Journey Without Maps

White men were not welcome in Liberia when Greene made it the object of his first journey outside Europe. Drawn by the seediness of a republic founded for released slaves, he travelled from Sierra Leone across the headwaters of several rivers and down to the coast at Grand Bassa.His originality lay in his gifts as a traveller. He had the foreign ear and eye for the strangeness of ordinary life and its ordinary crises' V. S. Pritchett In 1936 Graham Greene set off to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar West African republic founded for released slaves. Crossing the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast of Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, he came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by Western colonisation.