Everything was very still, very Sabbath; nobody left the huts to see us come in, which was odd (the town might have been sacked) but I noticed when we were nearer that there were about a dozen soldiers, in the scarlet caps with the gold star, marching up and down in the compound. At the other end of the town on a hill was a kind of garden shelter and I could see the scarlet cap there too. A small yellow-faced half-caste in a black fez came down from the compound and waited for me. Yes, he said, the Commissioner was there, and immediately led the way back into the compound between the sentries, leaving the carriers and the servants outsidelittle I had the impression that we had been expected; and how could we not have been if it were anyone’s duty to watch the road from the first storey?
A gramophone was playing, and Miss Josephine Baker’s voice drifted across the compound with an amusing and sophisticated melancholy. It made everything for the moment rather unreaclass="underline" the carriers sitting in the dust, the quiet drift of huts, the forest edging up over the horizon became no more than a backcloth for a lovely unclothed cabaret figure. One couldn’t really believe in Mr. Reeves, who appeared in a sinister melodramatic way from behind some curtains dressed in a scarlet fez and a long native robe; his heavy black Victorian side-whiskers, his thick grey skin, his voluptuous mouth were just part of the Paris revue. But somebody turned the gramophone off upstairs, and we were removed at once from the dour company of Mr. Reeves by a smart miniature black officer with glittering gaiters. He said, “Won’t you come upstairs? The President will see you in a moment.”
It was quite unexpected. I hadn’t asked to see the President, I had believed that the President was in another part of the country, and I was a little taken aback. I was in a shirt and shorts with a water-bottle at my side; I was very conscious of the dust I had collected on the way, and I remembered all the stories I had heard of the Liberian rulers, how they liked to keep a white man waiting and demanded that he should always be suitably clothed for an interview.
We sat down in a tiny upper room and a soldier with a revolver holster changed the record. Miss Edith Olivier’s Dwarfs Blood lay on the table. The black officer was very neat, very gende, very attentive; he was like a china figure which has been kept carefully dusted. Presently a young woman came in; she wore European dress : she looked more Chinese than African. She had slanting eyes and a quality of deep repose. She didn’t speak a word, though the officer presented her as “one of the President’s entourage”, but sitting down beside the gramophone she took up a pack of cards and began to shuffle them. Her father, I learnt later, had been made a justice of the supreme court: there is a distinctly Stuart air about the civilisation of the Liberian Coast.
She was the loveliest thing I saw in Liberia; I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I wanted to talk to her, somehow to express the pleasure the sight of her gave in the empty sun-cracked place. Josephine Baker’s voice couldn’t compete with her, whining out at the end of the record before the soldier could change it. It was as if suddenly one saw what Africa might be if she were left to herself to choose from Europe only what would beautify her; she promised more than the frozen rhetoric in the declaration of independence. I never said a word to her (“Very hot marching in this weather,” the little shining officer said politely, making small talk), I only saw her once again from a distance when she stood on the President’s balcony in Monrovia watching the Krus demonstrate their loyalty below, but she remains the kind of vivid memory which draws one back to a place, even after many years.
Then the President came in: a middle-aged man called Barclay with curly greying hair in a thick dark suit, a pinned and pinched old school tie and a cheap striped shirt. Africa, lovely, vivid and composed, slipped away, and one was left with the West Indies, an affable manner, and rhetoric, lots of rhetoric. But there was a lot of energy, too: he was a politician in the Tammany Hall manner, but I never saw any reason to change my opinion that he was something new on the Coast. He might be out to play his own game, but he was going to play it with unexampled vigour and the Republic would at least pick up some chips from his table. I asked him whether his authority was much the same as the American President’s. He said it was more complete. “Once electedlittle’ he said, “and in charge of the machine”- words ran away with him; something candid and childlike and excited continually peeped through the politician’s dignified phrases-“why then, I’m boss of the whole show.”
Liberian politics were like a crap game played with loaded dice. But in the past it had been the custom to give the other fellow a chance with the dice. There was a kind of unwritten law that the President could take two terms of office and then he had to let another man in to pick the spoils. It was a question of letting, for, as Mr. Barclay said, the President was boss of the whole show; the newspapers were his; most important of all, he printed and distributed the ballot papers. When Mr. King was returned in 1928 he had a majority over his opponent, Mr. Faulkner, of 600,000, although the whole electoral roll amounted to less than 15,000. But Barclay was altering that; he wasn’t playing fair in his opponent’s eyes; he was treating politics seriously and he has some claim to be known as the Republic’s first dictator. The term of office had hitherto been four years, but Mr. Barclay was to hold a plebiscite at the same time as the presidential election and increase the term to eight years. He could use the same means to put that through as he could put through a fabulous majority: he had the printing press. He had, too, the Civil Service, He explained to me, beaming with gold-rimmed benevolence, how he had cleaned it up and removed it from political influence, had instituted examinations in place of nominations.
What he failed to mention was the small string he kept in his fingers. When candidates of equal merit were presented-and that was very easy to arrange-the President himself had the right of choice.
But one had to admit that this man had energy and courage; he was worth a dozen Kings, and his hands were comparatively clean. He had been Mr. King’s secretary of state, but the League of Nations commission, which had found the President personally responsible for shipping forced labour to the little dreadful Spanish island, Fernando Po, and for countenancing the mild form of slavery that enabled a man to pawn his children, had exonerated Barclay. The only real blot in the eyes of the outside world on his administration was the Kru campaign described in the Blue Book from which I have quoted, and for that the man on the spot was chiefly responsible, Colonel Elwood Davis, the black mercenary from North America. No President before Barclay had dared to tour the interior. Mr. King had travelled rapidly down from the Sierra Leone border with two hundred soldiers, but the President now had with him only thirty men. I could see almost the whole lot of them marching up and down the compound. The tribes, of course, since Mr. King’s day, had been disarmed by Colonel Davis, they had no more than a few guns in every town, but they had swords and spears and cutlasses.
The President, it is true, didn’t linger. He travelled very rapidly, forcing the pace, up paths he was not expected to use, and his inquiries were very brief. I have said that the natives in Bolahun had no hopes that Mr. Reeves would be ever brought to book.
Their doubts were justified, for I heard later that when the President arrived, the chiefs, who had been bribed or intimidated, had no complaints to make. He was able to return as rapidly to Monrovia as he had come. He said that everywhere the population had been enthusiastic, but dances are easily arranged and it is not much trouble to build triumphal arches of greenery and sprinkle white powder. I never came across a single native in the interior who had a good word for the politicians in Monrovia. If they preferred one ruler to another it was simply because they were happier under one Commissioner than another. Everywhere in the north I found myself welcomed because I was a white, because they hoped all the time that a white nation would take the country over.