Murder in The Cassava Patch - Plot Introduction

Plot Introduction

This novelette (less than 16 thousand words, divided into three chapters) deals with the relationship between Gortokai, a young Liberian man, and Tene, the girl he hopes to marry. We learn on the first page that Tene has been murdered most horribly, and that Gortokai is in jail for it. The story promises "to piece together all the circumstances leading to the violent storm which nearly tore off the roofs from many houses in the Dewoin country one bright Sunday morning in the year 1957." The story begins in the fictional village of Bendabli, off the Monrovia-Bomi Hills road, but the action is quite wide-ranging, ranging from Gbarpolu County in the west as far as Gbarnga and Sanniquellie in the north, while places such as Bomi Hills and Firestone feature offstage as the source of the hard currency that proves such a lure to young girls such as Tene and her sister.

Taking the form of a first person narrative, with a narrator (Gortokai himself) who is fairly unreliable, the novelette makes use of Liberian English and Liberian customs, and deals particularly with how those customs came under pressure in the 1940s and 1950s as young Liberians adapted to the prospect of material advancement offered by the western world. As an indigenous Liberian who had been educated in a US university, Moore was well-placed to explore the tension between these worlds, but he does so in a way that is critical both of materialism and of traditional local culture.