64 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

sun; when they were young it soothed their head-
aches; 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 civilisation was worth;
looking back later to Kailahun from the villages of
the Republic, where civilisation stopped within fifty
miles of the coast, I could see no great difference.

'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, went 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 IJL.P. nor Communist Party urges
a strike in England because the platelayers in Sierra
Leone are paid sixpence a day without their food
Civilisation 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
white man came, 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 Commisioner really
know, shifted from district to district, picking up only
a few words of the language, dependent on an inter-
preter? Civilisation so far as Sierra Leone was con-
cerned was the railway to Pendembu, the increased
export of palm-nuts; civilisation, too, was Lever
Brothers and the price they controlled; civilisation
was the long bar in the Grand, the sixpenny wages.