Graham Greene - Journey Without Maps
Preface To Second Edition
SIX years after this book was written I found myself living in Sierra Leone-a writer should be careful where he goes for pleasure in peacetime, for in wartime he is only too likely to return there to work. It was odd flying up from Lagos, following from the sky the line of surf along the Liberian coast, seeing the huddle of tiny shacks which called itself Grand Bassa, where I had dismissed my carriers, passing over the small white isolated building which was the British Consulate at Monrovia. It was odd too retracing my steps from Freetown to Kailahun, travelling in the same tiny lamp-lit train, staying in the same rest-houses,
I can look back now with a certain regret at the hard words I used about Freetown, for Freetown is now one of the homes I have lived and worked in through all the seasons. I have been able to recognise in myself after a year’s sojourn the inertia which as a tourist I condemned so harshly in other people. But if there are fallacies into which the passing visitor falls, there are fallacies too which come from a close acquaintance. After a little while there is so much one ceases to notice, and if I were writing of Freetown now, how unnaturally rosy would my picture be, for I begin to remember mainly the sunsets when all the laterite paths turned suddenly for a few minutes the colour of a rose, the old slavers’ fort with the cannon lying in the grass, the abandoned railway track with the chickens pecking in and out of the little empty rotting station, the taste of the first pink gin at six o’clock. I have begun to forget what the visitor noticed so clearly-the squalor and the unhappiness and the involuntary injustices of tired men. But as that picture is true too, I let it stand.
London, November 1946
PART I, CHAPTER ONE, THE WAY TO AFRICA
Harvest Festival
THE tall black door in the narrow city street remained closed. I rang and knocked and rang again. I could not hear the bell ringing; to ring it again and again was simply an act of faith or despair, and later sitting before a hut in French Guinea, where I never meant to find myself, I remembered this first going astray, the buses passing at the corner and the pale autumn sun.
An errand boy came to my help, asking me whether I wanted the Consul, and when I said yes, that was what I wanted, the boy led me straight to the entrance of St. Dunstan’s Church and up the steps and into the vestry. It wasn’t the sort of beginning I’d expected when I was accumulating the tent I never used, the hypodermic syringe I left behind, the automatic pistol which remained hidden underneath boots and shoes and bags of silver in the moneybox. They were preparing for the harvest festival; the vestry was crowded with large dressy yellow blooms and litters of vegetable marrow; I couldn’t see the Consul anywhere. The errand boy peered among the flowers in the dim light and at last pointed to a little intent woman bent above the blooms. “There she is,” he said, “that’s her. She’ll tell you.”
I felt very selfconscious, making my way among the vegetables in St. Dunstan’s, asking : “Could you by any chance tell me? Is the Liberian Consul?”
But she knew and I left that street for another.
It was three o’clock and lunch at the Consulate was just over. Three men, I could not distinguish their nationality, overcrowded the tiny room which was deeply buried in the huge new glittering office block. The window-sill was lined with old telephone directories, school textbooks of chemistry. One man was washing up lunch into a basin stuck in the top of a waste-paper basket. Unidentifiable yellow threads like bast floated in the greasy water. The man poured a kettle of boiling water from a gas jet over a plate which he held above the basket; then he wiped the plate with a cloth. The table was littered with bursting parcels of what looked like stones, and the lift porter kept on putting his head in at the door and flinging down more parcels on the floor. The room was like a shabby caravan held up for a moment in a smart bright street. One doubted whether, returning in a few hours’ time to the gleaming mechanised block, one would still find it there; it would almost certainly have moved on.
But everyone was very kind. It all came down to a question of paying money; no one asked me why I wanted to go, although I had been told by many authorities on Africa that the Republic of Liberia resented intruders. In the Consulate they had little guttural family jokes among themselves. “Before the war,” a large man said, “you didn’t need passports. Such a fuss. Only to the Argentine,” and he looked across at the man who was making out my papers. “If you wanted to get to the Argentine you even had to give your finger-prints a month ahead, so that Scotland Yard and Buenos Aires could get together. All the scoundrels in the world went to the Argentine.”
I examined the usual blank map upon the wall, a few towns along the coast, a few villages along the border.” Have you been to Liberia?” I asked.
“No, no,” the large man said. “We let them come to us.”
The other man stuck a round red seal on my passport; it bore the National Mark, a three-masted ship, a palm tree, a dove flying overhead, and the legend “The love of liberty brought us here”. Above the same red seal I had to sign the “Declaration of an Alien about to depart for die Republic of Liberia.”
I have informed myself of the provisions under the Immigration Law, and am convinced that I am eligible for admission into the Republic thereunder.
I realise that if I am one of a class prohibited by law from admission, I will be deported or detained in confinement.
I solemnly swear that the above statements are true to the best of my knowledge and that I fully intend when in the Republic to obey and support the laws and constituted authorities thereof.
The only thing which I knew of the law was that it forbade a white man to enter the country except through the recognised ports unless he had paid a large sum for an explorer’s licence. I intended to enter the country from the British border and make his goods, but in this country the buyer enforces the price to suit his convenience.
The Government can kill all the people of Sasstown and all the tribes of the Kru Coast before we surrender to the Government. We will not return to the coast or surrender until we hear from the British Consul in Monrovia that there will be no more war. Then we will return to Old Sasstown… .
There was something satisfyingly complete about this picture. It really seemed as though you couldn’t go deeper than that; the agony was piled on in the British Government Blue Book with a real effect of grandeur; the little injustices of Kenya became shoddy and suburban beside it.
And it was saved from melodrama by its irony, by the fact that the Republic was founded as an example to all Africa of a Christian and self-governing state. An American philanthropic society at the beginning of the nineteenth century (many of its directors, it is said, were slave-owners who found it convenient thus to get rid of their illegitimate children) began to ship released slaves to the Grain Coast of Africa. Land was bought from the native rulers and a settlement established at Monrovia. “The love of liberty brought us here,” but one can hardly blame these first half-caste settlers when they found that love of their own liberty was not consistent with the liberty of the native tribes. The history of the Republic was very little different from the history of neighbouring white colonies: it included the same broken contracts, the same resort to arms, the same gradual encroachment, even the same heroism among die early settlers, the peculiarly Protestant characteristic of combining martyrdom with absurdity. There were, for example, the black Quakers from Pennsylvania, teetotallers and pacifists, who when they were attacked by Spanish slavers depended on prayer and were massacred. Only a hundred and twenty escaped and settled in Grand Bassa.
From the first these American half-caste slaves were idealists in the American manner. Their Declaration of Independence, when the Republic was declared, had the glossy white marble effect of the American. The-year was 1847, but the phrases were eighteenth century; they belonged to Washington; they had the rhetoric of an expensive tomb. The inalienable rights of life and liberty gravely led off the scroll; but then one passed to “the right to acquire, possess, enjoy, and defend property”. To-day the ‘ideals’ are still American, something a little like the American of Tammany Hall; the descendants of the slaves have taken to politics with the enthusiasm of practised crap players.