The old man without any teeth said, “That’s a true word.”
The minister said, “They’ll give us cards when we go to the convention and we shall have to put a mark against a name. But pencil can be rubbed out with India rubber. If we want God to have a chance in this convention we must take our pencils and push the point right through one of the names, tear it right out, then they won’t be able to do anything with India rubber.”
By the late afternoon nearly everyone was asleep; but they woke when the promontory that shelters Monrovia came in sight: the German consulate and just above the beach the long white front of the British Legation. Everyone began to tidy themselves for the capital, put on waistcoats and ties, and there, after a brief panic as we heeled over the bar, was a little jetty and a reception committee of smart politicians cheering and waving and embracing each other with excitement.
I never got quite away from my fellow-passengers. For every day I spent in Monrovia some seedy individual would pluck at my sleeve among the wooden shacks of the waterside, and drawing me on one side would remind me that we had travelled together, pointing out to me, as the financier of the Opposition party, that he had left his affairs in Cape Palmas or Sinoe in bad order and was finding the capital city very expensive. Most of the Opposition” indeed, had to be sent home at the expense of the President of Monrovia
To the casual visitor, at any rate, Monrovia is a more pleasant town than Freetown. Freetown is like an old trading port that has been left to rot along the beach; it is a spectacle of decay. But Monrovia is like a beginning; true, a beginning which has come to little beyond the two wide grassy main streets intersecting each other and lined with broken-paned houses all of wood and of one storey except for the brick churches, one little brick villa belonging to the Secretary of the Treasury, the three-storied Executive Mansion where the President lives, the State Department opposite, and the unfinished stone house of ex-President King. An asphalt drive, “for motor traffic onlylittle’ goes down to the water-front, but there are very few motors and all pedestrians use it. Along the waterside are the shops, the big wooden stores of the English P.Z., of the German and Dutch companies where you can buy gin as cheap as nine-pence a bottle, and the small huts of the Syrians, the wooden shed of the Post Office with a rickety ladder on the outside. There are telephone poles along the main street and out by the one motor road towards Mount Barclay and the Firestone Rubber Plantations, but the telephone service no longer exists. The residential street runs gently uphill towards a waste of scorched rock and sand, the road to the English Legation and the lighthouse, and here and there among the rocks are planted the beginnings of stone houses, sometimes only the foundation laid, sometimes several storeys, so that these unfinished buildings have the appearance of houses gutted by fire.
They are the only form of investment Liberia provides for though prospectuses have been issued for the Bank of Liberia Ltd., with a capital of 1,000,000 dollars divided into 200,000 shares, nobody has subscribed; as early as 1923 the Legislature granted the bank the exclusive right of issuing bank-notes and coins, but Liberia still depends for its currency on the British. The only Liberian coins in circulation are heavy copper pennies. So from ex-President King downwards anyone with any money to spare not invested in the Firestone Bank (the British Bank has left Liberia) puts it into building, but the buildings are very seldom finished. The foundations and the first storey usually exhaust the owner’s capital, though sometimes years later a few more stones are added to the follies dotting the rough slopes near the sea.
It is easy to make fun of this black capital city; of the Secretary of State who, when a white man expressed his amazement that he should occupy such a position at so young an age as thirty-four, replied, “Pitt was a Prime Minister at thirty”; of a town where almost every other man is a lawyer and every man a politician. “There is no body of men,” Thomas Paine wrote, “more jealous of their privileges than the Commons: because they sell themlittle’ and one cannot doubt that this motive forms a part of Liberian patriotism. The native in the interior, if he comes in close contact with a Government agent, has every reason to deplore “the mighty calamity of Government.” But there is a pathos about these stunted settlements along the coast, the grassy streets, the follies on the rocky hillside, the pathos of a black people planted down, without money or a home, on a coast of yellow fever and malaria to make what they can of an Africa from which their families have been torn centuries before. No one can pretend they have made much of their country, Colonel Davis’s conduct of the Kru campaign is only one example of the horrors of their history, but to me it seems remarkable that they have retained their independence at all : a kind of patriotism has emerged from the graft and the privation.
England and France in the last century robbed them of territory; America has done worse, for she has lent them money. Without any resources of their own, except what they could squeeze out of the unfriendly natives in an undeveloped interior, they have had to borrow again and again. Each fresh loan has only paid off the previous indebtedness and left them with a smaller surplus and an inflated interest. They have tried to build roads before, as they are trying to build them now, and I had seen outside Grand Bassa how previous roads had gone backward, not forward. They once had a telephone system, but now they have only the leaning poles by the roadside. They had bought machines, but they hadn’t had the money to work them, and driving out to the rubber plantations one passed the old dredges rusting in the scrub. I couldn’t wonder at their inanition in the soaking heat. I remember that one day, going out to Mount Barclay, we passed a motor-lorry broken down on the road with one wheel off; there were the remains of a camp fire and the crew were sleeping in the bush. It was only twenty miles from Monrovia, but as I went out next day to visit ex-President King the lorry and the crew were still camping there waiting for something to happen.
Nor can you wonder at their hatred and suspicion of the white man. The last loan and the last concession to the Firestone Company of Ohio all but surrendered their sovereignty to a commercial company with no interests in Liberia but rubber and dividends. The Liberian has quite rightly been condemned for his abuse of power in the interior, but the native can hardly expect a much higher standard of treatment from a commercial company without any responsibility to world opinion. It was a quite unconstitutional concession, in return for a loan, of 1,000,000 acres of Liberian territory on a lease of ninety-nine years. In 1935 only 60,000 acres were under cultivation : 45,000 acres outside Monrovia and 15,000 at Cape Palmas, but the concession remains an impediment to any form of development It was imagined, one may charitably suppose, that Firestone’s would bring more than money into the country, that they would provide employment and stimulate trade. The year of my visit they were employing 6,000 natives supplied by the chiefs; no one could really tell whether that labour was voluntary or forced, but if the million acres should ever be cultivated and the employment figures rise in proportion, voluntary labour will certainly not supply the demand, and there is a great moral distinction between the usual form of forced labour in Africa, which at least pretends to be for the good of the community, and forced labour for the good ot shareholders. The wages paid, though it must be admitted that they compared favourably with some of the British Government’s rates in Sierra Leone, were not likely to bring prosperity to the Liberian tribes. The wages of tappers ran from eightpence to a shilling and a penny a day, of clearers from sevenpence to a shilling. Out of this they had to buy their own food, but not to the benefit of local trade. They must buy at the Firestone stores and Firestone’s imported their own rice, so that it had to be sold at a rate one and sixpence in the hundredweight dearer than it could be bought in Monrovian stores, and the rate in Monrovian stores was already much dearer than anywhere else in Liberia.