Читать книгу Alone in West Africa - Mary Gaunt - Страница 24

“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 on his balcony 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 the Chama which 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.