124 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Their doubts were justified, for I heard later that
when the President arrived, the chiefs, who had been
bribed or intimidated, had no complaints to make.
He was able to return as rapidly to Monrovia as he
had come. He said that everywhere the population
had been enthusiastic, but dances are easily arranged
and it is not much trouble to build triumphal arches
of greenery and sprinkle white powder. I never came
across a single native in the interior who had a good
word for the politicians in Monrovia. If they
preferred one ruler to another it was simply because
they were happier under one Commissioner than
another. Everywhere in the north I found myself
welcomed because I was a white, because they hoped
all the time that a white nation would take the
country over.

This attitude is unreasonable, but their minds do
not move on the level of reason. To accept a black
overlord offended some deep communal instinct
which was unaffected by the fact that under the
worst black Commissioner they had not suffered
what the natives in French West Africa had suffered
under white Commissioners. They did not take into
account at all from what they were saved by the
nominal nature of black rule. In that rough, un-
mapped country, if they were twenty miles from a
Commissioner's headquarters, they were fifty years
away. They were left alone to their devils and secret
societies and private terrors, to the paternal
oppression of their chiefs. They weren't interfered
with as they would certainly have been interfered
with in a white colony, and one was thankful for
their lack of education, when one compared them