Kpangblamai was about four and a half hours’ march from Kolahun. It appeared quite unexpectedly towards the end of the worst heat on the usual hilltop, and there was Mark running dramatically down to meet us at the stream. He had a school friend with him, Peter, the chief’s son, and he said he had “plenty plenty fine house” covered with pictures. So it was : rectangular, like a small stable with two stalls and a verandah. The stalls were bedrooms, containing native beds, platforms of beaten earth spread with matting. The walls were papered thickly with old advertisements and photographs out of illustrated papers, most of them German or American. Over a chair made out of an old packing-case was an article by General Pershing on Youth; beautiful women showed their teeth brushed with Chlorodone, handsome men displayed their ready-made suitings, somebody wondered why she wasn’t a social success, and a man in uniform denounced a clause of the Treaty of Versailles. It was a really fine house, the only one like it in the town; we didn’t have another lodging in a native town so good before Monrovia.
The chief at Kpangblamai was overpoweringly hospitable. I hadn’t time to sit down and rest and take a drink before the old man arrived, wizened and reserved, in a turban and a kind of liberty robe which was like the tea-gowns worn at Edwardian literary teas. He brought with him his headman, who wore a robe of the ordinary blue and white striped native cloth and a battered bowler hat. He was even older than the chief, they neither could speak a word of English, but while from the chiefs manner I gathered an impression of a rather sad tired benevolence, the headman was full of shrewdness, satire, salacious humour. He giggled in a sly way; he had, I felt sure, the low-down on the whole town; he wasn’t, like the chief, an idealist; if he had belonged to another race, he would have been one of those elderly men who pinch girls’ bottoms on buses in a friendly, harmless way. Chief and headman were inseparable; they went everywhere together like the higher and the lower nature.
Now they had brought with them a basin full of eggs (every one of which proved to be bad), a huge basket of oranges, and three gourds of palm wine. For the first time I was thirsty enough to enjoy palm wine; I drank one gourdful not realising the danger of dysentery if it wasn’t fresh or the gourd was dirty; it was the colour of stone ginger beer and had a soft flat taste like barley water. The chief and the headman sat down on the native bed and I gave them cigarettes. Nobody spoke. Presently they got up and went away, but a minute later the chief returned with a chicken. That first day I didn’t know the right etiquette; I dashed back for each present when it arrived; and the presents multiplied rapidly-Later I learnt from Amedoo that I should dash once only at the end of my stay.
I was longing for a wash and I hadn’t had time to shave before I left Bolahun, but the hospitable chief kept me on the run. No sooner had he gone after presenting the chicken than his son came in to say that the devil would dance for the visitors : so with the chief and the headman we sat out in the blazing sun and waited for the devil to appear. This time it was a devil belonging to a woman’s society, a devil from Pandemai in Buzie country, who was travelling to Kolahun to dance before the President.
It came out between the last huts at the end of the wide little whitewashed town, then swayed and simpered forward in a country robe, swinging a great raffia bustle, nodding its black mask. The bustle swung up and showed huge pantaloons of fibre, like a caricature of a Victorian dress. One remembered Miss Tilly Losch in a Cochran revue hesitating before a pillar-box with just this air of coyness, the sophisticated copy of something young and artless. This devil seemed to a European to have a mock female, mock modest manner, which was curiously and interestingly gross when combined with the long cruel mask, the slanting eyes, the heavy mouth. It turned and turned, swinging the bustle above the pantaloons, and the interpreter ran round and round carrying a small whip. There was something about it of the witch of one’s childhood; perhaps because it remained so feminine even while it was unrecognisable as a woman; perhaps because of its curious headgear; the tall tufted pole taking the place of the sugar-loaf hat. It sank on to the ground and recited its greetings on a low gushing note. It was a far more accomplished dancer than Landow. To compare Landow’s wild rushes, matching the great crude muzzle, with the simpering silly sinister gait of this woman’s devil was like comparing brutality with cruelty. It may have been a tribal difference: no Bande craftsman could have made this mask. Landow’s was a mask of childish fancy running in the vein of nightmare : this was a work of conscious art in the service of a belief.
After the dance the chiefs son, Peter Bonoh, said that his father wished to show the visitors his town. The whole length of Kpangblamai cannot have exceeded a hundred and fifty yards, but before we had seen all the activities of that small settlement, I felt much as a member of the royal family must feel after a tour of an industrial fair. I had been allowed no rest after the march, the palm wine was lying heavy in my stomach, there was no air on the baked plateau, and I thought that I was going to faint before I reached the end. Five weavers were at work, each under his own little shelter of palm branches; a man was cutting leather sheaths for daggers; and in the smithy they were making blades, one man working a great leather bellows, another beating out the white-hot blade (I would have paid them more attention if I had known then the importance of the smith, how frequently he is the local devil and his word more powerful than the chiefs). In front of another hut two women were spinning a kind of top upon a plate, working the thread out of a mass of cotton. In a little wooden enclosure a woman was boiling the leaves of a forest plant in a great cauldron to make a dark-blue dye. The smell of the cauldron, the pressure of the crowd fingering my sleeves and the cloth of my trousers, the necessity of keeping my face fixed in a bright cheerful interested mask made me feel weak and ill. There seemed no end to the parade of industry. It was a tiny plateau, not much larger than the Round Pond; wherever I looked, between the shoulders of the crowd, I saw the huts give way to trees, and above the trees the high forested ridge of the Pandemai hills; but in the hot stuffy evening it seemed as endless as a maze of which one doesn’t know the clue.
Two women sat on the ground smoothing out cotton as it came from the pods; a group of women were extracting the thick yellow oil out of the palm nuts; another weaver. …. At last we were back at our hut; the chairs and tables were out; and another present arrived from the chief-a kid; it escaped and led a howling chase between the huts before it was brought back and tethered. My cousin went to bed, couldn’t stand the thought of food, and I had my very English meal alone, sardines on toast, a steam-ing hot steak and kidney pudding, a sweet omelette washed down with whisky and orange. I was only halfway through the second course when Peter Bonoh put his head through the screen to say his father was outside, and there the old chief was, sitting in his chair at the entrance in his tea-gown and turban. He had brought an orchestra with him and all through dinner they played their monotonous tinkling tones. The chief hadn’t anything to say; he $at there quite proud and happy and ignored, while the headman giggled salaciously somewhere in the dark nearby, until at last he slipped away into the moonless night carrying his chair.
But there was one thing I had to know before I went to bed-where to go next. The doctor at the mission had spoken of an easy day’s march to a place he called Dagomai, a long march the day after to Nicoboozu, and then Zigita. That was as far as he had been on the way to Ganta, but south of Zigita, at Zorzor, there was a Lutheran mission where someone might know something of the way beyond. The maps of the Dutch prospectors didn’t cover the ground so far east.