I remembered a Jack-in-the-Green I had seen when I was four years old, quite covered except for his face in leaves, wearing a kind of diving-suit of leaves and twirling round and round at a country crossroads, far from any village, with only a little knot of attendants and a few bicyclists to watch him. That as late as the ninth century in England had religious significance, the dance was part of the rites celebrating the death of winter and the return of spring, and here in Liberia again and again one caught hints of what it was we had developed from. It wasn’t so alien to us, this masked dance (in England too there was δ time when men dressed as animals and danced), any more than the cross and the pagan emblems on the grave were alien. One had the sensation of having come home, for here one was finding associations with a personal and a racial childhood, one was being scared by the same old witches. They brought a screaming child up to the devil and thrust him under the devil’s muzzle, under the dusty raffia mane; he stiffened and screamed and tried to escape and the devil mouthed him. The older generation were playing the same old joke they had played for centuries, of frightening the child with what had frightened them. I went away but looking back I saw a young girl dancing before Landow, dancing with the sad erotic infinite appeal of projecting buttoθki and moving belly; she at least didn’t know it was the blacksmith of Mosambolahun as she danced like a-Europa before the bull, and the old black wooden muzzle rested on the earth and the eyes of the blacksmith watched her through the flat painted rims.
Music at Night
That night Gissi, a Buzie man, came up to play the harp. A row of black heads lined the verandah, while he sat with dangling legs picking out of the palm fibres light melancholy monotonous music, beautifully superficial music which just tickled the surface of the mind, didn’t tiresomely claim any deep emotion whether of grief or exaltation, the claim which fixes strained masks on the faces in a concert hall. This was the music of a cigarette-box; it was sad, but it didn’t really care, everything would always be the same. The little recurring notes plucked with four nails died out and began again unvaried against the night, the black faces, the hurricane lamp and the moths that drove by in swarms to shrivel their wings against it. Mark shovelled them from the table in handfuls, and Gissi didn’t watch his harp or his fingers or his friends; he looked away smiling gently at the hopping wingless moths. He was not a handsome man, he was beautiful as a woman can be beautiful, without effeminacy. His round skull and tiny ears, projecting lower lip and long curling eyelashes had nothing in common with the buck negro type, who represents Africa to the European, lounging round the bars off Leicester Square, beating the piano in dance orchestras. His chin was very gently moulded, his hair fitted his head like a skullcap; he was more Grecian than African, early Grecian before the decadence. He wore an elephant-hide bracelet and a silver ring.
The goat-herd came and danced, stamping and flinging out his arms, and one by one the men came out of the dark on to the verandah, into the lamplight, hurling themselves this way and that, sending the shadows flying from their arms and legs. Their faces were strange but soon they were to become familiar, for these” were the labourers whom Vande, my newly-appointed headman, had found for me, to carry fifty-pound weights for four weeks on end, for three shillings a week and their food. It sounded to a stranger next door to slave labour, but these were not slaves stamping up and down with a controlled wildness and an unconscious grace. There was Amah, my second headman, a tall sullen humourless Mandingo with a shaven head in a long blue and white robe; there was Babu, a Buzie man like Gissi with the same delicate cultured features, the features of a tribe sensitive to art and fear, weavers of exquisite cloth, in touch more than any tribe with the supernatural, makers of lightning, poisoners; Fadai, a gentle-mannered boy from Sierra Leone with soft sad eyes, infected with yaws; there was one-eyed shaven shifty Vande Two.
They didn’t speak a word as they swayed and stamped; each improvised, dancing alone with no reference to the others; it was only the music and the shadows which lent them unity. I was to see these improvised dances again and again during the long trek. The slightest hint of a tune would set them off; if there was no music someone would tap a twig on an empty tin. They were more easy to appreciate than the communal dances. They had obvious dramatic qualities and one could see hidden under the personal idiosyncrasies the germ of the Charleston. But to the native, I suppose, the communal dance was on a higher, more subtle level; only one hadn’t oneself got a clue to their appreciation. I saw such a dance in the village. A band of youths with drums chanted an air, while about seven boys shuffled in a small circle with their hands at their sides, one foot forward, the other brought up beside it, then forward again. Presently three girls joined them and the circle became smaller than ever: a girl’s nipples bulged against the back in front, her buttocks were pressed by the girl behind. Round and round they went to the monotonous beat, a snake eating its own tail.
That night of dancing on the verandah was specially memorable because it was the last at Bolahun. The next day the real journey was going to begin. Amedoo had returned from hospital; even Van Gogh, pale as a ghost under his bleached gold stubble, a curiously intellectual sensitive face for a prospector (he treated the natives with a harsh lack of consideration one would never have guessed existed behind the horn-rimmed glasses), had staggered over for a cup of tea. Long study of the manuscript maps the Dutch prospectors had made of the Western province, consultations with the German linguist, had decided us to take a different and longer route. I wanted to deliver my letter to Chief Nimley, and so I planned to walk down to Sinoe and Nana Kru, first striking along the northern border to Ganta, where an American medical missionary, Dr. Harley, might be expected to know something of the route. Nobody in Bolahun had been so far as Ganta, but the German doctor at the hospital had been to Zigita, and there one might expect to get more information. The fathers with a saintly trust in human nature cashed my cheque for little40 in small silver on a trading firm in Monrovia and sold me two hammocks which could be carried by two men apiece. With these light hammocks I hoped to economise in men and time.
The first stop, so at first it was decided, was to be Pandemai, and I sent off two carriers ahead to warn the chief, but as we talked at tea, the distance to Pandemai seemed to increase while the kindness one might look for from the chief in Kpangblamai became more desirable. The truth was, I couldn’t help being a little scared. I wanted to break the strangeness and wildness gently.