112 REPORT OF THE HARVARD AFRICAN EXPEDITION 
themselves make regular tours at different times of the year to the towns and 
villages of their districts. Regarding some of these visits we have personal in- 
formation. On these tours the District Commissioner is accompanied by a 
large retinue consisting of women attendants and servants, and sometimes of 
a few soldiers preceded by drummers or men who toss knives into the air as the 
approach to the village is made. The District Commissioner is carried in a 
chair suspended from poles on the shoulders of porters, who work in relays of 
eight. 
Official regulations require the natives of the hinterland to furnish porters 
for the government. The Commissioner General and the Major commanding 
the frontier force are each entitled to thirty-two couriers, a District Commissioner 
and a Paramount Chief may each have sixteen.!. The porters receive no pay. 
Sixteen porters are all that the District Commissioner needs to carry his chair 
from one village to the next. After these visits the towns or villages are fre- 
quently left in at least temporary destitution, for apparently almost everything 
of value is taken away. Goats, poultry and other food supplies, the few animal 
skins or articles of native manufacture in the town, and sometimes even the 
young or more attractive girls disappear. There is no redress for the extortion; 
to avoid it villages are sometimes abandoned and groups of natives sometimes 
abscond across the border not always to return. This practice of raiding by the 
District Commissioners, however, has become more or less known. In 1926 the 
Liberian Legislature made an investigation in which two aboriginal native com- 
missioners (not Americo-Liberian) were concerned. It disclosed the fact ‘‘that 
in the name of providing entertainment for the President who was making a 
tour of the hinterland’’ several native Commissioners had collected from the 
natives without payment about two hundred goats, five hundred and eighty-five 
hampers of rice, forty tins of palm oil, four hundred chickens and other articles 
of food, to the total value of $1600. Although the President found it impossible 
to visit the area, the Commissioners kept the food. After the investigation the 
House of Representatives passed a resolution asking that the salary of one of the 
aboriginal commissioners be withheld until he returned the articles to the govern- 
ment, and that the other commissioner be dismissed. Obviously, however, it is 
exceptional to make any excuse, such as a possible visit of the President, for 
such raids upon the villages. 
Attention has been drawn to the fact that the District Commissioner is re- 
quired to encourage the people to commence farming and to see to it that no 
public or private work interferes with farm work. According to the statements 
of natives In some districts in the interior, the farms in the vicinity of the govern- 
ment compound occupied by the District Commissioner, are government farms 
or farms appropriated by the government. In any case, the produce from them, 
notably rice, is requisitioned by the government or by the District Commissioner, 
and is threshed within the government enclosure of the district by women who 
work during the threshing season approximately from sunrise to sunset, under 
the direction of soldiers, members of the Liberian frontier foree. The women 
1 Departmental Regulations, Liberia (1923). 
