Cape Palmas is a rocky headland at the southeastern corner of Liberia, with kilometres of gold sand either side and a town of roofless mansions above. Harper's grandest houses stand open to the sky: verandahs sagging, staircases climbing into nothing, trees pushing up through the floors of Tubman's clifftop mansion. Squatters live in some of them and goats in others. The streets you are walking are what is left of Americo-Liberian Maryland, a settler republic that lasted three years before Liberia absorbed it, and of the ruling class that outlived it. The Grebo of this coast carve masks whose eyes stick out as plain cylinders, with no sockets at all. Picasso owned two, and what he took from them — that a mask need not copy a face but can stand for one in signs — went into his sheet-metal Guitar of 1912.
At weekends the whole of Harper goes into the shallows at Change Beach, hundreds of people wading and ducking the surf together in bright clothes. This is the water the town trusts, the social centre of the coast rather than a resort strip. By dusk it has emptied out: the water goes coppery, the moored canoes show only as outlines, and children stand knee-deep watching. At the working end of the beach, getting a loaded dugout past the surf takes a whole crew leaning on the hull, reading the sets and running the boat out hard on the gap. It is heavy, practised work repeated every dawn, and the crews are rarely sorry to have your shoulders in it. Further along, boats sit upended on blocks while men work fresh planks into the tarred timber, out in the open, and you are part of the audience. Out at the tip the ground turns from sand to hard dark rock under your feet, the swell arrives from two directions at once, and the old lighthouse stands over the spray. Every hull hauled up on that sand flies its own flag and carries a name lettered across the bow: a motto, a football club, a line of scripture.