A flare-up of nervous irritation occurred a short while before my visit. The chauffeur of the French Consul had committed some offence, and an ignorant policeman who knew nothing about diplomatic immunities followed the servant into the Consulate and tried to arrest him. The Consul threw the man out, put on his diplomatic uniform and went down to the State building to demand from the Secretary of State an official apology from the Government. The Minister, young earnest Mr. Simpson, was quite prepared to apologise himself, but he refused to apologise on behalf of the Government. The whole affair would have been comic if it had not been a little tragic, for it showed to what absurdity, to what frayed nerves, the scorching damp, the bare exile, the shooting of bottles on Saturday evenings, the whistling loudspeakers lead. The French Consul went up the hill to the wireless station, which is run by a French company, and sent a message to a French gunboat he knew was passing down the coast. The gunboat anchored off Monrovia, the captain came ashore in a surf boat and the two solemn uniformed Frenchmen returned to Mr. Simpson’s office. The captain laid his sword on Mr. Simpson’s desk and said it would remain there until the Consul received an apology from the Government. The apology was given, the gunboat steamed away. I don’t know what happened to the policeman.
Quite outside this strained, dreary and yet kindly life, at the end of several hours’ rough driving from the capital, live the Firestone men in houses containing shower baths and running water and electric light, with a wireless station, tennis courts and a bathing pool, and a new neat hospital in the middle of plantations which smell all the day through of latex, as it drips into little cups tied beneath incisions in the trunks. They, more than the English or the French, are the official Enemy, and no story of whipping post, smuggled arms or burnt villages is too wild to be circulated and believed among Liberians of both parties.
Politics
We arrived in Monrovia when the political campaign was getting under way; those politicians embracing each other on the jetty were only a foretaste of the excitement. For the curious thing about a Liberian election campaign, which goes on for more than two months if there’s enough money in hand, is that, although the result is always a foregone conclusion, everyone behaves as if the votes and Sie speeches and the pamphlets matter. The Government prints the ballot papers, the Government owns both the newspapers, the Government polices the polling booths, but no one assumes beforehand that the Government will win, or if it is the turn of the Opposition, the Opposition. A curious fiction is kept up even among the foreign representatives. There are excited conversations at dinner parties; bets are always on the point of being laid. But the fiction, of course, stops short of losing money. Perhaps to an American, who is used to his state elections, the conditions seem less odd.
At this election, though, there may have been a very slight uncertainty just because the President was taking it so seriously and instead of surrendering his office was ensuring, by his plebiscite, that he would hold it for more than the length of three turns. There were rumours that the Cabinet was split, that Mr. Gabriel Dennis, the Secretary of the Treasury, who had distinguished himself by the sharp eye he kept on the funds of the Republic, was going to be jettisoned by his colleagues, and there was the unusual factor, too, that the President in power had as his opponent a former President who had shown his astuteness in manipulating the political machine. (For years the Presidential opponent had been Mr. Faulkner, the head of the People’s Party and of the Monrovian ice factory, who had no experience in the finer shades of political manipulation. Indeed, ex-President King won the first round. For when Mr. Faulkner finally retired from the contest and his supporters joined the Unit True Whig Party, otherwise known as the dissident Whigs, half a dozen members of the People’s Party kept together long enough to hold a convention to nominate Mr. King. As Mr. King was also nominated by the Unit True Whig Party, by Liberian law he would be able to have a representative of each party at every polling booth, while the Government would only have one, a very important point.
It will be seen that Liberian politics are complicated. Corruption does not make for simplicity as might be supposed. It may be all a question of cash and printing presses and armed police, but things have to be done with an air. Crudity as far as possible is avoided. For example, Mr. King could not be the only candidate at the convention of the Unit True Whig Party; at some expense supporters for Mr. Cooper had to be brought to the convention, even though it was known beforehand that Mr. King would be nominated. I received on the morning of the convention a programme issued by the organisers, signed by Mr. Doughba Carmo Caranda, the General Secretary, and attested by Mr. Abayomi Karnga, the national chairman (the names indicated the policy of the party, Liberia for the Liberians, everyone had been busy finding themselves native names to contrast with the Dunbars, Barclays, Simpsons, Dennises of the Government). The proceedings, I read, were to end with a procession to the house of the nominated candidate, but rather ingenuously the route of the procession was given, by the Masonic Hall, up Broad Street, on to Front Street, “to the residence of the candidate.” It was Mr. Kong who had a house in Front Street, not Mr. Cooper, so that the programme took some of the edge off the excitement. Rather damping, too, was the non-arrival of most of the delegates, for .the second launch was not so successful as the one in which we travelled and stuck on a sandbank outside Monrovia. The convention was to open with prayer at two-thirty, but when we arrived at three-thirty they were still waiting for the marooned delegates. Afterwards things got rather rushed, for when we arrived back at five the convention was over. The brass band was trying to get out of the ground and head the procession, but the mob was too great, and our Legation car helped to block the road. Several delegates hissed feebly at the little flag on the hood and a fat perspiring black pushed his head in at the window and asked furiously whether we did not know that this was a national occasion. There was a reek of cane juice and a few people looked nearly drunk enough to throw stones.
Meanwhile the President had staged another demonstration in front of his house: native dancers from the waterside slum of Kru Town rushed up and down before the Executive Mansion waving knives They looked like Red Indians in their feathered head dresses, and their spirited performance robbed the convention of a great many spectators. Later, when the blare of brass warned Monrovia that the procession was on its way, a rival procession was formed hastily outside the offices of state with large banners inscribed “Barclay the Hero of Liberia” and a rather enigmatic statement : “We want no King. We want no car. We want no money for our vote. Barclay is the Man”. For some time I thought it was inevitable that the processions would meet in tiny Monrovia, but I had under-estimated the ingenuity of their leaders. Drunk as everyone was by this time, they were not drunk enough to risk a fight. The Kru dancers and their friends swarmed into the Executive Mansion and were given free drinks, to the disgust of the President’s True Whig supporters, who had received nothing but the dictator’s thanks from a balcony at his formal nomination.