0126
Such a tatterdemalion crew! God forbid that I should scoff at any man's faith, but here cleanliness is practically divorced from godliness, and I can honestly say that never in my life have I seen dirtier bundles of rags than that congregation. A woman in a costume a scarecrow would have despised, her head adorned with a baby's hat, the dirty white ribbons fluttering down behind, was praying aloud with much unction, shouting that she was a miserable sinner, and calling upon the Lord to forgive her. The negro loves the sound of his own voice, and again I must claim that I do not scorn any man's sincere faith, but that negro lady was thoroughly enjoying herself, absolutely sure of her own importance. The ragged scarecrows who listened punctuated the prayer with groans of delight, and the only decent one amongst them was a small girl, whose nakedness was hidden by a simple blue-and-white cloth, and she was probably a household slave. For these descendants of a slave people make slaves in their turn, perhaps not men slaves, but women are saleable commodities among a savage nation, and for a trifling consideration, a bottle of trade gin or a few sticks of trade tobacco, they will hand over a girl-child who, taken into the household without pay, holds the position of a servant and is therefore to all intents and purposes a slave. This is really not as bad as it sounds; her position is probably quite as good as it would be in her own tribe, and as she grows older she either marries or forms some sort of alliance with a Liberian. Loose connections and divorce are both so common that she is no worse off than the ordinary Liberian woman, and the admixture of good, strong virile blood may possibly help the future race. At least that is what I thought as I watched the congregation at prayer. They sang hymn choruses so beautifully as to bring tears to my eyes, and then they came outside and abused me because I wanted to photograph them. Had I been they, I should have objected to going out to the world as specimens of their people, but they need not have reviled me in the blatant, coarse manner of the negro who has just seen enough of civilisation to think he rules the universe. I did not press the matter, because I felt it would be ungracious to make a picture of them against their will. But clearly the lovely little homes were not in Lower Buchanan. Nor were they in Cape Palmas.
Far be it from me to say that plantations of some useful description do not exist. They may; I can only say I have seen no evidences of them in three of their towns or near those towns. I will put it on record that I did see some cabbage stalks behind some broken railings opposite the President's house in Monrovia, but that was absolutely the only thing in the shape of a garden, vegetable, fruit, or flower, that I did see in the environs of the towns. You can buy no fruit in Monrovia, no chickens, no eggs. Bananas and limes have to be imported. Meat is only to be had at rare intervals, and living is so frightfully dear that when the British Consul had, during my stay, to provide for a distressed British subject who had been unfortunate enough to get adrift in the land, he had to pay six shillings and sixpence a day for his board and lodging—a bare room, not over-clean, with a rough bed in it, and board that did not include meat, but consisted chiefly of manioc or cassava which is what the majority of the Liberians live on themselves.
The country as a matter of fact lives on the Custom's dues which reach about £70,000 a year and are levied not only on the goods that they themselves use but on those the unfortunate natives of the hinterland require. No Liberian is a craftsman even of the humblest sort. The Kroo men are fishermen and boatmen; men from Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Lagos, with an occasional Vai tribesman thrown in, are painters, smiths, and carpenters. The Liberian, the descendant of the freed slave, despises these things; he aspires to be a gentleman of leisure, to serve in the Government Service, or in the Church, to walk about in a black suit with a high collar and a silver-mounted cane. Then apparently he is happy even if he come out of the most dilapidated house in Monrovia. There are, I believe, exceptions. I wonder, considering their antecedents and the conditions under which they have had to exist, whether one could expect more. Possibly it should be counted to them for great righteousness if any good men be found among them at all. But taken as a whole the Liberians after close on ninety years of self-government must strike the stranger as an effete race, blatant and arrogant of speech, an arrogance that is only equalled by their appalling ignorance, a race that compares shockingly with the Mandingo or Jolloff of the Gambia, the stately Ashanti, a warrior with reserve power, or the busy agricultural Yoruba. These men are gentlemen in their own simple, untutored way, courteous and dignified. The Liberian is only a travesty of the European, arrogant without proper dignity, boastful with absolutely nothing in the world to boast about unless it be the amazing wealth of the country he mismanages so shamefully. For Liberia is a rich country; it has a soil of surpassing fertility, and it seems to me that almost anything in the way of tropical products might be produced there. That nothing is produced is due to the ignorance and idleness of these descendants of slaves who rule or misrule the land. Since the days of the iniquitous trade, that first brought her into touch with civilisation, West Africa has been exploited for the sake of the nations of the western world. No one till this present generation seems to have recognised that she had any rights. Now we realise that the black man must be considered at least as much as the white man, who has made himself his master. Now most settlements along the Coast are busy, prosperous, and, above all, sanitary. Only in Liberia, the civilised black man's own country, does a different state of things prevail; only here has the movement been retrograde.
An end must come, but who can say what this end will be.
The missionary girl who had given up all she held most dear, who had joined the noble band of martyrs and heroes for Africa, said she had done so because she had seen a letter from a black man just mentioning a chapter and verse of the New Testament. She had looked it up and read the prayer of the Macedonians. Strange, strange are the workings of the Unseen, cruel sometimes the penalties poor human nature takes upon itself. Who shall say that a Guiding Hand had not made that girl choose wisely for the development of her own character, and who shall say that some ultimate good may not yet come for beautiful, wealthy, poverty-stricken Liberia. That the civilised nations, sinking their own jealousies, may step in and save her despite herself, I think, is the only hope. But it must be as Paul would have saved, not as the pitiful Christ. For the pendulum has swung too far back; the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. She does not know it herself, she will resent bitterly the imputation, but to me Liberia seems to be stretching out her hands crying dumbly to the white man the cry that came across the water of old, the cry the missionary girl listened to, the cry of Macedonia, “Come over and help us.”
But I was one who only heard the cry in passing, who felt that I at least could not help. I went on in theChamato Axim, interested with what I had seen, but forgetting much in what I thought was to be my first hammock-trip alone. For I wanted to go to Half Assinie, and since no one may be sure of landing all their gear in safety on that surf-bound coast, I had to land at Axim and go back overland the fifty miles to the French border, and I thought I should have to do it alone.
Every man's duty—“Three deaths in two days”—An old Portuguese settlement—A troubled District Commissioner—What to do with a wandering white woman—The Judge's quarters—The kindly medical officer and his wife—A West-African town—“My outside wife”—Dangers ahead—The man who was never afterwards heard of—The Forestry officer's carriers—“Good man, bad man, fool man”—First night in the wilds—Hair in the soup.
Agreat German philosopher has remarked that you very seldom get a human being who has all the qualities of his own sex without a trace of the characteristics of the other. Such a being would be hardly attractive. At least I consoled myself with that reflection when I found stirring within me a very masculine desire to be out of leading strings and to be allowed to take care of myself. It is pleasant to be taken care of, but it is decidedly uncomfortable to feel that you are a burden upon men upon whom you have no claim whatever. They were looking after me because they were emphatically sure that the Coast is no place for a lone woman. At the bottom of my heart, grateful as I was to the individuals, I didn't like it. I thought my freedom was coming at Axim, but it didn't.
Every man felt it his duty to impress upon me the unhealthiness of the Coast, and every man did his duty manfully, forgetting that I have a very excellent pair of eyes and an inquiring mind. The hot, still morning we arrived at Axim the captain, having discussed matters with the Custom officer, came to me solemnly shaking his head.
“A terrible place, Mrs Gaunt, a terrible place. Three deaths in Axim in the last two days.”
It was quite a correct Coast speech, and for the moment I was shocked, though not afraid, because naturally it never occurs to me that I will die, at least not just yet, and not because the people round me are dying. The captain was gloomily happy as having vindicated the evil reputation of the country, and I looked ashore and wondered what was wrong with so attractive a place.
The Portuguese, those mariners of long ago, chose the site and, as they always did, chose wisely. A promontory, on which is the white fort, juts out into the sea, and behind is all the luxuriant greenery of the Tropics, for the land rises just sufficiently to give beauty to the scene. I wondered why those three people had died, and I inquired. The whole incident is so characteristic of the loose talk that builds up an evil reputation for a country. Those deaths were held up to me as a warning. It would have been quite as much to the point if they had warned me against getting frost-bitten or falling into a cauldron of boiling sugar. One man died of a disease he had contracted twenty years before, and was exceedingly lucky to have lived so long, another had died of drink, and the third was a woman. She, poor thing, was the wife of a missionary from Sierra Leone, and had not been in a cooler climate for two years. There was a baby coming, and instead of going home she had come to Axim, had a bad go of blackwater, and when the baby came, her constitution could not stand the double strain, and she died. Only her death was directly attributable to the climate, and the exercise of a little common sense would have saved her.
So I landed and was not afraid.
But my arrival was a cause of tribulation to the District Commissioner. There was no hotel, so I appealed to him for quarters. It really was a little hard on him. He sighed and did his best, and the only time I really saw him look happy was about three weeks later when he saw me safely in a surf boat bound for the out-going steamer. But when I landed, the need for shelter was pressing, and he gave me a room in the Judge's quarters where it seems they bestow all homeless white strangers in Axim. Already the Forestry officer was there, and he had a sitting-room and a bedroom, so that I could only have a bedroom and a bathroom. Now, with a verandah and such a large room at my disposal, I could make myself more than comfortable; then, because I did not know African ways, I accepted the very kind invitation of the medical officer and his wife, the only white woman in Axim, to “chop” with them.
African ways are very convenient when you come to think of it. Here was a big empty room with a wardrobe and a little cane furniture in it. I went in with my brother's kit and set up my camp-bed, my bath, laid down my ground sheet and put up my table and chair, and I had all that was really necessary. Outside was the ragged garden, haunted they said, though I never saw the ghost, and because it was usually empty the big rats scrambled up the stairs, and the birds sat in the oleander bushes and called “Be quick, be quick” continually.
I couldn't take their advice because it is impossible to hurry things on the Coast and I must wait for the carriers.
The first night I had dinner—chop—with the medical officer and his wife and went to bed reflecting a little regretfully I had made no preparations for my early-morning tea. However, I concluded it might be good discipline to do without it. But it is a great thing to have a capable boy. Just as it began to get light Grant appeared outside my mosquito curtains as usual with a cup of tea and some fruit. The cup and teapot were my own; he had stolen all the materials from the Forestry officer next door, and I was much beholden to that young man when, on apologising, he smiled and said it was all right, he was glad I liked his tea.
Axim is a pretty little town with the usual handful of whites and the negroes semi-civilised with that curious civilisation which has probably persisted for centuries, which is not what we would call civilisation and yet is not savagery. It is hardly even barbarism. These Coast towns are not crowded with naked savages as many a stay-at-home Briton seems to imagine; they are peopled with artisans, clerks, traders, labourers, people like in many ways to those in the same social scale in other countries, and differing only when the marked characteristics of the negro come in. All along in these Coast towns the negroes are much the same. To their own place they are suitable; only when they try to conform too much to the European lines of thought do they strike one asoutréor objectionable. I suppose that is what jars in the Christian negro. It is not the Christianity, it is the striving after something eminently unsuited to him. Left to himself though, he naturally goes back to the mode of life that was his forefathers', and sometimes he has the courage to own it. I remember a man who called in the medical officer about his wife. The ordinary negro has as many wives as he can afford, but the Christian is by way of only having one, and as this man was clothed in the ordinary garb of the European, unnecessary coat, shirt, and hat, I naturally set him down as a Christian.
“I Christian,” he told me. “Mission-teacher once.”
“Not now?”
“No, Swanzy's agent now. You savey my wife; she get well?”
I said I had no doubt she would, and I rejoiced in this sign of marital affection, when he dashed it all to the ground.
“She not my real wife; she my outside wife,” said he as one who would explain their exact relations.
My views on negro homes received a shock, but after all if the women don't object, what matter? It is the custom of the country.
I looked round the town and took photographs, wasted many plates trying to develop in too hot a place, and declared my intention of going west just as soon as ever I could get carriers. I didn't quite know how I should manage, but I concluded I should learn by experience.
Even now, though I have travelled since then close on 700 miles in a hammock, I cannot make up my mind whether it would have been safe for me to go alone. Undoubtedly I should have made many mistakes, and in a country where the white man holds his position by his prestige it is perhaps just as well that a woman of his colour should not make mistakes.
“Not suitable,” said one who objected strongly to the presence of any white women on the Coast.
“Hardly safe,” said another.
“Not safe,” said a third emphatically, and then they told a story. Axim has been settled and civilised many years, and yet only last year a man disappeared. He was one of a party dining with his friends. After dinner they started a game of cards, and up the verandah steps came this man's house-steward. His master was wanted. The company protested, but he left declaring he would return immediately. He did not return and from that day to this neither he nor his house-boy have been seen by mortal eyes. The story sounds fearsome enough. It sounded worse to me preparing to go along the Coast by myself, but now, thinking it over calmly, I see flaws. Investigated, I wonder if it would turn out like the story of the three people dead in two days; true, but admitting of quite a different construction being put upon it than that presented for my edification. One thing I do know and that is that I would feel very much safer in an Ashanti village that has only been conquered in the last ten years than I would alone in any of those little towns along the Guinea Coast, between Axim and Half Assinie, that have been in contact with the white man for the last three hundred years.
Anyhow, Axim decided for me I should not go alone, and the Forestry officer, like the chivalrous, gracious gentleman he was, came forward and pretended he had business at Half Assinie and that it would be a great pleasure to have a companion on the road. And so well did he play his part that it was not till we were bound back from the Border that I discovered he had simply come to look after me.
Then I was initiated into the difficulties of carriers. The Omahin, that is to say the Chief of Beyin, had sent me twenty men and women, and the Forestry officer had two separate lots of Kroo boys and Mendis, and early one morning in January we made preparations for a start. We didn't start early. It seems to me how ever carefully you lay your plans, you never do. First no carriers turned up; then some of the Forestry officer's men condescended to appear. Then the orderly, a man from the north with his face cut with a knife into a permanent sardonic grin, strolled up. He was sent out to seek carriers, and presently drove before him two or three women, one with a baby on her back, and these it appeared were the advance contingent of my gang. A Beyin woman-carrier or indeed any woman along the Coast generally wears a printed-cotton cloth of a dark colour round her by way of a skirt, and one of the little loose blouses that the missionaries introduced on to the Coast over a hundred years ago because they regarded it as indecent for a woman to have her bosom uncovered. Now her shoulders are often covered by the blouse, but that many a time is of such skimpy proportions that it does not reach very far, the skirt invariably slips, and there is a gap, in which case—well, shall we say the result is not all the originators desired. A woman can carry anything but a hammock, but these carriers of mine were not very good specimens of the class. They looked at the loads, they went away, they came back, they altered, they grumbled, and at last about two hours late we started, I going ahead, the Forestry officer fetching up the rear to round in all stragglers, and in between came our motley array of goods. There is a family resemblance among all travellers on the Gold Coast. They all try to reduce their loads to a minimum and they all find that there are certain necessaries of life which they must have, and certain other things which may be luxuries but which they cannot do without, and certain other little things which it would be a sin not to take as it makes all the difference between comfort and savagery. So the procession comes along, a roll of bedding, a chop box, a kitchen box with pots and pans, a bath, a chair, a table, the servant's box, a load of water, a certain amount of drink, whisky, gin, and if the traveller is very luxurious (I wasn't) some claret, a uniform case with clothes, a smaller one containing the heavier things such as boots and the various goods that pertain to the European's presence there. Before the Commissioner goes his orderly, carrying his silver-topped stick, the insignia of his rank. I had a camera and a lot of heavy plates but I don't think the Forestry officer had anything special except a tent which took three men to carry and which we could never set up because we found on the first night that the ridge poles had been left behind. It is not supposed to be well to sleep in native houses, but it did us no harm.
The carrier divides the masters he serves into three divisions. “He be good man,” “he be bad man,” and “he be fool man.” My carriers decided I was a fool man and they were not far wrong. Less than an hour after leaving Axim, distance as yet is always counted by time in Africa, we came to the Ancobra River and my first difficulty arose. My hammock had not yet been brought across and I, walking on a little way, came to a swampy bit which it was difficult to negotiate without wetting my feet above the ankles. My headman stooped and offered a brawny, bare back for my acceptance. I hesitated. My clothes were not built for riding pick-a-back. I looked back; there was no hammock, neither, thank heaven, was there any sign of the Forestry officer. I tried to show them how to cross their hands and carry me as in a chair, but no, they would have none of my methods, and then I gave in hastily lest my travelling companion should appear, accepted the back, rode across most ungracefully, and was set down triumphantly on the other side. And then they, began to take advantage of me.
“Missus,” explained one, “you walk small. If man tote hammock, plenty broken bottle cut feet.”
And so I walked all through the outskirts of that little river-side village. It was the hottest part of a very hot day, the sand made the going heavy, and the sun poured down mercilessly out of a cloudless sky. I was soon exceedingly tired, but I was filled with pity for the unfortunates who had to carry me. They walked beside me happily enough or dawdled behind scorning the fool woman who employed them. I may say when I came back my men carried me over every foot of the path, but they set me down a dozen times that day, and when my companion came up and found me sitting under a cocoa-nut palm, as he did pretty frequently, he remonstrated with me and remonstrated with my men, but the thing rested with me. It took me all day long to learn that the men must do the work they had undertaken to do, and until I was convinced of it in my own mind they certainly were not. We had luncheon in the house of the headman of a fishing village; at afternoon tea-time we were sitting on the sand waiting for the tide to run out so that we might cross the Twin Rivers, and we waited nearly two hours, and at last as the darkness was falling we arrived at a village where we must stop the night. My first night in the wilds.
It was a small fishing village on the sands of the seashore, built of the stalks of the raffia palm which here the people call bamboo. The Chief had a compound cleared out for us, and I do not know now whether that compound was clean. In my mind it remains as clean, because till then I had always expected a native house to be most uninhabitable, and was surprised to find any simple comforts at all. The floors were of sand, the walls of the stalks of the raffia, and the thatch of the fronds. I prefer palm to mud for a wall; for one thing, it is nice and airy, the wind can blow right through it and you might almost be in the open air, but then again, you must make your toilet and have your bath in the dark, for if you have a light everything is as clearly visible to the outside world as if you had been placed in a cage for their special benefit. However, my bed was put up, my bath and toilet things set out, and I managed to dress and come outside for dinner which we had in the open. The grey sand was our carpet, the blue-black sky dotted with twinkling diamonds our canopy, and the flickering, chimneyless Hinkson lamp lighted our dinner-table. I was more than content. It was delightful, and then the serpent entered into our paradise.
“Kwesi,” said the Forestry officer angrily, “there's a hair in the soup.”
Kwesi had only brought the soup from the kitchen to the table, so it was hardly fair to blame him, but the average man, if his wife is not present, is apt to consider the nearest servant is always responsible for his little discomforts, and he does not change his character in Africa I find. Kwesi accepted the situation.
“It not ploper hair, sah,” he protested as apologetically as if he had sought diligently for a hair without success and been obliged to do the best he could with negro wool.
I, not being a wife and therefore not responsible, was equal to suggesting that it probably came off the flour bag and he might as well have his dinner in peace, but he was not easily soothed.
That first night, absolutely in the open, everything took on a glamour which comes back to me whenever I think of it. A glorious night out in the open in the Tropics is one of the pure delights of life. A fire flickered in the centre of the compound; to the right in a palm-thatched hut we could see the cook at work, and we hadhors d'oeuvre, which here they call small chop, and the soup which my companion complained of, and fish and chicken and sweets and fruit as good as if we had been in a London restaurant. Better, for the day's hammocking on the beach with the salt spray wetting our faces and the roar of the turbulent West-Coast surf in our ears had given us an appetite that required no tempting. The hair was but an incident; the sort of contrast that always marks West Africa. We dined luxuriously.
Around us were strewn our camp outfit, all the thousand and one things that are required to make two people comfortable. It had taken sixteen men to carry us twenty miles in our hammocks; it had taken five-and-twenty more to minister to our comfort. The headman of the village regarded us as honoured guests. He provided a house, or rather several houses in a compound, he told the carriers where they could get wood and water, he sold us chickens at exorbitant prices, but still chickens, and plantains and kenky and groundnuts for the men. And so we dined in comfort and talked over the incidents of the day.
The burying of the village dead—For Ju-ju—The glory of the morning—The catastrophes by the way—The cook is condemned to death—Redeemed for two shillings—The thunderous surf—The charm of the shore—Traces of white blood—A great negro town—Our quarters—Water that would induce a virulent typhus in any but a negro community—The lonely German trader—Difficulties of entertaining a negro potentate—The lair of the hunted.
The King's Highway is along the shore here easy enough going when the tide is out and the golden sand is hard; very heavy indeed when the roaring waves break almost at the foot of the cocoa-nut palms that stand in phalanxes tall and stately, or bending somewhat towards the sea that is their life, all the way from Axim to Half Assinie, and beyond again to the French border. There is no other way than this way along the shore. Occasionally, if the “sea be too full,” as the carriers say, they may go up to a rough path among the cocoa-nut palms, but it is a very rough path. Husks of the cocoa-nuts lie there, palm fronds drying and withering in the sun, a great creeping bean flings its wandering stalks across the path as a trap to the unwary, and when there is other greenery it stands up and stretches out thorny branches to clutch at the passer-by. Besides, the villagers—and there are many villages—bury their dead here, and they consider two feet a deep enough grave, so that the odour of decay rises on the hot air. All along the shore, which is the highway, just under the cocoa-nut palms, I saw tiny miniature sloping thatches over some pots—a sign that someone has been buried there. At first I was touched to think so many of the living mourned the dead; but my sentimental feelings are always receiving rude shocks, and I found that these thatches had not been raised in tender remembrance, but to placate the ghosts of the dead and to prevent them from haunting the living. They must be rather foolish ghosts, too, and easily taken in; for I observed that a bunch of cock's feathers evidently simulated a chicken, and the pots were nearly always rather elderly and often broken. There were more gruesome signs of Ju-ju too; a crow suspended with outspread wings, a kid with drooping head and hanging legs. I hope these things were not put up while they were alive and left to suffer in the tropical sunshine, but I fear, I fear. The negro is diabolically cruel.
When we were children we always ate the things we liked least first, bread and butter, and then cake; and there is much to be said for the plan. Afterwards I found it was much easier and nicer travelling in the bush, but on that first journey travelling along the shore had great charms for me. In the early morning a whitish mist hangs over the sea and veils the cocoa-nut palms, and there is a little chill in the air which makes travelling pleasant. We always got up before dawn. At the first streak of light we were having our breakfast, porridge and eggs and marmalade and fruit, bananas, pines, or oranges, quite as comfortably as if we were in civilised lands, though the servants were waiting to pack our breakfast equipage, and we watched our beds and boxes and baths borne away on men's heads as we drank our coffee. There were catastrophes sometimes, of course.
There was the morning when the coffee had been made on top of the early-morning tea, and the evening when the peaches were agreeably flavoured with household soap; the day when some unknown hand had conveyed native peppers, which are the hottest things in creation outside the infernal regions, into the sparklet bottle; and the day when the drinking water gave out altogether, and was replaced by the village water, black and greasy, and sufficient to induce in any but a negro community a virulent typhus. But all disasters paled before the day when neither the dinner nor the cook were forthcoming at Beyin.
The Forestry officer, in the kindness and hospitality of his heart, had asked me to be his guest, so that we always had chop together, and I gained experience without any trouble to myself.
I was sorry there was no dinner, because it seemed a long time since we had had tea, but otherwise I was not troubled.
“Where be cook, Kwesi?” asked the Forestry officer of his immediate attendant.
Kwesi spluttered and stammered; he was so full of news. Round at a little distance stood the people of the town of Beyin—men in cloths; women, some with a handkerchief round their heads, but some with a coiffure that suggested the wearer had been permanently surprised, and her hair had stood up on end and stayed there ever since; little children, who shyly poked their heads round their mothers' legs to look at the strange white woman. The truth was hardly to be told in Kwesi's agitated pigeon English. It was awful. The cook had marched into the town on business bent and demanded chickens for the white master and the white missus, and the inhabitants, with a view to raising the market price, had declared there was not a chicken within miles of the place, and they had not seen such a thing for years. Cook was aggravated, for the chickens were walking about under his very eyes, not perhaps well-bred Dorkings or Buff Orpingtons, but the miserable little runt about the size of a self-respecting pigeon that is known as a chicken all over West Africa, and the sight was too much for him. He seized one of those chickens and proceeded to pluck and dress it, and before he was half-through the Omahin's men had come down and hauled him off to durance vile, for he had committed the iniquitous offence of stealing one of the Omahin's guard's chickens, and public opinion was almost agreed that only death could expiate so grievous a crime. Of course, there was the white woman to be considered, an unknown quantity, for many of them had never seen a white woman before; and there was the Forestry officer, by no means an unknown quantity, for it was pretty certain he would resent any harm to his cook. Finally, with much yelling and shouting and tremendous gesticulation, the case was laid before him and the demand made that his cook should be handed over to the powers he had offended. I am bound to say that young man held the scales of justice with a niceness that is only to be properly appreciated when we remember that it was his dinner that was not forthcoming and his cook whose life was threatened. He listened to both sides, and then decreed that the cook was to be redeemed by the payment of two shillings, that the crowd was to disperse, and dinner to come up forthwith.
“Two shillings,” said the next white man we met, the preventive officer at Half Assinie, close to the Border, “two shillings! I should think so indeed. The price of a chicken is sixpence, and it's dear at that.”
They are such arrant savages, these people of the King's Highway; often enough they are stark save for a loin cloth, and I have seen men without even the proverbial fig leaf. The very decencies of life seem unknown to them, and yet they calculate in sixpences and shillings, even as the man in the streets in England does.
They have touched the fringe of civilisation for so many hundred years; for this is the Coast of the great days of the slave trade, and along this seashore, by this roaring surf, beneath the shade of these cocoa-nut palms, have marched those weary companies of slaves, whose descendants make the problem of America nowadays. It must have been the same shore, the very same. Here is the golden sand and the thunderous surf that only the men of the Coast will dare, and between Axim and the French Ivory Coast not always they. The white scallop shells are tossed aside by the feet of the carriers; the jellyfish that twinkle like lumps of glass in the strong sunshine must be avoided, for they sting; plover and little wading birds like snipe dart into the receding wave, or race back from its oncoming; and the little crabs, like brown pincushions on stilts, run to hide themselves in the water. Here are crows, too, with neat black coats and immaculate white waistcoats and white collars, who fly cawing round the villages. We saw an occasional vulture, like a ragged and very dissipated turkey, tearing at the carcass of a goat or sheep. Such is the shore now. So was it four hundred years ago. The people must have changed a little, but very, very little in this western portion of the Gold Coast, which is given over to the mahogany cutters, the gold-seekers, and the men who seek mineral oil. And the people are born, and live, and die, and know very, very little more than their forefathers, who lived in fear of the trader who would one day tear them from their homes, and force civilisation upon them with the cat and with the branding iron. In the old days they got much of their sustenance from the sea, and so do they get it still; and when the surf was not too bad we saw the dark men launching their great surf boats, struggling to get them into the surf, struggling to keep them afloat till they got beyond it, when they were things of life. And when the surf was too bad, as it was on many days, they contented themselves with throwing in hand-nets, racing back as the sea washed over them, racing forward as it receded; and the women and children gathered shell-fish just where sand and surf met, carrying in their hands calabashes, or cocoa-nut shells, or those enamelled iron-ware basins which are as common now on the Coast as they are in London town. It seems to me that enamelled iron ware is one of the great differences between now and the days when the English and Dutch and Portuguese adventurers came first to this coast trading for gold and ivory and slaves.
There are other traces of them, too, though they only built forts and dared hardly go beyond the shelter of their walls. Not infrequently the skin of the man who bore me was lightened to copper colour; every now and then I saw straight features and thin lips, though the skin was black, and I remembered, I must perforce remember, that these traders of old time made the dark women minister to their passions, and that the dark women bore them children with pride, even as they do to-day.
Beyin is one of the biggest purely negro towns along the Coast. It is close on the shore, a mass of negro compounds huddled close together; the walls of the compounds and of houses are alike made of raffia palm, and the roofs are thatched with the fronds, looking not unlike peasant cottages in Somerset or Brittany.
And the people who live in them are simple savages. They chatter and shriek, talking at the top of their voices about—God knows what; for it seems as if nothing in the nature of news could have happened since the long-ago slave-raiding days. In the street they pressed me close; only when I noticed any particular one, especially a woman or a child, that one fled shrieking to hide behind its neighbour. We sent our orderly forward to tell the Omahin we proposed to honour them with our presence for two days, and to ask for a house to live in. The house was forthcoming, a great two-storied house, built of swish, and whitewashed. It was right in the centre of the town, so closely surrounded by the smaller houses that, standing on the balcony, I could drop things easily on to the roofs below; but it had this advantage, that unless the people climbed on their roofs—they did as a matter of fact—we could not be overlooked. We had three rooms: an enormous centre room that someone had begun to paint blue, got tired, and finished off with splashes of whitewash, the council chamber of the town; and two side-rooms for bedrooms. And words fail me to describe those bedrooms. There were iron beds with mattresses, mattresses that looked as if they had been rescued from the refuse heap specially to accommodate us, and tables covered with dirt and the most wonderful collection of odds and ends it has ever been my fortune to come across. They were mostly the cheapest glass and china ornaments, broken-down lamps that in their palmy days must have been useless, and one of those big gaily painted china sitting hens that humble households sometimes serve up their breakfast eggs under. The first thing was to issue strict orders that not even the ground sheet was to touch that bed; the next was to clear away the ornaments, wipe down the table, cover it with clean paper and a towel, sweep the floor, lay down the ground sheet, put up the bed, and decide whether I would wash in sea water or in the black and greasy liquid which comes from a mile away across the swamp, and which was the only alternative. I may say I tried them both, and found them both unsatisfactory; and I finished with the sea water because I knew that, however uncomfortable, it was at least clean.
Here we used the last of our drinking water and had to beg a little from the only white trader in the town, who gave generously of his small store, as white men do help each other beyond civilisation. He was German, and somewhat difficult to understand at times when he grew excited; but he stood on the same side of the gulf as we other two, while the black people, those who served us, and those who stared at us, were apart on the other side. A weary, dreary life is the trader's. He had a house just on the edge of the surf. His “factory” was below it. His only companions were a beautiful green-crested clock-bird and a little old-man monkey with a white beard. The ghastly loneliness of it! Nothing to do but to sell cotton stuffs and enamel ware and gin to the native, and count the days till it was time to tramp to Axim and take the steamer that should bear him back to the Fatherland and all the joys of wife and children.
“I saw the homeward-bound steamer to-day,” he said pathetically, though he did not know he was pathetic. “I always look for it.”
“The steamer! I did not know it came close enough in.”
“It doesn't. Of course it was only the smoke on the horizon.”
Surely, surely, the tragedy of the exile's life lay in those words.
We had sent our orderly forward to say we were going to visit the Omahin, and soon after our arrival we called upon him. His palace is a collection of swish huts with palm-thatched roofs, built round a sanded compound; and we were ushered into a cramped, whitewashed room—his court. The population packed themselves into the body of the court to stare at the white people and native royalty; and the Omahin and his councillors were crowded up in the corner, whence, I presume, justice is dispensed. The exalted personage was clad in a dark robe of many-coloured silks, with a band of the same material round his black head. Round his neck was a great, heavy gold chain, on his arms bracelets of the same metal, and on his fingers heavy gold rings. Some of his councillors were also dressed in native robes, and they carried great horns of gold and the sticks that mark his rank with gold devices on top of them. The incongruity was provided by the “scholars” among his following—the linguists, the registrar, and other minor officials. These functionaries were clad in the most elderly of cast-off European garments, frock coats green with age, shirts that simply shrieked for the washtub, and trousers that a London unemployed would have disdained. However, they interpreted for us, and we explained to the Chief how pleased the white lady was with his country and how much she wished to visit the lake village, which was three hours away on the trade route to the back-country. He expressed his willingness to give us a guide through the swamp that lay behind the town, and then with a great deal of solemnity we took our leave and retired to our own somewhat delayed afternoon tea.
We were mistaken if we thought we were going to be allowed to have it in peace. We had not sat down a moment, the Forestry officer, the German trader, and I, when the ragged travesty of a Gold Coast policeman, who was the Omahin's messenger, came dawdling upstairs to announce that the Omahin was coming to return our call; and he and his councillors and linguists followed close on his heels. The linguist explained that it was the custom to return a ceremonial call at once, and custom rules the roost in West Africa. That might be, but our conversational powers had been exhausted a quarter of an hour before, and not the most energetic ransacking of our brains could find anything to say to this negro potentate, who sat stolidly in a chair surrounded by an ever increasing group of attendants. I asked him if he would have tea. No. Cake, suggested the Forestry officer frantically. No. Toast and butter we both offered in a breath. No; he had no use for toast and butter, or for biscuits or oranges, which exhausted our tea-table. And then the Forestry officer had a brilliant idea: “You offer him a whisky-and-soda.” I did, and the dusky monarch weighed the matter a moment. Then he agreed, and a glass of whisky-and-soda was given him. We did not offer any refreshment to his followers. It would have left us bankrupt, and then not supplied them all. For a moment the Omahin looked at his whisky-and-sparklet, then he held out the glass, and aman stepped forward, and, bending low, took a sip; again he held out the glass, choosing his man apparently quite promiscuously from among the crowd, and again the man bent low and sipped. It was done over and over again. I did not realise that a glass could have held so much liquid as one after another, the chosen of the company, among whom was my most troublesome hammock-boy, sipped. At last there was but a teaspoonful left, and the Omahin put it to his own lips and drank with gusto, handed it to one of his attendants, took it back, and, tipping it up, drained the very last dregs; then, solemnly holding out a very hard and horny hand, shook hands with us and departed.
The next day we visited Lake Nuba. Beyin stands upon a narrow neck of land between the sea and a swamp that in the rainy season is only passable in canoes, but when I was there in the middle of the dry season a winding path took us through the dense swamp grasses to the place that is neither land nor water, and it is difficult to say whether a hammock or a canoe is the least dangerous mode of progression. Be it understood that this is a trade route. Rotting canoes lay among the grasses; and there passed to and fro quite an array of people laden with all manner of goods, plantains, and cassava, stink-fish (which certainly does not belie its name), piles of cotton goods for the interior, and great enamelled-ware basins piled with loam to make swish houses in Beyin. Most often these heavily laden folks are women who stalk along with a child up on their backs, or suckling it under their arms. They stared with wonder at the white woman in the hammock and moved into the swamp to let her pass, but I should think they no more envied me than I envy the Queen of England driving in the Park. Presently the way was ankle-deep in water, knee-deep in mud. Raffia palm, creepers, and all manner of swamp grasses grew so close that the hammock could barely be forced through, and only two men could carry it. We went up perhaps twenty feet in squelching, slippery mud. We came down again, and the greenery opened out into an expanse of water, where starry-white water-lilies opened cups to the sky above, and the great leaves looked like green rafts on the surface of the water. There were holes hidden by that water, but it is the trade route north all the same; and has been the trade route for hundreds of years since the Omahins of Beyin raided that way, and brought down their strings of slaves, carrying the tiny children lest they should be drowned, to the Dutch and Portuguese and English traders on the Coast. Presently we came to a more marked waterway, and here were canoes waiting for us. I draw a veil over the disembarking out of a hammock into an extremely crank and wet canoe. I was up to my knees in water, but the Forestry officer expressed himself as delighted. I held up a dripping skirt, and he made his men paddle over, and inspected. It was, of course, as we might have expected; the natives had seen that the most important person in their eyes, the man, got the only fairly dry canoe, and my kindly guardian was shocked, and insisted on an immediate change being made. And if it is necessary to draw a veil over the disembarking from a hammock to a canoe it is certainly necessary to draw one over the changing from one crank canoe to another. I can assure you it cannot be done gracefully. Even a mermaid who had no fear of being drowned could hardly accomplish that with elegance. But it was done at last, and we set off up the long and picturesque waterway fringed with lilies and palms and swamp grasses that led to Lake Nuba. And sometimes the waterway was deep, sometimes shallow. The canoe was aground, and every man had to jump overboard to help push it over the obstruction, but more than one man went over his head in slime and water. At each accident the lucky ones who had escaped roared and yelled with laughter as if it were the best of jokes. Perhaps it was. It was so hot that it could have been no hardship to have a bath, and they had nothing on to spoil. But at last we got out on the lake. It looked a huge sheet of water from the little canoe, and it took a good hour's paddling till we came to the lake village.
This is the lair of the hunted, though it does lie on the trade route. Behind it lies the swamp which is neither land nor water in the dry season, and it looks just a tangle of raffia palm and swamp grass, and all manner of tropical greenery. The huts, like the huts of Beyin are, are built of raffia palm, but they go one better than Beyin and the fishing villages, even the flooring is of the stems; and the whole village is raised on stakes, so that it hangs over the water, and the houses can only be reached by a framework of poles.
“If youwillgo exploring,” said the Forestry officer, as I gathered up my skirts and essayed the frail ladder.
I here put it on record that I think savage life can by no manner of means be recommended, save and except for its airiness. There is plenty of air. It is easy enough to see through those lightly built walls of raffia palm, and the doings of the occupants must be fairly open to the public. Also, except in one room, where a hearth had been laid down about six feet by three in extent, the flooring is so frail that in trying to walk on it I slipped through, and was nipped tightly by the ankles. I couldn't rescue myself. I was held as in a vice till the grinning King's messenger and a Kroo-boy carrier got me out, wherefore I conclude the inhabitants of those villages must spend the most of their time on their backs. In the dry season there is a little bit of hard earth underneath the huts. In the wet season there is nothing but water and the raffia palm flooring or a crank canoe for a resting-place. No wonder even the tiny children seem as much at home in a canoe as I am in an easy chair. And yet the village is growing, so there must be a charm about it as a dwelling-place. We had “chop” on the verandah of the Chiefs house. The Chief had apparently quite recently buried one of his household, for at the end of the platform close against the dwelling-chambers was erected one of the miniature sloping roofs with offerings of cock's feathers, shells, and pots to placate the ghost. It was quite a new erection, too, for the palm-leaf thatch was still green; but where the dead body was I do not know, probably sunk in the swamp underneath, and why so close I do not know either, since the people evidently feared his ghost. However, even if we were lunching over a grave, it did not trouble us half so much as the fate of the toast which was being brought across from another hut in a particularly crank canoe, and was naturally an object of much curiosity.