In Kailahun at the time when we arrived there were only two white men, the District Commissioner and a Scottish engineer who was building a bridge, but a third man, a stranger, drifted in during the evening in a singlet and dirty ducks, with a little black beard and shaven monkish head. The Commissioner had arrived by the same train; he had been down the line to Segbwana to investigate a Gorilla Society murder. A child had been carried off and killed, and a woman had sworn she had seen the gorilla and that he wore trousers. A man confessed, but none of the Commissioners believed that he was the real murderer. He had in his possession a gorilla knife with curved prongs to make the rough clawing wounds, and possession of the knife was alone sufficient to earn him fourteen years’ imprisonment The Commissioner was small, dark, lively, subtle and sensitive; he was new to the place; something had happened to three of his predecessors. There had been a boundary dispute in the district for years between two chiefs, a suspicion of ‘medicine’ in the food, and in a month’s time he would be alone again (the engineer gone). Books came out to him from the Times Book Club, he read them and then they rotted on the shelves.
The engineer sat and smoked in silence. He didn’t read books; he had no conversation; he was white-haired, rocky, slow; he might have been sixty and it was a shock to hear that he was in his early forties. He didn’t mind the loneliness, he said, he was happier here than in England, it suited him. But he had more nerves than he cared to admit.
‘There’s a Liberian messenger waiting here for you,” the D.C. said. It was what I had feared, that the authorities would send a guide to keep us to the route they had suggested. The D.C. sent a man into the village to find him, and soon afterwards the stranger turned up in his dirty trousers and singlet. Everyone took him to be the Liberian messenger, nobody got up or offered him a drink; he was the Enemy with his shaven head and his curious black tuft of beard. He had nothing to say for himself, standing there patiently while he was told what he had to do. “You are going to show this gentleman the way to Bolahun. He will start the day after tomorrow. You know the way to the Holy Cross Mission?”
Yes, he said, he had come from there.
It was a long while before anyone thought of asking whether he was the Liberian messenger. He wasn’t, the messenger had disappeared from Kailahun, the stranger was a German. He wanted a bed; he had dropped in to Kailahun as casually as if it were a German village where he would be sure to find an inn. He had a bland secretive innocence; he had come from the Republic and he was going back to the Republic; he gave no indication of why he had come or why he was going or what he was doing in Africa at all.
I took him for a prospector, but it turned out later that he was concerned with nothing so material as gold or diamonds. He was just learning. He sat back in his chair, seeming to pay no attention to anyone; when he was asked a question, he gave a tiny laugh (you thought: I have asked something very foolish, very superficial), and gave no answer until later, when you had forgotten the question. He was young in spite of his beard; he had an aristocratic air in spite of his beachcomber’s dress, and he was wiser than any of us. He was the only one who knew exactly what it was he wished to learn, who knew the exact extent of his ignorance. He could speak Mende; he was picking up Buzie; and he had a few words of Pelli: it took time. He had only been two years in West Africa,
I discovered this very gradually; it took longer than the breakfast to which he came next day, more aristocratic than ever in a clean shirt and a pair of fawn trousers, with an ivory-headed stick, a round white topee, a long cigarette-holder in the corner of his mouth. It was a formal courtesy, but he wasn’t interested in anyone; he was only interested in learning what he wanted to know, and he could tell at once that from us he could learn nothing at all. We asked him questions and he retired more than ever into his reserve of secrecy. Had he ever been to Africa before he came out to the Republic two years ago? No, never. Hadn’t he found things difficult? No, he said with a tiny smile, it had all been very simple. Would one have trouble with the Customs at the frontier? Well, of course, it was possible; he himself had no trouble, but they knew him. Should one bribe them? That was one of the questions he didn’t answer, putting it aside, smiling gently, tipping the ash off his cigarette on to the beaten earth of the floor. The cockchafers buzzed in and out and he sat with lowered head, smoking. No, he wouldn’t have another biscuit. Only after a time he exerted himself to give one piece of information; teaching tired him as much as learning invigorated him. It would be as well, he said, while we were at the Holy Cross to visit the Liberian Commissioner at Kolahun. The Commissioner was a scoundrel; he could make things very unpleasant; besides, it was necessary to take out a permit of residence before one had been in the Republic a week. Then he walked briskly away, twirling his ivory-headed stick, his topee sloped at a smart angle, looking around, learning things. One day (it took a week to discover so much) he was going to write a thesis for Berlin University (he came from Hamburg, but Dr. Westermann was at Berlin and he hoped to win the approval of that great African scholar). The thesis was an end, but the collection of material for the thesis had no end. The thesis was as evasive as the Castle in Kafka’s religious parable.
‘ We met him again in the long flat village. The chief’s new house stood up above the huts, an absurd concrete skyscraper with row on row of stained-glass windows not made to open; in one corner, tucked away, an unpainted door and a flight of splintery steps. This was the house of Momno Kpanyan, one of the richest chiefs in the Protectorate. In the market we got small change; the penny was too large a sum for marketing, and the currency most in use was irons. Their price varied; one could speculate in irons: the rate that day was twenty for fourpence, They were flat strips of iron about fourteen inches long, like blunt arrows; the points must be undamaged and the tails unchipped (this was as good a way as a milled edge to ensure that the currency was not debased); men were coming in to the market with bundles of several hundred irons on their heads.
Kailahun, in memory, has become a clean village, one of the cleanest we stayed in, but what impressed me at the time was the dirt and disease, the children with protuberant navels relieving themselves in the dust among the goats and chickens, the pock-marked women smeared about the face and legs and breasts with some white ointment they squeezed from a plant in the bush and used for beauty and for medicine. They used it for smallpox, for fever, for toothache, for indigestion; for every ailment under their bleak sun; when they were young it soothed their headaches; when they were older they smeared it on their big bellies to bring them ease in their confinement; when they were dying it lay like a sediment of salt on their dried-up breasts and in their pitted thighs. Here you could measure what civilisation was worth; looking back later to Kailahun from the villages of the Republic, where civilisation stopped within fifty miles of the coast, I could see no great difference.
‘Workers of the World Unite”; I thought of the wide shallow slogans of political parties, as the thin bodies, every rib showing, with dangling swollen elbows or pock-marked skin, went by me to the market; why should we pretend to talk in terms of the world when we mean only Europe or the white races? Neither IJL.P. nor Communist Party urges a strike in England because the platelayers in Sierra Leone are paid sixpence a day without their food. Civilisation here remained exploitation; we had hardly, it seemed to me, improved the natives’ lot at all, they were as worn out with fever as before the white man came, we had introduced new diseases and weakened their resistance to the old, they still drank from polluted water and suffered from the same worms, they were still at the mercy of their chiefs, for what could a District Commissioner really know, shifted from district to district, picking up only a few words of the language, dependent on an interpreter? Civilisation so far as Sierra Leone was concerned was the railway to Pendembu, the increased export of palm-nuts; civilisation too,was Lever Brothers and the price they controlled; civilisation was the long bar in the Grand, the sixpenny wages.