by John Harris
He frowned. ‘I also want someone to find out more about the origin of that French beer. Although it came from French Guinea it arrived here from somewhere nearer than that. How about sending this chap Ginger, who seems to know everything that’s going on at Makinkundi, up there to collect fruit for the mess – together with those other two who went to Lungi? There’s a bundu ceremony coming off and it’ll need someone with a bit of a head on his shoulders.’
During the night, one of the signals sergeants installed a brand new radio aboard the pinnace and the following morning before the day’s work had properly started Corporal Fox brought the boat alongside. The padre climbed aboard and she was out of sight round the corner into the lagoon when Corporal Feverel brought Scow 14 from her buoy.
‘Sing us a song, Nelly,’ someone called from the jetty and Kneller, always obliging, offered his imitation of Bing Crosby singing Bing Crosby’s favourite and the favourite of everybody at Jum, ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Mistress’.
As the old scow trudged up-river, Kneller indicated a group of crocodiles basking on the mud, yellow-brown and hard to spot in the sunshine, one of them with its mouth open so they could see the yellow gums and saw-edged teeth. Crocodiles always intrigued. They seemed the very essence of evil, and though for the most part they moved slowly, that they could move fast the mooring party knew well because they had once seen one snatch an unwary dog from the water’s edge. Further upstream a huge lizard walked in slow motion among the mangroves and terns splashed like dive-bombers into the river after fish, while pelicans, beaks tucked into chests, took off and landed like clumsy grey Sunderlands. Cranes, herons and bright kingfishers hunted among the shallows, and the air was alive with the screech of monkeys and birds, while occasional eruptions on the surface of the muddy water indicated where a shoal of small fish fought to avoid the jaws of a barracuda. A native fisherman, balancing incredibly upright in his pencil-slim boat, flung a circular net touched to meshes of gold by the sun, and a great Susu canoe roared past under a bellying sail towards the fruit market at Freetown. The helmsman, a grinning cage of white teeth showing in his black face, held up a wicker basket as he leaned on the heavy steering oar on the poop. ‘Egg, boss?’ he yelled. ‘You want egg for cook?’
The pinnace was anchored at the head of the creek, bright in the glare of the sunshine against the dark mangroves, and Corporal Fox was on the foredeck with a hand compass taking a sight on one of the hills. The crew watched the scow move inshore, wondering what was going on. They knew something was. Nobody normally operated at that end of the lagoon and there were extra aerials slung from the pinnace’s mast while the padre was below with the wireless sergeant, their heads together, listening all the time as they fingered the dials.
The scow edged in near the loading jetty belonging to the iron mine. It rested on concrete piles that supported a narrow-gauge railway. Halfway along were three or four of the tipper wagons that brought the ore down from Yima for the little coaster, Maréchal Grouchy, which came from time to time from Conakry.
The smell of hot earth, sweat, river mud, decayed fish and excrement came from the land like the fumes from the open door of an oven, breath-catching and stifling as the sun rebounded off the ground with a violence that was almost physical. Makinkundi, half-hidden among the trees, looked lush and brilliantly green after the rain. As they climbed ashore, the women left their corn-pounding to crowd round, grinning and chattering and smelling of charcoal and perspiration, their bare black breasts rubbing against the white men’s arms.
Then the inevitable wide boy arrived, full of sly, smutty jests and convinced he knew how to deal with white men. There was one in every village, always full of smiles, always able to speak better English than the rest, though inevitably in the end they all resorted to the pidgin that was common to everybody. This one was small, his lower limbs swathed in a length of coloured cotton wrapped round him like a towel beneath the umbilical hernia which, as with so many of his kind, was the result of a wrenching village birth.
‘Boss come for kill crocodile?’ he asked.
The Africans liked to see crocodiles dead. That way they were safer and, skinned, crocodiles meant food. Occasionally the officers’ mess at Jum organized shoots from a motor dinghy with an Aldis lamp and a rifle, and the back of the hangar contained several neglected skins for which, in the shape of handbags or shoes, women in England would have given their right arms.
‘No come for crocodile,’ Feverel said.
‘Crocodile bad ju-ju,’ the black man complained. ‘Plenty magic. Humbug fisherman.’
The river villages attributed unearthly skills to crocodiles and before they would touch the flesh, even when they were dead, the village constable had to be fetched to cut out the spleen which they regarded as a fetish. When one was killed at Jum, the uproar as they pounced on the gutted carcass with their knives was as good as a circus and one of the camp’s free entertainments.
The black man was looking puzzled, then he grinned as light dawned. ‘Boss come for banana!’ he yelled and Feverel nodded. ‘Boss, I got banana! Also mango and pawpaw and orange! Lime very good for gin!’
As they stood in a group in the middle of the village, surrounded by shabby brown-thatched huts and circled by piccaninnies wearing nothing but ju-jus of bells or feathers to keep away the evil spirits, the fruit began to appear. So did the fruit flies.
‘Let’s leave it to him and go and find a drink,’ Feverel suggested. ‘Ginger knows where it’s lying around loose, I’m sure.’
Ginger led the way to Lizzie Morgan’s bar. As he put his head inside, he called out and a black face topped by a pink headcloth appeared. Feverel found himself approving of Ginger’s taste.
‘You got beer, Lizzie?’ Ginger asked. ‘French beer?’
‘I got.’
The beers appeared and Feverel paid with a Sierra Leone banknote as big as a bed sheet and a few washer-like coins. He looked round at the rows of black faces peering from their fretwork frames.
‘Relations?’ he asked. He sank half his beer and looked at Lizzie. ‘Where you get beer?’ he asked.
Lizzie shrugged. ‘Friend belong me.’
‘What him name him?’
‘Him name Brima Komorrah.’
Feverel looked at Kneller. Half the males in Sierra Leone were called Brima Komorrah in one or another of its variations.
‘What him do?’ he asked.
‘Him houseboy. In hills. Boina. Good job. Get plenty dash.’
Ginger wondered again if Brima Komorrah was one of Lizzie’s lovers. ‘Live ’ere?’ he asked.
‘No. Him live Hawkinge Town. All men know Brima. He big man. Strong like buffalo. Come Moa river way.’ As they sat on the edge of the dusty patch of earth edged with sunken beer bottles that Lizzie called her garden, she began to sing in a thin high-pitched voice. ‘I be sleepin’ tonight where de moon shines bright, on the banks of Moa ribber. He bring plenty food. He dash me money. Brima good man.’
‘Yeh,’ Ginger said thoughtfully. ‘He would be.’
‘What do white bosses at Boina do?’ Feverel asked.
Lizzie shrugged. ‘Brima say dey look for iron.’
‘That all?’
‘He say dey send messages. He hear dem.’
‘What sort of messages? Radio messages?’
‘Brima say dey got big mast. Like ship.’
‘To search for iron ore deposits?’ Feverel, looked at Kneller. ‘What else have they got up there?’
‘Lorries. Plenty lorries.’
‘How many white bosses? Dis Brima, him know?’
‘He say many.’ Lizzie held up her hands with her fingers outspread – one, twice, three times.
‘Thirty men?’ Feverel looked again at Kneller. ‘To look for iron ore? I’d have thought half a dozen could do the job easily.’
The French beer was cold and Feverel held up the empty bottles. ‘You got more?’ he asked. ‘For take back to camp.’
Half a dozen m
ore bottles arrived, to disappear unopened into the webbing side pack Feverel carried. As he was tucking them away, the black woman whispered to Ginger.
‘’Oo was it?’ he said.
She whispered again, her eyes flickering over the other two in an embarrassed way. Ginger finished his beer and stood up. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said, jerking a hand at the black woman. ‘Got somethin’ to do.’
Feverel and Kneller were just finishing their beer when Ginger returned. He nodded to the woman and squeezed her shoulder.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’s okay.’
As they left, Feverel looked back. The black woman was looking nervously after them.
‘What was all that about?’
‘She’s bein’ ’umbugged. Some white bloke.’
‘Where from?’
‘Boina.’
‘What’s he after?’
‘What you think ’e was after?’ Ginger looked angry. ‘It’ll be all right now though. I fixed ’im.’
‘How?’
‘She’s got eight brothers.’
Taking the scow with its load of fruit into the river, they lashed her alongside the pinnace and got the pinnace crew to row them back ashore with the inflatable dinghy.
‘Where are you lot going?’ Corporal Fox demanded. He was an amiable easy-going man but the mooring party seemed to take over the pinnace so often and so completely he was always inclined to be suspicious of their motives.
Feverel smiled. ‘We’re going to the bundu celebrations,’ he said. ‘Ginger got the chief to send us an invitation. Lovely pasteboard card, RSVP and everything.’
Fox frowned. ‘Well, watch your pockets. It’ll be like fight night at the Dog and Duck at Wapping Steps.’
The bundu ceremony took place in the early evening at a place called Aki in the bush, then the population of Makinkundi swept back and the native beer and the palm wine started flowing. Tall young palms, stripped of their leaves, had been hauled down and secured to the ground like great bows, and, as the celebrations began, youths clinging to ropes while the lashings were cut made forty-foot leaps into the air as the trees sprang upright.
A magician, dressed in strips of monkey skin, seemed to drive a feathered arrow through his cheeks and, with a scalpel-like knife, slashed at his tongue and chest until the blood flowed. Tumblers and acrobats were followed by jugglers who put on a hair-raising performance, using four-year-old piccaninnies flung from one to another over whirling razor-sharp swords that flashed within a fraction of an inch of the small spinning bodies, then an old evil-looking man wearing nothing but a triangle of cloth and a jumper of fishnet decorated with jangling bells made of shells, appeared, his whole body enveloped in snakes. Two great pythons formed the foundation but on top of them were layered puff adders, cobras and green and black mambas and dozens of smaller snakes. He draped the mambas over the body of a small boy assistant with a whitewashed face, wearing little else but beads and a straw-and-feather head-dress, then allowed himself to be bitten all over his body. Finally, by way of light relief, he pushed one of the smaller snakes up each of the boy’s nostrils, for the heads to appear a second later from his mouth while the tails were still hanging from his nose.
One of the villagers made an audible remark about the venom having been extracted from the snakes’ fangs and in a flash the snake charmer was in front of him offering him the chance to test them for himself.
As the man vanished to the shrieks of delight of the other spectators, the snake charmer grinned at Ginger. ‘You want ’em bite, you, Boss Ginger?’ he asked. ‘You want, I let ’em.’
‘They couldn’t bite their way out of a rice pudden,’ Ginger said scornfully. ‘’Ow’s business, Luki?’
The old man shrugged and Ginger went on. ‘You all right for snakes?’
‘You got some for me, Boss Ginger?’
‘I can catch ’em if you want ’em.’
Finally the witch doctors started their ju-ju. As the chanting began, the women turned away but the men, eager to see, pressed forward and within minutes a dozen of them were shuffling about in the crowd, hypnotized and indifferent to the blows and pushes that kept them stumbling along. It was only when half a dozen of them started fighting, stolidly clubbing at each other with wooden stakes as thick as their arms, that Ginger touched Feverel’s arm. ‘I reckon we’d best be off,’ he murmured.
None of them had any fears of staying the night in Makinkundi. Ginger knew the place inside out and they had no doubts that he would know where to go.
When he had first arrived in Africa he had been severely lectured on the proper attitudes to take towards black men, and earnest officers concerned with racialism had instructed him how to behave to the natives. It had all gone in at one ear and out at the other, and he still called them wogs, blackies and niggers and, against all the predictions of the experts, wasn’t left for dead. The sheer inexplicability of it might have worried the experts, but it never entered Ginger’s head that it was at all unusual.
Establishing themselves at Lizzie Morgan’s bar, they ate a meal of rice and fish and Lizzie kept them supplied with the French beer she had acquired. With the seventy-two black portraits staring at them, high stiff collars, picture hats and all, it was like eating a meal in the middle of a football crowd.
As it grew dark, they began to hear drums, throbbing and insistent as black hands fluttered over the skins. The excitement of the bundu ceremony and the beer and palm wine were getting hold of the crowd now and the drunkenness increased. Among the trees, the sky was bright with the glare of fires and occasionally it was possible to get a glimpse of torches and kerosene lanterns, while the black shapes in the darkness seemed to be nothing more than half-moon grins, eyes and a pair of shorts or a lappa. As the gaudy stars pricked their way through the palm fronds, the biscuit-tin zithers began their flat plink-plonking and more drums started, bigger than before, interspersed with shrieks of laughter and the monotonous tinkling of native xylophones.
Inevitably the rain came, falling heavily in an unexpected thunderstorm that drove everybody indoors, and the mooring party took shelter in a large square hut constructed of straw, palm fronds and mud. It had three rooms, all dark and smelling of woodsmoke, and the owner, who knew Ginger, produced a bottle of palm wine which Feverel and Kneller drank to the accompaniment of the spat and trickle of rain, while Ginger pretended to be a monster and chased the owner’s wife and daughters in and out of the rooms, the women shrieking with mock terror while the owner gave shouts of twanging laughter at their antics.
As the rain stopped and they headed back to Lizzie’s bar, they could see the lights of the pinnace, which Corporal Fox had moved further out into the river in case some drunk with a canoe decided it was worth setting up a raid. Then, abruptly, they were aware that the whole of Makinkundi seemed to be in the open space in front of Lizzie’s bar, a mass of agitated figures and wavering torches that etched highlights on black faces. The voices seemed suddenly to have become angry and Lizzie was beginning to look worried so they closed the garage-like doors and placed the bars across, watching through the cracks as the crowd swept past. A small boy was knocked down and trampled on and a hut was shoved over. Banana plants were broken and they could see the women edging to safety as the crowd pushed by.
Then, for a brief moment, they saw a white man outside, yelling angrily as the crowd washed over him like a tide.
‘That chap’s in trouble,’ Feverel said.
They wrenched the door open to go to the rescue but the white man had vanished and the crowd was milling round the square, so that it was clearly impossible to move among them. As they dispersed, there was no sign of the white man and the whole place seemed to be on the move, a mass of running figures and wavering torches. The mood of the crowd had changed completely. From being full of high-pitched African laughter and deep banjo-voiced singing, it was suddenly filled with menacing shouts and the deep baying sound of anger, and people started to run along the road by the edge of
the river, dozens of dogs and small boys leaping back and forth across the drainage ditches as they went.
‘Was that the bloke who was humbugging your girlfriend, Ginger?’ Feverel asked.
Ginger nodded. ‘Yeh. Reckon so.’
‘Well, he won’t be humbugging anybody else for a bit,’ Feverel said grimly. ‘I reckon he’ll be lucky to get out of this lot alive.’
Ginger nodded again, his face expressionless. ‘Yeh,’ he said. ‘Reckon ’e will.’
Nine
Africa looked its age and Makinkundi seemed to wear a guilty expression as the mooring party went to the river’s edge the following morning. A house had been set on fire and the rain, which had come again during the night, had washed the embers into sooty puddles. But it was as though it had sluiced away the violence of the villagers and brought them to their senses, and they were moving about sheepishly in the bright morning sunlight, curious to see what the night’s depredations had brought, but not too curious because the police had arrived from Hawkinge Town and too much curiosity could seem like guilt.
The climbing sun drew steam from the earth to mingle with the thin wisps of blue smoke that still curled lazily from the burned-out house. There was a strong smell of crushed grass and the spicy aroma of burned vegetation but no sign of the white man they had seen the night before, and their questions brought no response so that they could only assume he’d got back into the car which had undoubtedly brought him to Makinkundi and headed back to where it was safe. The familiar smell of charcoal, the smell everybody who served in Africa would remember to the end of his days, was stronger than ever and the deep red of the road to the river’s edge was touched by the bright bronze-yellow of the new day.
The pinnace crew responded to the yells from the shore and the inflatable dinghy took them off. Fox watched them approach. The noise ashore the previous night had worried him a little and he had moved the pinnace still further out into the river and had stood on deck, watching the flames and the torches and the moving crowd ashore with narrowed eyes.
