This attitude is unreasonable, but their minds do not move on the level of reason. To accept a black overlord offended some deep communal instinct which was unaffected by the fact that under the worst black Commissioner they had not suffered what the natives in French West Africa had suffered under white Commissioners. They did not take into account at all from what they were saved by the nominal nature of black rule. In that rough, unmapped country, if they were twenty miles from a Commissioner’s headquarters, they were fifty years away. They were left alone to their devils and secret societies and private terrors, to the paternal oppression of their chiefs. They weren’t interfered with as they would certainly have been interfered with in a white colony, and one was thankful for their lack of education, when one compared them as they were in Buzie country, striding along the narrow forest paths, the straight back, the sword with an ivory handle swinging against the long native robe, with the anglicised ‘educated’ blacks of Sierra Leone, the drill suits and the striped shirts and the dirty sun-helmets. Every head of a family in this tribe had his sword and wore it when he left his village, every young man had his dagger, and even the tool of the men working on the farms, the broad-bladed cutlass in its beautifully-worked leather sheath, had an air of chivalry, of an older civilisation than the tin shacks on the Coast. Even the poorer tribes beyond the Buzie country, the Gios and the Manos, with their loin-cloths and sores, were not more neglected than were the natives of a Protectorate under the care of a single sanitary inspector.
Hospitality in Kpangblamai
His Excellence the President talked for more than an hour in the little room above the Sunday-stricken town. He was very courteous, and it went against the grain to deceive him and give the impression that Zigita was the farthest extent of the journey I intended to take. The Commissioners in the Western Province had been warned of my coming, and I wanted as quickly as possible to slip over into a province where I was not expected. As quickly as possible … but it was not easy to stem the rolling tide of the President’s hopes, the roads, the aeroplanes, the motor-cars. It was a paradoxical situation; a black preaching progress to a sceptical white, but the white had come out of the busy bustling progressive scene and he had noticed there nothing more lovely than the Buzie cloths the President spread for his inspection. There was nothing crudely peasant, nothing art and crafty, nothing to remind one of stalls at bazaars and dear ladies with pale-blue bulbous eyes, about these cloths : they were sophisticated in their design, but the sophistication had a different source from ours. It sprang directly from a deeper level; it wasn’t tinged by the artistic selfconsciousness of centuries.
There was a world of difference between these cloths and the Mandingo cloths from French Guinea, one of which I had bought in the market at Bolahun and which can be bought, too, at double the price, on the Coast, at Freetown and Monrovia. The Mandingo is a trader, his line of country is immense when it is computed less in mileage than in difficulty: in forest, swamp, river and flood. One finds him in the ports, one finds him five hundred miles in the interior in places where no white man has been seen in living memory. He is unmistakable : his height and shaven head, his Semitic features^ his air in his scarlet fez and his long robe, a verse of the Koran hung round the neck, of a long trading lineage. He rides the only horses to be seen in the interior, but more often he does the journey on foot. In French Guinea I met a Mandingo who could tell me the whole route to the Coast at Cape Palmas or Grand Bassa. He made the wild four weeks’ journey as regularly as a traveller in silk stockings who catches the Brighton Belle once a week. But the cloths, the swords and knives they carry with them .are not superior to the peasant lands of Central Europe; they have the same crude tourist stamp; lozenges of bright crude colours on the heavy cloth. And this is interesting when one considers that there are no tourists in French Guinea, and few white men at all in the far corner of the colony which touches Liberia. The trade goods have to be carried through hundreds of miles of forest to reach the kind of public which enjoys the bogus gaudy article.
It was all against the proper White House etiquette, I felt, but it was I who had to make the move to end the interview, for I began to fear that it would be dark before I reached Kpangblamai. I was still following roughly the route which Sir Alfred Sharpe took in his journey through Liberia in 1919. All the way along this northern border the ground is high, generally about sixteen hundred feet, and the ground broken. Sir Alfred Sharpe wrote after his journey that he had never been in any part of Africa where the going was so bad, but at least it isn’t monotonous like the way through the central forest, where there is no variation in the narrow paths, the dull tangled greenery, where there is nothing to see for hours on end but the carrier’s feet and the tree-roots. Here, between Kolahun and Kpangblamai, there were hills to scramble over, the Mano River to cross on a wide bridge of twisted creeper, the great swallow-tailed butterflies swarming at the watercourses, tiny winged primroses resting on the damp sand and rising in clouds round our waists, and once a little ferny, brackeny glade, warm and sweet like an English summer.
These first few days of trekking had a beauty that later one completely missed: everything was new the villages with the women pounding rice, the cluster of stones where the chiefs were buried, the cows rubbing their horns along the huts; the taste of warm, boiled and filtered water in the dried mouth; the sense, above all, that one was getting somewhere, that one was going deeper. It made me walk fast, faster than my carriers and my companion. A march, this first week, was a dash; my hammock-men, as I didn’t use my hammock, kept my pace, and an evasive half-relationship developed from shared oranges, the rests at the watercourses, where they drank out of the empty meat tins they carefully preserved and I from my bottle.
Babu was one of these men, the Buzie : he played the harp tentatively when we rested; he couldn’t speak a word of English, but he had amused friendly reliable ways of showing that he was on your side in the arguments which soon came thick and fast. He was one of the few carriers who smoked a pipe, a small clay pipe, and one could imagine him a season-ticket-holder, the reliable support of his mother and sisters in a remote sad suburb. For there was an undertone of sadness which grew as the trek went on; he wasn’t strong enough for the work; he didn’t complain, he was completely reliable until he was simply too sick to go farther. He was at first the only Buzie man with us; he didn’t mix easily but sat apart with his pipe, sometimes coming up to the door of my hut to smile his good wishes and go away again.
The other man on the first day who went ahead with me was Alfred. Alfred was another type altogether, in his cloth cap and shorts. He had learnt to read and write, he knew English; he thought he was out for a jaunt. Plump and sweaty and horribly ingratiating, he managed to be the one who carried the harp and not the empty hammock. He pointed out everything which he considered of interest, he hung around; but among the men he was the focus of discontent; he always knew that a town was “too far”, I could hear his fat grumble doing its work whenever a group gathered together to voice their complaints, and a moment later there he would be, back at my side, doing me a little service, oily and friendly and proud of his English.