View of the World (10 page)

The last sentiment was applauded by several of the regulars, and then, perhaps remembering the shocking spectacle of a condemned dog eating
good meat that it would never have time to digest, Pepa was struck by an idea. Perhaps, after all, it is because the foreigners never see the misery of the children. Perhaps we should tell our children to go and weep where nervous foreigners can see them.

O
N THE WHOLE LIBERIA
has had a poorish press. Back in the 'thirties Graham Greene gave the impression, in his travel book
Journey Without Maps
, that he found it a sad and sinister place. John Gunther, writing in 1955, summed it up as ‘odd, wacky, phenomenal, or even weird'. Lesser authorities in between have produced books with supercilious titles like
Top Hats and Tom Toms
, while some of us with tenacious memories can still recall the startled headlines in 1931 when a League of Nations committee published a report proving that slavers still hunted down their human prey in the Liberian hinterland. To me in the spring of 1957, Liberia still sounded potentially a traveller's collector's piece; so on my way home by slow stages from the Ghana independence celebrations, I decided to break my journey at Robertsfield airport and see something of the country.

It happened that I was seated in the plane next to the only other passenger getting off at Robertsfield, an American rubber man who had also read John Gunther's account: he spoke of what faced us with the kind of macabre relish sometimes found in old soldiers and world travellers. ‘If anything, Gunther soft-pedalled the situation,' he assured me. ‘And don't, by the way, run away with the idea that this place is a kind of American colony: they push us around just like anyone else. Step out of line and you pretty soon find yourself in gaol.' I asked the rubber man if he knew Monrovia well, but he said no, they had a pretty comfortable set-up on the plantation and he'd only been down there once or twice. And that reminded him, we should be fingerprinted at the airfield. They would take our passports away, and we should have to go to the police
headquarters in Monrovia to get them back. As a final warning, he recommended me to keep out of arguments with Liberian officials and to submit with good grace to the going-over that awaited us in the customs.

These predictions proved to be ill-founded. It was an hour before dawn when we touched down. The immigration officer, yawning, stamped our passports wordlessly and disappeared as if dematerialised. The customs man put his mark on our bags and waved us away. A moment later my American friend, claimed by a colleague with a waiting car, was borne off to the security of his comfortable set-up, and I was left alone in the dimly lit customs shed until a boy of about fourteen appeared and offered to show me where I could get what he called ‘morning chop'. There was a wait of three hours before the daily DC
₃
plane took off for Spriggs Payne airfield, Monrovia. So I went with him. We walked about a hundred yards before reaching a long building raised on piles, looking like an Indonesian long-house, which the boy said was the airport hotel. Here, he said, I should have to leave my luggage, which it was forbidden to take to the restaurant. I was suspicious of what seemed to me a possible manoeuvre to dispossess me, but, before I could argue, a zombie came out of the hotel, took my bags from the boy, went in, and shut the door. The restaurant was a little farther on: a chink of light showing in the black shutters of the forest. The boy pointed it out and told me that he would come and fetch me when it was light. He shook hands with me and went off. At the time, this perfunctory service struck me as peculiar; but after I had been in Liberia a few days I realised that small boys preferred not to walk about by themselves in the dark.

The only other occupants of the restaurant made up a conspiratorial group, muttering in Spanish at a nearby table. I was served an
American-style
breakfast by a taciturn waiter. While I was busy with this, a young Liberian in a flowered shirt wearing a snub-nosed gangster's pistol in a shoulder holster came in and gave me a quick, power-saturated,
policeman's
stare. The muttering Spaniards looked up hopefully. I paid one dollar and twenty-five cents, and went outside again. Dawn was rising in total silence like grey smoke among the trees. A thick coverlet of mist lay along the low roofs of the airport buildings. There was a pharmaceutical
smell coming out of the forest like the odour of dried-up gums, medicinal roots and benzoin. The air was flabby as if breathed in through a mask holding the moist warmth of one's last exhalation. I could see the boy squatting distantly by the door of the airport hotel, waiting for the daylight, to cross the no-man's-land between us.

It was a fifteen-minute flip in the DC3 across forty miles of swamp to reach Spriggs Payne airfield, on the outskirts of Monrovia. From the air, the capital looked gay and dilapidated like a Caribbean banana port. It was crowded on to a peninsula outlined in yellow beach, with a hard white line of surf on the Atlantic side. The cheerful mossy green of the bush came unbroken right up to the neck of the peninsula. There were big ships in port, and as the plane came down you could see a few vultures drift past over the rooftops and the tangle of traffic in the central streets.

Visitors to Monrovia have complained that it is short of public transport, that the telephone system is uncertain, that there are regular breakdowns in the basic services, that most of the streets are unpaved, and that until recently the appropriation for brass bands exceeded that for public health. On the whole they have been stolidly impervious to the city's faded charm and its colour. The ex-slaves who were the original settlers here built Monrovia in the time-improved image they carried in their minds of the American South. They built with a touching and preposterous affection for Greek columns, porticoes, pilasters and decorative staircases; and a century of Liberian sun and rain has reduced their creations to splendidly theatrical shacks. The bright, slapped-on paint no longer serves to keep up pretences, although Van Gogh would have been in his element here among all the sun-tamed reds and blues and browns. There is a carnival cheerfulness about all the sagging,
multicoloured
façades beneath which the citizens of Monrovia promenade with the senatorial dignity of a people whose ancestors have carried burdens on their heads in a hot country. It was Monrovia that taught me the beauty and the interest of corrugated iron as a building material, when suitably painted, with its rhythmical troughs of shade. And in Monrovia it is in lavish use.

By night, especially if there is moonlight to put back a little of the colour, the effect is strikingly romantic. The city becomes fragile, its buildings cracked and seamed with the pale internal light of Hallowe'en candles. There are visions of interiors crammed with Victoriana, and walls hung with holy pictures and framed diplomas. As the Liberians, although shy, are polite and sociable, one is continually greeted by a soft guttural ‘How-do-you-do?' spoken by an invisible watcher behind a shutter. A little music is spun out thinly into the night from aged
gramophones
playing in barbers' shops: ‘Bubbles', ‘Alice Where Art Thou?' … Cadillacs, festooned with fairground illumination and bearing their
dark-skinned
grandes dames and white-tied cavaliers, swish over the snow-soft laterite dust of the streets. A congregation of silent worshippers collects outside the Mosque – a yellow building with its walls edged with broken lager bottles, possessing a minaret like a fat section of drain-piping. Here, where the Faithful have cleared a space, they spread their personal
prayer-rugs
on a small oasis of clean white sand amid the urban debris. If it is Sunday there will be the sound of ecstatic hymn-singing from the direction of many nonconformist Houses of Worship. Every night at about ten the town's
belles de nuit
begin to lurk in the neighbourhood of the cinemas, where the last performances are coming to an end. They are dressed in the style introduced by the missionaries of the last century: blouses with leg-of-mutton sleeves, voluminous frilled skirts, honest calico underclothing – it is said – and they carry parasols.

It is by day that you notice the squalor bred from the problem of the relative indestructibility of modern waste. At Byblos and at Sidon the domestic debris of a thousand years may be compressed into a yard of dust. In Monrovia there are towering middens of imperishable rubbish; of iron, rubber and plastic that are the legacy of barely two generations. Most Monrovian houses are raised on piles, and the space under each house serves for the concealment of old engine blocks, back axles, radiators and batteries. In the gardens you sometimes see one
car-chassis
piled upon another, their members entwined with flowering convolvulus and transfixed by the saplings of self-sown tropical fruit
trees. Almost every side-street is littered with abandoned vehicles, many of them recent models which may at first have been immobilised by some small mechanical failure, but then subjected to nightly piracy for spare parts until only the bare bones have remained. The citizens of Monrovia have not yet learned to clear up their debris as they go along. Even the fragments of basic rock blasted out over a hundred years ago to level the ground for the original buildings are still left just as they fell.

Old prints of Monrovia suggest that basically the town has changed little in its appearance from the days when over a century ago the first settlers ventured to leave their tiny stronghold on Providence Island in the Mesurado River estuary and establish themselves on the mainland. These pioneers were negro freedmen returned to Africa from the United States under a scheme promoted by a philanthropic body known as the
American
Colonization Society. Their first decade was precarious. They suffered from disease, semi-starvation, and the attacks of slavers who probably felt that the success of this experiment in resettlement might establish a disastrous precedent for the business. The first Liberians were supported entirely by shipments of provisions from the USA and protected by the guns of American and British warships. Their numbers were strengthened by further batches of Africans released from
slave-running
ships, but from 1822 – the date of the first settlement – until 1840, they were ruled by white governors appointed by the American society, and the country had no official existence in international law. In 1846 the first black president, Joseph Jenkin Roberts, prepared a constitution, and Great Britain recognised Liberia as an independent republic, although the USA did not follow until 1862. The first century of Liberia's existence has been called by Liberians ‘The Century of Survival'. Considerably more territory than Liberia's present extent of 43,000 square miles was originally claimed by the settlers, but this, before the days of exact surveying, and despite the frowns of the USA, was constantly nibbled at by the adjacent British and French colonies.

It is said that the Liberian pioneers included many skilled tradesmen who were in fact responsible for the building of Monrovia. This spadework
accomplished, later generations seem to have been content to relax. A social order recalling that of the American plantations soon developed, with the freed slaves and their descendants playing the part of
pseudo-aristocratic
and leisure-loving masters, leaving all manual work to be done by such native Liberians as could be induced or compelled to do it. An elaborate social ritual was built up, from which Liberia has never fully recovered, and which sometimes seems to the foreign eye to achieve the opposite of the dignity at which it aims. All professions fell into social disrepute except those of the law, politics and diplomacy. Liberians developed into a race of astute politicians, but there were no native craftsmen, doctors, technicians, engineers – and there are few even today. In the meanwhile the hinterland, occupied by its twenty-odd tribes, remained roadless and neglected, and a concealed oppression of native Liberians by their African brothers returned from servitude gradually developed, until it was fully exposed by the League of Nations committee in 1931, with the ensuing world-wide scandal. The fact still remains that in spite of all reforms that have since been carried out, Liberia has been, and remains in practice, a species of colony in which about two million tribal Africans are governed by a minority of 150,000 English-speaking Americo-Liberians from which they are totally separated by barriers of race, religion, language and way of life.

At the present time there is a drive towards the integration of the tribal people into what is called ‘the social life of the nation'. This unification policy is a favourite enterprise of President Tubman, Liberia's eighteenth president and probably the most able and energetic figure ever to appear on the Liberian political scene. President William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman performs the considerable feat of leading a parliamentary democracy in which no official opposition is permitted to exist. The president was elected in 1943 to serve a term of eight years, re-elected in 1951 for a second term of four years, and in 1955 once again (although he was reluctant, the
Liberian Year Book
informs us) for a further four-year term. The national jubilation at the enormous majority obtained by the president in 1955 was marred by an attempt on his life. Since this occurrence the official opposition has ceased to
exist, its members having withdrawn into exile, died suddenly, or been converted with equal suddenness to the policies of the True Whig Party of which His Excellency is the leader. It is said that President Tubman, in spite of the geniality and exuberance of his character, is resentful of criticism. When the official opposition crumbled and fell, such journalistic mouthpieces of divergent public opinion as the
Friend
and the
Independent
also collapsed. The year book tells us that they were suppressed as ‘irresponsible'. The two remaining newspapers, the
Listener
and the
Liberian Age
, wholeheartedly support the president's point of view. With the object of emphasising the unanimity of the country's acclaim for the president, these papers sometimes publish eulogistic tributes from ex-opponents newly released from prison. At odd times an appreciation in poetic form may be slipped into their pages. Here is an example from a recent
Liberian Age
, which in its complete form runs to eight happy verses: