the cold empty Customs shed with a couple of suitcases, a few pieces of silver jewellery, a piece of script found in a Bassa hut, an old sword or two, the only loot I had brought with me, was as far back as one needed to go, was Africa: the innocence, the virginity, the graves not opened yet for gold, the mine not broken with sledges.
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Copyright © Graham Greene 1936, 1978
Foreword copyright © Tim Butcher 2010
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First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann 1936
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Journey Without Maps Page 27
