The trouble was, no one had heard of Dagomai. Peter Bonoh hadn’t heard of it, nor had his father or the old headman. The only town they could suggest between Kpangblamai and Zigita was Pandemai. But that wasn’t far enough for a day’s march, and besides I didn’t expect too friendly a reception from the chief there, who had been expecting me that night. Dagomai, Dagomai, I kept on repeating in the hope that somebody would have heard of the place. Presently “Duogobmai,” the chief said doubtfully. It sounded very nearly right, it was on the way to Nicoboozu, and I decided that it must be the place the doctor had meant. ‘Too far,” Alfred said, joining in, “too far”; the carriers clustered round and he whispered to them how far it was; they hadn’t begun to work together yet, they were full of jealousy and suspicion:, he had the right material to his hand. But I didn’t believe him; even the doctor’s wife had done the march to Dagomai, and now I quite firmly .believed that Duogobmai and Dagomai were the same place. It wouldn’t pay me not to believe it; time was money, and it wouldn’t do to lose myself my first day loose in the Liberian interior.
For hours as I lay in bed I heard the faint music of the harps, the low sound of Alfred talking to the carriers; I wondered what I’d do if they refused to obey me. I suppose it is the thought which strikes every new prefect at school, but I had never been a prefect; I had never before so abjectly depended on other people’s obedience. I was glad afterwards that I hadn’t for a moment imagined that Alfred, oily, smart, ingratiating, mutinous Alfred, might be right.
It was die first time I had slept in a native hut, and foolishly, for the sake of privacy, I kept the door closed, as the natives do themselves for fear of wild animals from the forest. I had never experienced such heat; it was like a blanket over the face, even the thin muslin mosquito-net took the breath. But at any rate there were not yet rats; only a few rustles in the roof, and in the end I fell asleep in spite of Alfred’s whisper, the music and the heat and the strangeness.
The Primitive
I was called at five by Mark and Amah, whom I again sent on ahead to warn the chief at Duogobmai. It was just as well to get Amah out of the way; Vande had chosen him as second headman, but already I could tell how unpopular he was. He was the only Mandingo among the carriers, and for the first week of the march tribal differences caused almost continuous trouble. He was strong, reliable, the best-looking man of a rather weedy set, but he had no sense of humour and they teased him mercilessly until he got into a sullen rage.
Mark and Amah had nearly three hours’ start, for the chiefs hospitality was by no means over. He gave my cousin a hideous leather satchel made in the village in the bright crude colours of Italian leather work, and his son gave me a bundle of knives from the smithy. Unfortunately his hospitality included the carriers, and he provided them with a large meal before they started.
The character of a carrier is childlike. He enjoys the moment. He cannot connect cause and effect He is used to one meal in the day at evening, he lives on the edge of subsistence, and it would be a hard master who grudged him the unexpected pleasure of an extra meal. The chief’s kindness made them for a few minutes gloriously happy; and when almost immediately they suffered from walking with heavy loads on a full stomach, they didn’t connect their suffering with their pleasure. They simply felt with minds clouded by indigestion that somebody was treating them badly. It was always the same throughout the four weeks of marching; whenever they had a breakfast they worked badly, grumbled and made palavers; when food became scarce they worked well and were happy. On one occasion they spent nearly forty-eight hours without food and at the end of that time they were fresher than they had ever been.
I had been warned of this; I knew what to expect; the food hadn’t been in their bellies five minutes before rebellion stirred. But they could be distracted, too, as easily as children, and when a man presented me with a small grey monkey on a string they were temporarily happy again. They liked something to torment. They poked it with sticks. They turned it upside down. They dragged it head first in the dust. They tickled its private parts, and the little brute screamed at them and tried to bite and turned its bloodshot eyes this way and that for an escape. When they left it in peace for a moment it sat with its head in its wrinkled hands as if it were weeping. Laminah and Alfred were its chief tormentors, they were like bullies at school with a new boy who couldn’t hit back; the other men were amused and tormented it occasionally when they were bored, but sometimes they were kind to it, offering it pieces of banana or kola nuts, and after a while they forgot it. Even Laminah gave up teasing it in the end, and Mark became its companion. After the first four days it went everywhere with him; it sat on his shoulder all the way through the forest until at Ganta it escaped; it rested its hands on his head and searched his hair for insects. It never tried to bite him; he never talked to it; they accepted each other in silence.
It was eight o’clock before the men had finished eating and were ready to start. They were very slow and quarrelsome, and I went on ahead with my two spare hammock-men. Alfred walked in front dangling the monkey, and Babu walked behind carrying two harps. Almost immediately we were in the forest, but it was only the edge of the great waste of bush which covers the Republic to within sight of the sea. I felt rather absurd with my two companions climbing up out of the forest, over the crest of a small cracked hill covered with round huts while the natives came to the door and stared at the sight of the first white man they’d seen for months. One really needed to be a minor prophet to emerge suddenly like this, almost unaccompanied, with two harps and a monkey… .
On a narrow path we met three men with long curved cutlasses cutting away the bush; Alfred spoke to them; they came from Pandemai. They said the chief had expected the white man the night before; he had swept a hut and cooked food for thirty men. Alfred suggested it would be a good thing to spend the night with the chief. He would be offended otherwise. Duogobmai was too far, too far… . He asked the men about it. They shook their heads. He said that it was more than a day’s march from Pandemai. But I couldn’t speak the language, and Babu, whom I trusted, couldn’t speak any English, and Alfred I believed to be a Har. But liars sometimes speak the truth.
A little later a tiny stream, a patch of sand, a cloud of butterflies, marked the boundary between Bande country and Buzie country, and soon after we came out into a broad sun-drenched clearing below Pandemai. A concrete house was being built beside the path with a fence and a garden gate, and a black man in a European suit with an old white topee came out to meet me and laughed and lifted his hat and laughed again. He was a middle-aged man with a hard mean face which he had covered defensively for the occasion with an expression of silliness and subservience. He said, “Mr. Greene, we were expecting you last night.” He had the name pat, he laughed in a nervous servile way after every sentence, and there was something unmistakably clerical about his manner. One felt the Sermon on the Mount was somewhere about, though it had gone sour. He was a missionary from Monrovia, and now he was engaged in building his new mission. Like Mr. Reeves he believed in concrete and like Mr. Reeves he kept his brother blacks well in hand.
He said, “The chief had everything prepared for you last nightlittle and again he laughed as much as to say, 1 know I’m laughable, I’m only a black and you are a white, you are laughing at me, but you needn’t think I don’t laugh toolittle He led the way up to Pandemai, laughing and complaining all the way, not taking himself seriously, with a bitter humility which didn’t really disguise the hardness and meanness below it. I wanted to go straight through; I was afraid of trouble with the carriers if they once put down their loads, but the missionary was too ready to accept my refusal as one more sign that he was despised. I couldn’t give him that excuse, and now that my cousin had joined us, I let the missionary lead the way to his two-roomed hut in the town. The place was bug-ridden; we had only sat on the porch for a minute, while we ate the bananas he brought in a wooden bowl, before we realised that.