I HEAR STRANGE STORIES AND VAGUE RUMOURS.
Of the details of my life during the time that I remained in charge
of the store it is not my intention to speak, for, although every day
brought with it some new incident which interested me then as it does
now to recall, yet few of the events of my busy and laborious life had
any relation to those subsequent adventures and strange occurrences
which it is the purpose of this narrative to describe.
I shall therefore content myself by giving a brief account of my
manner of life at Quittáh, and of the one or two events that
determined my subsequent destiny.
When I first took charge of the store, being ignorant alike of all the
native languages and of the value of both the trade goods that I sold
and the produce that I was to buy, the Captain secured for me the
assistance of Vanderpuye, who, although a Fanti by birth, had been
settled many years in Quittáh. But in a week I was able to manage the
business alone, or, at least, with the aid of one native assistant
only.
It was a curious life, less distasteful than I had expected, but very
hard work, for I had to be in the store soon after daybreak and
remained until near sunset, with only a short interval at midday.
I would earnestly recommend any explorer who wishes to attain to an
intimate knowledge of the people amongst whom he is dwelling, to open
a store and trade with them, for by so doing he will obtain an
acquaintance with their language, appearance, dress, habits, tastes,
disposition, and the natural productions of their country, which it is
practically impossible to reach under any other circumstances. To the
trader, as to one engaged in a rational and intelligible pursuit, the
native exhibits himself as he is, without any more reserve or
deception than the particular transaction seems to require, while to
the professed explorer he shows himself full of suspicion and
perversity. The mere pursuit of knowledge he neither understands nor
believes in, but attributes to the investigator some hidden and
sinister motive for his inquiries; whereas the actions and objects of
the trader, differing in nowise from those of native merchants, are
perfectly comprehensible to him. Hence the trader is treated by the
native with a frank familiarity in great contrast to the cautious
reserve that is exhibited towards the traveller, the official or the
missionary.
It thus happened that, before I had been ashore a month, I had begun
to get some insight into the manners and customs of the negro as
applied to commerce. My natural facility in picking up languages, too,
to which I have already referred, stood me in good stead, for I soon
acquired a quite useful collection of phrases in the local dialects,
particularly in the barbarous and unmusical Efé language which was
spoken around Quittáh, and the hardly more euphonious Adángme of the
people who came from beyond the Volta River.
I also began to learn, but in a more systematic manner, the simpler
and really melodious language of Hausa, of which Pereira had on his
shelves a dictionary and some selections by Dr. Schön. This was
indeed less useful than the local tongues, but I was not without the
means of exercising it, for it was spoken by the native troops, or
Hausa constabulary, who were constantly making small purchases at the
store, and by the itinerant merchants from the interior, whose visits
were somewhat rare, but who, when they did come, were rather extensive
buyers.
It was from one of these travelling merchants that I received the
first of the series of impulses that finally sent me wandering into
the unknown interior. This man, a Hausa named Amádu Dandaúra,
arrived at Quittáh when I had been there about two months, in company
with his two sons and a small caravan of slaves.
He was a man of some substance, and as he came day after day to
purchase goods for the markets of the interior, I used to have a mat
spread for him in the store, on which he would sit and make his
purchases in the leisurely, chaffering manner so characteristic of the
native trader.
But it was impossible to keep his attention fixed on business matters,
for, being a perfectly indefatigable talker and having apparently had
many strange adventures, he used to collect quite a considerable
audience of his countrymen from the Fort and the lines to listen to
his spirited narrations. While he was discoursing in this manner I
would often, if I had leisure, lounge hard by and listen, trying to
follow the conversation but never succeeding, for, not only was my
acquaintance with the language insufficient, but, as I presently
discovered, neither Amádu nor the soldiers pronounced the words as
they were spelt in my books.
But although unable to make out the matter of Amádu’s discourse, I
succeeded in picking out one or two phrases, which, as they often
recurred and were received by the listeners with a great show of
surprise, I conjectured to be an important part of the merchant’s
story.
One of these phrases was “Matári ’n seliki” or “King’s treasure
house”; another was “Makáfi dayáwa,” “a number of blind men.” When I
had with some difficulty translated these phrases and committed to
memory some detached words which seemed to be the names of
places--such as Diádasu, Tánosu, Insúta, and Kumási--I had learned
all that I was destined to learn of Amádu’s story, for my assistant,
Daniel Kudjo, spoke not a word of Hausa, and few of the Hausas spoke
more than half a dozen words of English; and thus my curiosity, which
had been strongly aroused by these mysterious phrases, had to remain
unsatisfied.
But a curious light was thrown on the subject by Pereira in the course
of a conversation that I had with him one evening.
It was my invariable custom at this time, on returning home from the
store, heated and fatigued with the endless weighing of rubber,
kernels and copra, and measuring of countless demijohns of palm oil in
the glaring compound, or rummaging amongst the bales and cases in the
store, to spend the long evenings, after my bath and dinner, lolling
in a great chair, pipe in mouth, while the old gentleman reclined in a
hammock and entertained me with his reminiscences of life in West
Africa.
We were talking on this occasion about the Ashanti war, then just
concluded, and were discussing the indemnity of sixty thousand ounces
of gold claimed by the British Government.
“It seems an enormous sum,” I remarked. “Nearly two hundred and forty
thousand pounds. One would not expect the king of a barbarous tribe
like the Ashantis to possess such a reserve of wealth as that.”
“Probably he does not,” replied Pereira, “and probably the indemnity
will never be paid. Perhaps,” he added with a dry smile, “your
judicious Government never intended it to be paid. A debt that cannot
be met is sometimes of great use to the creditor.”
“Then you think that the king of Ashanti doesn’t possess sixty
thousand ounces?”
“Who knows?” replied Pereira, deliberately rolling a cigarette. “One
hears wonderful stories of the store of gold in the Royal Treasury at
Bantamá, but then no one has seen it, and an African’s idea of a
large sum is so different from that of a rich European Government.”
He lighted his cigarette and stared absently at a gecko that was
creeping stealthily along the ceiling towards a corpulent black moth.
“It is probable,” he remarked presently, after blowing a cloud of
smoke up towards the unconscious gecko, “that there are really large
hoards of gold scattered about the country, but these are not
available for the king’s use.”
“How is that?” I asked.
“Why, you see, among the African tribes the custom exists of making
over certain treasures to particular fetishes. Here a rich gold mine
is shut down and given to one fetish; here a river that has alluvial
gold in its bed is made sacred to another fetish; here a mountain
containing a rich vein of quartz is ‘busum’--sacred; here a temple has
a hoard of gold raised from the sacred mine, or washed from the sacred
river. If you travel in the interior you will constantly meet with
fetish mountains--you can see one, the Adáklu mountain, from this
verandah on a clear day--and every river of any size that you cross is
sacred to some fetish or other; and probably nearly all those rivers
and mountains are rich in gold.”
“It is a curious custom,” I remarked.
“Not so very unlike our own,” the old man replied, with a dry smile,
that spread out a fan of wrinkles on either temple; “think of the
South American churches that your countrymen looted; think of the
shrines in my own poor country, and think of the fetish treasures that
your king Henry laid his strong hands upon. No, Englefield, man is
much the same all the world over--love, war, greed, and superstition
are the forces that move him, whether his skin be white, black, red or
yellow, and whether his house is in the frozen North or the sunny
Tropics.”
I was amused at this philosophic outburst on the part of my host, who,
having delivered himself of these truths, resumed his abstracted
observation of the gecko.
That reptile, having captured the moth, proceeded to devour it,
scattering fragments of its wings down on to the table; after which it
suddenly started in pursuit of another gecko, presumably a female,
which had made its appearance on the ceiling.
Pereira nodded at the lizard.
“See, Englefield,” he said, “even the little house-master is no
different. He has his business to attend to like us, and now that he
has filled his belly, he finds leisure to attend to the affairs of his
cold little heart.”
I laughed at this mild pleasantry, but as the old gentleman appeared
to be wandering away from the subject of our talk I gently led him
back to it.
“Is the situation of any of these fetish hoards known?” I asked.
“To the natives a good many of them are,” replied Pereira. “You see,
they are quite safe; no native would incur the displeasure of the
fetish by attempting a robbery--not even an invading tribe, for the
invader believes in and respects the local fetish. Of course, towards
the white men the natives preserve a good deal of secrecy, but still I
have heard indirectly of one or two of the sacred hoards.”
“Have you really?” I exclaimed.
“Yes. The accounts have been generally rather vague, but one or two
were quite clear, although I can’t vouch for their truth. It is said,
for instance, that by the side of the caravan road from Ashánti to
Kong there is a mass of gold sticking up out of the ground like an
ant-hill. Nobody can touch it because it is guarded by a fetish who
would instantly destroy the sight of any person who should attempt to
seize it; and this, it seems, is firmly believed even by the
Mahommedans of Kong. Then there is a queer story about the Aboási
pool near the source of the Tano River in the north of Ashánti. It is
said that the head waters gush out of a great rock with tusks like an
elephant--whence the name Abo-ase, under the rock--and fall into a
still pool, the floor of which is thickly coated with gold dust. Now
all this gold is sacred to the great Tano fetish (or abúsum, to speak
more correctly), and it is said to be protected from possible
pilferers by a bodyguard of huge, ferocious fishes, which swim about
in the depth of the pool.”
“That sounds pretty far fetched,” I remarked.
“It does,” agreed Pereira, “although it doesn’t do to be too
sceptical, you know. However, the rest of the story is, I must admit,
quite incredible. It is reported that near Aboási is a large cavern
which forms the treasure-house of the Tano fetish, and here the fetish
priests live with a number of slaves or prisoners, all of whom have
had their eyes put out. Once a month a party of the prisoners are
taken on to the lake in a canoe and are made to dredge up the
gold-bearing sand in copper buckets, and when they have got up a
sufficient quantity they are taken back to the cave. There it is
supposed that they spend their time in washing out the gold under the
direction of the priests, and working it into ingots or ornaments, and
it is said that the treasure accumulated in the cave is enormous.
Twice a year the King of Ashánti is reported to send to Aboási a
party of his executioners with a fresh batch of prisoners whose eyes
are put out as soon as they arrive. Then a similar number of the
oldest prisoners are killed as a sacrifice to the fetish, and their
bodies thrown into the lake to the sacred fishes; after which the
executioners receive a tribute of the fetish gold for the king, and
return to Kumási.”
“You don’t suppose that there is any truth in that story, do you?” I
asked, as Pereira finished his recital.
“I certainly do not imagine it to be true,” he replied. “But as I have
said, we should not be too incredulous, for the longer one lives in
Africa the more does one realise that it is a land of wonders.”
This story of Pereira’s, wildly improbable as it was, made a
considerable impression upon me, for not only is it true, as my host
had remarked, that Africa is a land of strange and unexpected
happenings, but to a newcomer like myself, the novelty of the
surroundings, and the total contrast to the conditions of life in
prosaic, workaday England, produce an impression of unreality that
vitiates the standard of probability. I recalled, too, the mysterious
references of Amádu Dandaúra to the “treasure-house” and the “blind
men” of Tánosu, and bitterly regretted that I had not taken the
opportunity of learning from him more about the weird and dreadful
cavern of Aboási, if such a place really existed.