It is a cold January morning in 1935. The steamboat, SSDavid Livingstone, slips out of Liverpool docks under a low grey sky on its standard cargo service to the west coast of Africa. Amongst the seven passengers listed in the manifest are two Greenes: H. G. Greene of 9 Woodstock Close, Oxford, is the writer, Graham Greene, with five novels and a reputation already under his belt at the age of thirty-one; the other, with a London address, is Graham’s first cousin, twenty-seven-year-old Barbara. Or maybe we should start in October 1934 at a Greene family wedding reception, when after a few glasses of champagne, Barbara impulsively agreed to go with Graham to Liberia, ‘wherever it was’. She looked it up inThe British Encyclopaedia. The only maps Graham Greene could find showed a few dotted lines for the ‘probable course of rivers’, and areas marked ‘jungle’, ‘wild animals’ and ‘cannibals’. Their other source of information, a British Government Blue Book, listed the endemic diseases: yellow fever, plague, elephantiasis, leprosy, yaws, malaria, hookworm, schistosomiasis, dysentery, smallpox; and swarming populations of rats.
Liberia was the first modern African republic. In the 1820s territory had been bought (sometimes at gunpoint) from the local rulers on what was known as the Grain Coast of Africa (after a pepper spice traded in the area) with American money so that freed slaves and the illegitimate children of slave owners couldgo back to Africa. This was a sort of conscience-salve and a way of disappearing a problem in one, for many were freed on condition they emigrate. From 1822–1861, 15,000 African Americans and 3,100 African Caribbeans were shipped in to form the new country, settling along the coast. In 1847 they attained independence but the ideal of freedom behind the name Liberia (for ‘Land of the Free’) would not resonate with the indigenous peoples of the interior. The Black minority settler elite who survived (disease meant many didn’t) monopolised the positions of power, imposed punitive tax collections, and clashed violently with the local tribes. In 1923 came reports of shipments of forced labour from Liberia to the Spanish colony of Fernando Po. In 1926, the American rubber company, Firestone, leased a million acres for latex production, and interesting to this story is that aNew York Times article on Firestone’s investment noted ‘Carrying forty or fifty pounds all day long on his head is said to be nothing to a native Liberian.’ Allegations of modern slavery began to filter out.
The story goes that Graham Greene wanted an African experience to probe into his own Heart of Darkness and he didn’t want to take a well-worn road. Indeed, Liberia in 1935 was
