The Liberian ‘Devils’
I call him ‘devil’ because it is the word most commonly used among the whites and English-speaking natives in the Republic. It is no more misleading, I think, than the word ‘priest’ which is sometimes used elsewhere. A masked devil like Landow (of what are known as the Big Bush Devils I shall have something to say laterlittle might roughly be described as a headmaster with rather more supernatural authority than Arnold of Rugby ever claimed. Even in the Sierra Leone Protectorate, where there are many missionary schools, most natives, if they are not Mohammedan, will attend a bush school, of which the masked devil is the unknown head. Even the Christian natives attend; Mark had attended, though the Christians are usually favoured with a shortened course because they cannot be fully trusted with the secrets of a bush school. And the bush schools are very secret. All the way through the great forest of the interior one comes on signs of them; a row of curiously cropped trees before a narrow path disappearing into the thickest bush : a stockade of plaited palms : indications that no stranger may penetrate there. No natives, girls or boys, are considered mature till they have passed through the bush schools, and the course in the old days lasted as long in some tribes as seven years, though now two years is the more usual period There are no holidays; the children are confined to the bush; if a child dies his belongings are deposited outside his parents’ hut at night as a sign that he is dead, and he is buried in the bush. When the children emerge again they are supposed to be born anew, they are not allowed to recognise their parents and friends in the village until they have been introduced to them again. One definite mark they bear with them from the bush, the mark of ‘tattooing’. The tattooing varies with the tribes : in some tribes a woman’s body from the neck to the navel is elaborately and beautifully carved. ‘Carved’ is a better word than ‘tattooed’ to convey the effect, for tattooing to a European means a coloured pattern pricked on the skin, but the native tattoo marks are ridged patterns cut in the flesh with a knife.
The school and the devil who rules over it are at first a terror to the child. It lies as grimly as a public school in England between childhood and manhood. He has seen the masked devil and has been told of his supernatural power; no human part of the devil is allowed to show, according to Dr. Westermann, because it might be contaminated by the presence of the uninitiated, but it seems likely also because the unveiled power might do harm; for the same reason no one outside the school may see the devil unmasked for fear of blindness or death. Even though the initiates of his particular school, who have seen, as it were, the devil in his off-moments, know him to be, say, the local blacksmith, some supernatural feeling continues to surround him. It is not the mask which is sacred, nor the blacksmith who is sacred; it is the two in conjunction, but a faint aura of the supernatural continues to dwell in either part when they are separate; so the blacksmith will have more power in his village than the chief, and the mask may continue to be reverenced, even when discarded, and fed by its owner like a fetish.
Mark, when I knew him better, told me a little of his own experience. As a Christian boy he spent only a fortnight in the bush, and all he did, he said, was to sit and eat rice. He was in the mission school one day when the devil, this same Landow, came for him. There had been no warning. His teacher told him not to be afraid, but the devil, through his interpreter (for the devil does not speak a language the native can understand), said, “I’m going to swallow you.” He was not allowed to go home first; he was bound hand and foot and his eyes were bandaged and he was carried into the bush. He was very scared. Then they flung him on the ground and cut him with a razor, but he said it didn’t hurt much. They made two little ridges on his neck, two under the armpit, two on the belly. I asked him if he was beaten, for Dr. Westermann, writing of the Pelle tribe in Liberia, has described a kind of Spartan training. He said he was beaten once : one day the devil told the boys they were not to go outside their huts all day whatever they heard; of course they disobeyed and were beaten. At the end of a fortnight he was dressed in white clothes and taken back to the village in the dark. He admitted at last rather reluctantly that the devil, who didn’t wear his mask in the school, was the blacksmith at Mosambolahun: so perhaps they were wise to teach him nothing, but just to let him sit and eat rice for a fortnight. In any case they are easygoing, lazy, not very religious in Bande country. It was to be different among the Buzies.
The Masked Blacksmith
It was the blacksmith of Mosambolahun then who now swayed forward between the huts in a head-dress of feathers, a heavy blanket robe, and long raffiia mane and raffia skirts. The big drum beat, the heels stamped and the gourds rattled, and the devil sank to the ground, his long faded yellow hair billowing in the dust His two eyes were two painted rings and he had a flat black wooden snout a yard long fringed with fur; when it opened one saw great red wooden tusks. His black wooden nose stuck up at right angles between his eyes which were almost flat on his snout. His mouth opened and closed like a clapper and he spoke in a low monotonous sing-song. He was like a portmanteau word; an animal, a bird and a man had all run together to form his image. All the women, except the musicians, had gone to their huts and watched Landow from a distance. His interpreter squatted beside him carrying a brush with which, when the devil moved, he kept his skirts carefully smoothed down lest a foot or arm should show.
The devils need an interpreter because they do not speak a language the native can understand. Landow’s mutterings were fluent and quite unintelligible. Anthropologists, so far as I can gather, have not made up their minds whether it is a real language the devil speaks or whether the interpreter simply invents a meaning. Mark’s explanation has the virtue of simplicity, that the Bande devil speaks Pessi, that the Pessi devil speaks Buzie; the Buzie devil, on the other hand, he continued with a convincing lack of consistency, spoke Buzie, but in so low a tone that no one could follow him.
The devil was paying his respects to the chief and to the strangers, so the interpreter explained in Bande, and was ready to dance for them. There was an uneasy pause while I wondered with the embarrassment of a man in a strange restaurant whether I had enough in my pocket. But a dash of a shilling was sufficient and the devil danced. It was not so accomplished a dance as we saw later by a devil belonging to a woman’s society in Buzie country; the lack of religious enthusiasm in the Bande tribe, if it allows them to lead an easier life, less under the fear of poisoning, diminishes their artistic talent. Vitality was about the only quality one could allow Landow; he lashed a small whip; he twirled like a top; he ran up and down between the huts with long sliding steps, his skirts raising the dust and giving his progress an appearance of immense speed. His interpreter did his best to keep up with him, brushing him when he was within reach. The spirit was definitely carnival; no one above the age of childhood was really scared of Landow; they had all passed through his school, and one suspected that the blacksmith of Mosambolahun, the slack grimy town, had not maintained very carefully his unmasked authority. He was a ‘good fellow’, one felt, and like so many good fellows he went on much too long : he would sit on the ground and mutter, then run up and down a bit and sit down again. He was a bore as he played on and on in the blistering afternoon sun, hoping for another dash, which I simply hadn’t got with me. One woman ran up and flung down two irons and ran away again, and he cracked his whip and raced and turned and spun. The villagers stood in the background smiling discreetly; it was a carnival, but it wasn’t a carnival in the vulgar sense of Nice and the Battle of Flowers; it wasn’t secular and skittish; like the dancing in the Spanish cathedral at Easter, it had its religious value.