Charlie the Snakeman : Old Trade Creeps On in Liberia Bush

It was midnight on a moonless night and Charlie the Snakeman was doing business. He sat in a hut on the edge of a sagging bed, sweat glistening on his folded flesh. Two candles, held upright by molten wax, burned on the table before him. Intent dark faces, just in from the bush, peered at him from across the table’s lighted divide, waiting expectantly for Charlie’s appraisal of the goods.

Meanwhile, the goods crawled. The scorpions were coming out of the basket. The medium-sized ones were as big around as Charlie’s thumb. Charlie’s thumb, like the rest of Charlie, is not dainty. The scorpions looked as if they had crawled out of a can of old motor oil, their pincers reflecting nasty points of light from the candles. Their tails, curled over their backs, carried a venomous stinger the size of a rose thorn.

‘Small’ Scorpions

Charlie the Snakeman, unimpressed, wheezed a column of cigarette smoke into the thickened air. Several scorpions were steadily making their way from the folds of a dirty rag toward the bare wrist of their putative owner. “Small,” was Charlie’s initial discouraging assessment. He took a hit from his jug of cane juice, shuddered, and asked, “How many you got?”

Charles D. Miller III, known widely in Liberia as Charlie the Snakeman, is a 35-year-old American from suburban Long Island who has been living and traveling in the wilds of this West African nation for the last nine years. He made his first trip to Africa when he was 16 years old and is one of those sorts of people that Africa seems peculiarly to attract and then hold forever in its grip. He has a degree in anthropology from Yale University, a houseful of some of the world’s most venomous snakes and a collection of African art that is worth . . . well, he really wouldn’t want to say.

Art Collection

The snakes are a sort of sideline, really, to Miller’s real work, which is his art collection, his study of Liberian secret societies and simply living in Africa among all this exotica, which, in fact, is an end in itself.

Although Miller lives on the outskirts of Monrovia, Liberia’s capital on the coast, his adopted village is Gbonwea, the homeland of the Dan tribe, a hard day’s journey to the interior hills of Nimba County, near the junction of the Liberia, Guinea and Ivory Coast borders. There he travels several times a year, passing mile upon mile of old unworked rubber plantations and stopping at a dozen points along the way to chat up his contacts and friends, picking up news, messages and gossip.

It is the same country that British writer Graham Greene wrote about in a 1936 book called “Journey Without Maps,” and although maps do exist now, the country has changed remarkably little since those days. Once past the paved road, the enveloping bush, thick as any in Africa, pushes in with its deep stillness, its brooding light and silent coiling blackwater creeks. Parts of the forest give off the deathly smell of rotting flesh, an odor peculiar to a parasitic vine that clings to the trees. However logical the explanation (there could hardly be that much death in the bush), the evocation of decay amid the bursting foliage is appropriate to a setting where snakes seem as plentiful as birds.

It remains a land of juju, of witch doctors, of secret societies devoted to magic arts whose rumored power is accepted as no less tangible than the forest. Reports of human sacrifice persist to this day in Liberia, and although no one in recent years claims to have seen one--and of course they have been outlawed for a century or more--no one who lives deep in Nimba County, and who will speak frankly, will say with certainty that they have altogether stopped.

Such occurrences, if or when they happen, are said to be the work of “heartmen”--so called because they remove the vital organs from the bodies of their victims. (Last month, university students in Sinoe County complained to the government of a “rash of ritualistic killings,” which they said had become “more numerous and more daring.” They listed 10 cases of murder-by-mutilation over the last nine years.)

“Heartmen” remain one of the unutterable secrets of the bush. But the term zoe is the more benign name usually applied to the shamans, witch doctors and herbalist healers whose influence remains powerful in rural Liberia. At least figuratively, Gbonwea sits at the heart of this influence. John Bartuah, a Nimba County politician, regards the people of Gbonwea as especially “difficult and disrespectful” because they have a reputation for possessing so many zoes among their population, which numbers fewer than 500.

Gbonweans are believers in the old ways. They still maintain the “bush schools” as a rite of male passage from adolescence to adulthood and adhere to a respectful fear of devils, spirits and mysterious “medicine.” If ill fortune or calamity cannot be explained or remedied by the talent at hand, then higher talent is summoned from afar.

A few years ago, when lightning struck the village, a special zoe was invited from the Ivory Coast. Among his advice was a warning that Chiclets chewing gum should never again be brought into the village. The connection between chewing gum and electrical storms was never spelled out, but the advice seems to have been sound: Lightning has not struck Gbonwea since.

Charlie Miller’s immersion into all this was gradual, but now he walks the paths of Gbonwea more or less in the spirit of a visiting rich uncle, followed by crowds of children who assume, usually correctly, that where Charlie Miller is, interesting things are about to happen. His continual fussing about with cameras, bags of equipment, buckets full of scorpions and sacks full of cobras brings limitless fascination. His generosity with dimes and quarters and pouches of powdered tobacco doesn’t hurt, either.

Invariably, a bottle of whiskey is brought for the chief, who will rouse himself gratefully in the middle of the night to receive it. Blinking in the lantern light while his townsmen silently fill the front room of his house, he listens with grave formality while Charlie pays his respects, then responds with his own stately welcome. And, indeed, the countryside for miles around seems to respond to Miller’s arrival as a commercial shot in the arm.

The people of Gbonwea are poor, but not destitute. The town has a two-room schoolhouse, but no prospect of electricity. Most of the villagers are rice farmers, and although some children show signs of vitamin deficiency, severe hunger is mercifully absent. The heavy rains make for a reliable rice harvest, and the forest is laden with fruit. Chickens, sheep and goats, although reluctantly slaughtered, are plentiful. Cash, however, is hard to come by, which is one reason Charlie the Snakeman remains a welcome visitor.

The cash he brings is also the reason that normally rational men go skulking around the bush, often in the middle of the night, trying to catch green mambas, forest cobras, tree vipers and the hideous gaboon viper, a serpent of such breathtakingly obvious deadliness that some of the uninitiated have been known to faint straight away just looking at it.

“Nighttime is really the best time to go snake hunting,” Miller says. “That’s when a lot of them feed. I don’t go out a lot, but I like to keep my hand in.”

On a couple of occasions. Miller has had his hand in a little too far. He has been bitten twice, once by a green mamba and once by a gaboon viper. Both incidents, fortunately for him, occurred when he was at home in Monrovia and managed to get to a hospital to have the antivenin injected. He keeps the antivenin himself, but the excruciating pain and general disorientation following a bite make it almost impossible for the victim to inject the serum himself.

“They both damn near killed me,” Miller recalled. “The gaboon viper carries a combination blood and nerve poison. It had actually begun to digest my hand. There is an agent in the venom that breaks down the tissue and helps the snake digest his prey. It causes a very nasty necrosis of the flesh. I could barely use my hand for six months.”

The green mamba, equipped with a virulent nerve poison, generally affects the muscles of the diaphragm, causing the victim to stop breathing. In some parts of Africa, this snake is known as the “two-step mamba,” reflecting the belief that the victim cannot get far after the fangs go in. This sobriquet is apt in the case of a small animal, but an adult human might actually survive several hours--long enough to wish that the poison were faster acting.

Miller was lucky; the mamba probably did not hit him with its full load of venom or he would not be around to talk about it today.

Miller sells the snakes, when he can, sometimes to zoos, snake farms and private collectors--or, as he calls them, “nut cases”--in the United States and Europe. A gaboon viper may fetch $300, which seems cheap, considering. Moreover, it is not a growing market, as the snakes are plentiful and generally breed well in captivity. Why does he keep doing it? Well, he is known as Charlie the Snakeman, after all, and it’s not easy to give up the title. Besides, he notes, it gets a man out in the fresh air.

It takes a while after Charlie arrives in Gbonwea for things to get organized. He arrived there recently with a station wagon full of his usual supplies--buckets and cloth bags, scores of flashlight batteries for his snake hunters, nets, snake-handling sticks, notebooks, a jeweler’s loupe for examining diamonds (should any come his way) and sacks of heavy Liberian one- and five-dollar coins. He set up his base of operations in a small room of his host’s house amid a general hubbub that continued unabated for the next two days.

Runners were dispatched to surrounding villages, including the one where he had been made an official of the local snake society. (Its rituals aside, the snake society’s role in the community is doing good works--no more sinister, in its setting, than a typical American service club such as the Lions or Rotary.) Programs of traditional dancing and other ceremonies were arranged to be laid on for the Charlie and his guests, and each occasion required funds for paying the masked “devils” and their dancers to perform. Proper audiences were held with elders and powerful zoes of the area, accompanied by much handshaking and finger-snapping.

Forest Hums With Messages

Within hours, the forest is humming with relayed messages, their bearers arriving at Miller’s door in a steady stream, most of them requesting small sums to conclude some mission or other. A man on a motorbike is sent on an overnight journey to a mining camp to procure seven gallons of gasoline, necessary for trips around the countryside.

Meanwhile, the hallway outside Miller’s room fills up with ominous-looking cloth bags, most of them wriggling. Touched with a careless foot, a bag containing a gaboon viper emits a wheeze like a small furnace. Live chickens, brought for gift or barter, lie tethered and terrified among the bagged vipers.

But it is at night that Gbonwea’s activity comes to a head. The moon sets early, backlighting for an hour the towering and somehow timeless forest before it plunges into darkness. The frogs and insects begin their racket. Owls boom through the woods. And Miller, with 40 or more waiting sellers, does business. It goes on for hours.

He gradually reclines to a kind of emperor’s pose on the bed while he views the items proffered for sale--old carved dancing masks, blackened pottery, statues, wooden combs oiled by a generation of handling, all examined by the light of two candles in an atmosphere thickened by the smells of sweat, wood smoke, tobacco and even the thrumming forest outside.

It was a scene that seemed to hark back far into Africa’s past, to the first white traders or adventurers who pushed into the continent for the same motives of curiosity, excitement or profit. Not that much had changed, really, for in effect it was still baubles and bright coins, tobacco and whiskey that served as the medium of exchange, and the bargains were driven just as hard.

“What’s in the box?” Charlie the Snakeman asked.

“Cobra.”

“How many cobra?”

“Six cobra.”

“Big cobra?”

“You see, you see.”

The young man, barefoot and wearing a tattered shirt, stood behind a black wooden box, two feet long and a foot high. He opened it. An angry cobra could come out of such confinement with the force of a coiled spring. These, shining and black, writhed slowly as a sour odor escaped their box.

“Close the box,” Miller said. “I give you $90.”

“No. One-fifty.”

“Impossible. You know my price. I have a fixed price.”

A brief impasse followed, during which Miller negotiated for one large cobra.

“I give you $22.50.”

“Make it $23, Mr. Charles.”

“I have one price. If I give you $23, then I have big humbug in the village, because everybody knows the price is $22.50.”

He got the one cobra for $22.50 and, in the end, the other six for $90.

After three days, Miller had laid out well over $1,000 and had stuffed the station wagon full to the ceiling with scorpions, lizards, tropical fish, about 30 snakes, carvings and pottery. He also had four live chickens to take back to Monrovia, but in the end was persuaded to leave them behind, a sacrifice reluctantly made.

Four police roadblocks guarded the road back to the city, but the officers, who will sometimes look at everything in a car just for sheer meanness or the hope of a bribe, didn’t bother much with this car. Charlie the Snakeman just gave a quick jab at the bag containing one of his gaboon vipers, listened for its awful hiss, and he was waved on down the road.