A Journey Without Maps

Excerpts from a book I am reading:

Kailahun, in memory, has become a clean village, one of the cleanest we stayed in, but what impressed me at the time was the dirt and disease, the children with protuberant navels relieving themselves in the dust among the goats and chickens, the pock-marked women smeared about the face and legs and breasts with some white ointment they squeezed from a plant in the bus hand used for beauty and for medicine. They used it for smallpox, for fever, for toothache, for indigestion; for every ailment under their bleak sun; when they were young it soothed their headaches; when they were older they smeared it on their big bellies to bring them ease in their confinement; when they were dying it lay like a sediment of salt on their dried-up breasts and in their pitted thighs. Here you could measure what civilization was worth; looking back later to Kailahun from the villages of the [Liberian] Republic, where civilization stopped within fifty miles of the Coast, I could see no greater difference.

This passage was published in 1936. Not much difference in 2005. Stunningly parallel in 2005. The saddest and most tragic thing about Liberia is the amount of loss it has experienced. It was (is) rich. It lost its entire infrastructure. Imagine within 15 years taking Toronto and turning it into...say... the small island in the Romblon, Philippines?

Another paragraph goes:
'Workers of the World Unite': I thought of the wide shallow slogans of political parties, as the thin bodies, every rib showing with dangling swollen elbows or pock-marked skin, when by me to the market; why should we pretend to talk in terms of the world when we mean only Europe or the white races? Neither ILP nor the Communist Party urges a strike in England because the platelayers in Sierra Leone are paid six-pence a day without their food. Civilization here remained exploitation; we had hardly, it seemed to me, improved the natives' lot at all, they were as worn out with fever as before the whiteman came, and we had introduced new diseases and weakened their resistance to the old, they still drank from polluted water and suffered from the same worms, they were still at the mercy of their chiefs, for what could a District Commissioner really know, shifted from district to district picking up only a few words of the language, dependent on an interpreter? Civilization so far as Sierra Leone was concerned was the railway to Pendembu, the increased export of palm-nuts; civilization too was the Lever Brothers and the price they controlled; civilization as we think of it, a civilization of Suffolk churches and Cotswold manors, of Crome and Vaughn......The noble savage no longer exists; perhaps he never existed, though in the very young (among the few who are not disfigured by navel hernia) you seem to see behind the present to something lovely, happy and un-enslaved, something like the girl who came up the hill that morning, apiece of bright cloth twisted above her hips, the sunlight falling between the palms on her dark hanging breasts, her great silver anklets, the yellow pot she carried on her head.

We are looking at the same scenery, Graham and I.