by Tim Butcher
It was during my journey across the Congo that I developed my favoured tactic for dealing with volatile, unstable African countries – travel quickly, quietly and as anonymously as possible. Guinea is an elongated country and the section we transited was admirably remote, two or three days’ drive from Conakry and a world away from the immediate turbulence caused by the coup. Out here in the forested east we could pass through communities embroiled not in politics but in the daily struggle to make a living.
The villages we slept in were poor but they did not have quite the same edge-of-survival feeling that I had sensed in their Liberian counterparts. We saw more houses built with cement and plenty of non-rusty corrugated-iron sheeting as roofs. The roads were better maintained, roadside stalls better stocked and the people clearly more used to seeing white visitors. Our arrival in Guinean villages barely registered with most locals who often saw foreigners, mostly businessmen running the huge agricultural sociétés, or companies, responsible for the well-maintained plantations. After welcoming us the village chiefs would routinely ask for our ordre de mission, the official engagement letter carried by foreigners doing business in Guinea. We had to make do with the stamped letter provided by the helpful police officer back in Zorzor, Maj. Gborley.
Many of the LURD rebels who brought down Taylor in 2003 had come from Guinea and I had been warned that a large number had then returned home with their guns and their combat experience, a major security threat in Guinea’s remote east. Johnson’s linguistic skills were of little use here so I used my French to probe the issue, only to be assured that the LURD foot soldiers were long gone and had either returned to farming or moved on to Conakry.
As travellers moving through remote country we would have to have been very unlucky to bump into a group of armed men but for the villagers living in the region the odds were different. They had to accept the reality of being swamped by armed groups and foreign refugees at times of regional instability. During the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Guinea’s frontier had acted as a sort of buffer zone, inundated with civilian refugees from both countries, as well as gangs of unaccountable, armed militiamen. Several times I heard villagers express the fear that, after the honeymoon period, the latest coup could spark another cycle of cross-border turmoil or even full-blown conflict in Guinea. We had shown ourselves just how porous the borders of Guinea were and could see the huge disconnect between the provinces and the seat of power in Conakry. A cross-border raid into Liberia by Taylor’s small force in 1989 was all it took to condemn that country to years of war. To me Guinea felt dangerously fragile.
But with the massacre of September 2009 still months into the future, we enjoyed the calm of the coup’s immediate aftermath and in time I was able to stop fretting about security. Worry makes a good travelling companion, occupying the mind and sharpening the senses, so as I began to relax for the first time in the journey the walking began to feel like a chore. On the second day, between Galaye and Gbamou, we were told that there were no jungle footpaths in the direction of Diecke, only a dirt road suitable for vehicles, so we had no option other than to tramp down a relatively open track in the full glare of the sun, angering those same blisters from the road stretch into Zorzor. Without quite the same incentive as David and I had to keep going on foot, Johnson would sensibly rest by taking lifts with Mr Omaru from time to time, buzzing ahead on the motorbike and waiting for us to catch up. With only a single road to follow there was little chance of us losing our way.
On those long, open stretches of road my spirits begin to sag, an echo of the Greenes’ experience. It was while in Guinea, with his illness steadily getting worse, that Graham Greene began to despair of the relentlessness of the trek.
It was not that the villages were ever dull to me, and only here in French Guinea were their simplicity and hospitality a little tarnished by the touch of white rule, but the rising in the dark, the hurried breakfast, the seven hours of tramping along narrow paths through the hot-house forest with no view to either side and only occasional glimpses of sky above, this routine became almost unbearable.
As the Greenes’ progress slowed in Guinea, a worsening sense not just of tedium but of claustrophobia grips both their books. Barbara Greene wrote of the ‘utter boredom of walking for hours on end, when the bush closed in so heavily on either side’.
To combat the tedium of the walk I kept my brain busy with logistical details, plotting our route south through Guinea and the crossing back into Liberia. But I also came to rely on Graham Greene’s writing. A paperback copy of Journey Without Maps was in my daypack, not just as a source of inspiration for the trek but as something to occupy my thoughts. It is not the most straightforward travel book and on those long road stretches in Guinea I would take it out from time to time and try to decode its more opaque passages and what hints they gave about the author’s character.
Graham Greene’s fear of the mundane loomed over his entire life, depressing him so fiercely as a young man he flirted with self-harm and even suicide. In his teenage years he tried to poison and drown himself, and during his time at Oxford he claimed to have played Russian roulette with a First World War revolver hidden in a bedroom cupboard at the Greene family home in Berkhamsted. To run away from childhood troubles he would sneak off to the nearby Berkhamsted Common, so back he went when he decided for the first time to spin the pistol’s cylinder and risk the ultimate escape. In his autobiography, A Sort of Life, he described standing beneath giant beech trees on the edge of the common, sodden wintry leaves underfoot, as he put the muzzle to his right ear and pulled the trigger. The resulting rush was something he could never forget.
The same fear of mediocrity towered over his writing, no more so than when he returned from the West African adventure. The idea of putting together a standard travel book drove him to despair and the only thing that saved him from giving up was the dread knowledge that he owed his publisher the £350 advance already spent funding the trip. In Ways of Escape, published more than forty years after the journey, he recalls his horror at the thought of writing a traditional travel book: ‘I was haunted by the awful tedium of A to Z’. When he sat down to write the book (the working title evolved from Journey in the Dark to Journey Without Maps and then The Mapless Journey, before finally settling on Journey Without Maps) he flatly states in an early draft that ‘this book does not pretend to be a travel book’ although this remark was not included in the published edition. The same draft shows how Graham Greene initially withdrew himself completely from the adventure, ascribing it to an unnamed character X who was then crossed out and replaced by a character named Trench, the literary alter ego Graham Greene had used since writing poetry as a student. X reappears when Trench is crossed out and only on the fourth iteration does Graham Greene place himself in the journey, replacing the X/Trench/he references with I/me.
So to avoid a standard travel narrative he came up with a formula of melding two parallel journeys, one the slog through a remote corner of Africa, the other – one for which there truly were no maps – a more metaphysical journey back to private ideas or memories of quintessential importance. Several times within the book he borrows from the vernacular of psychoanalysis, drawn from the time when he underwent psychiatric treatment as a young man, writing of being taken back to ‘repressed ideas’ and ‘primal memories’. For this internal journey Liberia was not important as a destination but as a means of unlocking the mind, a way not so much of going back physically to Africa but going back mentally by Africa, releasing memories, experiences and mental images, ones that sometimes sparked dark and sinister associations.
So his first travel book is deliberately punctuated by snapshots of seediness precisely because he viewed them as stepping stones back to lost primal innocence. An interest in seediness would be a feature of a writing career that would span sixty years, but in Journey Without Maps, which he started drafting when he was still thirty, he gives perhaps the clearest account of what he saw as its virtue.
… seediness has a very deep appeal: even the seediness of civilisation, of the sky-signs in Leicester Square, the ‘tarts’ in Bond Street, the smell of cooking greens off Tottenham Court Road, the little tight-waisted Jews in the Strand. It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back.
Throughout the book the reader is given extraordinary snapshots from Graham Greene’s life, his own direct experience of seediness: an Old Etonian pervert in Kensington Gardens talking to strangers about caning schoolgirls; a vagrant who froze to death in a wintry Cotswolds cottage being dragged out by the police, his stiff corpse rattling down the stairs; an army Major telephoning a brothel on Savile Row and ordering girls, as if choosing a meal from a menu – young, fair, curved; an old Baltic aristocrat fallen on hard times, forced to carry tourists’ luggage as a porter.
These images are used by Graham Greene in the book to reveal his distrust of the ‘civilisation’ represented by contemporary Britain and the developed world, and to justify the desire to go somewhere more base, pure and unspoiled.
… but when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.
His trip to Liberia was what he called ‘a smash-and-grab raid into the primitive’ and he wrote that he found what he was looking for. While he sneered at those Africans like the Krios of Freetown who embraced western clothes and education, he found among the native tribes of the Liberian interior the existence of characteristics he saw as more admirable and honest – a sense of innocence, simplicity, even virginity that accentuated natural feelings, both good or bad.
The sense of taste was finer, the sense of pleasure keener, the sense of terror deeper and purer.
He identified the same community-minded virtue that Laurens van der Post would later describe in the bushmen of the Kalahari. But while Van der Post was more interested in the anthropology of a people surviving as hunter-gatherers in an austere desert environment, Graham Greene appeared more focused on a moral search, perhaps linked to his conversion to Catholicism in his twenties. Several times he refers to looking for clues in Africa as to where modern man had gone wrong, as if he could discover something in primitive Liberia that might help right what he saw as the sins of the modern world. But while he found much to praise in the communal life of Liberia, he found no answer to this central question.
In many ways I too had come on this trek in the search for a better understanding of purity, but from my own experience of Sierra Leone and Liberia, the purity I was focused on was at the other end of the moral spectrum from Graham Greene’s. The corruption, conflict and suffering here in recent years had destroyed whatever traces of innocence and simplicity Graham Greene identified. As our trek went on, so my search continued for an understanding of the pure evil witnessed here during the wars.
One feature of Graham Greene that I came to relish was his sense of humour. His religious conversion had taken place when he worked on a newspaper in Nottingham, a provincial town he teases in Journey Without Maps.
you couldn’t talk of darkest Africa with any conviction when you had known Nottingham well: the dog sick on the mat, the tinned salmon for tea and the hot potato chips for supper carried into the sub-editor’s room ready-salted in strips of newspaper.
And the same light spirit showed itself unexpectedly during my research when I was looking into his time as a wartime spy in Africa working for MI6. For most of his life Graham Greene was a ceaseless communicator who wrote, according to one assessment, an average of seven letters a day for his entire adult life, as well as keeping diaries and notebooks on top of the published material – novels, plays, film scripts, non-fiction books and other works. But for reasons of security his letter-writing and diary-keeping tailed off after reaching Freetown just after New Year’s Day 1942.
One of the rare references to Graham Greene in this period is an irreverent mention within the pages of Never Judge a Man by his Umbrella, the memoirs of another MI6 agent, Nicholas Elliott. During a journey by sea to Lagos in 1942, Elliott’s ship put in to Freetown where he had a chance encounter.
On the quayside I bumped into Graham Greene, who had the unrewarding task of trying to find out what was going on in Dakar. His The Heart of the Matter represents MI6’s contribution to world literature, but his principal current preoccupation seemed to be the shortage of contraceptives in Sierra Leone; this we managed to alleviate through the generosity of some of our passengers. When, many years later, I reminded Graham of this episode he retorted that when I came ashore I was the tattiest Army officer he had ever seen. I had even, he said, omitted to put on my badges of rank.
Twenty-five years after serving as agent 59200 in Freetown, Graham Greene self-deprecatingly mocked his efforts as a spy, describing how he managed to muddle the combination of his safe, locking his crucial codebooks inside. They could only be retrieved with the help of a blow torch. One of the books did, however, contain a symbol for ‘eunuch’, something that fired his imagination, making him keen to come up with an official message that included the word. After much thought, he cabled his MI6 opposite number in Gambia to turn down an invitation to attend a regional meeting with the words ‘as the chief eunuch said I cannot repeat cannot come’.
Official documents connecting him to MI6 remain rare but I came across a bundle, never before published, at the National Archives in London. Greene’s humour illuminates an otherwise dreary collection of papers dating from the period after his deployment to Sierra Leone, when he had been moved back to Britain with responsibility for covering MI6 affairs in Portugal.
In a letter, classified ‘Secret’ and dated 29 December 1943, to a colleague at MI5, Graham Greene warns of suspicious activity by a British sailor serving as a fireman on a ship that docked at Lisbon. The sailor had been spotted in the city consorting with a known German agent, providing him with quinine. The letter is strictly formal, addressed without honorific, first name or initials – ‘Dear Stopford’. But it has a wonderfully informal ending as Graham Greene suggests how MI5 might pick up the trail of the sailor when the boat returned to Britain.
… our representative on December 20 reported that the fireman bought four canaries in Lisbon, and this may assist you to identify him.
Your secretary has promised to reserve me one canary!
The letter sparked a mild flurry of canary-related activity within the British intelligence community, all of which is chronicled in the file. An agent reported officers on the ship had been seen buying birdseed, while another agent was able to report the section of the ship where the fireman had his quarters was too cramped to house a bird cage. In the end a letter, addressed ‘Dear Greene’, is sent from MI5 declaring the canary report a red herring.
The wonderful thing about intelligence matters, however, is the ‘what if?’ that clings to them, the way it is possible to come up with theories about secret services that, by the very nature of the intelligence world, can rarely be either proved or disproved. There have been plenty of commentators over the years who attributed to Graham Greene a sinister role as super spy and the canary story made me think they might find fresh support for their theory.
In 1943, at the time the canary letter was sent, the head of German military intelligence was trying covertly to contact the British government to express his loss of faith in the way the war was being run by Hitler. Several attempts to establish a line of communication with MI6 were made through its agents in Lisbon and Madrid but they were suppressed by Graham Greene’s boss, Kim Philby. In the 1960s Philby was revealed as a Soviet spy who would have been under orders from Moscow back in 1943 to block attempts by moderate Nazis to reach an accommodation with Britain and the western allies. Any peace on Germany’s western front would have allowed it to focus all its efforts on the eastern front against Russia, something Moscow w
as anxious to avoid.
The name of the German military intelligence chief, a man who would eventually be executed as a traitor by Hitler’s loyalists, was Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. I wondered if Greene’s letter about canaries was part of a ploy to get round Philby by informing MI5 that Admiral Canaris was in play.
David and I became so anxious to avoid walking along the open road in Guinea that we were willing to take jungle tracks, even if that meant lengthy diversions and the cost of hiring additional guides. At the end of our second day in Guinea, and after a hike of 20 miles, we reached a village called Gbamou where we were so determined to return to the bush the following day that we made the mistake of ignoring Johnson’s advice.
After bathing and putting up my tent in the dirt outside the chief ’s hut, I had strolled into the centre of the village which was dominated by a huge tree hung with thousands of nests woven by rice birds. There was a restful end-of-day calm about the place until suddenly, from behind the tree, came a commotion. A dozen giggling children were chasing after a sprightly kid that had escaped from its owner, who in turn rushed past me and launched himself at the escapee, rugby tackling it in a muddle of dust and bleats.
With the goat firmly settled around his neck and holding on tight to its front and back legs, Musa Koroma-Gbembu greeted me in Liberian English, a language not commonly spoken in Guinea. He had a mild stammer but I was still able to understand as he explained how he had been forced by the war to move from his birthplace across the border into Guinea.
