MISSION STATION
American doctor to examine the body. Dr. Harley
exonerated him and the priest was expelled from the
Republic. As for Dunbar, he had been made to
realise that whites were not only hypocritical in their
attitude to the Republic, they could be crooked in
their dealings with individuals.
The Secret Societies
That afternoon the doctor came in to talk about
the bush societies. His investigations were the only
enthusiasm he had kept after ten years, but he
wanted to be sure that my boys were out of the house.
I went and looked in the kitchen where they slept.
It was empty. Laminah was sitting in the shade of
the hospital looking sick. The doctor had drawn a
tooth of his in the morning: I had heard the painful
dog-like howls through the wooden wall: and now
he was afraid that he was going to die because the
gum still bled. He was too sophisticated to paint
himself with native medicine, but he had brought a
pot of cold cream with him from Freetown and was
smearing it all over his face and neck and scalp.
I am not an anthropologist and I cannot pretend
to remember very much of what Dr. Harley told me;
a pity, for no white man is closer to that particular
'lieart of darkness", the secret societies being more
firmly rooted in Liberia than in any other country on
the West Coast. The Government have put up the
feeblest of resistances: though Colonel Davis, so he
told me later, had court-martialled and shot fifty
members of the Leopard Society in a village near
Grand Bassa. Indeed, they could not properly resist