View of the World (12 page)

The examination of witnesses began with the routine question put by the commissioner, ‘Do you hear English?' – followed, if the witness did in
fact hear English by a second question, ‘You Christian man?' Three out of four of those appearing before the court were not Christian men, and in these cases Mr Williams ordered the administering of an oath by ‘carfoo' – a liquid concoction, or medicine, prepared by a witch-doctor, which although normally innocuous, is supposed to be fatal to the pagan perjurer. Although restrained in his manner at most times, Mr Williams seemed unable sometimes to control an outburst of genial contempt when he noticed a tendency on a witness's part to hang back at this moment of the oath-taking. ‘Come, drink carfoo and lie, so that you may die tonight,' was a typical invitation roared at a minor chief who showed some reluctance when the witches' brew was put into his hands. When a Christian witness avoided touching the Bible with his lips, the commissioner leapt to his feet and pushed the book into his face. ‘Come on, man. Kiss the holy book, unless you are determined to lie.'

Most of the civil cases arose out of what is known in Liberia as ‘woman palaver'. Mr Williams explained to me that no man of standing would have fewer than three wives, each having been purchased for the standard bride-price of forty dollars, paid to the girl's father. A rich man bought wives as an investment. They worked his land for him without expecting to be paid, and they produced valuable children into the bargain. The local paramount chief, he mentioned, had a hundred wives, each one decently housed in her separate hut in his compound. Unfortunately the tendency was for a man's wives to increase in number as he himself advanced in years, and – well – you knew what it was – the women sometimes found themselves with a fair amount of time on their hands. This meant that they were inclined to get into hot water, and although most possessors of large harems took a pretty civilised view of wives forming subsidiary
friendships
, there were a few narrow-minded and litigious husbands who went to court, particularly to sue for the return of the forty dollars paid, when a wife ran off with some other man. In dealing with these ‘woman palaver' cases, one of Mr Williams's chief difficulties was his evident distaste for coarse language. When a man complained that his wife refused to sleep with him, Mr Williams winced and put this blunt statement into the more elegant and evasive English of Monrovia. ‘Your husband alleges that you
refused to accord him the privilege of meeting with you,' was how he reworded this delicate circumstance, when cross-examining the wife. The only European to appear in court that day was the Italian overseer in charge of a gang of labourers working on a bridge-construction project nearby. His offence was that in dismissing one of his men for malingering he had referred in a burst of anger – as Italians will – to the man's wife, using at the same time a four-letter word. This was a grave matter indeed in a country where a European can be heavily fined and deported for calling a man a ‘nigger', and all work on the bridge stopped while the whole gang of workmen were brought to the court to testify. Mr Williams, after first ordering English-hearing women to leave the court, asked for the actual word complained of to be repeated. It was spoken in a stunned silence. The Italian spread his palms and smiled apologetically. One English word was like another to him. He genuinely didn't understand what the fuss was about. In the end Mr Williams read him a long lecture on vulgarity and let him off with a caution, and the Italian went away still mystified, shaking his head.

Shortly after this a woman was brought in by her husband, who charged her with infidelity. She had confessed to five lovers – or as Mr Williams put it, to granting intimate favours to five men other than her lawful husband – and in accordance with Liberian law the husband had been awarded damages of ten dollars against each man. The trouble was that he now claimed that the names of other lovers had been concealed. Witnesses and counter-witnesses were produced, there were charges of perjury, and it was quite clear that this had all the makings of a lengthy and endlessly complicated case, when the woman agreed to submit to trial by ordeal. With evident relief Mr Williams ordered this to take place next morning immediately after dawn.

I slept the night in the commissioner's house, and at the appointed hour next morning I went over to the local lock-up, outside which the trial was to be staged. I found the calabozo of Bgarnba to consist of a long thatched hut, on the veranda of which several female prisoners, faces plastered with white cosmetic clay, were reclining in hammocks, under the apathetic guard of a soldier of about sixteen years of age. A
witch-doctor – previously referred to by Mr Williams as ‘a mystical man' – had arrived, and was lighting a small fire of twigs. He was a
foxy-looking
old fellow dressed in a fairground mountebank's purple robe. Mr Williams was not present.

As soon as the fire was well alight, the mystical man produced from the folds of his robe a metal object like a large flattened spoon, engraved with Arabic characters, and put this to heat in the heart of the fire. This was to be a version of the ordeal by the burning iron. In another variant of this type of ordeal, a heated sabre is brought into contact with one of the limbs. Other ordeals in common use involve the insertion of small pebbles under the eyelids, or the thrusting of needles into the flesh.

A few minutes later the wronged husband and the errant wife came on the scene. Both had dressed very carefully for the occasion – the man in a sort of yellow toga and the girl in a bright cotton frock printed with a pineapple design. They were accompanied by the clerk of the court, who wore a sports blazer with a crest on the breast pocket, and had a pencil stuck in his thick, woolly hair. A young soldier carrying a rifle trailed behind them. No one spoke or showed the slightest interest in the preparations. Liberians, other than the citizens of Monrovia, are trained by their long and rigorous years of initiation in the bush to maintain an attitude of formal unconcern in the face of all such crises. Later, I discovered that the woman had not been held in custody overnight, and may have had the opportunity to visit the head of the local women's secret society, the Sande, then in session, who might have prepared her with some ‘bush-medicine' for what she had to face, or even have induced a protective hypnotic state.

Chairs were fetched, and the couple took their seats facing the fire, which was now burning briskly. They sat a few feet apart, stolidly oblivious of each other, like bored life-partners awaiting the serving of an uninspiring meal. The mystical man pulled out the iron, tested it with his spittle, and pushed it back into the fire. There was a short wait, and at a nod from the witch-doctor the girl put out her tongue. He bent over her and there was a faint sizzle. The witch-doctor went closer, peering at the girl's mouth like a conscientious dentist. He dabbed again with the
iron. Nothing moved in the girl's face. Her husband looked glumly into space. The witch-doctor picked up a mug that stood ready, containing water, handed it to the girl, who filled her mouth, rinsed the water round, spat it out, and thrust out her tongue again for inspection. The witch-doctor, the clerk and the soldier then examined it closely for condemnatory traces of burning. ‘Not guilty,' said the clerk in a flat voice. He took the pencil out of his hair, wrote something in a notebook, and the whole party, their boredom in no apparent way relieved, began to move off. Justice had been done.

The bush society which may well have taken a surreptitious hand in these proceedings is probably the feature of Liberian life which has most impressed – or appalled – foreigners who have visited the hinterland. African tribal life from the southern limits of the Sahara Desert to the borders of the Union of South Africa is dominated more or less by secret societies, but it is in Liberia, where European influence has been least felt, and the original fabric of tribal life therefore best preserved, that the secret societies are most strongly entrenched. There is a society for the men called the Poro, and one for the women, the Sande. These are in session alternately, each for several years. Every member of the tribe must enter the society and the prestige of the society is so great that, outside the control exercised by government officials, it is the
de facto
ruler of the country, with the grand-master of the society as a kind of undercover opposite number of the government-appointed district commissioner. When the women's society – the Sande – takes over from the Poro for its normal session of three years, actual power passes to the women. All major decisions relating to tribal life are decided by them, and it is customary for men to dress in symbolical homage as women, and in this guise to apply for admission to the Sande – which is of course refused.

Exact information about African secret societies is extremely difficult to obtain, even by anthropologists, but it is clear that their real purpose is to perpetuate the tribe's highly complex way of life, by the communal education of its youth, which at the same time is physically and mentally
prepared for the hard life of savannah and jungle. Both societies impose a Spartan, even terrifying, discipline on their initiates. The boys must in theory – even if the practice has fallen into disuse – be transformed into warriors, must learn to defend themselves against savage animals, to take part in successful raiding parties, and to frustrate the attacks of tribal enemies. To achieve this result they are subjected to a more than military discipline; starved, flogged, made to sleep in the rain, to take part in gladiatorial combats, attacked and wounded superficially by human beings disguised as wild beasts, finally ‘swallowed' by the totemic animal of the tribe, after which they are ‘reborn' – in theory with no memory of their past lives – as fully initiated tribal members. The training of the girls is less arduous, but may be even more painful since it includes processes of beautifying by cicatrising, tattooing, and sometimes actually carving the flesh with knives, and finally that scourge of nearly all African women: clitoridectomy – performed with crude surgery, and without anaesthetics.

All the African races seem to have decided that only supernatural sanctions can induce human beings to submit to such a course of
self-improvement
: so teachers in the bush schools are masked and regarded by their pupils as spirits. These are the celebrated ‘bush-devils' of Liberia, who vary in their importance according to their function, and who are presided over by a kind of super-devil who is a combination of
headmaster
, sergeant-major and ghost – as well sometimes as judge, and even executioner – and who projects a power so devastating that merely to catch sight of him as he walks in the moonlight is death to an African. Not all this aroma of terror is consciously a disciplinary device. The devils, who are high-ranking members of the bush society, are believed by adepts to be controlled at certain times by powerful spirits, including the tribal ancestors – a belief which may well be shared by the devils themselves. Anthropologists in neighbouring French Guinea, where such aspects of tribal life are more easily observed than in Liberia, believe that masked dancers often pass into a kind of trance, on ceremonial occasions – or sometimes as soon as they put on their masks, which in themselves are supposed to possess a kind of separate life, and to require ‘feeding' with blood.

Remarkably enough, the life of the bush-school is popular with
Africans
. After initiation – which corresponds to graduation in the West – people frequently return to the bush on a voluntary basis to take further courses, and success in these ‘postgraduate courses' is recognised as a stepping-stone to advancement in the hierarchy of the secret societies, and carries with it at the same time much social prestige.

African art is seen at its best in the production of cult objects and masks for the Poro and the Sande, and Liberia is one of the last strongholds of vigorous, untainted African art. As the masks worn by the principal bush-devils possess a kind of sanctity, it is not easy for a foreigner even to inspect one, let alone purchase one. The men who carve the sacred masks – who are usually high-ranking adepts of the Poro – say that they do so only when under the influence of an inspirational dream. While I was staying in one of the villages in the bush with an American anthropologist I shall call Warren, the local tribe's best carver dropped in to pay one of the formal calls which are a part of the complex social ritual of African village life. The carver came in smiling, shook hands, with the characteristic Liberian snap of thumb and finger, accepted a glass of cold beer, and picked up an illustrated book on African art that had just arrived from the United States. ‘Why you no come before, man?' Warren asked him. ‘I'm vexed with you because you no come.' The mask-carver said he hadn't been able to dream for weeks, and as his inspiration seemed to have dried up, he'd gone off to look for diamonds – a popular occupation at present in the area adjoining the Sierra Leone frontier. Warren was relieved. He was afraid that he had unwittingly offended the man in some way. The elaboration of Liberian tribal etiquette makes it quite bewildering to a white man, and although Africans will make intelligent allowances for a foreigner's ignorance of good manners, it is sometimes difficult to avoid giving offence.

The mask-carver turned over the pages of the book, giggling slightly, and Warren asked him what he found funny. It was the African's turn to tread warily now. He'd probably done a six-months course in the
bush-school
, learning, the hard way, how to avoid hurting people's feelings,
and he clearly didn't want to tell Warren that he found this collection of masterpieces chosen from the whole African continent pretty poor stuff. In the end Warren got him to express his objection – the
mask-carver
by the way had picked up a fair amount of English, working on the plantations. ‘I no see the use for these things.' Non-Liberian African art, in fact, was as extravagant – as grotesque even – to him, as African art as a whole tends to appear to the average untutored Westerner. He just couldn't see what purpose these distorted objects could serve. The idea of art for art's sake was completely foreign to him. He flipped over the pages of the book, making a well-bred effort to disguise his contempt. None of these objects could be used in his own tribal ceremonies, so they were useless – and ugly. He was like a die-hard admirer of representational painting asked to comment on the work of, say, Braque. The point was that his own work, which both Warren and I readily accepted as great African art, was as exaggerated and distorted in its own way as were all the rest in this book: except of course that all these diversions from purely representational portraiture had some quasi-sacred meaning for him. Warren had managed to buy a single mask from this man. He had made it to be worn by a woman leader of society, who for some reason had not taken delivery. The mask was kept out of sight, covered with a cloth. It was dangerous because it was sacrilegious to have it in the house, and it was destined for an American museum unless the Liberian Government suddenly decided to clamp down on the export of works of art – which this certainly was.