The country was stamped as French from the first village we stayed in, which was neither Bamakama nor Jbaiay as I had intended: French in its commercial sense, in its baits which I should have believed to be intended for tourists, if there had been any hope of tourists. It was astonishing what a difference the invisible boundary made. You could not have mistaken this land for Liberia. Tourists would have been quite at home here among the round huts and the scarlet fezzes of the Mandingo traders. For these traders were indistinguishable, except that their dignity was less tarnished, from the men who sell carpets in the Dτme and the Rotonde. The only difference was we had followed them home. It was as if we had shadowed them all the way from the Boule Miche, sitting in third-class carriages, travelling steerage, riding up the long way from Konakry on horse-back.
In ‘France’ the trouble with the carriers came to a head. Their complaints, the phrase ‘too far’, ‘too far’, had got on my nerves. To be deserted altogether, I began to think, might be preferable to this recurrent bickering, this pressure to go more slowly than I could afford. The trouble was I did not know the extent of my authority and I did not know which of them I could trust. Vande I suspected; the headman was a cheerful rogue with his pipe and his cloth cap and his rattle; but it sometimes seemed to me that he let the carriers have their own way too often. I trusted Amah, because Amah was unpopular with the other men; I trusted Babu, the Buzie, and his friend Guawa; I thought I could trust my hammock-man, Kolieva, who went ahead with me on each day’s march.
But it was Kolieva who led me effectually astray the first day in France. We took the wrong path from the first : the carriers had evidently talked in Zorzor with the inhabitants and decided that the way to Bamakama by Jbaiay was too long and rough. No one ever knew the name of the town we reached about two hours later, across the upper reach of the St. Paul. It sounded like Koinya. It was distinguished from the Liberian villages by a kind of town-planning. The huts of the chief and his wives were enclosed by a high wall in the centre, round which the town circled. The whole place was rather like an encampment of traders on the road.
When Amah arrived he interpreted what the chief had to say: that Bamakama was a full day’s trek away and that he was uncertain whether the paths between had been cleared or the bridges opened after the last rains. He was a man of great dignity, a little below the average Mandingo height with a black beard and a scarlet fez and a country robe and that Semitic expression in the dark eyes above the hooked nose of being open to the commercial chance. The men in the village had their hair curiously cut into patterns and tufts : I had seen nothing of the kind in Tiberia. Their heads were often completely shaved except for two tufts, at the crown and the nape; they looked like poodles, and a poodle of course is a French dog. The women in French Guinea, too, lived up to the standard of a country which provides the handsomest whores and the most elegant brothels; their hair was gummed into complicated ringlets like watch-springs round the ears, they were sometimes painted on the face with blue and ochre, as well as the usual white stripes, and this gave them the thick rather unfinished look of a modern portrait.
It was no good going on after what the chief had said. He promised a guide for the next day and had the only square hut in the village swept out. This was another peculiarity of the French colony, that every town had to supply a rest-house for travellers. The idea would have been a better one if travellers had been more frequent, but these rest-houses (usually, though not in Koinya, a little outside the towns in a compound of their own) had almost always fallen to decay with spiders building across the doors, the thatch dropped in and the cookhouse a ruin over the ashes of old fires. In Koinya, perhaps, the inhabitants were far enough from the route of any French Commissioner to use the rest-house themselves, with the result that it was clean and well-cared for.
No sooner were we settled in the hut than trade began. Everything was for sale. There was no such thing as dashing here. The dash, though it has become a convenient method of extorting money, must have originated in a gesture of courtesy and hospitality, in a generosity rather alien to the modern Mandingo mind. All the junk of civilisation had been washed up in the village like the last line of seaweed on a beach. One could get porcelain pans and pails, knives crudely decorated with silver alloy and brass to catch a stranger’s jackdaw eye; even the common curved cutlass for hacking a path through the bush was offered gaudily got up, its handle covered with the alloy from Napoleonic coins, the blade as blunt as wood. It must have been the pure spirit of commerce which led them to manufacture these objects (they could not have encountered white tourists here twice in ten years), or perhaps this was the obscure factory from which the gimcrackery on sale in Konakry and Dakar, in Paris itself, came; we had stumbled on an industrial centre in the furthest corner of one of the least known of the French colonies. Perhaps even the cannibals on the Ivory Coast were now chiefly occupied in manufacturing baits for tourists.
The carriers had only marched for half a day, but they had eaten before they left Zorzor and there was trouble in the air. They kept sulkily apart from my hut, all except Babu and Amah, talking in high angry voices. I was no longer a patriarch among my retainers; I was the unjust employer; there was bad blood somewhere which had to be let out. It worked a little on the nerves not knowing what complaint they would make or when they would bring it me; and the worst of it was that I could not lose my temper, I must remain cheerful and good-humoured, I had to laugh at them however much I wanted to curse them.
In the afternoon I lay down but I couldn’t sleep. A little while before sundown, when I was sponging myself in my tin bath, Amedoo came into the hut. He said, “The labourers say they want more money. Massa say no.” He was the perfect manservant; he advised me how to meet a mutiny with the calmness and firmness of Jeeves advising Bertie Wooster on the choice of a tie. But it was sometimes a strain to live up to him : his loyalty, his honesty and his complete reliability demanded so much in return: a master, too, who was reliable as he understood reliability, in the imperial manner. He had lived with District Commissioners; he completely failed to understand any other than the official attitude of a man to his carriers. It was a relief to me when in the last week of the trek even Amedoo’s morale began to weaken.
I lingered as long as I could in my bath; it was embarrassing to know that Amedoo would judge me by my conduct now; it would have been so disgracefully easy to have given way. For, after all, the carriers were disgracefully underpaid. At last I had to go outside, sit down, pretend to write my diary. I was aware of them watching me, judging the moment to strike, I felt like a fly on a wall and they held the whisk. Then Kolieva came forward, and about fifteen carriers drifted up in a close group behind him. I hadn’t expected Kolieva to be one of them. He was embarrassed and that helped me; he was exaggeratedly sullen and falsely dignified, his heavy lip drooped, he beat at his toes with a stick and spoke thickly. He was the only one of the mutineers who knew a few words of English. It occurred to me as I counted the number of die strikers that I could never reach my objective without them, paying at every town for new carriers at the Government rate. If they remained firm and took their pay and left us, we should have to cut straight through the forest towards Monrovia. I wasn’t sure that my money would last even then. If they had only known it, they had all the aces in their hand.
Kolieva said they wanted to talk to me. They wanted more money. I pretended not to understand him. I said I was willing to lend anyone a little money on his wages. Vande had already borrowed sixpence at Zigita. How much would they like? Kolieva grew more embarrassed; he said the Government wage for a carrier was a shilling a day. He was quite right of course; the proper wage was a shilling, though I believe it was legal to contract over a period at a smaller rate, and actually no one in Liberia, except a few unfortunate travellers taking carriers from town to town, ever pays the proper wage. Certainly not Government officials, who can generally get carriers for no payment at all.