72 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

four with safety, for in West Africa there are strict
Emits to the lightness of travel, as the story of Dr. Dv
a German botanist, suggests.

A week after I crossed the frontier Dr. D. died at
Ganta in the Central Province, a town which I
reached on February the fourteenth. His pathetic
and dignified death, which was obviously deliberate,
brought the world of Hitler, of Dachau and the con-
centrarion camps and Nazi self-righteousness even
into this corner of Africa. Dr. D. had had forty years*
experience of West Africa. Before the war he was
German Consul in Monrovia and an agent for the
Woermann Line, but he was already known at Ham-
burg University as a botanist. After the war he was
the first German to reopen business in the Republic,
but he failed, he left debts behind him, and the new
Hitler's Germany to which he returned was not
sympathetic to failure. He was seventy years old and
a ruined man, and after forty years on the Coast he
cannot have been at home among the swastika
banners of Berlin, the Sunday processions with drums
and bugles and bayonets under the Brandenburg
Gate, the demonstrations at the Tempelhof. He was
interested in tropical flowers, he wasn't interested in
who fired the Reichstag. Harvard University gave
him a little money to return to the Republic and
make a collection of botanical specimens in the
interior. He found Hitler's Germany well established
in Monrovia; the two enthusiastic Nazis there dis-
approved of Dr. D. Hearing a rumour that he would
be staying at the German Legation, they called on
the Consul-General to protest, so that in those last
days he was forced to find hospitality at an English