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Sunday in Bolahun

It was Sunday in Bolahun, unmistakably Sunday. A herd drove out his goats among absurdly Biblical rocks, a bell went for early service, and I saw the five nuns going down in single file to the village through the banana plantations in veils and white sun-helmets carrying prayer-books. They were English; tea with them (a large fruit cake and home-made marmalade and chocolate biscuits wilting in the heat and delicious indigestible bread made with palm wine instead of yeast) was very like tea in an English cathedral town; it was an English corner one could feel some pride in: it was gentle, devout, childlike and unselfish, it didn’t even know it was courageous. One couldn’t help comparing the manner of these nuns living quite outside the limits of European protection with that of the English in Freetown who had electric light and refrigerators and frequent leave, who despised the natives and pitied themselves.

A great deal of nonsense has been written about missionaries-When they have not been described as the servants of imperialists or commercial exploiters, they have been regarded as sexually abnormal types who are trying to convert a simple happy pagan people to a European religion and stunt them with European repressions. It seems to be forgotten that Christianity is an Eastern religion to which Western pagans have been quite successfully converted. Missionaries are not even given credit for logic, for if one believes in Christianity at all, one must believe in its universal validity. A Christian cannot believe in one God for Europe and another God for Africa: the importance of Semitic religion was that it did not recognise one God for the East and another for the West. The new paganism of the West, which prides itself on being scientific, is often peculiarly neurotic. Only a neurosis explains its sentimental lack of consistency, the acceptance of the historic duty of the Mohammedan to spread his faith by the sword and the failure to accept the duty of a Christian to spread his faith by teaching.

The missions in the interior of the Republic are, of course, peculiar in being completely free from political or commercial contacts. The black Government distrusts them and no European firm has any trading posts in the Liberian hinterland. Faith in their religion is the only thing which can have induced American monks and English nuns to settle at Bolahun. There is no drama to compensate them for the fever, the worms and the rats; the only danger is the danger of snake-bite or disease. They are not ascetics, who find satisfaction in cords and hair-shirts; they have done their best, once settled in Bolahun, to make themselves comfortable. The fathers have built a little hospital, they get their chop boxes from Fort-num and Mason, wine comes in over the French border, vegetables once a month from Sierra Leone; they have even built a kind of rough hard court for tennis. They haven’t forced Christianity on an unwilling people, they haven’t made a happy naked race wear clothes, they haven’t stopped the native dances. The native in West Africa will always wear clothes if he has the money to buy them, he will always prefer a robe to a loin-cloth, and to anyone who has spent much time in the bush villages the roughest native robe will appear aesthetically preferable to the human body-the wrinkled dugs, the running sores. As for the dances and the fetish worship, the missionaries have not the power to stop them if they wished to; Christianity here has its back to the wall. Converts are comparatively few; there is no material advantage in being converted; the only advantage is a spiritual one, of being released from a few fears, of being offered an insubstantial hope.

And in Bolahun particularly there were material disadvantages in Christianity. No white man is allowed to own land in the Republic, the missions are at the mercy of the Government, and nine miles away at “Kolahun lived Mr. Reeves, the District Commissioner. Mr. Reeves was a Vai, a Mohammedan; he belonged, psychologically, to the early nineteenth century, to the days of the slave trade He hated Christians, he hated white men, especially he hated the English language. With his seal-grey skin, dark expressionless eyes, full deep red lips, dressed in a fez and a robe of native cloth, he gave an effect, more Oriental than African, of cruelty and sensuality; he was gross, impassive and corrupt. His wife was a Miss Barclay, a member of the President’s household, and it was said among the natives that when he was appointed the President promised him that he would be a District Commissioner for ever. He was sent first to Sanoquelleh at the other end of the country and an unpleasant story had followed him to Kolahun, a story of some Mandingo traders whom he was said to have caught smuggling goods over the border from French territory, and to have shut in a hut and burned to death. It was impossible in the Republic to investigate a tale like that, but there were other stories of cruelty and despotism for which I found plenty of evidence: stories of his house built by forced labour and paid for by the seizure of the natives’ produce; stories of how ‘his messengers flogged the men working on the road, how no man from Christianised Bolahun dared show his face in the town. The nuns one day had seen him pass hurriedly by in a hammock, his messengers whipping the carriers on. So many stories leaked down to Monrovia that even a Government separated by ten days’ rough trekking was forced to take notice, and the President was on his way, at this very time, to Kolahun to listen to the chiefs’ complaints.

One had to remember that background to Benediction in the little ugly tin-roofed church. The raised monstrance was not a powerful political symboclass="underline" “Come to me all ye who are heavy laden and I will give you commercial privileges and will whisper for you in the ear of a Minister of State.” It offered, like early Christianity, stripes from the man in power and one knows not what secret oppression from the priests of the fetish. There were not many at Benediction : Christianity here was still the revolutionary force, appealing to the young rather than the old, and the young were on holiday. A tiny piccaninny wearing nothing but a short transparent shirt scratched and prayed, lifting his shirt above his shoulders to scratch his loins better; a one-armed boy knelt below a hideous varnished picture. (He had fallen from a palm-tree gathering nuts, had broken his arm, and feeling its Hmp uselessness had taken a knife and cut it off at the elbow.)

A Chiefs Funeral

A few days after our arrival Amedoo fell ill. All through the night I heard his racking cough, and in the morning the German doctor examined him and found one lung affected. He lay on the doctor’s couch dumb with terror, but he agreed to go into the hospital; he was frightened, but he was still the perfect servant. His illness introduced me to Mark. Mark was a Christian schoolboy; he came down from the local “devil”, Landow from Mosambolahόn had entered the village for the funeral, and it was really to see him dance that I was there. I had caught one glimpse of him at dusk in Bolahun striding by in his long raffia skirts and his wooden snouted mask. From each village on the way he collected irons, for on entering Tailahun he must pay the new chief a tribute of several bundles.

The new chief dozed in his hammock in the tiny palaver-house. I dashed him two shillings; it was the heat of the day, and he was bored and embarrassed by the visit. Two chairs were fetched for us, and about thirty people crowded into the cramped hut; the insects were hopping on the floor. Presently two men with long drums arrived; dangling below each drum a metal disc. They wore red caps with gold stars on them and a long tassel very like the caps of the Frontier Force I had seen at Foya. They stamped their bare feet among the jiggers and tapped their drums and metal discs with little curved hammers. More musicians slowly gathered in the cramped hot hut at the sound, of the drums. Three women came with varying sizes of rattles-gourds containing grains of rice which they shook in nets, and a man with a harp of five strings made of palm fibre, attached to half a gourd which he pressed to his breast (the faint sweet twanging could only be heard when the drums and rattles were still). Last came a man with an ordinary big drum, which did give a kind of sexual urgency to a music hard for a European to understand. The music was continually mounting to a climax as the drummers beat their feet and sweated “and the women rattled and swayed, but nothing ever happened. It seemed only one more meaningless climax when the devil at last appeared.