THE HOME FROM HOME 63

and he hoped to win the approval of that great
African scholar). The thesis was an end, but the
collection of material for the thesis had no end. The
thesis was as evasive as the Castle in Kafka's religious
parable.

' We met him again in the long flat village. The
chiefs new house stood up above the huts, an absurd
concrete skyscraper with row on row of stained-glass
windows not made to open; in one corner, tucked
away, an unpainted door and a flight of splintery
steps. This was the house of Momno Kpanyan, one
of the richest chiefs in the Protectorate. In the market
we got small change; the penny was too large a sum
for marketing, and the currency most in use was
irons. Their price varied; one could speculate in
irons: the rate that day was twenty for fourpence,
They were flat strips of iron about fourteen inches
long, like blunt arrows; the points must be un-
damaged and the tails unchipped (this was as good
a way as a milled edge to ensure that the currency
was not debased); men were coming in to the market
with bundles of several hundred irons on their
heads.

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 bush and used for beauty and for medicine.
They used it for smallpox, for fever, for toothache,
for indigestion; for every ailment under their bleak