Fear God Honour Your King, be just to mankind -Says Bungie.
Easy System British-African Workmen Store undertake to supply Coffin with Hearse, Men, Grave, etc., by special arrangements for easy payment by instalment.
Contracts taken up for Carpentry, Masonry, Painting, etc., at moderate charges.
Ready-made Plain and Polished Coffin supplied with Hearse and Uniformed men at any moment. Corpse washed and dressed.
Cornel I’ll bury the dead by easy system only be true to your sympathetic friend. That’s Bungie.
Do not live like a fool and die like a big fool. Eat and drink good stuff, save small, be praying for a happy death, then a decent funeral. Bungie will do the rest.
I’ll bury the Dead. (Book of Tobias) I’ll bury the dead and feed the living. THAT’S BUNGIE ALL OVER.
The City Bar
I wanted to do a pub crawl. But one can’t crawl very far in Freetown. All one can do is to have a drink at the Grand and then go and have a drink at the City. The City is usually more crowded and noisy because there’s a billiard table; people are rather more dashing, get a little drunk and tell indecent stories; but not if there’s a woman present. I had never found myself in a place which was more protective to women; it might have been inhabited by rowing Blues with Buchman consciences and secret troubles. Everyone either had a wife at Hill Station and drank a bit and bought chocolates at the weekend and showed photographs of their children at home:
(“I’m afraid I don’t care much for children.”)
(“O, you’d like mine.”) or else they had wives in England, had only two drinks, because they’d promised their wives to be temperate, and played Kuhn-Kan for very small stakes. They played golf and bathed at Lumley Beach. There wasn’t a cinema that a white man could go to, and books of course rotted in the damp or developed worms. You developed worms too yourself, after you’d been out a little time; it was inevitable; nobody seemed to mind. Freetown, they told you, was the healthiest place on the Coast. The day I left a young man in the educational department died of yellow fever.
Worms and malaria, even without yellow fever, are enough to cloud life in ‘the healthiest place along the Coast’. These men in the City bar, prospectors, shipping agents, merchants, engineers, had to reproduce English conditions if they were to be happy at all. They weren’t the real rulers; they were simply out to make money; and there was no hypocrisy in their attitude towards ‘the bloody blacks’. The real rulers came out for a few years, had a Ion? leave every eighteen months, gave garden parties, were supposed to be there for the good of the ruled. It was diese men who had so much to answer for: the wages, for example, of the platelayers on the little narrow-gauge line which runs up to Pendembu near the French and Liberian borders. These men were paid sixpence a day and had to buy their own food, and yet in the days of the depression they were docked one day’s pay a month. This was perhaps the meanest economy among the many mean economies which assisted Sierra Leone through the depression, a depression caused by the fall in price of palm oil and palm kernels, the preference Levers at that time were showing for whale oil. The economies were nearly all at the expense of the coloured man; government staffs were reduced by a clerk here and a messenger there. Until the visit of Lord Plymouth, the Under-Secretary of State, who arrived in Freetown on the day that I did, there had been only one sanitary inspector for the whole colony and protectorate. Badgered by the central authority, constantly moved from a district which he was attempting to clean up, he would apply in vain for assistants. Forced labour is illegal in a British Colony, but the sanitary inspector without a staff had to choose between breaking the law or leaving villages as dirty as he found them.
One could exonerate the men in the bar; they were not guilty of these meannesses; they were only guilty of the shabbiness of Freetown, the tin roofs and the Poppy Day posters. Santayana, with the romanticism of a foreign Anglophile, has written that “what governs the Englishman is his inner atmosphere, the weather in his soul”. The inner atmosphere, he explains, “when compelled to condense into words may precipitate some curt maxim or over-simple theory as a sort of war-cry; but its puerile language does it injustice, because it broods at a much deeper level than language or even thought. It is a mass of dumb instincts and allegiances, the love of a certain quality of life”, and in a finely chosen if romantic metaphor, he describes how “it fights under its trivial fluttering opinions like a smoking battleship under its flags and signals”. So to be fair to these men one must recognise a certain fidelity, a kind of patriotism in the dust and Anglicanism and the closing hours; this is their “corner of a foreign field”, just as much as the flowers and cafιs and the neat tarts of Dakar are the Frenchmen’s corner. If you are English, they would argue, you will feel at home here : if you don’t like it you are not English. If one must condemn, one should condemn not the outposts but the headquarters of Empire, the country which has given them only this : a feeling for respectability and a sense of fairness withering in the heat
No Screws Unturned
When I came on shore I was met by an elderly Kru carrying an umbrella. He said reproachfully, I’ve been waiting for some hours.” He held a cable in his hand from London; it asked him to get in touch with Greene, who was leaving for the Republic. “My name,” the Kru said, “is Mr. D.’\ He knew the Republic well, he could be of use.
An even more august authority was giving me unwanted help. Before I left the boat I had been handed a letter from His Majesty’s Chargι d’Affaires in Monrovia, the capital of the Republic, saying that he had announced my visit to the Secretary of the Interior, and the Secretary had informed all the District Commissioners in the Western Province. “Any courtesies shown these persons by the Commissioners and Chiefs with whom they contact will be very highly appreciated, and it is incumbent that you leave no screws unturned to make their trip a pleasant one.” The phrase about the screws had a slightly sinister ring, but this fairylike activity had been no part of my plan. If there was anything to hide in die Republic I wanted to surprise it. Luckily the Secretary of the Interior had suggested a route for me to follow, and it would be quite easy for me to avoid it, to avoid indeed the Western Province, after a few days, altogether.
It would have been easier if I had been able to obtain maps. But the Republic is almost entirely covered by forest, and has never been properly mapped, mapped that is to say even to the rough extent of the French colonies which lie on two sides of it. I could find only two large-scale maps for sale. One, issued by the British General Staff, quite openly confesses ignorance; there is a large white space covering the greater part of the Republic, with a few dotted lines indicating the conjectured course of rivers (incorrectly, I usually found) and a fringe of names along the boundary. These names have been curiously chosen : most of them are quite unknown to anyone in the Republic; they must have belonged to obscure villages now abandoned. The other map is issued by the United States War Department. There is a dashing quality about it; it shows a vigorous imagination. Where the English map is content to leave a blank space, the American in large letters fills it with the word ‘Cannibals’. It has no use for dotted lines and confessions of ignorance; it is so inaccurate that it would be useless, perhaps even dangerous, to follow it, though there is something Elizabethan in its imagination. ‘Dense Forest’; ‘Cannibals’; rivers which don’t exist, at any rate anywhere near where they are put; one expects to find Eldorado, two-headed men and fabulous beasts represented in little pictures in the Gola Forest
But this was where Mr. D., the elderly Kruman, could help; he knew the Republic.