IIIA DYING TRIBE
This amiable and attractive people, the Mpongwe tribe, is now but a dying remnant, hurrying to extinction. It is not long since they were numbered by tens of thousands; now there are probably not more than five hundred pure Mpongwe. There are women among them for whom marriage is impossible. For, as I have already said, their social superiority makes it impossible for them to marry into other tribes; but, within their own tribe, many Mpongwe women are related, nearly or remotely, to every surviving family, and the very strict laws of consanguinity forbid the marriage of related persons. It is expected, therefore, that these women will make their alliances with white men; that is, that they will not marry at all.
The first exterminating factor was slavery. Sir Harry Johnston, inThe Civilization of Africa, has this to say in regard to the fatal adaptability of the Negro to a condition of slavery:
“The Negro in general is a born slave. He is possessed of physical strength, docility, cheerfulness of disposition, a short memory for sorrows and cruelties, and an easily aroused gratitude for kindness and just dealing. He does not suffer from homesickness to the overbearing extent that afflicts other peoples torn from their homes, and, provided he is well fed, he is easily made happy. Above all, he can toil hard under the hot sun and in the unhealthy climates of the torrid zone. He has little orno race-fellowships—that is to say, he has no sympathy for other Negroes; he recognizes and follows his master independent of any race affinities, and as he is usually a strong man and a good fighter, he has come into request not only as a labourer but as a soldier.”
Sir Harry, speaking as an eye-witness of the capturing and the exportation of slaves, gives a lurid description of their sufferings, which, he says, “were so appalling that they almost transcend belief.” He makes a conservative estimate that in the modern period of the slave-traffic twenty million Africans must have been sold into slavery. The Mpongwe was one of the tribes that suffered most. A large portion of their country was depopulated. The slave-traffic was frightfully demoralizing to the Africans themselves. It excited fiendish passions, stifled every instinct of humanity and inspired craft and cruelty far surpassing anything hitherto known. It was said that three men of the same family dared not leave their town together lest two of them should combine to sell the third.
More than half a century has passed since the last slave ship sailed out of Gaboon harbour and disappeared over the western horizon with its cargo of grief and rage, many of them wailing vengeance in a mournful chant, improvising the words as they sang. For the African sings his bitterest grief as well as his joy. He sings where the white man would weep, or curse; but to the accustomed ear no cry could equal the pity of his song.
It was in this region that Du Chaillu hunted the gorilla and gathered much of the material for his famous books. An interior chief, in appreciation of Du Chaillu’s visit to his town, once presented him with a fat slave; and when Du Chaillu kindly declined the offer, protesting that he would not know what to do with him, the chief exclaimed in astonishment: “You must kill him and eat him, of course.”
Du Chaillu spat violently upon the ground—the African way of expressing disgust and abhorrence.
“Then,” said the bewildered chief, “what do you do with all our people who are sent down the river and far away to your country? We have believed that you fatten them and eat them.”
It is supposed that our present mission station was formerly the site of a slave pen, where slaves were kept until they were shipped—abarracoon; hence the nameBaraka.
The slave-traffic was succeeded by the rum-traffic; and it would not be easy to say which of the two has proved the greater evil for Africa. There is more drunkenness in Gaboon, among the Mpongwe, than in most places on the coast. Except among the few Christians, an abundance of rum is used at every marriage and every funeral and both men and women drink to drunkenness. The women drink as much as the men, and there are a greater number of hopeless dipsomaniacs among them.
One day, as I was walking along the beach, I met a bright-looking Mpongwe woman who surprised me by addressing me in English. I was eager to know who she was. She said her name was Elida Harrington, and that when she was very young the wife of one of our missionaries, for whom she had been working, took her to America when she went on furlough and that during the period of the furlough she had attended school in America. Those early days were evidently a sweet memory, and Elida’s face was aglow with pleasure as she told me. Finally I asked her why I had never seen her at the mission. The glow faded from her face, and after a moment of gloomy silence she replied: “You’ll know soon enough.”
I afterwards learned that Elida, when she was young, was married to a man who was given tonagging. He wascontinually making petty and groundless charges of infidelity against his wife. There is no surer way to inspire the dislike of the African. They are wonderfully generous in forgiving impulsive cruelty, but continual nagging will alienate them. At last, just to spite her husband, Elida told him that all his charges were true; that she had done all those things, and much worse—such things as he had never thought of charging against her. Her husband, when he recovered from a paroxysm of rage and astonishment, told her to pack her things and leave his house; to which she quietly replied that she would be glad to do so, since she had already decided upon that very course.
Soon after my first meeting with Elida I called at her house. It was then that I learned why she kept away from the mission. She was so intoxicated that she could not get to the door. And this was habitual.
One day Elida went to see her sister Jane, who was sick in bed. Jane wanted some bread and gave her the price of a loaf and asked her to go out and buy it for her. Poor Jane never got the bread. And poor Elida! She went only as far as the first rum-shop.
I think of another, a young man who bore an honoured name,Augustus Boardman, and who from his childhood was closely connected with the mission. He spoke English not like an African but as if it were his native tongue. I never knew a native who understood the finer feelings of white people as Augustus did. I never knew a native who had in himself so much of what we callsentiment. On one occasion he went with me to Angom where Mr. Marling was buried. Mr. Marling, who had been dead for five years, was the missionary whom Augustus had known best and loved most. In the evening, just before leaving for the coast, I happened to pass Mr. Marling’s grave, and there I saw a beautiful wreath of flowers carefullywoven, which Augustus had laid upon the grave. The African is strangely indifferent to flowers, and I have never known another who would have done what Augustus did.
On another occasion I received a letter from him when he was up the Ogowè River. He wrote that while visiting at our old mission on the Ogowè he had come across an English song-book, in which he had found a song, the words of which were the most beautiful he had ever read in his life; so beautiful that he had committed them to memory; and he was wondering whether it was well known and commonly sung among English-speaking people. He copied the words of the entire song and enclosed them in the letter. The song wasThe Lost Chord. The anguish of the lost chord in his own life was the secret of the deep impression that the song made upon him.
In America a child can be kept out of the way of the worst temptations until he has reached years of discretion, but such separation is impossible in Africa. This boy, when he was a little child, was taught to drink rum; his mother died a hopeless victim of it; and by the time he was a young man the appetite for it was insatiable and complete master of him. The finer feelings which characterized him seemed to make him all the more the victim of this inordinate desire. He fought it as he might have fought a python of his native jungles, but in vain. On one occasion, in the presence of Mr. Marling, he pledged himself with the solemnity of an oath never to taste it again. A few days afterwards he was walking down the street of an interior town when most unexpectedly he met a boy with a bottle of rum. He sprang at the boy, snatched the bottle from him and drank the contents. Other efforts ended similarly. He afterwards made such promises to me,weeping and fairly prostrated with shame and humiliation; yet he soon fell again. He became at length quite hopeless, and it was necessary to dismiss him from all service in the mission. He got several good positions, but lost them immediately. When I last saw him he was a moral wreck and almost an outcast even in Africa, where there are no outcasts. Augustus has since died; one more victim of poisoned rum.
He is full of compassion and plenteous in mercy.And, knowing Augustus as I knew him, I dare to hope that he has again at last heard the long-lost chord, and the sound of the greatAmen.
The native is constitutionally incapable of being a moderate drinker. And, besides, drunkenness is not disgraceful; they have not the spirit that revolts from it. I have personally seen little children intoxicated. I have seen them intoxicated in the schoolroom. I have known of parents getting their own children to drink to intoxication for their amusement. It is doubtful whether there is another tribe in all West Africa so besotted with alcoholism as the Mpongwe. Physicians agree that it is one of the chief causes of their increasing sterility.
Another factor in the extermination of the Mpongwe is the demoralization of domestic life incident to methods of trade. The Mpongwe man is a trader by instinct. In shrewdness and diplomacy I doubt whether he has a superior among all the tribes of West Africa. This shrewdness he expresses in many homely proverbs; as, for example, when he says: “If you must sleep three in a bed, sleep in the middle.” White traders all along the coast employ the Mpongwe as middlemen between them and the interior people, who possess the export products. The white man gives the middleman a certain quantity of goods on trust. With these he goes to the interior and establishes a small trading-post in one orseveral towns. It is a life of privation and danger, a lonely, miserable existence, but he endures it with patience for the joyful hope that at the end of a year or two he may return to his beloved town and family in Gaboon, so rich that he can afford to “rip” for six months; to dress so that the women will adore him and the men hate him. His goods being soon exhausted by his numerous relations as well as himself, he starts off for another year or two. He has a wife, or wives, at Gaboon, and he takes to himself a wife or two at each of his interior trading-centres.
In the dangers of these middlemen and the necessities of trade Miss Mary H. Kingsley finds a plausible argument for polygamy, amounting, in Miss Kingsley’s opinion, to a full justification. Indeed, for various reasons, the majority of traders defend and advocate native polygamy. The journeys of these native traders to the interior are dangerous, and I agree with Miss Kingsley that they deserve credit for their courage. “Certainly they run less risk of death from fever than a white man would; but, on the other hand, their colour gives them no protection; and their chance of getting murdered is distinctly greater; the white governmental powers cannot revenge their death in the way they would the death of a white man, for these murders usually take place away in some forest region, in a district no white man has ever penetrated.”
There are two reasons why so many of them nevertheless survive. The first is that trade follows definite routes and the trader is expected about once in six months by all the towns along the way, in which the people are eager for trade-goods, the men “fairly wild for tobacco” and the women impatient for beads and other ornaments. Under these circumstances, for the people of any one town to kill the trader would meantrouble between that town and the other towns along the route.
But this consideration alone is not sufficient; and Miss Kingsley gives us the means that he employs for his further safety, as follows: “But the trader is not yet safe. There is still a hole in his armour, and this is only to be stopped up in one way, namely, by wives; for you see, although the village cannot safely kill him and take all his goods, they can still let him die safely of a disease, and take part of them, passing on sufficient stuff to the other villages to keep them quiet. Now the most prevalent disease in the African bush comes out of the cooking-pot, and so to make what goes into the cooking-pot—which is the important point, for earthen pots do not in themselves breed poison—safe and wholesome, you have got to have some one who is devoted to your health to attend to the cooking affairs; and who can do this like a wife?—one in each village of the whole of your route. I know myself one gentleman whose wives stretch over 300 miles of country, with a good wife base in a coast town as well. This system of judiciously conducted alliances gives the black trader a security nothing else can, because naturally he marries into influential families at each village, and all the wife’s relations on the mother’s side regard him as one of themselves and look after him and his interests. That security can lie in woman, especially so many women, the so-called civilized man may ironically doubt, but the security is there, and there only, and on a sound basis; for remember that the position of a travelling trader’s wife in a village is a position that gives the lady prestige, the discreet husband showing little favours to her family and friends, if she asks for them while he is with her; and then she has not got the bother of having a man always about the house, and liable to get all sorts of silly notions into his head, if she speaks to anothergentleman, and then go and impart these notions to her with a cutlass, or a kassengo, as the more domestic husband, I am assured by black ladies, is prone to.”[1]
1.Travels in West Africa, p. 252.
1.Travels in West Africa, p. 252.
This picture is not untrue to the facts. And yet some of us who have old-fashioned ideas of morality are not convinced that polygamy is thereby justified with its beastly immorality on the part of those men and of all those women who prefer not to have husbands hanging about the house with silly notions—that is to say,moralnotions—about the behaviour of women. And however heartrending may be the condition of those interior men and women, without tobacco and without beads, we cannot agree that their necessity justifies any such degrading practice for its relief. As for the slight excess of rubber and ivory that civilized folks obtain by this means, it may soothe the civilized breast to know that all, or nearly all, this trade produce would reach the coast in other and more legitimate ways without these middlemen, whose presence is a curse to the interior people, whose absence is a curse to their own tribe, and who are above all a curse to themselves.
This demoralization of domestic life is even worse for the Mpongwe women than for their absent husbands. There is a large settlement of white men in Gaboon, most of them government officials. And because of the climate the white population is always rapidly changing. Nearly all the Mpongwe women become the mistresses of those men. And the worst of it is that instead of being deemed disgraceful this only gives them social prestige among their own people. A woman said to me one day:
“Iga is so proud she won’t speak to me any more.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Oh, she is living with a white man now,” was the reply.
The marriage tie in Gaboon has long ceased to be a “tie.” It was much more binding before the advent of the white man, and it is more binding to-day among the uncivilized Fang.
The dreadful diseases that have been imported into Africa are certainly a factor in the extermination of the Mpongwe. But the subject is too unpleasant to discuss at length in this place.
Again, the disregard of native institutions and the destruction of tribal authority by the foreign government tends to break down all authority and remove all moral restraints. This is more or less true in all West Africa. The native form of government among the Mpongwe is somewhat patriarchal; authority belongs to the head of the family, the head of the clan and the head of the tribe. The native reverence for the authority of these men is the saving virtue that sustains the tribe. But the chief’s authority and this reverence are destroyed together when the people see him tied up occasionally and flogged; or ruthlessly flung into prison; or his authority superseded by that of a native policeman. The kingly office goes begging for an occupant when men find that the grandeur of royalty consists in being held more or less responsible for all the misdoings of all the tribe, while, perhaps, some black mistress of a government official has more real power than the native king.
The authority of custom, in former times, even exceeded the authority of kings. But the foreigner ignores native customs, or ridicules them, or even condemns and forbids them—often without understanding them. The tribal customs of Africa, from the most trivial to the most revolting, are not arbitrary, but have a moral meaning and significance; though they sometimes outlive their usefulness. They either embody such rude justice as the African has attained; or else they represent the operationof the law of self-preservation. One can give a rational explanation even of the most cruel and revolting custom that I have ever known in Africa, namely, the custom of burying a man’s wives alive with him when he dies. Africa abounds with deadly poisons, and African wives frequently contract an unpleasant habit of using them in the cooking-pot. How common the practice is may be judged by the African proverb: “We don’t eat out of the same dish,” used for instance as follows: “So-and-so is angry but what do I care? We don’t eat out of the same dish.” The wife prepares her husband’s food and has the daily opportunity of using this deadly weapon. But this burial custom—the fact that when he dies she will be buried with him—gives her a personal interest in keeping him alive. It is scarcely necessary to say that I think that this custom ought to be suppressed and its observance severely punished. But meantime something ought to be done to improve the morals of the African wife.
The dowry paid for a wife among the Mpongwe is forty dollars. Among the uncivilized Fang it is several times this amount, although the Fang are very poor in comparison. The Mpongwe dowry was reduced by the French government as a step in the direction of its abolishment; for it is nothing more than a purchase price. But the result of this forced reduction of the dowry has been demoralization rather than civilization. The custom among all tribes is that if a wife desert her husband her family must pay back the dowry or send back the wife. It is not easy to send back a large dowry, and the people, being unable or unwilling to do it, will send the woman back unless she has a very strong case against her husband. But forty dollars can easily be raised, especially if there should be several white men to help. So there is nothing to prevent the Mpongwe woman fromleaving her husband when she pleases; and it pleases her to change him frequently. Until the African attains the moral sentiment that makes the marriage bond sacred it is better that there should be the bond of outright purchase and ownership rather than no marriage at all.
It is so with the whole body of custom. It expresses the inward life of the people. It contains such rudimentary morality as they know, or embodies a principle that is necessary for the preservation of society. It is on the level of the African’s moral culture. It corresponds with his beliefs and has the consent of his mind. The foreigner may by sheer force change his outward condition, but unless there be also a corresponding inward change he does not respond to the new obligations; his moral responsibility is not equal to the new demands, and the result is moral degeneration followed inevitably by physical degeneration.
This very matter of the dowry illustrates the different method of the missionary and, I believe, the true principle of progress. Our early missionaries made no church laws against the dowry, but they faithfully preached the equality of woman and the higher idea of marriage; and as the Christians became imbued with this sentiment they themselves abolished the dowry within their own society. But they did it at the instance of a moral sentiment which made marriage more secure than ever. The inward preceded the outward change. The missionary does as much harm as anybody else when he adopts the easy method of ruthless and indiscriminate assaults upon native customs and beliefs. It was not the Master’s method. Even slavery Jesus did not attack with violence; that were as vain—if I may use the illustration of Dr. Richard Storrs—as vain as to attack an Arctic ice-field with pick and drill; but He turned upon it the summer sunshine and it slowly melted away. He inspiredmen with a sentiment of human brotherhood and destroyed slavery by expelling the spirit that made it possible. The African has a rooted antipathy to the pick and drill, but he loves the sunshine; he is responsive to truth and capable of high and transforming affections.
It is said on the coast that England rules her African colonies forcommerce, France forrevenueand Spain forplunder. The English policy gives the utmost encouragement to native enterprise and thrift, and on the whole the English colonies are the most prosperous and promising. The French policy of revenue imposes such a burden of taxation that life no longer consists in eating and drinking and talking palavers, but in paying taxes. And the enormous import and export duty stifles enterprise and in the end defeats its own purpose. But it must be said that the French officials, of all classes, in their personal intercourse with the natives, are free and friendly, and in consequence are much better liked than the English officials, who, though usually just, are often arrogant, and, while they care for the welfare of the native, care nothing for his feelings. One recalls that in the early days of America the French got on with the Indians much better than the English.
The German policy cannot be described in one word. Their policy is commercial; but they love government for its own sake and they govern far too much. There is an element of militarism in their rule that is entirely too rigorous for the African, and must ultimately destroy him unless it becomes modified through knowledge and experience. It is certain that Germany has not yet solved the problems of colonial government in Africa. Some years have passed since I lived in Kamerun and it may be that conditions have improved—though I doubt it; but it used to be that the first visible institution of government in a new district was the whipping-post. Whatever Germany does she does with all her might, and the activity of this institution made the proximity of a government station an undesirable neighbourhood if one chanced to have a human heart. The outpost of civilization in Africa is frequently a whipping-post.
TRADING-HOUSE AT GABOON.The beach strewn with logs of mahogany in preparation for shipment.
TRADING-HOUSE AT GABOON.The beach strewn with logs of mahogany in preparation for shipment.
TRADING-HOUSE AT GABOON.The beach strewn with logs of mahogany in preparation for shipment.
The fatal defect, both of trade and government, as independent civilizing agencies, is that they have forcibly altered the outward conditions of the native without changing the inward man. The African is somewhat in the position of the poor Indian in our own country a few generations ago. He was a hunter in a land stripped of game, a warrior deprived of arms and obliged henceforth to seek his rights by legal technicalities—while he was still the very same old Indian, inwardly not a whit better, and by no means equal to the demands and moral obligations which the new conditions imposed upon him. One may clip the claws of the tiger and even pull his teeth, but he is still a tiger; and a French uniform on an African cannibal does not make him a vegetarian.