It was not civilisation as we think of it, a civilisation of Suffolk churches and Cotswold manors, of Crome and Vaughan. The District Commissioner’s work was to a great extent the protection of the native from the civilisation he represented. The ‘noble savage’ no longer exists; perhaps he never existed, though in the very young (among the few who are not disfigured by navel hernia) you seem to see behind the present to something lovely, happy and unenslaved, something like the girl who came up the hill that morning, a piece of bright cloth twisted above her hips, the sunlight falling between the palms on her dark hanging breasts, her great silver anklets, the yellow pot she carried on her head.
Freedom to Travel
Kailahun is on the border of French Guinea; that presumably is why the District Commissioner’s office was transferred there from Pendembu at the railhead. At Kailahun there is no railway and no telegraph: to communicate with Freetown the Commissioner must send a messenger the eighteen miles to Pendembu. It is difficult to understand what control he has over the border; natives pass freely to and fro; indeed with a little care it would be possible to travel all down West Africa without showing papers from the moment of landing. There is something very attractive in this great patch of ‘freedom to travel’; absconding financiers might do worse than take to the African bush. They could be buried there for a lifetime, and they could carry all the money they needed with them in a country where oranges are fifteen a penny, chickens sixpence each, and wages, if you go deep enough, three shillings a week; where you can feed thirty men, as I found, on thirty shillings a week.
That afternoon we went for a walk into French Guinea with the engineer. The border is the Moa River, about twice the width of the Thames at Westminster. We crossed in a dug-out canoe, standing and balancing with the roll. It was quite easy, only a little frightening because there were alligators in the Moa, The curious thing about these boundaries, a line of river in a waste of bush, no passports, no Customs, no barriers to wandering tribesmen, is that they are as distinct as a European boundary; stepping out of the canoe one was in a different country. Even nature had changed; instead of forest and a rough winding road down which a car could, with some difficulty, go, a narrow path ran straight forward for mile after mile through tall treeless elephant grass. Along the hot wrinkled surface lay the skins of snakes. Natives came stooping up the path, bowed tinder green hammocks of palm nuts; they looked like grasshoppers in a Silly Symphony. We walked for an hour and a half without coming to a village and at last turned back to Sierra Leone. The engineer said the path went straight down to the coast by Konakry, and again one felt the happy sense of being free; one had only to follow a path far enough and one could cross a continent. Sweating in the hot dry day and growing cool again, one found it hard to believe that this part of Africa should have so unhealthy a reputation; one forgot C.’s sickness and the diseased villagers. I had not so much as heard a mosquito and the daily five grains of quinine seemed a waste of medicine.
But that was during the day; when it was dark, sitting in the engineer’s bare bungalow and drinking warm beer, I wasn’t so sure about the place. The man looked sixty; one had to explain somehow the fifteen years of white hair and lines he hadn’t really lived. He said again how happy he was; he hadn’t been able to settle in England, his wife was nervy, she had never been out with him, West Africa wouldn’t suit her, she was afraid of moths, and as he spoke, the moths flocked in through the paneless windows to shrivel against the hurricane lamp, the cockchafers and the beetles detonated against the walls and ceiling and fell on our hair. He didn’t mind insects himself, he said, leaping from his chair, hitting at the moths with his hand, squashing the beetles underfoot. (He couldn’t keep still for a moment.) The only thing he feared, he said, was elephants. He had been watching a shoot once beside his motor-cycle when an elephant charged him; it was a hundred yards away and he couldn’t start his cycle. When it was ten yards away he got his cycle started, and after a quarter of a mile at twenty miles an hour he looked back and saw that the elephant hadn’t lost a yard. He got up from his chair again and made for a beetle, but it was too quick for him, driving up against the ceiling. He said he wasn’t lonely, he didn’t know what nerves were-bringing his hand against the wall-he always believed in having one hobby; the last tour it had been the wireless, another tour butterflies, this tour it was his car.
‘Those things are so noisy,” he complained. “They keep one awake at night.”
“Surely it’s only the light that brings them in,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, “I always leave a light burning at night,” and his eyes followed the beetles up and down the bare room. Somebody was playing something; the sound came all the way from the village : a kind of harp playing without melody, an endless repetition of notes.
He said, Tm sorry you are off tomorrow.” He said it so often that one couldn’t doubt him, even little though in the next breath he would explain that he wasn’t lonely, that he liked the life.
I had sent off a messenger that morning with a letter to the Father Superior at the mission at Bolahun. The act of sending a letter by messenger a day’s journey ahead into another country was pleasantly mediaeval. One paid the messenger nothing when he left; he met one somewhere on the road on his return journey, the road a foot-wide path through thick forest, crossed and recrossed by other paths. But the messengers never went: astray; they were as reliable as the English Post Office. Once, when the message was urgent, I sent a man by night, giving him a £01 of paraffin for his lamp, and with a dagger hanging over his shoulder he ran out into the dark bush, the letter stuck in a cleft stick.
It was January the twenty-sixth when we left for the Republic (snow in London, yellow fever in Freelittle town, mist over the burnt grasses at Kailahun). There was a road for another fifteen miles towards the border; I had ordered two lorries to call for myself and the German, who had brought carriers with him from the Republic, at seven o’clock. It was a twenty-mile march from the end of the road to the mission on the other side of the frontier and I was anxious to be there before dark. Nor had I any idea how long we might be held up at the Customs. Only one lorry turned up and it was an hour and a quarter late. The German doubted whether my cousin and I would reach Bolahun before night, for we had only one hammock and his aristocratic mind recoiled from the idea of walking with the men, from the stumbling and scrambling in the dust, and the tiredness. He himself had a chair slung on poles so that he could sit upright above the carriers. But I had to think of money; one couldn’t have less than six carriers for a four-man hammock and by walking from Biedu I was saving seven and sixpence. We packed ourselves on the one small lorry; three whites, three boys, eleven carriers, and thirty loads, and drove unsteadily down the rough road through the thin morning mist. Great flattened thimbles of perpendicular rock rose above the dripping palms; we drove between.
I was vexed by the delay at Kailahun. I had not yet got accustomed to the idea that time, as a measured and recorded period, had been left behind on the coast. In the interior there was no such thing as time; the best watches couldn’t stand the climate. Sooner or later they stopped. My own watch and my cousin’s were the first to go, and afterwards, one by one, I used up the six cheap watches I had brought with me for ‘dashes’ from Marks and Spencer’s. Only one reached the coast and it had long ceased to record the ‘real’ time; when it got dark I simply put the hands at six-thirty. If I wanted to get up earlier in the morning I put the hands on. Perhaps this was what Stanley had in mind when he heard Big Ben strike as he lay dying and exclaimed at the strangeness, “So that is Time!”