0083
I don't know who chose Sierra Leone, but whoever he was the choice does him infinite credit. It is the most beautiful spot on all the west coast of Africa. I have seen many of the beautiful harbours of the world, Sydney, and Dunedin, and Hobart, which to my mind is the most beautiful of them all, Cape Town, and Naples, and Vigo, Genoa, Palermo, Messina, and lovely Taormina, which after all is not a harbour. I know them intimately, and with any of these Sierra Leone can hold her own. We entered the mouth of the river, passed the lighthouse, a tall, white building nestling among the palms, and all along the shore were entrancing little green bays, with green lawns. They looked like lawns from the ship, shaded by over-hanging trees. The blue sea met softly the golden sands, and the hills behind were veiled in a most alluring mist. It lifted and closed down and lifted again, like a bride longing yet fearing to disclose her loveliness to her lord. Here it seemed to me that a man might, when the feverish heat of youth is passed, build himself a home and pass the evening of his days resting from his labours; but I am bound to say I was the only person on board who did think so. One and all were determined to impress upon me the fact that Sierra Leone was known as the White Man's Grave, and that it deserved the name. And yet Zachary Macauley, who ruled over it in the end of the eighteenth century, staunchly upheld its advantages. I do not know that he exactly recommends it as a health-resort, but something very near to it, and he is very angry when anyone reviles the country. Zachary Macauley was probably right. If a man is not prepared to stand a certain amount of heat he must not go to the Coast at all; and if he does go he must be prepared so to guide his life that it is possible to conform to the rules of health demanded of the white man in the Tropics. If he looks for the pleasures and delights of England and her temperate climate, he will find himself bitterly disappointed, but if he seeks for what Africa can give, and give with lavish hand, he will probably find that the country will treat him well.
We cast anchor opposite the town appropriately named Freetown, and I landed, presented my letter, and was asked by the kindly Governor to stay for a few days at Government House.
The majority of the Europeans, with the exception of the Governor, do not live in Freetown. They have wisely built their bungalows on the healthier hillsides, and I suppose as the colony increases in importance the Governor will go too; but I am glad when I was there he was still at Fort Thornton.
0087
Of the history of the fort I know nothing. The bungalow is raised on thick stone walls, and you go up steps to the dwelling-house, past great rooms that are railed off with iron bars. There are ornamental plants there now, but there is no disguising the fact these are evidently relics of old slave days; I presume the barracoons of the slaves. But behind the one-time courtyard is filled up and sown with Bahama grass kept close-cropped and green, so that croquet and bowls may be played upon it. The bastions are now embowered in all manner of tropical greenery, and the great guns, the guns that Zachary Macauley used against the French privateers, peep out from a tangle of purple bougainvillea, scarlet hibiscus, fragrant frangipanni, and glorious white moon flowers.
There are white women in Freetown, not very many, but still fifteen or sixteen—the wives of the soldiers, of the political officers, medical officers, and the traders, and their number is growing, so that when the Governor gives a garden-party, the lawn that was once the courtyard of the fort is gay with bright muslin dresses, ribbons, and flowers. They seemed to like it too, those to whom I spoke, and there is no doubt that the place is improving from a health point of view. Until within the last two or three years the management of sanitary affairs was in the hands of the Town Council, of whom a large number were negroes, and the average negro is extremely careless about things sanitary; at last, so evil a reputation did the most beautiful town on the Coast get that it was found necessary to vest all power in the hands of a strong and capable medical officer, and make him responsible for the cleanliness of the town. The result, I believe, has more than justified all hopes. Perhaps some day the town may be as healthy as it is beautiful.
But I really know very little about Sierra Leone. I intended to come back and go up the railway that goes a couple of hundred miles up country, but as yet I have not had time, and all I can speak about with authority is its exceeding beauty. The streets are wide and rather grass-grown, for it is difficult to keep down vegetation in a moist and tropical climate, and I am glad to say there are, though the town is by no means well-planted, some beautiful trees to be seen. Government House is embowered in verdure, and the first station on the railway that runs up to the hill-top is “Cotton-tree.”
And the dwellers in this earthly paradise? Knowing their pathetic and curious history I was anxious to see this people sprung from men and women gathered from all corners of Africa, unfortunate and unhappy.
Frankly, I share with the majority of Coasters a certain dislike to the educated negro. But many of the men I like best, the men whose opinion I have found well worth taking about things West-African, tell me I am wrong. You cannot expect to come up from savagery in a few decades, and the thing I dislike so in the negro clerk is but a phase that will pass. Here in Sierra Leone I met one man who made me feel that it would pass, that the time will come when the colour of the skin will make no difference, and that is the African known to all the world as Dr Blyden. He is an old man now and he was ill, so I went to see him; and as I sat and talked to him one still, hot evening, looking down the busy street where men and women in all stages of dress and undress were passing to and fro, carrying burdens on their heads, shrieking and shouting at one another in the unintelligible jargon they call English, had I not looked and seen for myself that his complexion was the shadowed livery of the burnished sun, I should have thought I was talking to some professor of one of the older Universities of England. His speech was measured and cultivated and there was no trace in it of that indescribable pompous intonation which seems peculiar to the educated black man. He gave me good advice, too.
0091
“What shall I write about?” I asked, and halfexpected him to enter into a long dissertation upon the possibilities that lay latent in his race. But I might have known this man, who had conquered more difficulties on his way upwards than ever I had dreamed about, better than that.
“Write about what you see,” said he. “And if you do not understand what you see then ask until you do.”
So I have taken his advice and I write about what I have seen, and though afterwards I found reason to like much the peasant peoples of West Africa, I did not like the Creoles, as these descendants of freed slaves call themselves. Do I judge them hardly, I wonder? If so, I judge only as all the West Coast judges. They are a singularly arrogant people, blatant and self-satisfied, and much disliked along the Coast from the Gambia to San Paul de Loando. But they have taken advantage of the peace which England has ensured to them, and are prosperous. Traders and town-dwellers are they if they can manage it, and they pursue their avocations up and down the Coast. A curious thing about them is their language. If you ask them they would tell you it is English, and they would tell you they know no other; and English it is, as to the words, but such an extraordinary jargon it is quite as difficult to understand as any unknown tongue. Yet it is the peculiar bastard tongue that is spoken all over the Coast. Many who speak it as the only means of communication between them and their boys must have wondered how such a jargon ever came into existence, and it was not till Mr Migeod wrote his book on the languages of West Africa that anyone in fact ever thought of classing it as a separate language. But once pointed out, the fact is undoubted. Sierra Leonese is simply English spoken with a negro construction.
Listening very carefully, it took a great deal of persuasion to make me believe the words were English. When I bought bananas from a woman sitting under the shade of a spreading cotton tree and the man behind her came forward and held out his hand, saying: “Make you gi'e me heen ooman coppa all,” I grasped the fact that he intended to have the money long before I understood that he had said, in the only English, the only tongue he knew: “Give me her money,” even though I did know that “coppa” stood for money. Some of the words, of course, become commonplaces of everyday life, and I am sure the next time I call on a friend, who is rich enough to have a man-servant, association of ideas will take me back, and I shall ask quite naturally, “Massa lib?” instead of the customary “Is Mrs Jones at home?” Of course, in the case of Mrs Jones it would be “Missus,” but it was generally a master I was inquiring for in Africa.
Sunday or some high holiday is the day to see Freetown in its best clothes. Then the black gentleman appears in all the glory of a tall, black-silk hat, a frock coat, a highly starched waistcoat, the gayest of ties, scarlet or pink, the palest of dove-coloured trousers, and bright-yellow kid gloves; and the negro woman hides her fine figure with ill-fitting corsets, over which she wears an open-work muslin blouse, through which her dark skin shows a dull purple. Of all the places in Africa to transgress the laws of beauty and art Freetown is the very worst, and if ever a people tried their best to hide their own charms it is the Creoles of Sierra Leone. It would be comic if it were not pathetic. And yet, that these clothes are not part and parcel of the lives of these children near bred to the sun is promptly seen if a shower of rain comes on. In a lightning flash I saw a damsel, who might have come out of Fulham Road, or, at the very least, Edgeware Road, strip off the most perishable of her precious finery, do them up in a neat parcel that would carry easily under her umbrella, and serenely and unembarrassed march home in her white chemise and red petticoat. And she seemed to think as she passed me smiling she was doing the only right and proper thing to be done; as indeed she was.
I was a seeker after knowledge while I was in Freetown, and was always anxious to go anywhere and everywhere if a reason could be possibly contrived, so it happened that on one occasion I went to Lumley in search of fish. Lumley is a little village in the environ of Freetown, and the fish was to be bought from one Abraham Freeman, who dwelt at the side of the lagoon there. I went in a hammock, of course, and the way was lovely, up hill and down dale, through country that looked like a gigantic greenhouse run wild. The village was mostly built of mud with thatched roofs, but sometimes the houses were of wood, and the upper parts very wisely of trellis-work so as to insure a free current of air. When I arrived I looked round and told my hammock-boys to set me down at a cottage where a negro clad in a white shirt and trousers was lolling in a hammock. He did not scream at the scenery. He was rather suitably clad, I thought. It seemed he was the schoolmaster and a person of authority in the place.
“Can you tell me where Abraham Freeman lives?” I asked.
He corrected me gently but decidedly in his pompous English.
“Mr Freeman's abode is a little farther on by the lagoon. I believe Mr Freeman is absent in his boat, but Mrs Freeman is at home and will receive you.”
So we went on a little farther through the tangle of greenery till the waters of the lagoon showed up. A dried mud-shack, thatched with palm leaves, stood between the row of cocoa-nut palms that fringed the lagoon and the roadway, and there my hammock-boys set me down.
“Dis Abraham Freeman's?” They were Timini and did not waste their breath on titles for a Creole, whom they would have eaten up save for the presence of the white man.
I got out and a tall, skinny black woman clad in a narrow strip of blue cloth round her hips came forward to meet me. Nothing was left to the imagination, and all her charms had long since departed. She hadn't even a handkerchief round her head, and the negro woman has lost all sense of vanity when she leaves her wool uncovered. Mrs Abraham Freeman was at home! My boys found a box for me to sit upon, and I contemplated Mrs Freeman and her family. Rebecca Freeman, about fifteen, was like a bronze statue so beautifully moulded was she; she really did not need anything beyond the narrow cloth at her hips, and being very justifiably vain she wore a gaily coloured silk turban. Elkanah Freeman, when he took off his coat to shin up a cocoa-nut palm, wore no shirt, was built like a Greek god; and “my little gran'-darter, Deborah,” stark but for a string of green beads round her middle, was a delightful little cuddlesome thing, but “my sistah Esther an' Mistah Freeman's sistah Elizabeth” were hideous, skinny, and withered old hags, and the little strips of cloth they wore did not hide much. Each had a stone between her bony knees, and on it was breaking up some small sort of shell-fish like periwinkles. I got Mrs Freeman to show me the inside of her house. It was just four windowless rooms with openings under the eaves for air, with walls of dried clay, and for all furniture two wooden couches heaped up with rags. Outside on three stones a pot was boiling, and I asked her what was in it and could not make out her answer till she pointed out three skinny pigs rooting among the unsavoury refuse of the yard, then I grasped she was saying “hog,” and I was thankful I was not going to have any of that dinner. She begged from me on the score of her poverty, and in pity I gave her a shilling, and then the little grand-daughter was so winsome, she had to have a penny, and then the two poor old souls, cracking shell-fish and apparently done with all that makes life good for a woman, begged so piteously that they had to have something; so, on the whole, it was rather an expensive visit, but it was well worth it to see Mrs Freeman “at home.”
But I don't know Sierra Leone. I speak of all the West Coast as a passer-by speaks of it; but I know less of Sierra Leone than any other place I visited. Only it charmed me—I am going back some day soon if I can afford it—and I went on with regret to the negro republic.
America's experiment in the way of nation-making—Exiles in their mothers' land—The forlorn little company on Providence Island—Difficulties of landing and finding accommodation—British Consul to the rescue—The path to the British Consulate and the Liberian College—An outrageously ill-kept town—“Lovely little homes up the river”—A stickler for propriety—Dress and want of dress—The little ignorant missionary girl—At prayer in Lower Buchanan—The failure of a race.
No one on board theZariareally believed I would land in Liberia. When I heard them talk I hardly believed it myself, and yet being there it seemed a pity not to see all I could see. The captain and officers were strongly of opinion there was absolutely nothing to see whatever. If it was madness for a woman to come alone to the Coast, it was stark-staring madness that almost needed restraining in a strait-waistcoat to think of landing in Liberia, for Liberia of all the countries along the Guinea Coast is the one most disliked by the sailors, most despised, and since I have been there I am inclined to say not without reason. For of course I did land; I should have been ashamed of myself if I had not, and I spent the best part of a fortnight there, and thanks to the kindness of His Britannic Majesty's Consul spent it very comfortably indeed.
Liberia is America's experiment in the way of nation-making even as Sierra Leone is Great Britain's, and if I cannot praise the Creole of Sierra Leone I have still less admiration for his American cousin.
In the second decade of the last century philanthropists began to consider the future of the freed slave in the United States, and it was decided that it would be wisdom to transport him back to the continent from which his forefathers came, and let him try there to put into practice the lessons he had learned in the art of civilisation. Bitter is the slur of black blood in the States; bitter, bitter was it ninety years ago when the forlorn little company who were to found a civilised negro state first set foot on their mothers' land. America was but young among the nations in 1822, so she took no responsibility, made no effort to launch these forlorn people in their new venture, or to help them once they were launched. Their leader was a quadroon with a fine face if one may judge from the picture in Executive Mansion, Monrovia, and he dreamed I suppose of wiping away the slur, the unmerited slur which lay across him and all like him with dark blood in their veins. With the chain and with the lash had America enforced the stern law that by the sweat of his brow shall man live, and she had seen to it that the personal toil of the negro and all with negro blood in their veins profited them only after their taskmasters had been satisfied. They belonged to a degraded subject race; no wonder they came back gladly, hopefully to the land from which certainly all their mothers had sprung. But it was no easy task they had before them. For a strong, hopeful, virile people it would have been difficult; to a people burdened with the degradation of centuries of servitude it has proved a task well-nigh beyond their capabilities. And before we condemn as do all the men along the Coast, as very often I do myself, it is only fair to remember the past.
0101
It must have been a very forlorn little company of people who landed on a small island at the mouth of that unknown river in 1822. They called the island Providence Island, and there they were cooped up for some weeks, for the people on the shore, warlike savages who brooked no master, objected to the newcomers, and it was some little time before they could set foot on the mainland and found their principal town of Monrovia. That was nearly ninety years ago, but very far inland they have never been able to go, for though Liberia takes up quite a large space on the map it is only Liberia in name. The hinterland is held by fighting tribes who resent any interference with their vested rights, and make the fact particularly clear.
The outlines of the history of Liberia I had known vaguely for many a long day even to the name of Monrovia their capital, so called after President Munro, and it seemed to give point to the story to sit on the deck of the ship that swung at her anchors just beyond the surf of the river mouth. At least they had chosen a very beautiful place. Blue sky, blue sea, snow-white surf breaking on the bar, and a hillside clothed in dense greenery with palms cutting the sky line and the roofs of houses peeping out from among the verdure, that is what I saw, and the captain was emphatic I had seen the best of it. I did not doubt his word then, and having been ashore I am bound to confess he was right.
But the difficulty was to get ashore. I had a letter to the British Consul, but I had not sampled the kindliness of British Consuls as I had that of the Governors, and I did not know exactly what he would say. “I wonder if there is an hotel,” I said doubtfully to the captain, and he sniffed.
“You couldn't stay in a negro hotel.”
I sent off my letter to the Consul and waited, and a little cloud came up out of the sea and spread over all the sky, and it rained, and it rained, and it rained, and it rained. The sky was dark and forbidding, the sea was leaden-coloured, the waves just tipped with angry, white foam, and the green hills were blotted out, the decks were awash, the awnings were sopping and wept coaly tears, and the captain said as if that settled it, “There, you can't possibly go ashore.” But I was by no means sure. Still there was no letter from His Majesty's Consul. Morning passed on to afternoon, and afternoon waned towards evening and still there was no letter. A ship on a pouring wet day is just about as uncomfortable a place as one can be in, but still I was inclined to accept the captain's opinion that Monrovia without someone to act as guide, philosopher, and friend would be a worse place.
No letter, and the captain came along.
“I must get away before dark.” He spoke as if that settled it, and he was right, but not the way he expected.
I felt I simply could not go without seeing this place, and I decided. “Then I'll go ashore.”
“You can't possibly.”
“Oh yes, I can. They won't eat me.”
I don't know though that I was quite comfortable as I was dropped over the side in a mammy chair into a surf boat that was half-full of water. The rain had stopped at last but everything in that boat was wet, and my gear made a splash as it was dropped down.
My soldier brother had lent me his camp-kit for the expedition.
“Can't possibly hurt it,” said he good-naturedly. “It's been through two campaigns. If you spoil it, it shall be my contribution; but you won't.”
I accepted, but I thought as I sat on the bedding-roll at the bottom of that very wet boat, with my head not coming above the gunwale, that he did not know Africa. I hoped I should not have to sleep on that bed that night, because it was borne in on me it would be more than damp.
Luckily I didn't. We crossed the bar, and the ragged, half-naked Kroo boys, than whom there are surely no better boatmen in the world, begged a dash, “because we no splash you,” as if a bucket or two of salt water would have made much difference, and I gave it and was so absorbed in the wonder as to what was to become of me that I gave hardly any heed to the shore that was approaching. When I did it was to notice that all the beauty I had seen from the deck was vanishing. Man's handiwork was tumble-down, dirty, dilapidated, unfinished. I stepped from the boat to a narrow causeway of stone; it is difficult to get out of a boat five feet deep with grace, more especially when your skirts are sopping, and I stepped from the causeway, it was not above a foot wide, into yellow mud, and saw I was surrounded by dilapidated buildings such as one might see in any poor, penniless little port. There were negroes in all stages of rags round me, and then out from amongst them stepped a white man, a neat and spick-and-span white man with soldier written all over him, the soldier of the new type, learned, thoughtful, well-read.
“Mrs Gaunt?”
I said “Yes” with a little gasp, because his immaculate spruceness made me feel I was too much in keeping with the buildings and the people around us.
“Did you get my note? I am sorry I only got yours a couple of hours ago.”
Oh, I understood by now that in Africa it is impossible for a note to reach its destination quickly, and I said so, and he went on to arrange for my accommodation.
“If you will stay at the Consulate I will be delighted, but it is a mile and a half from the town, and I have no wife; or there is a boarding-house in the town, not too uncomfortable I am told.”
There could be but one answer to that. Of course I accepted his invitation; there are but few conventions and no Mrs Grundy in out-of-the-way spots, thank heaven, and in the growing darkness we set off for the Consulate. It was broken to me regretfully that I would have to walk; there is no other means of progression in the negro republic.
Such a walk as it was. Never have I met such a road. It was steep, and it was rough, and it was stony as a mountain torrent; now after the rain it was wet and slippery and the branches of the overhanging trees showered us with water as we passed. It was lonely as a forest path in Ashanti, and the jungle was thick on either hand, the night birds cried, the birds that loved the sun made sleepy noises, the ceaseless insects roused to activity by the rain made the darkness shrill with their clamour, and there were mysterious rustlings as small animals forced their way through the bush or fled before us. My host offered me his stick to pull me over the steepest rocks, and also supplied the interesting information that round the Consulate the deer came down to lick the salt from the rocks, and the panthers, tigers they called them there, came down and killed the deer. I made a mental note not to walk in that path by night; indeed I made a note not to walk in it ever again, as drenched and dripping with perspiration we emerged into a clearing and saw looming up before us a tropical bungalow and beyond the sea. It is an exquisite situation but is desperately lonely.
0108
My gear came on men's heads and the Consul's note was delivered to me in the bush. Neither he nor I understood why it had come by such a roundabout path. One of his servants also met us half-way with a lantern, and since I had heard by then about the “tigers” I confess to thinking it was a wise precaution.
The Consulate is a fine two-storied building with wide verandahs and a large hall where we generally sat, and that hall was very inadequately lighted by some excellent lamps. The Consul didn't understand them and the negro servants didn't understand them, and darkness was just visible and I determined as soon as I knew my host well enough to ask him to let me have a turn at his lamps. Such is the power of a little knowledge; when I left the Consulate it was lighted as it should be, but that first night we spent in a dim, religious light, and I felt I was going to enjoy myself hugely, for here at last was something new. The Gambia and Sierra Leone had been too much regulation Tropics; all that I had seen and done I had at least read of before, but this was something quite different. This had all the glamour of the unknown and the unexpected. I am bound to say that His Majesty's Consul did not look at things with the same eyes. He didn't like Liberia, and he said frankly that things might be unexpected in a measure but he always knew they would be unpleasant. But I went to bed that night with the feeling I was really entering into the land of romance.
Next morning I told my host I would go and see the town.
“But I shan't go by the short cut,” I added emphatically.
“What short cut?”
“The way we came last night.”
“That's not a short cut,” said he, and he smiled pitifully at my ignorance of what was before me. “That's the main road.”
And so it was. Afterwards I tried to photograph it, but in addition to the difficulty of getting an accurate picture of a steep slope, I had the misfortune to shake the camera, and so my most remarkable picture was spoiled. I give a picture of the road, but I always felt when I came to that part the worst was left behind. And yet on this road is the Liberian College where the youth of Liberia, male and female, are educated. It is a big building built of brick and corrugated iron, in a style that seems wholly unsuited to the Liberian climate, though viewed from a distance it looks imposing in its setting of greenery. They teach the children algebra and euclid, or profess to do so—evil-tongued rumour has it that the majority of the Liberian women can neither read nor write—but to attain that, to them a useless edge, they have to scramble over without exception the very worst road I have ever met.
But the road only matches the rest of the place. Monrovia is not only an ill-kept town, it is an outrageously ill-kept town.
0112
Many towns have I seen in the world, many, many towns along this west coast of Africa, so I am in a position to compare, and never have I seen such hopelessly miserable places as Monrovia and the other smaller Liberian towns along the Coast. The streets look pretty enough in a photograph; they are pretty enough in reality because of the kindly hand of Nature and the tropical climate which makes vegetation grow up everywhere. There is no wheeled traffic, no possibility of getting about except on your own feet, and in consequence the roadways are generally knee-deep in weeds, with just a track meandering through them here and there, and between the roadway and the side walk is a rough gutter, or at least waterway, about two feet deep, and of uncertain width, usually hidden by the veiling weeds. Occasionally they have little gimcrack bridges apparently built of gin cases across these chasms, but, as a rule, if I could not jump as the wandering goats did, I had to make my way round, even though it involved a detour of at least a quarter of a mile.
And the houses in the streets were unlike the houses to be seen anywhere else on the West Coast, and, to my mind at least, are quite unsuited to a tropical climate. They are built of wood, brick, or, and this is the most common, of corrugated iron, are three or four stories high, steep and narrow, with high-pitched roofs, and narrow balconies, and many windows which are made with sashes after the fashion of more temperate climes. The Executive Mansion, as they call the official residence of the President, is perhaps as good a specimen as any and is in as good repair, though even it is woefully shabby, and the day I called there, for of course I paid my respects, clothes were drying on the weeds and grass of the roadway just in front of the main entrance. Two doors farther down was a tall, rather pretentious redbrick house which must have cost money to build, but the windows were broken and boarded up, and one end of the balcony was just a ragged fringe of torn and rotting wood. So desolate was the place I thought it must be deserted, but no. On looking up I saw that on the other end of the balcony were contentedly lolling a couple of half-dressed women and a man, naked to the waist, who were watching with curiosity the white woman strolling down the street.
A great deal of the Liberian's life must be spent on his balcony, for the houses must be very stuffy in such a climate, and they are by no means furnished suitably; of course it is entirely a matter of taste, but for West Africa I infinitely preferred the sanded, earthen floor of my friend the Jolloff pilot's wife to the blue Brussels-carpet on the drawing-room floor of the wife of the President of the Liberian republic. But, as I have said, this is a matter of taste, and I may be wrong. I know many houses in London, the furniture of which appears to me anything but suitable.
It was quaint to me, me an Australian with strong feelings on the question of colour, to be entertained by the President's wife, a kindly black lady in a purple dress and with a strong American accent. She had never been out of Africa, she told me, and she had great faith in the future of Liberia. The President had been to England twice. And the President's sad eyes seemed to say, though he hinted no such thing, that he did not share his wife's optimism.
0116
“We have lovely little homes up the river,” she said as she shifted the array of bibles and hymn-books that covered the centre-table in the drawingroom to make room for the tray on which was ginger-beer for my refreshment, “and if you will go up, we will make you very welcome.”
She would not let me take her photograph as I desired to do; possibly she had met the amateur photographer before and distrusted the species. I could not convince her I could produce a nice picture.
I never saw those “lovely little homes” either. They certainly were not to be found in my meaning of the words in Monrovia or any of the Coast towns, and up country I did not go; there was no way of doing so, save on my own feet, and I felt then I could not walk in such a hot climate. There may be such homes, I do not know, for between this good, kindly woman and me was the great unbridgeable gulf fixed, and our modes of thought were not the same. In judging things Liberian I try to remember that. Every day it was brought home to me.
The civilised black man, for instance, is often a great stickler for propriety, and I have known one who felt himself obliged to board up his front verandah because the white man who lived opposite was wont to stroll onhisbalcony in the early morning clad only in his pyjamas, and yet often passing along the street and looking up I saw men and women in the scantiest of attire lounging on their balconies doing nothing, unless they were thinking, which is doubtful.
Dress or want of dress, I find, strikes one curiously. I have times without number seen a black man working in a loin cloth or bathing as Nature made him, and not been conscious of anything wrong. He seemed fitly and suitably clad; he lacked nothing. But looking on those men in the balconies in only a pair of trousers, or women in a skirt pure and simple, among surroundings that to a certain extent spoke of civilisation, there was a wrong note struck. They were not so much barbaric as indecent. It was as if a corner of the veil of respectability had been lifted, the thin veneer of civilisation torn off, and you saw if you dared to look the possibilities that lie behind. I believed all the horrible stories of Vaudooism of America and the West Indies when I saw the naked chest and shoulders of a black man leaning over a balcony in Monrovia, and yet I have been only moved to friendliness when the fetish man of an Ashanti village, with greasy curls flying, with all his weird ornaments jingling, tom-toms beating, and excited people shouting, came dancing towards me and pranced round me with pointing fingers that I hope and believe meant a blessing. Can anyone tell me why this was? Was it because the fetish man was giving of his very best, while the half-civilised man was sinking back into barbarism and looking at the white woman gave her thoughts she would deeply have resented? Was it just an example of the thought-reading we are subconsciously doing every day and all day long without exactly realising it ourselves?
The people of Monrovia, there are over 4000 of them, seem always lounging and idling, and the place looks as if it were no one's business to knock in a nail or replace a board. It is falling into decay. It is not deserted, for the people are there, and presumably they live. They exist waiting for their houses to tumble about their ears. There is a market-place down in Waterside, the poorest, most miserable market-place on all the African coast. The road here, just close to the landing-place, is not made, but just trodden hard by the passing of many feet. Here and there the native rocks crop up, and no effort has been made to smooth them down. Above all, the stench is sickening, for the Coast negro, without the kindly, sometimes the stern guidance of the white man, is often intolerably dirty, and if my eyes did not recognise it, my nose would. In all the town, city they call it, there is not one garden or attempt at a garden. The houses are set wide enough apart; any fences that have been put up are as a rule broken-down, invariably in need of repair, and in between those houses is much wild growth. The scarlet hibiscus covers a broken fence; an oleander grows bushy and covered with pink roselike flowers; stately cocoa-nut palms, shapely mangoes are to be seen, and all over the streets and roadway in the month of January, I was there, as if it would veil man's neglect as far as possible, grew a creeping convolvulus with masses of pink cup-shaped flowers—in the morning hopeful and fresh and full of dew, in the evening wilted and shut up tightly as if they had given up the effort in hopeless despair. Never have I seen such a dreary, neglected town. It would be pitiful anywhere in the world. It is ten times more so here, where one feels that it marks the failure of a race, that it almost justifies the infamous traffic of our forefathers. It was all shoddy from the very beginning. It is now shoddy come to its inevitable end.
For all the great mark on the map, as I have said, the settlements at Monrovia do not extend more than thirty miles up the river; elsewhere the civilised negroes barely hold the sea-board. They are eternally at war with the tribesmen behind, and here in Monrovia I met half a dozen of the prisoners, dressed in rags, chained two and two with iron collars round their necks, and their guard, a blatant, self-satisfied person, was just about as ragged a scarecrow as they were. Not that the victory is by any means always to the Liberians, for a trader, an Englishman, who had been seeking fresh openings in the hinterland where no Liberian would dare to go, told me that though the tribes are not as a rule cannibals, they do make a practice of eating their best-hated enemies, and he had come across the hands and feet of not a few of the Liberian Mendi soldiery in pickle for future use.
To keep these tribesmen in check, the Liberian, who is essentially a man of peace—a slave—has been obliged to raise an army from the Mendis who inhabit the British protectorate to the west, and so he has laid upon himself a great burden. For, unfortunately, there is not always money in the treasury to satisfy this army of mercenaries when they get tired of taking out their pay in trade gin or tobacco. Poor Liberians, threatened with a double danger. If they have no soldiers the tribesmen within their borders eat them up, and if they have soldiers, war they must have, to provide an outlet for energies that otherwise might be misdirected.
I left my kind host with many regrets and Monrovia without any, and I went on board theChamawhich was to call at Grand Bassa and Cape Palmas, and if I did not intend to view them entirely from the ship's deck, at least I felt after my visit to Monrovia it would hardly be necessary for me to stay in either of these towns.
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They bear a strong family resemblance to the capital, only they are “more so.” The tribes see to it, I believe, that there is no communication with the capital except by sea, and the little communities with their pretensions to civilisation are far less ininteresting than the people of an Ashanti village who have seldom or never seen a white man.
I landed at Lower Buchanan, Grand Bassa, early one morning. The beach simply reeked of human occupancy. They do not trouble about sanitation in Liberia, and the town itself looked as if the houses had been set down promiscuously in the primeval bush. Perhaps there were more signs of wealth than in Monrovia, for I did see three cows and at least half a dozen hairy, razor-backed pigs on the track that was by courtesy the principal street, and it must require something to support all the churches.
I suppose it is the emotional character of the negro that makes him take so largely to religion, or rather, I think I may say, the observances of religion. The question of the missionaries is a vexed one, and on board theChamawas a missionary who made me think. She was a pretty young girl who had left home and father and mother and sisters and brothers and lover—ah, the lover was evidently hard where all had been hard—to minister to the spiritual needs of the people who dwelt behind Cape Palmas. She was sweetly ignorant of the world, of everything that did not apply to the little home in Canada that she had left with such reluctance, and was evidently immensely surprised to find the captain and officers of the ship kindly, honest gentlemen who treated her as tenderly and deferentially as they might have treated one of their own young sisters.
“I thought all sailors were bad men,” she said wonderingly. “I have always been led to believe they were bad.”
Now, what could such a nice, ignorant little girl as that teach the negro? And yet she had curiously hard ideas on some subjects. She talked about the missionary and his wife to whom she was going for five long years and to whom she was bringing out clothes for their baby.
“If it is alive,” she added naively.
“Oh, I hope it will live,” said I, the heathen who doubted the use of missionaries and all their works.
“Well, I don't know”—and the cynicism sat curiously on the sweet, young face—“poor little kiddie, perhaps it is better dead. What sort of a life could it have out there, and what sort of an upbringing? Its mother has other work to do.”
And I tried to show her that one white child was worth a thousand problematical souls of negroes, and I tried in vain.
But if ever I saw the wrong side of Christianity I saw it here in Liberia. Monrovia had many churches, all more or less unfinished, all more or less in decay, and here in Lower Buchanan three corrugated-iron churches within a stone's throw of one another constituted one of the chief features of the town. It was early on a Tuesday morning, the best time for work in a tropical climate, if work is going to be done at all. On the beach the Kroo boys were bringing from surf boats the piassava, the fibre that grows in the swamps and constitutes a large part of the Liberian export, but in Lower Buchanan itself the greater part of the inhabitants that I saw were in church. I entered that church.