View of the World (13 page)

The village of the mask-carver was the cleanest ‘native' village I have ever seen in any part of the world, as well as being very much cleaner than the average village of southern Europe. Silver sand had been laid between the neatly woven huts, and there were receptacles into which litter – including even fallen leaves – had to be put. While I was there, a tremendous hullabaloo arose because a stranger from another village had relieved himself in a nearby plantation instead of taking the trouble to go to the proper latrine creek in the bush. This was an exceedingly grave offence by Liberian country standards. The man was haled before the town chief, and as he had no money and therefore couldn't be fined on
the spot, he was sentenced to ignominious expulsion from the village – a sentence which was carried out by a concourse of jeering children.

It was in this village too that I heard the eerie sound of the head woman bush-devil coming out of the sacred bush for a rare public appearance. We could hear the cries of her female attendants, first faint and then coming closer, as she came down the jungle path leading to the village, and a neighbour popped in to tell us that she was on her way to supervise the clearing of a creek by the women's society. Then something happened and she failed to appear. Perhaps she had been informed of the insalubrious presence of a stranger in the village, and we heard the warning cries of her attendants grow fainter again, and then stop. The men pretended to be relieved. The devil's attendants acted as female lectors, and administer mild beatings to anyone who happens to cross their path.

It was while I was in Liberia that an economic use in the modern scheme of things was found for the bush-devil, and the sophisticates of Monrovia were as happy as if they had hit upon a method of extracting cash from some previously discarded industrial by-product.

Liberia possesses two predominant flourishing industries: rubber, and the mining of the extremely high-grade iron ore. Business heads on the look-out for further sources of national income recently thought of the tourist trade, which has been the economic salvation of far less viable countries than Liberia, and there was some talk even of developing tourism as a third industry. Accordingly plans were laid, and in March this year Monrovia received its first visit from a cruising liner, the
Bergensfjord
, a luxury Norwegian ship carrying 350 passengers, most of whom appeared from the passenger list to be presidents of US banks and insurance companies, and their womenfolk.

Unfortunately the
Bergensfjord
docked on a Sunday, which in Monrovia is surrendered to a zealous nonconformist inactivity, the silence only disturbed by the chanting of hymns and the nostalgic quaver of harmoniums in mission halls. The town was shut up – ‘like a clam', as the
Listener
put it. Liberia's new industry was in danger of dying stillborn, when someone thought of the bush-devils, and a few fairly tame
and unimportant ones were hastily sent for. Even when the tourists finally landed, the situation was in the balance. Although they had already been given handbills describing the traditional Liberian entertainment that awaited them, they found their path barred by a large and determined matron in a picture hat who was determined to protect them from such pagan spectacles as they had been promised. When asked where the
devil-dancing
was to take place, she smiled indulgently and said, ‘In Liberia we do not dance on Sunday. We remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.' She would then recommend various places of interest which might be visited by taxi, such as the Capitol building, the lighthouse, the nearby Spriggs Payne airfield, and the Trinity Pro-cathedral.

Most of the passengers succeeded in escaping the clutches of this
well-intentioned
lady, and led by an organiser of the Bureau of Folklore in a jeep, they were taken in a taxi-caravan to the vacant lot behind a garage, where the dancing was to take place. There were half a dozen assorted devils in not very good masks and all-concealing mantles of raffia, and three little bare-breasted girls who had just finished their initiation and who, despite the presence of a mob of camera-brandishing tourists, were still plainly timid of the devils. It all went off very well. The little girls did a rapid, sprightly dance, and the devils whirled and somersaulted diabolically in their manes and skirts of flying raffia. When the dancers stopped, the tourists clapped enthusiastically. They lined the girls up, took close-up portraits of them with miniature cameras, asked them their ages, shook hands, and gave them silver coins.

Next morning the Liberian Press wallowed in its usual self-criticism. Hadn't the town's lights failed and the telephone system gone dead last time a distinguished party of foreigners headed by none other than Vice-President Nixon, had visited Monrovia? There were stories of tourists being carried off on enormous purposeless drives by taxi-drivers who didn't understand English and who charged them extortionate fares, and of others stuck in the City Hotel's Spanish lift. ‘We did it again,' wailed the
Listener
. ‘… Here was a chance to impress some of these big business tycoons and draw their capital here some day – but we did it again.'

In the paper's next edition, however, the situation wasn't looking
quite so black. The wife of a president of a Boston safe deposit and trust company was reported to have said she loved the country and wanted to come back. Liberia's latest industry had got off to a hesitant start perhaps, but at least it was on the move.

S
OON AFTER DAWN
the Goa shore lifts itself out of the sea, a horizon of purplish rocks and palms sabred by the dark sails of dhows. The Indian trippers who came aboard at Bombay, fashionably scarfed, in tweeds and corduroys, have accepted a mood of southern lassitude, and now gather in pyjama-clad groups to gaze respectfully shorewards. As the ship swings into a river-mouth, the shores close in, a red watch-tower on every headland, and baroque chapels gleaming through the greenery. Over the starboard-bow Nova Goa is painted brilliantly on the sky, a hubbub of colour with bells chiming in the churches built on its high places. A few minutes later the gangplank goes down, and as the passengers are released into the smiling apathy of the water-front, a flock of mynahs settle on the ship’s rigging. A line of golden omnibuses wait to bear the voyagers away to distant parts of the territory. The town itself is served by calashes of skeletal elegance, drawn by ponies who, even while dozing in the shafts, are unable to relax their straining posture. For foreigners there are taxis of reputable old Continental make, such as De Dion Bouton. They are decorated with brass-work and advertisements for German beer. Although their owners are usually Christians, Hindu gods, considered as more effective in purely routine matters of protection than, say, St Christopher, squat amongst the artificial flowers over the dashboards.

The quayside, which is really the heart of the town, is presided over by a statue, not – as one would have expected – of the great Albuquerque, founder of the colony, but of one José Custodio Faria, who, the inscription relates, ‘discovered the doctrine of hypnotic suggestion’. Faria, who is not
mentioned in short textbooks on the subject, is dressed in a wicked squire’s cloak of the Wuthering Heights period, and is shown strikingly in action. His subject – or victim – a young lady with a Grecian hairstyle, has been caught in the moment of failing, one trim foot in the air, left hip about to strike the ground, while Faria leans over her, fingers potently extended. Her expression is rapt; his intense, perhaps demoniacal. The background to this petrified drama is a row of shops and taverns, coloured like the wings of tropical birds and decorated with white plaster scrollwork, seemingly squeezed out of a tube.

A stranger, newly landed, is whisked quickly beyond the range of Faria’s ardent gaze. Ahead of him strides the porter, carrying on his shoulder the luggage which several small boys, running on either side, reach up to touch with their fingertips, as if it contained relics of
extraordinary
curative virtue. This attendance entitles them to claim a reward of one anna apiece. The baggage is then placed in the taxi, and the newcomer is driven to the Hotel Central, because it is a long way from the centre of the town and therefore a worthwhile taxi-fare. All this happens to be to the good. The Central is a precious repository of the atmosphere of Goa, and worthy of mention not on account of its advertised attraction – the small tiled dungeon, called a bathroom, available with every room – but of many less tangible charms unappreciated by the management. The fine old Portuguese colonial building growing naturally from the red earth of Goa is the colour of Spanish oxide, with its main façade covered in green tiles and a white make-believe balcony moulded on one wall. Coconuts and frangipani blossoms float down a jade-green stream at the back of the house, and burnished bright-eyed crows come hopping into the front rooms and try to fly away with the guests’ sunglasses. The beach is just across the road, and you can sit and watch Goans prowling about it in search of the nacreous discs with which they repair their old-fashioned mother-of-pearl windows. A cab-driver sleeps on his seat under a banyan tree just outside the dining-room, and when any guest wants to go, the waiter leans out and wakes him up by pulling the end of his whip.

Old Goa is eight miles away up the river. With the exception of five great churches standing impressively isolated in a jungle clearing, it is a
Carthaginian ruin. The Bom Jesus, vast and superbly baroque, houses the principal treasure of the old Portuguese Indies in the shape of the mortal remains of St Francis Xavier, the great evangelist who was not quite successful in the conversion of the Japanese. Owing to its
worldwide
reputation for miracle-working the mummified body has undergone a gradual decrease in size. Inspired by the example of a Pope who asked for an arm to be severed and sent to him,
*
pilgrims have succeeded, under an osculatory pretence, in gnawing small portions off the saintly anatomy and carrying them away in their mouths.
Sometimes
these were recovered, and the phalanx of a thumb is kept in a silver reliquary, which, after it has been wrapped in a protective cloth, is placed in the visitor’s hand.

St Francis Xavier, although of indisputable sanctity, was partly responsible for the bringing to Goa of the Inquisition, which he believed to be essential for the survival in the Indies both of the Portuguese influence and the Christian religion. In Goa, the Inquisition functioned as more of a political than a religious instrument; an efficient security service, supreme in jurisdiction and secret in procedure. Its prisoners, well fed and housed in two hundred hygienic cells, were subjected to constant psychological pressure in accordance with the most modern practice. The object was their reduction to an utter and unquestioning conformity to the discipline which the Portuguese, as a small community surrounded by vast hostile forces, believed necessary to their survival. In this the Inquisition was rarely unsuccessful, and during the century and a half of its active mission only about eight hundred and fifty of the incorrigibly independent were burned to death on the open space which has now become a football field. Even such a modest exercise of disciplinary action, however, was enough to shock the tolerant East, and render almost hopeless the task of evangelisation.

As a weapon of self-defence the Inquisition was less successful than others, such as the social equality offered to all converts to the Christian religion. This was a colony with no ‘Natives’. A Christian, whether of
Portuguese or of Indian birth, was a Goan, and distinctions soon became unthinkable in the face of the intermarriage policy, which has bequeathed to so many admirable P & O stewards the purposeful faces of conquistadors.

A mellowed authoritarianism still pervades the Goanese air and constitutes a provocation to the nascent democracy across the frontier. For example, everything printed in the local Marathi language – even a marriage invitation – must be submitted to the censor. Such pin-pricks set off explosions in the Indian Press. In January
Filmindia
– not the kind of journal, one would have thought, to bother itself with the problems of India’s remaining pockets of colonial rule – emitted almost a Hitlerian scream of exhausted patience, under the heading ‘Portuguese Pirates in India!’ This article, provoked by an order under which all Indian films shown in Goa must bear Portuguese subtitles, began by the declaration that ‘a White man is always a nuisance to the rest of the human race’, and went on to describe Goa as a place where a small crowd of white-skinned Portuguese rulers practised colonial imperialism over eight million coloured Indians. The truth is that one can walk about all day in Goa without seeing a white skin, and that the fifty per cent of the Goanese population which professes Christianity would exceedingly resent being described as Indians. There is in fact less colour prejudice in Goa than in India, and no Goanese paper would be allowed to publish the matrimonial advertisements for brides of fair or ‘Jewish’ colour which are a regular feature of the Indian Press. It is indeed unlikely that Goa would return to India in the event of a plebiscite being held. The Christian Goans would certainly vote to remain as they are, while many of the Hindus believe that they are better off economically under Portugal; for Goa shows few signs of the really appalling poverty common throughout the Indian countryside.

Certainly
Filmindia
was on firmer ground when it accused Goa of large-scale smuggling activities, although it did not add that this was done through the connivance of corrupt Indian frontier officials. Across the border flows a torrent rather than a stream of those things for which the hunger of the East is insatiable: fountain-pens, watches, and
patent medicines. A more important traffic is that of gold, carried not in lorries but in the bodies of the smugglers themselves, and whole human caravans, thus strangely burdened, are regularly marshalled for the trek across the frontier. Herein lies the source of Goa’s present prosperity, and on the strength of it half a street of delightful old buildings has been torn down and replaced by a miniature Karl Marxhof in grey cement, housing shops which sell nothing but American goods. Thus perishes the charm which poverty protected.

Goa’s other immediate commercial advantage depends on the fact that it is an alcoholic oasis in a largely dry subcontinent – a paradise for the Indian weekender who has been unable to wangle a doctor’s certificate classifying him as an addict and therefore entitled to a ration of costly liquor. In Goa he can sit and drink all day, so long as he succeeds in concealing obvious intoxication, for at the slightest disorder a policeman will appear, to conduct the celebrant to a cell, which is likely to be less well-arranged than those provided in the Inquisition building of old.

Goa prides itself on the sobriety of its pleasures. There are no popular amusements beyond an occasional snake-charming and a well-censored cinema show. Night-clubs do not exist. If you want to listen to music, you must go down to the water-front to the Café Praia, where Arabs, pious and withdrawn – who are supposed to do a little gold-smuggling on their own account – sit pulling at their hookahs and drinking
qishr
, a decoction made to their own specification from the husk of the coffee-bean. Sometimes they tell the owner of the place to switch off Radio Cairo, and begin to hum nasally and to pluck at the strings of archaic instruments. At ten o’clock a paternal authority sends all citizens home to bed by turning out the city lights. Obediently the Arabs get up from their table and grope their way down to their canoes. The dhows are anchored in mid-stream, with the silhouettes of ancient ships on decorative maps. Even if there is no moonlight you can follow the path of the canoe by a ripple of phosphorescence as the spoon-like oars stir the water, or by the declining notes of a flute.