Mr. D, lived in Krutown. Krutown is one of the few parts of Freetown with any beauty; the Krus, the great sailors of the coast, whose boast it is that they have never been slaves and have never dealt in slaves, have escaped Anglicanisation. The native huts still stand among the palm trees on the way to Lumley Beach, the women sitting outside with their long hanging breasts uncovered. Mr. D.’s house was in the only Europeanised street. A bare wooden stair led into a room with wooden walls on which were hung a few religious pictures in Oxford frames. There were four rickety chairs and an occasional table with a potted plant on it. Crudely painted Mothers of God bore the agony of seven swords with indifference, Christ just above his head exposed a heart the colour of raw liver. Insects hopped about on the wooden floor and Mr. D. gently instructed me how to reach the frontier. A Iittle way over the border there was an American mission, the Order of the Holy Cross at Bolahun; it would be as well to stay there a few days and try to get carriers to go through with me to Monrovia. He examined the route suggested by the Secretary of the Interior; that had got to be avoided as far as possible; though I should have to follow it to Zigita. On the blank spaces of the English map, Mr. D. made his pencilled suggestions; he couldn’t be really sure to a matter of ten miles where to put the places he mentioned; the English map confused him with its inaccuracies. At last he gave it up altogether, and I simply wrote the names down in my notebook, spelling them as best I might: Mosambolahun, Gondolahun, Jenne, Lombola, Gbey-anlahun, Goryendi, Bellivela, Banya. But it is unnecessary to give them all here, for as it turned out I did not follow this route at all, didn’t even aim at Monrovia, which had been my object when I sailed. Circumstances in a country where the only way to travel is to know the next town or village ahead and repeat it as you go, like the Syrian woman in Little Arthur’s History who said “Gilbert, London” across England, were to alter my plans again and again until my small book was filled with lists of probably mispelt names in smudged pencil of places I never succeeded in finding. Examining it now I discover this cryptic entry : “Steamer calling C. Palmas and Sinoe. Keep S. dark. Get off at S. Take the beach to Setta Kru, Nana Kru. At N.K., Dr. V., Am. missionary. To Wesserpor or Dio. Tell people to take me to Nimley. On to New Sasstown and C.P.”
This is the record of another plan which came to nothing through lack of money and exhaustion. I had brought with me from England a letter of introduction to Paramount Chief Nimley of the Sasstown Tribe of Krus, the leader of the rebellion on the coast in 193a, It was in the fight against Nimley that the Frontier Force under the command of Colonel Elwood Davis, the President’s special agent, a North American black, had, according to the British Consul’s report, killed women and children, destroyed villages, tortured prisoners. Peace had been patched up but not with Nimley, who with the remains of his tribe was hidden in the bush vainly hoping for white intervention. No white man, Mr. D. said, would be allowed to travel to the Kru coast, but it would be possible by booking a passage on a coasting steamer from Monrovia to Cape Palmas to change one’s mind on board and land unexpectedly at Sinoe. From Sinoe one would travel along the beach to Nana Kru, and from there it would be necessary to get guides who knew the way to Nimley’s hiding-place.
I only mention these plans which came to nothing, these routes which were not followed, because they may give some idea of the vagueness of my ideas when I landed at Freetown. I had never been out of Europe before; I was a complete amateur at travel in Africa. I intended to walk across the Republic, but I had no idea of what route to follow or the conditions we would meet. Looking at the unreliable map I had thought vaguely that we would go up to the Sierra Leone railway terminus at Pendembu, then go across the frontier the nearest way and strike diagonally down to the capital. There seemed to be a lot of rivers to cross, but I supposed there would be bridges of some kind; there was the forest, of course, but that was everywhere. One apparently reliable book I had read on Sierra Leone mentioned a number of prospectors who had crossed the border into what was supposed to be an uninhabited part of the forest looking for gold and had never returned; but that was a little lower down (the Republic was on the bulge of Africa’s coast-line, and I could never properly remember the points of the compass).
Mr. D. discouraged me. It wasn’t possible, he said, that way. It was evident that he was particularly anxious for me to travel down by Bellivela. Bellivela was the headquarters of the Frontier Force and was being used as a concentration camp for political prisoners, those who had given evidence before the League of Nations Commission of Inquiry into slavery in the Republic. “They’ll have to invite you inside the camp for the night,” Mr. D. said, “and then you can poke around and see things.”
That night I dreamed of Mr. D. and the Customs at the border, a muddled irritating dream. I was always forgetting something; I had arrived at the Customs with all my bags and boxes and Mr. D. tied up in a bale, but I’d forgotten to get any carriers and I had no boys. I was afraid all the time that the Customs inspector would discover Mr. D., that I would be fined for smuggling, and have to pay a heavy duty.
The Three Companions
I arrived in Freetown on a Saturday and the train for Pendembu left on the following Wednesday; I had hoped to find servants engaged for me when I arrived, but Jimmie Daker, to whom I had an introduction, who had promised months before to do his best, had forgotten all about it. He was vague, charming, lost, and a little drunk. He sat in the Grand bar drinking whisky and bitters and talking about the Nazis and the war; he began as a pacifist but after his third drink he was ready to serve again at any moment; his face was scarred from the last war. He hadn’t any idea of how to get boys for the journey, though he agreed that it wouldn’t be wise to take any of those who stood all day at the entrance to the hotel offering their services. He didn’t know anybody who knew anything at all about the Republic. No one in Sierra Leone had ever crossed the border.
“Oh, Jimmielittle’ they all said in Freetown, “poor dear Jimmie,” when I said that Jimmie was finding me boys. “Jimmie doesn’t know a thing.”
In the end I got the best boys in Freetown. My head boy, Amedoo, was famous all the way up the line, and Amedoo chose the second boy, Laminah, and the old Mohammedan cook, Souri. And Jimmie Daker was, in a way, responsible. If I had not been to Jimmie’s for a sundowner, I wouldn’t have met Baddy, who had been twenty-five years in Freetown and knew every native in the place. He was quite drunk. He drove rapidly up and down the hills choosing the worst roads, he nearly got arrested for taking off a black policeman’s hat, the atmosphere was rather like Boat Race night in Piccadilly. “Everyone knows Daddy,” he said, trying to drive into Government House at two in the morning (but the gates were closed), reversing rapidly to the edge of a ditch, plunging uphill again while the sentries stood at attention and watched the car disappear with impassive faces, roaring past the barracks (the guardroom emptied at sight of a car on to the grass and everyone stood to attention in the green under-water light), up a muddy track off the road, coming to a halt against a bank, “You poor innocents,” he said. “We were stranded like criminals in a small lit cage above Freetown. “Have you ever been in Africa before? Have you ever been on trek? What on earth made you choose to go There?” Therelittle it appeared, was quite unspeakable, though, of course, he knew it only from hearsay; he would never dream… . Had we any idea of what we were up against? Had we any reliable maps? No, I said. There weren’t any to be got. Had we any boys? No. Had we let the D.Cs up the line know of our coming and engaged rest-houses? No, I hadn’t known it was necessary. When we crossed the border, how were we going to sleep? In native huts.