One came to Ganta through a series of leopard traps, winding maze-like paths between walls of plaited reed, and then out on to a beaten road, beside a straggling line of huts across a wide treeless plain, up the side of a hill and down again, with the Liberian flag flying above a whitewashed compound and more people than we had seen for weeks, Mandingos and soldiers among them. There were stores here, the first we had seen in Liberia, with the goods laid out on the ground, but the whole appearance of the place was as nomadic as a forest market. It looked as if it had been built up overnight and might be shifted next morning. It was the plain, I think, which gave it that air. One was used to villages circumscribed by a hilltop, with the burial stones and the palaver-house in the centre, looking as old as the rock itself and the cracked soil. This ribbon development along a highway which was being driven north and south had a raw look. Only the District Commissioner’s compound at one end and the little group of mission buildings a mile down the road at the other had a stable air, as if the next rains wouldn’t wash them away.
As our caravan came out on to the road from the river path and the leopard traps, a group of yellow-faced Liberians in European clothes, more like Italians than Africans, turned to watch us. One of them, the only dark-skinned one, took off his topee. Later in Tapee-Ta I was to get to know him better, and those soft sad lustrous seeking-a-friend eyes of his. He was called Wordsworth. He watched us yearningly as we toiled up the bare scorched road towards the Methodist mission. Already he was intent on joining that odd assortment of ‘characters’ (the Grants and the Kilvanes) one collects through life, vivid grotesques, people so simple that they always have the same side turned to one, damned by their unselfconsciousness to be material for the novelist, to supply the minor characters, to be endlessly caricatured, to make in their multiplicity one’s world.
MISSION STATION
The Lowlands
MR. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, I suppose, has done more than anyone to stamp the idea of the repressed prudish man of God on the popular imagination. There was an earlier time when Stevenson’s Open Letter allowed us to recall Father Damien; Rain has impressed the image of Mr. Davidson over the missionary field: the Mr. Davidson who said of his work in the Pacific Islands, “When we went there they had no sense of sin at all. They broke the commandments one after the other and never knew they were doing wrong. And I think that was the most difficult part of my work, to instil into the natives the sense of sin” : the Mr. Davidson who slept with the prostitute, Sadie Thompson, and then killed himself.
I remember at school finding it a little hard to reconcile the popular idea of missionaries with the thin tired men who used to stand on a platform rapping with a small stick while the starved-looking bodies of black children slid across the screen. They seemed to be less Biblical than Mr. Davidson; they seemed to be more concerned with raising a few shillings for the support of the hideous tin church which was projected as a grim climax onto the sheet than with the sense of sin. The sense of sin lay far deeper across the altar steps of our own school chapel. Her was all the prudery and pornography one needed. These visitors from Africa, I felt, were not only innocent beside our own masters, they were innocent among the blacks they taught. There they stood, in their ruined health and their worn simplicity, begging for our shillings for a new altar cloth, a silver cruet stand; I couldn’t believe they had done much harm among the alligator societies, the human leopards, nor corrupted very effectively those men whose secret ritual it is to sacrifice a child once a year to the great python.
In Liberia I discovered another kind of missionary, I do not imagine Dr. Harley, the Methodist medical missionary, is unique in Africa : a man with a body and nerves worn threadbare by ten yearslittle unselfish work, cutting away the pus from the huge swollen genitals, injecting for yaws, anointing for craw-craw, injecting two hundred natives a week for venereal disease. He had made his home in this corner of Liberia with his wife and two children, curious little elderly yellow-faced boys; he had lost one child, who was buried at the mission.little
All the way along the Liberian border I had heard of him; he was the man in Liberia who knew most about the bush societies; the little time that the long hopeless fight against disease allowed him was devoted to these investigations. But he did not care to talk about them before his servants for fear of poison.
We had been lent a house a hundred yards from the mission, a luxurious little house it seemed to us by this time, for it was built of wood with a tin roof, the floor raised to escape the ants. At one end was a dispensary, and just outside was the open hospital building, long wooden benches under a roof of thatch. The forest came up at the back, like a small private wood. Ganta scared me : there was a smell of chemicals, of sickness and death about the place. Quite suddenly we had dropped down from the highlands, and the air had changed. It was heavy and damp. There were palms about and a sense of drenched ground, flies and ordure. I would never have believed that a climate could so completely change in the course of a day’s march. It had an immediate effect on the health: all energy left me: that night it was difficult to walk as far as the mission house for dinner; my stomach quite suddenly ceased to function.
I remember a rather grim dinner. Dr. Harley had been out all day and was tired and ready to fall asleep where he sat; it was the dead boy’s birthday. When he heard that I had walked from the Sierra Leone border without using a hammock, he said I was mad to do it; he had just sent a man-Dr. D.- home dead who had made the comparatively short trek from Monrovia on his feet. Nobody could walk long distances in this climate without danger. I tried to turn the conversation to the bush societies, but he sheered away from them. He said that Sinoe, which we had planned to reach, was at least four weeks away. The pain I had been feeling for some days now in my stomach seemed to get worse at the news. I could have been happy enough settled in one place for months, but the thought of four more weeks of physical exertion, of rising before dawn and walking for six or seven hours through the dreadful monotony of the forest, I could not bear.
On the way back to our house I remembered we hadn’t taken our quinine for two days. The rats had been at the hair-brushes and gnawed the bristles. They ran along between the wall and the roof in my room without even waiting for me to put out the light. I took a handful of Epsom in the warm boiled water from the filter which was dripping regularly in the corner and watched them scamper along the narrow crack above my head. I didn’t care a damn about the rats any longer, the sisters at Bolahun were right; I was scared in the same way as I had been in England when I suddenly found that my plans had gone too far for me to back out of the Liberian journey; I could remember reading the British Blue Book and thinking, “In three weeks I shall be there? ‘there’ meaning the long list of diseases and of Colonel Davis’s atrocities. I got no thrill at all; I was just scared. I comforted myself, “I shan’t try for Sinoe,” but I knew I hadn’t the moral courage to make straight for Monrovia. The rats jumped down when I turned out the lantern, but I wasn’t any longer afraid of rats. I was discovering in myself a thing I thought I had never possessed : a love of life.
Liberian Commissioner
Of course by daylight I felt better; it is difficult to believe in death before sunset. But a four weekslittle longer trek to Sinoe was beyond me, especially as I hadn’t enough men with me now to use the hammock. There was one other excuse, too; no money, I had no means of getting more money at Sinoe and I should not have enough to pay the carriers after the longer trek.