Sir Alfred Sharpe passed through Pandemai, “an old war town”, in 1919, and was received with great hospitality by the local chief. Perhaps the black missionary had not then arrived: now the town seemed dead : the chief when he came, a sullen suppressed man who presented his dash of a chicken and a pail of rice as if they had been exacted from him by force. The missionary ruled him. When, thinking of the wasted chop and the trouble he had taken the night before, I prepared to dash him five shillings in return, the missionary caught my hand. He said he couldn’t allow it; there was no need to give the chief anything; I was the guest of .the country. At last he allowed two shillings to pass to the chief, who stood by with a beaten smouldering air like an honest man who watches, without the power to intervene, two racketeers squabbling over his property.
The missionary calculated that Duogobmai was still six hours away. That was disquieting, for we had already marched for more than two hours, but nothing would induce me to stay. It wasn’t only the unfriendly chief and the bugs in the hut; I was still planning my journey by European time : the listless-ness, the laissez-faire of Africa hadn’t caught me. I had planned to reach Duogobmai that night and to fail to reach it seemed to put back everything. I wasn’t confident enough to see the journey as more than a smash-and-grab raid into the primitive…. There was a dream of a witch I used to have almost every night when I was small. I would be walking along a dark passage to the nursery door. Just before the door there was a linen-cupboard and there “die witch waited, like the devil in Kpangblamai, feminine, inhuman. In the nursery was safety, but I couldn’t pass. I would fling myself face downwards on the ground and the witch would jump. At last, after many years, I evaded her, running blindly by into sanctuary, and I never had the dream again. Now I seemed to be back in the dark passage : I had to see
the witch, but I wasn’t prepared for a long or careful examination.
So I wouldn’t be delayed, and though the carriers grumbled and Alfred whispered again into my ear, “Too far. Better stay here. Too far,” I insisted on going on. Rather recklessly I pledged myself that it wasn’t far to Duogobmai. I nursed the idea that a black always exaggerated, when the fact was they had so hazy an idea of time that they were just as likely to minimise. I said, “It’s only about five hours from here. I know. The white doctor at the Holy Cross told me.”
Only five hours, I thought, as the midday heat came nearer, striking up from the dry ground, catching the feet as much as did the roots of trees, beating down on one’s helmet so that for moments at a time it was cooler to raise it and take the full sun on the skull. We were in the forest now, but it was still the edge where it flattened out towards the Mandingo plateau to the north : the dead dull edge of it which didn’t shelter sufficiently. A few birds moved overhead, out of sight, their wings creaking like unoiled doors. A monkey ran along a branch of a great grey cotton tree, which was buttressed on the ground like a tower. It flung itself into the air at the height of a cathedral spire, dropped fifty feet and out of sight behind the palms and ivy, the tangle of greenery. The boy with the harps leapt aside at a slither in the grass. That was all the life there was, except for the long sullen chain of carriers, dropping farther and farther behind. I wondered whether they would stay the journey; if they left us I hadn’t the money to reach the Coast. Would I have the nerve, I wondered, if it came to a show-down, to refuse to pay them or would we go tamely back with them to Bolahun?
The bush got thicker; the paths narrower. It was difficult to keep one’s feet among the roots. My cousin and the carriers were out of sight and hearing. Nothing seemed to live but the snakes and birds, and they were invisible, and the ants. It was a country made for ants. Their great yellow tenements, twelve feet high, broke through the bush, enchained the villages. Their swarms drove across the paths, like Carthaginian armies; the route on either side was lined with sentries; one could imagine the heaving at tiny ropes, the cracking of infinitesimal whips. Sometimes near water there were other ants, guerilla ants this time who whipped at one singly through the air and fastened their pincers in the skin: stockings couldn’t keep them out: their nip was like the cut of a knife. These, one sometimes felt, were the real owners and rulers of the bush, not the men in the villages one passed every two or three hours above their scanty streams, ringed with a little plantation of kola trees, the leaves turned upwards in great ugly yellow bowls like brass epergnes; not certainly die few white men who had passed this way and left in a little cleared space beside the path an abandoned gold-working: a deep hole the size of a coffin, a few decaying wooden struts above a well of stagnant water, die ivy already creeping up. This was the ruling passion of most white men in this dead bush, a passion just as secret, needing as much evasion, kept perhaps with as much fear, as the secrets of the bush e houses which stood away from the path behind a row of stunted charred trees like funeral cypresses or a fence of woven palm leaves. A few banana trees at the edge of one village were fenced in : “the devil’s bananas”.
It was odd in this shabby lost bush to be told by one’s guide, pointing to a tiny path, that that was the ‘road’ to Voinjema. The carriers were still near their own country, and though the paths were sometimes as numerous and apparently as random as a child’s criss-cross scrawlings on a sheet of paper, Babu knew his way. He didn’t have to hesitate; to show the route to those who came behind he would close the wrong paths with sprays of leaves. These were the only road signs in the bush.
Under the vertical sun we reached another village, I and my two spare hammock-men and Amedoo. They led me to the palaver-house, the low thatched barn in the middle of the village where the old men were drowsing out their siesta. I sat down in a hammock which was slung on one side, and the old men ranged themselves opposite and blinked and scratched. It was too hot to talk. A woman lay in a patch of shade, on her face in the dust, and slept. The chickens scratched on the floor for the grains of rice which sometimes fell between the slats of the roof. A long time passed; I wanted to scratch too. I wasn’t bitten; it was a nervous reaction. The old men blinked and scratched their armpits and heads and thighs; they burrowed inside their loose robes to find a new spot to scratch. It was too hot to be really curious about anyone, though a few of the younger men of the village stooped under the thatch and sat down and stared and began to scratch. The delay irritated me. I wanted to eat my lunch and get away, but it was nearly an hour before the carriers began to stumble in, tired and stubborn, suspicious and complaining. Alfred went round among them, urging them to rebel, gathering evidence from the villagers as to how far Duogobmai was.
But I still persisted in believing that they were wrong. I was without experience. All the white men I had met in Sierra Leone had told me how blacks must be driven, how they lied and humbugged, and it was not unnatural that I should believe they were lying now, ‘trying it on’, like schoolboys who are testing a new master’s discipline. And as a weak master who knows his own weakness bluffs it out with a new form, unable to recognise who is truthful and who is not, alienating the honest by classing them with the dishonest, I became all the more stubborn. I ate my food very fast, so that the men might have only a short rest, I told Vande to make Alfred one of my cousin’s hammock-carriers so that he might be forced to work, I wouldn’t listen to their arguments.