Zigita is the principal town of the Buzie tribe, it is a town where even the commonest bush cutlass is beautiful, but it isn’t happy. It is Buzie in another fashion, the fashion of witchcraft and fear.
The village women danced to us that evening in starlight to the music of rattles. It was not a lovely dance; they were not lovely dancers but emaciated old women slapping their pitted buttocks in a kind of Charleston; but they were cheerful and happy, and we were happy, too, as they slapped and rattled and laughed and pranced, and we drank warm boiled water with whisky and the juice of limes, and the timelessness, the irresponsibility, the freedom of Africa began to touch us at last.
It wasn’t easy to analyse the fascination behind the dirt and disease, but it was more than a personal fantasy, satisfied more than a personal need. Different continents have made their call to different ages, and people at every period have tried to rationalise in terms of imperialism, gold or conquest their feeling for an untouched land, for a country “that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance; the graves have not been opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges, nor their images pulled down out of their temples.”
The old women danced and were cheerful, with the sores on their breasts and the silver arrows in their hair. There were mines in Nigeria broken by sledges: over the border in Sierra Leone were other mines, Justice ruled on the north, the east and the west: —here there was injustice, massacres, exaction, but the forest stayed forest, it was hardly pitted at all by the little holes the white prospectors had dug, the steep paths to Zigita sparkled with mica, but die minerals remained where they were in the soil of the country, and the images had certainly not been pulled down out of the temples.
That Zigita proved, the Buzie town reached by forest paths so steep that I hardly had to bend to use my hands in climbing. The President might speak of building motor roads through the Republic : these paths proved what difficulties lay before him. He had forgotten or never trodden this way, as hard and rough, according to Sir Alfred Sharpe, as any in Africa, which leads to Zigita sprawling across a high plateau, surrounded by forests and higher hills, five and a half hours’ trek from Nicoboozu. Zigita itself is nearly two thousand feet up, and to the northwest, Onagizi, a thimble of almost perpendicular rock, rises another thousand feet, the home of evil spirits. But all round Zigita are hills and forest; it is overlooked from every side but one, and on nights of storm the lightning runs along the top of the hills, circling it with green flame.
The Big Bush Devil
In Zigita it is quite easy to believe that there are men in Buzie country who can make lightning. The use of lightning is little more than a post-graduate course to be taken when the ordinary initiations of the bush school are over, just as the women may take poisoning as their post-graduate course. About six years ago the old blind chief of Zigita lost his wife.
She ran away to the hut of a younger man, and when the chief sent to him to claim the proper fine, they had gone. This flight, this failure to pay the customary fine, made the couple guilty, not their adultery. A year later the chief travelled down to Monrovia to a conference with President Kong. He heard that the young people were living in the town with their baby. He was a forbearing man and again he sent to them to demand that the fine be paid. When the young man refused, the chief, who was a member of the Lightning Society, made artificial lightning which struck the hut, killed the man and the woman, but left the baby, who lay in the bed between them, unharmed. This story is believed by everyone in Liberia, white and black. I heard it from several sources, and it never varied. The old chief I did not see, because he was away at Voinjema meeting the President.
A Liberian District Commissioner is stationed at Zigita: the compound lies up the slope of a hill above the town, above the long field of thatched and pointed huts like stooks of bound bean-stalks. The town chief, who brought to my hut in the compound a crowd of men with swords and daggers and jewellery for sale, seemed young and downtrodden. He was ordered about by the D.Cs clerk (the D,C. was away at Voinjema), but if the D.C. had the chief well under this thumb, there was a higher, though more secret, authority than the Commissioner’s : the Big Bush Devil, in Dr. Westermann’s phrase the Grand Master of a Bush Society, whom it is death or blindness for an uninitiated native so much as to see ^and who must be distinguished from the devils we had watched dancing in grotesque masks, the mere heads of the local bush schools. A new hut was being fenced in for him by the townsfolk as my carriers climbed the slope to the compound : this was a force ruling by terror and poison, which had already driven away one District Commissioner, the other side of the Buzie medal to that which now, as we sat in the verandah with the town chief and the clerk, so richly displayed itself.
The servants did the bargaining. Bracelets and daggers were sold for a few shillings apiece; a sword with a carved ivory hilt was bought from a fat man with the authoritative air of an Eastern eunuch for eight shillings. He lost his temper with Laminah, who, he said, was spoiling the market. He had a few words of English; he said ‘yes’m’ and ‘no’m’; there was something servile and baleful in his manner. He was one of the richest men in the town. I met him in my stroll that evening and he asked to have a picture taken of him. “Which is your hut?” I said. ‘TU take you in front of it.”
‘That my hut,” the fat man said, pointing past a black bull. “Yes’m. And that. And that. And that. Yes’m. And that,” marking out half the town with his plump finger. Next day, the terrified Laminah, who remembered how his bargaining had angered the stranger, learnt that he was the headman of the devil.
The sales continued until late: all the finest swords and spears were brought last by men who slipped quietly in behind the lowered reed screens which at mosquito-time made the verandah into a little private room. One owner, at the chief’s command, unwillingly brought a lovely sword in a worked leather sheath, with a hilt of ivory and brass. He didn’t want to sell; he loved the sword; it had been his father’s. It was pathetic to watch the struggle in his mind between his love for it and the wealth he was offered. I raised my bid to twenty-two shillings and the man nearly gave way. That sum of money would have fed him, and fed him well, for more than three months. He lifted up the screen and ran from temptation, back down the hill into the village, carrying the sword. The carriers laughed at him as they lay sprawling in the verandah.
For we led a patriarchal life on trek. Only the places in which we slept were free from intrusion. If the hut had a verandah or a room to eat in, it belonged to the carriers too. They sat around, on the floor, in the hammocks; they slept in corners. It was assumed that I would always be glad to see them there, to attend to their wants even in the middle of a meal, giving them iodine or Epsom salts. At Zigita a leprous man from the town came, with the sellers, to be healed, standing dumbly, holding out his rotting hands. Passive misery had been stamped on his face for a long while, but he had seen the carriers take medicine from me and one could tell that behind the misery a spark of belief had been struck in miracles. It was no good destroying hope and admitting there was nothing I could do. I gave him a few tablets of boric acid to dissolve and bathe his hands with.
At half-past six when the leper and the men with swords to sell had all gone home, the mosquito-screen was lifted and a stranger slipped in. We were drinking whisky and lime; the hurricane lamp was turned down to save oil; we couldn’t understand what the man wanted when he spoke urgently to us from the shadows. We called Mark to translate. It was a command from the devil in the town that no one should go outside; no one must even look through a window, for the devil proposed to leave his hut. The servants came in from the cookhouse and listened; the man slipped away again into the dark and left them scared. I tried to sound the servants; it was disquieting to see how grave and frightened Laminah had become, although the longest march never stilled his tongue for long. He stood there silent and gloomy in his shorts, his little white waiter’s jacket which the forest had torn, his woollen cap with the red bobble. He believed, one could not doubt it, that if we so much as saw the devil through a window we would go blind. The warning reached the carriers who were gathered in the cookhouse, and suddenly all the voices were turned low like lamp flames. One could hear the silence welling up the hill from Zigita into the compound. I looked from under the mosquito-screen; the compound was quite empty; the sentry who usually guarded the gateway had disappeared; the screens were down in the clerk’s house and the windows shuttered.