Into the Greene terrain

LITERARY FOOTSTEPS

For Graham Greene, travel was the driver, the device which framed the greatest work of a great writer. From a childhood home in the historic but forgettable English market town of Berkhamsted, he journeyed widely — from Mexico to Vietnam, Vienna to Havana, Haiti to the Congo — forever mining literary material.

But, his most important journey never warranted a novel and never made it to the silver screen. The trip was to an African backwater, and, in an appropriately complex, Graham Greene-ish kind of way, it saved his life.

The year was 1935 and the destination for Greene, then just 30 years old, was Liberia, the troublesome African stepchild of America, a place so remote it had no roads and scant infrastructure.

The journey of 350 miles through thick tropical bush had to be completed almost entirely on foot, although, in that era of high colonialism, Greene was occasionally carried in a hammock by those among his 24 bearers who were not already weighed down with his metal bath, collapsible furniture, clay water filter and numerous cases of tinned steak-and-kidney pie, sausage and scotch.

Some of these everyday details I learned from Journey Without Maps, Greene’s non-fiction account of his trek. But its huge significance for him — both as a writer and as a man — became apparent to me only after I followed in his footsteps, retracing every blistering inch of his route, during a memorable two-month trip to West Africa in 2009.

I dodged aggressive jungle elephants, tripped on hallucinogens contained in vegetation they munched in the bush, and swung over rivers on bridges skillfully constructed by villagers from plaited ivy. With the exception of a few machete-wielding louts, I was welcomed throughout by Liberians happy to share their overlooked world.

Seventy-four years separated me from Greene’s trek, travelling without a modern version of his cook, butler or bearers, although I was comforted by a satellite-telephone and a stash of antibiotics in my rucksack. In walking the same jungle trails, getting mugged by the same fierce heat and sleeping in the same simple bush villages, I discovered why Greene wrote that his was “altogether a trip that altered life.”

It was in the village of Duogomai, a tiny nothing of a place up in Lofa County, the northernmost district of Liberia, that I met an elderly Liberian who remembered meeting Greene and told me of a collision between this most Catholic of writers and the African spirit world.

My feet were blistered and I had had a rotten night’s sleep in a hut infested with rats. Little wonder, I thought, that Greene described this place as “so horrible there was nothing else to do but drink.”

The village elder was called Mulbah Obelee. He leant heavily on a stick, his hair frosted with age and eyes rheumy with river blindness. But his recall of Graham Greene’s visit was crystal clear.

“I remember the day a white man came to our village,” he said. “He drank a lot of whisky. When he left, the bottle was taken by one of our people who put a spell in it, a message to the spirit world, and then took it out into the jungle and buried it.”
This sense of the spirit world dominates life in the region. So does an intense spirit to survive. Rural Liberia suffered heavily in waves of civil war between 1980 and 2003, yet I came across scores of communities where people were determined to rebuild a life.

War had kept them on the same treadmill they had trudged in Greene’s time, battling hunger, thirst and disease, living through a daily rhythm of backbreaking labour set by the transit of the sun. At first light, people head into the forest to clear space for planting rice, cassava or other crops; toward midday, when the sun is most cruel, they withdraw to shade; then they’re back in the fields until time comes to return home, to eat, sleep and prepare for the next day.

In these villages there is no reliable source of clean water, no modern farm equipment, no electricity. The sheer effort of survival consumes everything, and it showed me in part why the nation flatlines in spite of eight years of post-war international aid.

The strong current of traditional belief is what guides people through life. Christianity and Islam may be entrenched across Liberia, but pre-monotheistic traditions of ancestor worship, animism and spirits have greater power.

These spirits — whether good or evil — appear in the form of believers wearing masks, figures referred to as “devils.” The good ones teach life skills to young men, such as how to trap animals or survive in the bush. The bad ones thrive on fear and demand obedience on pain of death. Whether benign or malignant, both kinds of spirits reflect the values of a society that lives by an almost suffocating egalitarianism.

Survival in the hostile jungle demands conformity, shared values and dedication to the common cause. To stand out is to jeopardise, not enrich, the community. For centuries it has been the devils who enforce the rules, punish those who break them, and keep Liberian society — at least to my outsider’s eyes — fragile, atomistic and inward-looking.

Devils play a large part in Greene’s journey. Toward the end of his trek, a haggard, malnourished and troubled Greene fell ill. Delirious with fever, the religiously attuned writer became convinced he had been bewitched by angry devils.

Greene risked all on this African venture; a long-term depressive, he had toyed with suicide and quit his job as a sub-editor with the Times of London to struggle as a novelist. Leaving his wife and child in rented digs in Oxford, he scraped enough together to fund a voyage into his unknown in search of inspiration.

It did not come easily — Journey Without Maps is at best an apprenticeship piece. But something happened to Greene as he lay near death, flitting in and out of consciousness in the worst moments of his sickness. The trip changed forever his attitude to mortality and risk.

It was there, in the troubled hinterland of Liberia, that Greene later said he “learned to love life again.”