We thought it politic to walk up through Ganta to call on the D.C. He wore a well-cut tropical suit, a small military moustache, his skin was slightly yellow; he looked more Latin than African. He had a reputation for fairness, honesty and efficiency. Now he was engaged in driving the Sanoquelleh-Ganta road south. Once again we were encountering Liberian patriotism. This time it was of a more European brand. There was not a carrier who would not have welcomed white intervention; patriotism in their minds had nothing to do with who ruled them, it was love of a certain territory. But Commissioner Dunbar was one of the rulers, His patriotism was like a European’s; to him the thought of white interference was hateful and because England’s attitude to the Kru rebellion suggested a danger to Liberian independence, he suspected and disliked the English. He was courteous and reserved and it was hopeless to try to convince him that our journey had no political motive. I felt our amicable expressions becoming shrill in the effort to convince, beating hopelessly against the hard courteous surface of his mind. There was no need to convince him; but he was a man with such admirable qualities that one wanted to leave him with a good impression. But the more we struggled to leave that good impression, the more our voices sounded in our own ears false and hypocritical. I tried to make him express some of his suspicions by mentioning the town on the forbidden coast-line, but he contented himself with saying that it would probably take us another five weeks to reach Sinoe. Should we have to wait long for a boat to Monrovia? Perhaps a month, he said, leaning back in his wicker chair, the blazing sun over the compound behind giving his yellow handsome face a blurred black outline. It was a politic inaccuracy, because, as we learnt later, there was a weekly launch. I suggested Grand Bassa as an alternative and he encouraged the idea: we could do it in ten days, he informed us, but that was an exaggeration. He didn’t know the road himself, it was used only by the Mandingo traders; impassable in the rains, it would be a very rough way through the biggest bush, but ten days should see us on the Coast.
The Commissioner had other reasons than patriotism to distrust the white man. There was a Catholic priest at Sanoquelleh, his headquarters, and the previous Commissioner had been married to a Catholic. The priest had resented the difference between Dunbar and his predecessor; Dunbar had stood strictly to the letter of the law, allowing the priest no privileges. The priest tried to get rid of him, writing letters to the President in Monrovia; and the heat: and desolation worked on both men. The priest saw his chance when one of the men working on the roads fell sick. He took him into the mission and the man died there. Immediately the priest wrote a letter accusing Dunbar of having starved his workers and beaten one to the point of death. Dunbar acted with admirable promptitude; he arrived at the mission with a squad of soldiers before the man was buried and carried both the body and the priest over the eighteen miles to Ganta, where he asked the American doctor to examine the body. Dr. Harley exonerated him and the priest was expelled from the Republic. As for Dunbar, he had been made to realise that whites were not only hypocritical in their attitude to the Republic, they could be crooked in their dealings with individuals.
The Secret Societies
That afternoon the doctor came in to talk about the bush societies. His investigations were the only enthusiasm he had kept after ten years, but he wanted to be sure that my boys were out of the house. I went and looked in the kitchen where they slept. It was empty. Laminab was sitting in the shade of the hospital looking sick. The doctor had drawn a tooth of his in the morning: I had heard the painful dog-like howls through the wooden walclass="underline" and now he was afraid that he was going to die because the gum still bled. He was too sophisticated to paint himself with native medicine, but he had brought a pot of cold cream with him from Freetown and was smearing it all over his face and neck and scalp.
I am not an anthropologist and I cannot pretend to remember very much of what Dr. Harley told me : a pity, for no white man is closer to that particular “heart of darkness”, the secret societies being more firmly rooted in Liberia than in any other country on the West Coast. The Government have put up the feeblest of resistances : though Colonel Davis, so he told me later, had court-martialled and shot fifty members of the Leopard Society in a village near Grand Bassa. Indeed, they could not properly resist because they believed. President King himself was rumoured to have been a member of the Alligator Society. When the League of Nations Commission was appointed to inquire into Liberian conditions, Mr. King and several members of his cabinet-so it was believed in Monrovia-had sacrificed a goat After the sacrifice, which should traditionally have been a human one, a boatload of young Krus had been drowned close to the beach at Monrovia, and it was generally felt that the alligator was dissatisfied with the goat.
It is a grim world, this of the societies, of the four men who, Dr. Harley said, came to Ganta a year or two back from the north looking for a victim. Everyone in Ganta knew they were there, with their ritual need of the heart, the palms of the hands, the skin of the forehead, but no one knew who they were. The Frontier Force were active, searching for strangers. Presently the fear passed. The Manos round Ganta knew what the men were seeking, for they have their own cannibalistic societies, and though I had said nothing of this to my boys and there were no Manos among the carriers, Laminat and Amedoo knew all about it. Laminah said to me one day, “These people bad, they chop men,” and they were happy to leave the Manos behind. This is the territory the United States map marks so vaguely and excitingly as “Cannibal”.
The Terrapin Society of the women and the Snake Society of the men, of course, are not peculiar to the Manos. There is the ordinary snake society, a kind of post-graduate course in handling snakes, in curing their bites and dancing the snake dance, and the secret society which does actually worship a python, to which one baby should be sacrificed each year by the fully initiated. This was a common terror once : we came across the memory of what I suppose was a related cult at the sacred waterfall beyond Ganta; now only in Liberia, where the secret societies are so immune from interference, do cases of child murder or disappearance occur with any frequency.
Dr. Harley was particularly pleased with having discovered the nature of one devil, the most sacred in the women’s eyes, whom it is death for a woman to see. He found it was not an individual at all, but a circle of young warriors who had entered bush school at the same time as the chiefs son. The women were warned by drums that the great devil was out, and the young men danced fully armed beating the ground with staffs.
Among all these devils, Dr. Harley said, there was one supreme devil, whose fiat ran the length of the Coast and who had the power to stop war between tribe and tribe. He could appear simultaneously in places far apart: he was known by his distinctive mask and robes. These were probably stored in every place of importance along the Coast, above the palaver-house or in the blacksmith’s hut. For the blacksmith of Mosambolahun, it appeared, was not peculiar in being the local devil. Dr. Harley was inclined to believe that the craft of blacksmith was always linked with the status of devil.
It is a curiously Kafka-like situation : headmasters who wear masks and turn out to be the local blacksmith … One reaches the village at the foot of the Schloss, to discover that almost anyone may tie the master of the Schloss; his agents are everywhere … there is an atmosphere of force and terror . . occasionally beauty … ‘meaning behind meaning, form behind form’. I can imagine that after seven years of investigating this formal but Protean religion, one may still despair of an interpretation. Olga in Kafka’s novel, it will be remembered, tried to construct “out of glimpses and rumours and through various distorting factors” an image of Klamm. “He’s reported as having one appearance when he comes into the village and another on leaving it, after having his beer he looks different from what he does before it, when he’s awake he’s different from when he’s asleep, when he’s alone he’s different from when he’s talking to people, and-what is comprehensible after all that-he’s almost another person up in the Castle.” Take the case of the rich and sinister headman at Zigita : for all anyone knew he might be the devil himself … or was the devil the blacksmith? or was there a devil in the sense of an individual at all, any more than the group of young warriors had been a devil, was it perhaps a fraud practised by the initiates? But it was a mistake to suggest that the young warriors were frauds : in their composite form they were the devil.