Chasing the Devil

by Tim Butcher

  ‘The book was very controversial here in Liberia,’ he explained. ‘The government banned it so people like me never had a chance to see it.’

  Indeed, the Liberian government was irritated by the writings of both Greenes. Barbara Greene mentioned the president’s suits being left to air on the balcony of the Executive Mansion in Monrovia, an irreverent detail that prompted a complaint from the Liberian authorities. But the reaction to her cousin’s book was far more serious, as the government was deeply embarrassed by his description of corrupt officials from the coast exploiting the native population upcountry. It made Graham Greene persona non grata in Liberia to such an extent that when he asked MI6 to send him there during the Second World War, several years after the book was published, the authorities in Monrovia refused. Banned from Liberia, he ended up serving in Sierra Leone.

  Even an authoritative chief has no guarantee of wealth or power reaching beyond the patch of beaten earth that makes up the village limits. As we waited for our rice that evening, Chief Duolar disappeared. I caught sight of him bent over a table writing by torchlight, but it was only after I had zipped myself up in my tent that I learned what he was working on. Through the netting I saw his shadowy form approach. He coughed formally, I unzipped the tent door and, without a word, he handed me this letter and disappeared. I read it by torchlight:

  Nekebozu Town Chief

  Nekebozu Town, Zorzor District, Lofa County

  Febreuary 14 2009

  Dear Sir

  Please help me with Motto Cycle. I do not have good foot.

  I was wounded with gun during the war. I usually attend meeting with my friend chief in long distances.

  This will enable me to over this distance.

  Contact Forkpa Duolar’

  The unremitting poverty I encountered was acute, making the continued survival of the jungle communities all the more impressive. On the occasions our route took us close to the single main road through Lofa County we noticed signs from aid groups announcing completed projects, like the digging of a well or the construction of a palaver house. But in more remote places, further from the main artery, there was no evidence of any outside influence at all, whether from aid groups or central government. It was as if the rural people of Lofa County, passed over for more than a century by the Americo-Liberian government in Monrovia and savaged in more recent times by marauding rebels, had simply turned in on themselves, relying on the tough but proven forest survival methods of their forebears – subsistence farming, palm oil harvesting and hunting.

  It meant the forest appeared, for the most part, a silent and barren place. The chance to eat protein is such a rare treat for rural Liberians that almost anything, from chimpanzees to frogs, is fair game – netted, shot or trapped, and served up as ‘bushmeat soup’ to garnish rice. We could walk for days without hearing birdlife or seeing any beast larger than a grasshopper springing across bare earth patches in the footpath, and the occasional scorpion – terrifying-looking things, matt black, about seven inches long with claws as mean as a crab’s and a wicked stinger at the tip of their arched tail.

  There was only one section of the trip when the forest truly came alive and that was because the trail passed through an area so remote and mountainous people had largely stopped venturing there. In 1935 the Greenes had found the trail to Zigida, one of the rare rural towns large enough to have a district commissioner sent up from Monrovia, clearly marked, but since the construction in the 1950s of Lofa County’s main road which skirts the mountain range both the trail and the town have declined. Swallowed by the advancing jungle, the last time the track was used by any great number of people was in the 1990s during the war, when terrified villagers used it to flee on foot to sanctuary in nearby Guinea. Survivors described a hellish journey as half-starved adults carrying children fought their way through the thick bush, disorientated, parched and scared. Scores died, their bodies dumped in the undergrowth to be consumed by ants.

  According to the Greenes, Zigida lay 12 miles almost due south of Nekebozu, a relatively short distance but one that took a full day of hiking because of the steep mountains that had to be crossed. It was to Chief Duolar that I appealed for help but while he appeared willing enough it took several hours to find anyone prepared to lead us over the hills. In the end two hunters from Nekebozu, Forkpa Zaza and Karmah Gayfor, agreed to help. They would earn a day’s pay from us but the trek also gave them a good opportunity to go after quarry in a rarely visited patch of jungle. As well as the standard cutlass that almost every villager carries through the bush, they brought with them a single-barrelled shotgun and a torch. It is after dark, they said, that the forest comes alive with prey.

  ‘It will take us all day to get to Zigida but we will come back in night and see what we can find,’ Karmah explained.

  We started out at first light, picking our way through sections of jungle where trees had been cut or burned down to make rice fields. A tall young boy appeared on the trail with a plastic bottle brimming with freshly drawn palm wine hanging from his wrist on a loop of grass. I remembered what Johnson had said about the need to be light and lithe for palm tree husbandry. Our two guides had clearly arranged this palm wine delivery because without a word the boy handed over the bottle and disappeared. Forkpa took a firm hold of the grass loop and continued on his way.

  We reached a wall of undergrowth and the marked trail faded to nothing but with a slash of his cutlass Karmah forced an opening and we stepped through, entering a different Liberia, an older, more primeval version not so tamed by man. The jungle was thicker than any we had seen, the atmosphere stickier, the tree canopy higher, the drifts of leaf mulch deeper. For the first time on the trip I heard the trill of hornbills, distinctive African birds, front-heavy with their oversized beaks. When I looked up I caught glimpses of their dipping flight in the voids between the boughs of trees, rafters supporting a cathedral-like roof of green.

  Like almost all other early explorers in Liberia, the Greenes soon tired of its jungle. The fuggy, closed-in embrace of the forest came to irritate them and throughout their books about the journey they complained about being bored, even stifled by the jungle. In a short story called ‘A Chance for Mr Lever’ that was set in West Africa, Graham Greene would write of ‘the drab forest’ as an unkempt garden with ‘… nature dying around you, the shrivelling of the weeds’. But on that mountain traverse to Zigida I felt completely different. I found the bush exciting and enthralling, a place of majesty and mystery.

  Our guides’ blades were busy that day, slashing and clearing, but every so often the two men would stop simultaneously, eyes straining upwards, ears picking up on a noise – the crack of distant branches being broken by monkeys or the screech of squabbling birds. They might not have been able to see much but through sound they were mapping the area for the night’s hunt.

  The trail took us up and down endless steep hills but the jungle choked any chance of a decent view. I was soon in my own sweaty, breathless world, focusing all my powers on keeping my footing and not tripping over roots or tumbling down steep banks. Whenever we stopped to rest, the two guides would take a few moments to make stools to sit on as they drank their palm wine. With their cutlasses they would cut three truncheon-length pieces of branch and then bundle them in one place around the middle with a length of ivy. Splaying the three ends on the ground would offer up a sort of cupped support between the upward ends, ten inches or so clear of the earth. The first time we stopped I did not bother with one of their stools, flopping down exhausted on a leafy bank. Within a few seconds I had ants all over my backside and was jigging up and down for the rest of our break trying to dislodge them.

  In seven hours of trekking the only sign of man we saw was a table in a small clearing made from lengths of bamboo that had been split and then tied together with strands of ivy. It was blackened from a fire lit beneath it.

  ‘A hunter made that for smoking bushmeat,’ Johnson explained. ‘Once an animal is shot
you only have a few hours before it begins to rot. So you either eat it or smoke it so you can keep it for later.’

  At the bottom of a little gorge we had to cross a marshy area of damp, black peaty soil. As I looked for firm footing to pick my way across I noticed a set of almost circular imprints, as if someone had pressed a dustbin lid repeatedly into the mud.

  ‘Jungle elephant,’ whispered Forkpa, looking around him anxiously. Karmah held up his hand to silence us and I watched as both men turned slowly through 360 degrees to try to pick up any sounds.

  ‘Jungle elephant is the most dangerous animal in this type of bush,’ Forkpa said after satisfying himself the tracks were old. ‘You must never hunt them because they will ambush you. They are big but they move silently in these forests and you will never see them until you walk into their ambush.’

  The primordial bush ended as abruptly as it started. One moment we were in its claustrophobic grasp and the next we had stepped out onto a footpath next to rice fields on the approaches to Zigida. Our two guides paused to swallow the last of their palm wine and then led us up the final slope towards a tightly bunched cluster of huts where a dumb mute groaned a greeting and I retired to a shaded bamboo bench to catch my breath.

  In Zigida, Johnson got busy with his regular negotiations for food and shelter, explaining to the villagers our journey and our interest in the Greenes, while I tried to restore my feet once more in a bucket of hot water. After an hour or so a man approached and asked if I would like to meet someone who knew all about the Greenes. I was still thrilled by Mulbah Obelee’s description of their whisky-drinking habits and I rather doubted that I could find anyone who could beat that anecdote. I was wrong.

  Down on the northern edge of the village, the side facing the mountains we had just crossed, was a hut and outside it, on a bench, sat another Forkpa, this time Forkpa Argba, an elderly man with milky white eyes. Born in 1920, it was clear he could not now see. River-blindness, a nasty disease still common in Liberia, had struck in his sixties but it had given him a longer life than average, as he had been spared years of debilitating toil in the rice fields.

  ‘I can remember the day those people came very clearly. I was a teenager of about fourteen or fifteen and they came from the north through the mountains. They had guides with them but we had problems understanding their language because the guides came, I think, from Sierra Leone.’

  I could not believe my luck but the old man’s account was incredibly detailed and, as far as I could tell, accurate. He even remembered the Greenes’ companion. Barbara Greene refers several times to a pet monkey brought on the trip by Mark, the jester hired back at Bolahun, and she describes how it was tormented by some of the other team members. The first edition of Journey Without Maps even included a photograph of Mark with the animal clinging to his shoulders.

  The old man went on: ‘They arrived in hammocks. It’s a difficult journey, you know, through those hills.’

  I smiled. The Greenes had three hammocks with them, one heavy-duty version brought from Britain and the two lighter ones acquired from the missionaries at Bolahun. Barbara describes how from quite early in the trip she would walk some of the way and then rest while being carried in a hammock, before walking once more. In contrast, Graham Greene only admits using his towards the end of the trip when his fever got so bad that he was barely conscious.

  The blind man went on: ‘The thing I remember most about the man was how he wrote everything down. He had a notebook with him all the time and he wrote down everything that was said to him. I remember he was very interested in a man called Yassah Doweh because he could make lightning. He asked our elders many questions about that.’

  ‘Is there anyone in the village today who can make lightning?’ I asked.

  ‘If you have the right training of course you can make lightning,’ was his answer.

  I asked him to explain more but he shook his head and mumbled something about tradition and secrecy.

  As I walked up the slope to the centre of the village I looked back towards the mountain range we had crossed. Zigida has long had a reputation for having strong magical power, a place of rugged remoteness but great spiritual importance where senior devils of the bush societies can attain higher skills, such as the ability to conjure lightning or prepare poisons. The skyline of the hills was clearly lit by the setting sun and above all the peaks stood the sinister humpback shape of what is known in the local Loma dialect as ‘Chimpanzee Mountain’. Graham Greene describes it as a ‘thimble of almost perpendicular rock … the home of evil spirits’, and mentions how it loomed over his two-night stay in Zigida, spooking him and the other members of his party. The sense of portent in Zigida reduced the bearers to a state of outright terror and they begged the Greenes to push on as early as possible. Barbara Greene later wrote that it was in Zigida that the illness that came close to killing her cousin began.

  Whether it was the power of ideas over the body or whether it was already the beginning of his illness I do not know. But from that last evening in Zigida his health began to suffer and for the rest of the trip and even for sometime after he got back to England, he was unwell.

  Some time after I zipped myself into my tent that night in Zigida a woman walked slowly past me in the moonlight. There was nothing odd about the dark outline of her body, dressed in a vest and a skirt, but then she turned towards me and I saw her face. It was ghostly white with chalk. It might have been as innocent as a medicine or a balm for dry skin but I began to sense the same spookiness that had troubled the Greenes. I drew my knees up tight to my chest, screwed my eyes shut and urged on the arrival of daybreak.

  And that was the feeling that came to dominate my mind as we crossed Lofa County, a strong sense of portent, of brushing up against the power of African spiritualism without truly understanding it. The devil who danced for us at Bolahun was a minstrel, an entertainer like other costumed devils who put on public displays across Liberia. Some even perform on stilts. But the dancing devil was also a symbol of much stronger forces, wizards and conjurers who would not show themselves to outsiders like me and who are believed to have powers that go far beyond entertainment, powers connected to the spirits that dwell in the forest.

  All the way along our trek I spotted clues to their presence. On the approaches to villages I would often see a trackside shrine where food and drink had been left for ancestor spirits. The edge of one community was marked by an unbroken cable of knotted ivy that went around the entire village, like a boundary rope on a cricket pitch, but one with magical powers protecting the villagers from dark forces outside. In Duogomai, the village where Greene’s empty whisky bottle had been snaffled by a conjurer, I noticed it was common for houses to be protected by bottles carrying charms. In the last house I slept in before resorting to my tent, a bottle had been sunk into the soil of the hearth, the lip of the neck just proud of ground level. When I asked what was in the bottle, our host smiled but stayed silent.

  With Johnson as my interpreter I asked at several of our stops if the devil would meet us but was always politely refused. The villagers did not deny the existence of a devil but they would decline to discuss why it would not appear. As we got further and further from Johnson’s own tribal territory it was fascinating to watch him trying to decode local traditions with which he was unfamiliar. Like many Liberians he was a Christian who had been initiated into the Poro bush society and, also like many Liberians, he refused to discuss with me, a non-initiate, what he had undergone. But when he saw unfamiliar things, such as a house in a village where the devil was said to live, he was as curious as me.

  The only occasion in Lofa County when we met hostility was when we were accused of seeking to discover the secrets of devil societies. In Nekebozu some young men reacted angrily when we asked for guides through the jungle the following day.

  ‘Why do you want to go there?’ one of them shouted. ‘There is a road you can use with a motorbike so why go through the bush? The forest has
secrets and I think you are going to take them from us – you must not be allowed to go.’

  It took the intervention of Chief Duolar to reassure the young men, although the next day I had the strong feeling that the guides he provided were also told to act as chaperones, keeping us tightly to the path.

  Ever since anthropologists first learned of the existence of devil societies in Liberia a hundred years or so ago, they have struggled to discover exactly what rituals and beliefs are involved. Secrecy is key to the societies and intrusion by the uninitiated is shunned but a breakthrough of sorts came by accident in the early 1930s when a German missionary doctor in rural Liberia became the first white outsider to enter a Sande initiation school for girls out in the bush. An outbreak of smallpox in the region had reached the students and the elders of the Sande temporarily overcame their inhibitions, urging Dr Werner Junge to come and treat the sick initiates. His resulting description of the bush societies remains one of the most authoritative.

  The whole initiation process, he said, presumed that until someone was initiated they did not truly exist. Initiation was so fundamentally important to followers of the bush societies that a person was not regarded as having been really born until initiated. One Liberian tribe even uses a word that means shadow or imitation to mean a young person and only after graduation from the bush school does an individual fill out into a person.

  Key to the transformation that goes on in the bush schools is a process of symbolic death and rebirth. On entry to the society, the younger self is believed not just to have died but to have been eaten by a senior devil. For some tribes the ceremonial scars made on the bodies of initiates symbolise the tooth marks from when the young person is consumed by this omnipotent figure. After months, sometimes years, of training out in the remote bush, where students have to endure starvation, thirst and hardship, they are reborn as adults, often with new names, and finally allowed to return to their families. Many of the skills are practical, such as hunting or learning which trees in the forest have medicinal purposes, while many others are designed to ensure the continuity of the social order as the young are taught respect for the old. But the whole process is suffused with strong spiritualism and secrecy on many levels. Students are not just told to keep secret what they see, they are also told the powers of the devils are secret and only revealed to those with special training who climb up a hierarchy said to have ninety-nine ranks of seniority. The regime is notoriously tough and it is not uncommon for students to die while in the hands of the bush society, something that is accepted by their parents without complaint although they are never offered any explanation or body to bury.