Wherein the Voyager, having fallen among the black traders,
discourses on these men and their manner of life; and the
difficulties and dangers attending the barter they carry on with the
bush savages; and on some of the reasons that makes this barter so
beloved and followed by both the black trader and the savage. To
which is added an account of the manner of life of the Fan tribe;
the strange form of coinage used by these people; their manner of
hunting the elephant, working in iron; and such like things.
I spent a few, lazy, pleasant days at Agonjo, Mr. Glass doing all he
could to make me comfortable, though he had a nasty touch of fever
on him just then. His efforts were ably seconded by his good lady,
an exceedingly comely Gaboon woman, with pretty manners, and an
excellent gift in cookery. The third member of the staff was the
store-keeper, a clever fellow: I fancy a Loango from his clean-cut
features and spare make, but his tribe I know not for a surety.
One of these black trader factories is an exceedingly interesting
place to stay at, for in these factories you are right down on the
bed rock of the trade. On the Coast, for the greater part, the
white traders are dealing with black traders, middle men, who have
procured their trade stuff from the bush natives, who collect and
prepare it. Here, in the black trader factory, you see the first
stage of the export part of the trade: namely the barter of the
collected trade stuff between the collector and the middleman. I
will not go into details regarding it. What I saw merely confirmed
my opinion that the native is not cheated; no, not even by a fellow
African trader; and I will merely here pause to sing a paean to a
very unpopular class--the black middleman as he exists on the South-
West Coast. It is impossible to realise the gloom of the lives of
these men in bush factories, unless you have lived in one. It is no
use saying "they know nothing better and so don't feel it," for they
do know several things better, being very sociable men, fully
appreciative of the joys of a Coast town, and their aim, object and
end in life is, in almost every case, to get together a fortune that
will enable them to live in one, give a dance twice a week, card
parties most nights, and dress themselves up so that their fellow
Coast townsmen may hate them and their townswomen love them. From
their own accounts of the dreadful state of trade; and the awful and
unparalleled series of losses they have had, from the upsetting of
canoes, the raids and robberies made on them and their goods by
"those awful bush savages"; you would, if you were of a trustful
disposition, regard the black trader with an admiring awe as the man
who has at last solved the great commercial problem of how to keep a
shop and live by the loss. Nay, not only live, but build for
himself an equivalent to a palatial residence, and keep up, not only
it, but half a dozen wives, with a fine taste for dress every one of
them. I am not of a trustful disposition and I accept those
"losses" with a heavy discount, and know most of the rest of them
have come out of my friend the white trader's pockets. Still I can
never feel the righteous indignation that I ought to feel, when I
see the black trader "down in a seaport town with his Nancy," etc.,
as Sir W. H. S. Gilbert classically says, because I remember those
bush factories.
Mr. Glass, however, was not a trader who made a fortune by losing
those of other people; for he had been many years in the employ of
the firm. He had risen certainly to the high post and position of
charge of the Rembwe, but he was not down giddy-flying at Gaboon.
His accounts of his experiences when he had been many years ago away
up the still little known Nguni River, in a factory in touch with
the lively Bakele, then in a factory among Fans and Igalwa on the
Ogowe, and now among Fans and Skekiani on the Rembwe, were
fascinating, and told vividly of the joys of first starting a
factory in a wild district. The way in which your customers, for
the first month or so, enjoyed themselves by trying to frighten you,
the trader, out of your wits and goods, and into giving them fancy
prices for things you were trading in, and for things of no earthly
use to you, or any one else! The trader's existence during this
period is marked by every unpleasantness save dulness; from that he
is spared by the presence of a mob of noisy, dangerous, thieving
savages all over his place all day; invading his cook-house, to put
some nastiness into his food as a trade charm; helping themselves to
portable property at large; and making themselves at home to the
extent of sitting on his dining-table. At night those customers
proceed to sleep all over the premises, with a view to being on hand
to start shopping in the morning. Woe betide the trader if he gives
in to this, and tolerates the invasion, for there is no chance of
that house ever being his own again; and in addition to the local
flies, etc., on the table-cloth, he will always have several big
black gentlemen to share his meals. If he raises prices, to tide
over some extra row, he is a lost man; for the Africans can
understand prices going up, but never prices coming down; and time
being no object, they will hold back their trade. Then the district
is ruined, and the trader along with it, for he cannot raise the
price he gets for the things he buys.
What that trader has got to do, is to be a "Devil man." They always
kindly said they recognised me as one, which is a great compliment.
He must betray no weakness, but a character which I should describe
as a compound of the best parts of those of Cardinal Richelieu,
Brutus, Julius Caesar, Prince Metternich, and Mezzofanti, the latter
to carry on the native language part of the business; and he must
cast those customers out, not only from his house; but from his
yard; and adhere to the "No admittance except on business"
principle. This causes a good deal of unpleasantness, and the
trader's nights are now cheered by lively war-dances outside his
stockade; the accompanying songs advertising that the customers are
coming over the stockade to raid the store, and cut up the trader
"into bits like a fish." Sometimes they do come--and then--finish;
but usually they don't; and gradually settle down, and respect the
trader greatly as "a Devil man"; and do business on sound lines
during the day. Over the stockade at night, by ones and twos,
stealing, they will come to the end of the chapter.
Moonlight nights are fairly restful for the bush trader, but when it
is inky black, or pouring with rain, he has got to be very much out
and about, and particularly vigilant has he got to be on tornado
nights--a most uncomfortable sort of weather to attend to business
in, I assure you.
The factory at Agonjo was typical; the house is a fine specimen of
the Igalwa style of architecture; mounted on poles above the ground;
the space under the house being used as a store for rubber in
barrels, and ebony in billets; thereby enabling the trader to hover
over these precious possessions, sleeping and waking, like a sitting
hen over her eggs. Near to the house are the sleeping places for
the beach hands, and the cook-house. In front, in a position
commanded by the eye from the verandah, and well withdrawn from the
stockade, are great piles of billets of red bar wood. The whole of
the clean, sandy yard containing these things, and divers others, is
surrounded by a stout stockade, its main face to the river frontage,
the water at high tide lapping its base, and at low tide exposing in
front of it a shore of black slime. Although I cite this factory as
a typical factory of a black trader, it is a specimen of the highest
class, for, being in connection with Messrs. Hatton and Cookson it
is well kept up and stocked. Firms differ much in this particular.
Messrs. Hatton and Cookson, like Messrs. Miller Brothers in the
Bights, take every care that lies in their power of the people who
serve them, down to the Kruboys working on their beaches, giving
ample and good rations and providing good houses. But this is not
so with all firms on the Coast. I have seen factories belonging to
the Swedish houses beside which this factory at Agonjo is a palace
although those factories are white man factories, and the
unfortunate white men in them are expected by these firms to live on
native chop--an expectation the Agents by no means realise, for they
usually die. Black hands, however, do not suffer much at the hands
of such firms, for the Swedish Agents are a quiet, gentlemanly set
of men, in the best sense of that much misused term, and they do not
employ on their beaches such a staff of black helpers as the English
houses, so the two or three Kruboys on a starvation beach can fairly
well fend for themselves, for there is always an adjacent village,
and in that village there are always chickens, and on the shore
crabs, and in the river fish, and for the rest of his diet the
Kruboy flirts with the local ladies.
Although, as I have laid down, the bush factory at its best is a
place, as Mr. Tracey Tupman would say, more fitted for a wounded
heart than for one still able to feast on social joys, it is a
luxurious situation for a black trader compared to the other form of
trading he deals with--that of travelling among the native villages
in the bush. This has one hundred times the danger, and a thousand
times the discomfort, and is a thoroughly unhealthy pursuit. The
journeys these bush traders make are often remarkable, and they
deserve great credit for the courage and enterprise they display.
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.
You will naturally ask how it is that so many of these men do
survive "to lead a life of sin" as a missionary described to me
their Coast town life to be. This question struck me as requiring
explanation. The result of my investigations, and the answers I
have received from the men themselves, show that there is a reason
why the natives do not succumb every time to the temptation to kill
the trader, and take his goods, and this is twofold: firstly, all
trade in West Africa follows definite routes, even in the wildest
parts of it; and so a village far away in the forest, but on the
trade route, knows that as a general rule twice a year, a trader
will appear to purchase its rubber and ivory. If he does not appear
somewhere about the expected time, that village gets uneasy. The
ladies are impatient for their new clothes; the gentlemen half wild
for want of tobacco; and things coming to a crisis, they make
inquiries for the trader down the road, one village to another, and
then, if it is found that a village has killed the trader, and
stolen all his goods, there is naturally a big palaver, and things
are made extremely hot, even for equatorial Africa, for that village
by the tobaccoless husbands of the clothesless wives. Herein lies
the trader's chief safety, the village not being an atom afraid, or
disinclined to kill him, but afraid of their neighbouring villages,
and disinclined to be killed by them. 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? So you have a wife--one in each village up
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 his
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 women, especially so many women, the so-called civilised man
may ironically doubt, but the security is there, and there only, and
on a sound basis, for remember 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 when 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 another
gentleman, 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.
You may now, I fear, be falling into the other adjacent error--from
the wonder why any black trader survives, namely, into the wonder
why any black trader gets killed; with all these safeguards, and
wives. But there is yet another danger, which no quantity of wives,
nor local jealousies avail to guard him through. This danger arises
from the nomadic habits of the bush tribes, notably the Fan. For
when a village has made up its mind to change its district, either
from having made the district too hot to hold it, with quarrels with
neighbouring villages; or because it has exhausted the trade stuff,
i.e. rubber and ivory in reach of its present situation; or because
some other village has raided it, and taken away all the stuff it
was saving to sell to the black trader; it resolves to give itself a
final treat in the old home, and make a commercial coup at one fell
swoop. Then when the black trader turns up with his boxes of goods,
it kills him, has some for supper, smokes the rest, and takes it and
the goods, and departs to found new homes in another district.
The bush trade I have above sketched is the bush trade with the
Fans. In those districts on the southern banks of the Ogowe the
main features of the trade, and the trader's life are the same, but
the details are more intricate, for the Igalwa trader from
Lembarene, Fernan Vaz, or Njole, deals with another set of trading
tribes, not first hand with the collectors. The Fan villages on the
trade routes may, however, be regarded as trade depots, for to them
filters the trade stuff of the more remote villages, so the
difference is really merely technical, and in all villages alike the
same sort of thing occurs.
The Igalwa or M'pongwe trader arrives with the goods he has received
from the white trader, and there are great rejoicing and much uproar
as his chests and bundles and demijohns are brought up from the
canoe. And presently, after a great deal of talk, the goods are
opened. The chiefs of the village have their pick, and divide this
among the principal men of the village, who pay for it in part with
their store of collected rubber or ivory, and take the rest on
trust, promising to collect enough rubber to pay the balance on the
next visit of the trader. Thereby the trader has a quantity of
debts outstanding in each village, liable to be bad debts, and
herein lies his chief loss. Each chief takes a certain understood
value in goods as a commission for himself--nyeno--giving the
trader, as a consideration for this, an understood bond to assist
him in getting in the trust granted to his village. This nyeno he
utilises in buying trade stuff from villages not on the trade route.
Among the Fans the men who have got the goods stand by with these to
trade for rubber with the general public and bachelors of the
village, in a way I will presently explain. In tribes like Ajumbas,
Adooma, etc., the men having the goods travel off, as traders, among
their various bush tribes, similarly paying their nyeno, and so by
the time the goods reach the final producing men, only a small
portion of them is left, but their price has necessarily risen.
Still it is quite absurd for a casual white traveller, who may have
dropped in on the terminus of a trade route, to cry out regarding
the small value the collector (who is often erroneously described as
the producer) gets for his stuff, compared to the price it fetches
in Europe. For before it even reaches the factory of the Coast
Settlement, that stuff has got to keep a whole series of traders.
It appears at first bad that this should be the case, but the case
it is along the west coast of the continent save in the districts
commanded by the Royal Niger company, who, with courage and
enterprise, have pushed far inland, and got in touch with the great
interior trade routes--a performance which has raised in the breasts
of the Coast trader tribes who have been supplanted, a keen
animosity, which like most animosity in Africa, is not regardful of
truth. The tribes that have had the trade of the Bight of Biafra
passing through their hands have been accustomed, according to the
German Government who are also pressing inland, to make seventy-five
per cent. profit on it, and they resent being deprived of this. A
good deal is to be said in favour of their views; among other things
that the greater part of the seaboard districts of West Africa, I
may say every part from Sierra Leone to Cameroon, is structurally
incapable of being self-supporting under existing conditions. Below
Cameroon, on my beloved South-west coast, which is infinitely richer
than the Bight of Benin, rich producing districts come down to the
sea in most places until you reach the Congo; but here again the
middleman is of great use to the interior tribes, and if they do
have to pay him seventy-five per cent, serve them right. They
should not go making wife palaver, and blood palaver all over the
place to such an extent that the inhabitants of no village, unless
they go en masse, dare take a ten mile walk, save at the risk of
their lives, in any direction, so no palaver live.
We will now enter into the reason that induces the bush man to
collect stuff to sell among the Fans, which is the expensiveness of
the ladies in the tribe. A bush Fan is bound to marry into his
tribe, because over a great part of the territory occupied by them
there is no other tribe handy to marry into; and a Fan residing in
villages in touch with other tribes, has but little chance of
getting a cheaper lady. For there is, in the Congo Francais and the
country adjacent to the north of it (Batanga), a regular style of
aristocracy which may be summarised firstly thus: All the other
tribes look down on the Fans, and the Fans look down on all the
other tribes. This aristocracy has sub-divisions, the M'pongwe of
Gaboon are the upper circle tribe; next come the Benga of Corisco;
then the Bapuka; then the Banaka. This system of aristocracy is
kept up by the ladies. Thus a M'pongwe lady would not think of
marrying into one of the lower tribes, so she is restricted, with
many inner restrictions, to her own tribe. A Benga lady would marry
a M'pongwe, or a Benga, but not a Banaka, or Bapuka; and so on with
the others; but not one of them would marry a Fan. As for the men,
well of course they would marry any lady of any tribe, if she had a
pretty face, or a good trading connection, if they were allowed to:
that's just man's way. To the south-east the Fans are in touch with
the Bakele, a tribe that has much in common with the Fan, but who
differ from them in getting on in a very friendly way with the
little dwarf people, the Matimbas, or Watwa, or Akoa: people the
Fans cannot abide. With these Bakele the Fan can intermarry, but
there is not much advantage in so doing, as the price is equally
high, but still marry he must.
A young Fan man has to fend for himself, and has a scratchy kind of
life of it, aided only by his mother until--if he be an enterprising
youth--he is able to steal a runaway wife from a neighbouring
village, or if he is a quiet and steady young man, until he has
amassed sufficient money to buy a wife. This he does by collecting
ebony and rubber and selling it to the men who have been allotted
goods by the chief of the village, from the consignment brought up
by the black trader. He supports himself meanwhile by, if the
situation of his village permits, fishing and selling the fish, and
hunting and killing game in the forest. He keeps steadily at it in
his way, reserving his roysterings until he is settled in life. A
truly careful young man does not go and buy a baby girl cheap, as
soon as he has got a little money together; but works and saves on
until he has got enough to buy a good, tough widow lady, who,
although personally unattractive, is deeply versed in the lore of
trade, and who knows exactly how much rubbish you can incorporate in
a ball of india rubber, without the white trader, or the black bush
factory trader, instantly detecting it. When the Fan young man has
married his wife, in a legitimate way on the cash system, he takes
her round to his relations, and shows her off; and they make little
presents to help the pair set up housekeeping. But the young man
cannot yet settle down, for his wife will not allow him to. She is
not going to slave herself to death doing all the work of the house,
etc., and so he goes on collecting, and she preparing, trade stuff,
and he grows rich enough to buy other wives--some of them young
children, others widows, no longer necessarily old. But it is not
until he is well on in life that he gets sufficient wives, six or
seven. For it takes a good time to get enough rubber to buy a lady,
and he does not get a grip on the ivory trade until he has got a
certain position in the village, and plantations of his own which
the elephants can be discovered raiding, in which case a percentage
of the ivory taken from the herd is allotted to him. Now and again
he may come across a dead elephant, but that is of the nature of a
windfall; and on rubber and ebony he has to depend during his early
days. These he changes with the rich men of his village for a very
peculiar and interesting form of coinage--bikei--little iron
imitation axe-heads which are tied up in bundles called ntet, ten
going to one bundle, for with bikei must the price of a wife be
paid. You do not find bikei close down to Libreville, among the
Fans who are there in a semi-civilised state, or more properly
speaking in a state of disintegrating culture. You must go for
bush. I thought I saw in bikei a certain resemblance in underlying
idea with the early Greek coins I have seen at Cambridge, made like
the fore-parts of cattle; and I have little doubt that the articles
of barter among the Fans before the introduction of the rubber,
ebony, and ivory trades, which in their districts are comparatively
recent, were iron implements. For the Fans are good workers in
iron; and it would be in consonance with well-known instances among
other savage races in the matter of stone implements, that these
things, important of old, should survive, and be employed in the
matter of such an old and important affair as marriage. They thus
become ju-ju; and indeed all West African legitimate marriage,
although appearing to the casual observer a mere matter of barter,
is never solely such, but always has ju-ju in it.
We may as well here follow out the whole of the domestic life of the
Fan, now we have got him married. His difficulty does not only
consist in getting enough bikei together but in getting a lady he
can marry. No amount of bikei can justify a man in marrying his
first cousin, or his aunt; and as relationship among the Fans is
recognised with both his father and his mother, not as among the
Igalwa with the latter's blood relations only, there are an awful
quantity of aunts and cousins about from whom he is debarred. But
when he has surmounted his many difficulties, and dodged his
relations, and married, he is seemingly a better husband than the
man of a more cultured tribe. He will turn a hand to anything, that
does not necessitate his putting down his gun outside his village
gateway. He will help chop firewood, or goat's chop, or he will
carry the baby with pleasure, while his good lady does these things;
and in bush villages, he always escorts her so as to be on hand in
case of leopards, or other local unpleasantnesses. When inside the
village he will lay down his gun, within handy reach, and build the
house, tease out fibre to make game nets with, and plait baskets, or
make pottery with the ladies, cheerily chatting the while.
Fan pottery, although rough and sunbaked, is artistic in form and
ornamented, for the Fan ornaments all his work; the articles made in
it consist of cooking pots, palm-wine bottles, water bottles and
pipes, but not all water bottles, nor all pipes are made of pottery.
I wish they were, particularly the former, for they are occasionally
made of beautifully plaited fibre coated with a layer of a certain
gum with a vile taste, which it imparts to the water in the vessel.
They say it does not do this if the vessel is soaked for two days in
water, but it does, and I should think contaminates the stream it
was soaked in into the bargain. The pipes are sometimes made of
iron very neatly. I should imagine they smoked hot, but of this I
have no knowledge. One of my Ajumba friends got himself one of
these pipes when we were in Efoua, and that pipe was, on and off, a
curse to the party. Its owner soon learnt not to hold it by the
bowl, but by the wooden stem, when smoking it; the other lessons it
had to teach he learnt more slowly. He tucked it, when he had done
smoking, into the fold in his cloth, until he had had three serious
conflagrations raging round his middle. And to the end of the
chapter, after having his last pipe at night with it, he would lay
it on the ground, before it was cool. He learnt to lay it out of
reach of his own cloth, but his fellow Ajumbas and he himself
persisted in always throwing a leg on to it shortly after, and there
was another row.
The Fan basket-work is strongly made, but very inferior to the Fjort
basket-work. Their nets are, however, the finest I have ever seen.
These are made mainly for catching small game, such as the beautiful
little gazelles (Ncheri) with dark gray skins on the upper part of
the body, white underneath, and satin-like in sleekness all over.
Their form is very dainty, the little legs being no thicker than a
man's finger, the neck long and the head ornamented with little
pointed horns and broad round ears. The nets are tied on to trees
in two long lines, which converge to an acute angle, the bottom part
of the net lying on the ground. Then a party of men and women
accompanied by their trained dogs, which have bells hung round their
necks, beat the surrounding bushes, and the frightened small game
rush into the nets, and become entangled. The fibre from which
these nets are made has a long staple, and is exceedingly strong. I
once saw a small bush cow caught in a set of them and unable to
break through, and once a leopard; he, however, took his section of
the net away with him, and a good deal of vegetation and sticks to
boot. In addition to nets, this fibre is made into bags, for
carrying things in while in the bush, and into the water bottles
already mentioned.
The iron-work of the Fans deserves especial notice for its
excellence. The anvil is a big piece of iron which is embedded
firmly in the ground. Its upper surface is flat, and pointed at
both ends. The hammers are solid cones of iron, the upper part of
the cones prolonged so as to give a good grip, and the blows are
given directly downwards, like the blows of a pestle. The bellows
are of the usual African type, cut out of one piece of solid but
soft wood; at the upper end of these bellows there are two chambers
hollowed out in the wood and then covered with the skin of some
animal, from which the hair has been removed. This is bound firmly
round the rim of each chamber with tie-tie, and the bag of it at the
top is gathered up, and bound to a small piece of stick, to give a
convenient hand hold. The straight cylinder, terminating in the
nozzle, has two channels burnt in it which communicate with each of
the chambers respectively, and half-way up the cylinder, there are
burnt from the outside into the air passages, three series of holes,
one series on the upper surface, and a series at each side. This
ingenious arrangement gives a constant current of air up from the
nozzle when the bellows are worked by a man sitting behind them, and
rapidly and alternately pulling up the skin cover over one chamber,
while depressing the other. In order to make the affair firm it is
lashed to pieces of stick stuck in the ground in a suitable way so
as to keep the bellows at an angle with the nozzle directed towards
the fire. As wooden bellows like this if stuck into the fire would
soon be aflame, the nozzle is put into a cylinder made of clay.
This cylinder is made sufficiently large at the end, into which the
nozzle of the bellows goes, for the air to have full play round the
latter.
The Fan bellows only differ from those of the other iron-working
West Coast tribes in having the channels from the two chambers in
one piece of wood all the way. His forge is the same as the other
forges, a round cavity scooped in the ground; his fuel also is
charcoal. His other smith's tool consists of a pointed piece of
iron, with which he works out the patterns he puts at the handle-end
of his swords, etc.
I must now speak briefly on the most important article with which
the Fan deals, namely ivory. His methods of collecting this are
several, and many a wild story the handles of your table knives
could tell you, if their ivory has passed through Fan hands. For
ivory is everywhere an evil thing before which the quest for gold
sinks into a parlour game; and when its charms seize such a tribe as
the Fans, "conclusions pass their careers." A very common way of
collecting a tooth is to kill the person who owns one. Therefore in
order to prevent this catastrophe happening to you yourself, when
you have one, it is held advisable, unless you are a powerful person
in your own village, to bury or sink the said tooth and say nothing
about it until the trader comes into your district or you get a
chance of smuggling it quietly down to him. Some of these private
ivories are kept for years and years before they reach the trader's
hands. And quite a third of the ivory you see coming on board a
vessel to go to Europe is dark from this keeping: some teeth a
lovely brown like a well-coloured meerschaum, others quite black,
and gnawed by that strange little creature--much heard of, and
abused, yet little known in ivory ports--the ivory rat.
Ivory, however, that is obtained by murder is private ivory. The
public ivory trade among the Fans is carried on in a way more in
accordance with European ideas of a legitimate trade. The greater
part of this ivory is obtained from dead elephants. There are in
this region certain places where the elephants are said to go to
die. A locality in one district pointed out to me as such a place,
was a great swamp in the forest. A swamp that evidently was deep in
the middle, for from out its dark waters no swamp plant, or tree
grew, and evidently its shores sloped suddenly, for the band of
swamp plants round its edge was narrow. It is just possible that
during the rainy season when most of the surrounding country would
be under water, elephants might stray into this natural trap and get
drowned, and on the drying up of the waters be discovered, and the
fact being known, be regularly sought for by the natives cognisant
of this. I inquired carefully whether these places where the
elephants came to die always had water in them, but they said no,
and in one district spoke of a valley or round-shaped depression in
among the mountains. But natives were naturally disinclined to take
a stranger to these ivory mines, and a white person who has caught--
as any one who has been in touch must catch--ivory fever, is
naturally equally disinclined to give localities.
A certain percentage of ivory collected by the Fans is from live
elephants, but I am bound to admit that their method of hunting
elephants is disgracefully unsportsmanlike. A herd of elephants is
discovered by rubber hunters or by depredations on plantations, and
the whole village, men, women, children, babies and dogs turn out
into the forest and stalk the monsters into a suitable ravine,
taking care not to scare them. When they have gradually edged the
elephants on into a suitable place, they fell trees and wreathe them
very roughly together with bush rope, all round an immense
enclosure, still taking care not to scare the elephants into a rush.
This fence is quite inadequate to stop any elephant in itself, but
it is made effective by being smeared with certain things, the smell
whereof the elephants detest so much that when they wander up to it,
they turn back disgusted. I need hardly remark that this
preparation is made by the witch doctors and its constituents a
secret of theirs, and I was only able to find out some of them.
Then poisoned plantains are placed within the enclosure, and the
elephants eat these and grow drowsier and drowsier; if the water
supply within the enclosure is a pool it is poisoned, but if it is a
running stream this cannot be done. During this time the crowd of
men and women spend their days round the enclosure, ready to turn
back any elephant who may attempt to break out, going to and fro to
the village for their food. Their nights they spend in little bough
shelters by the enclosure, watching more vigilantly than by day, as
the elephants are more active at night, it being their usual feeding
time. During the whole time the witch doctor is hard at work making
incantations and charms, with a view to finding out the proper time
to attack the elephants. In my opinion, his decision fundamentally
depends on his knowledge of the state of poisoning the animals are
in, but his version is that he gets his information from the forest
spirits. When, however, he has settled the day, the best hunters
steal into the enclosure and take up safe positions in trees, and
the outer crowd set light to the ready-built fires, and make the
greatest uproar possible, and fire upon the staggering, terrified
elephants as they attempt to break out. The hunters in the trees
fire down on them as they rush past, the fatal point at the back of
the skull being well exposed to them.
When the animals are nearly exhausted, those men who do not possess
guns dash into the enclosure, and the men who do, reload and join
them, and the work is then completed. One elephant hunt I chanced
upon at the final stage had taken two months' preparation, and
although the plan sounds safe enough, there is really a good deal of
danger left in it with all the drugging and ju-ju. There were eight
elephants killed that day, but three burst through everything,
sending energetic spectators flying, and squashing two men and a
baby as flat as botanical specimens.
The subsequent proceedings were impressive. The whole of the people
gorged themselves on the meat for days, and great chunks of it were
smoked over the fires in all directions. A certain portion of the
flesh of the hind leg was taken by the witch doctor for ju-ju, and
was supposed to be put away by him, with certain suitable
incantations in the recesses of the forest; his idea being
apparently either to give rise to more elephants, or to induce the
forest spirits to bring more elephants into the district.
Dr. Nassau tells me that the manner in which the ivory gained by one
of these hunts is divided is as follows: --"The witch doctor, the
chiefs, and the family on whose ground the enclosure is built, and
especially the household whose women first discovered the animals,
decide in council as to the division of the tusks and the share of
the flesh to be given to the crowd of outsiders. The next day the
tusks are removed and each family represented in the assemblage cuts
up and distributes the flesh." In the hunt I saw finished, the
elephants had not been discovered, as in the case Dr. Nassau above
speaks of, in a plantation by women, but by a party of rubber
hunters in the forest some four or five miles from any village, and
the ivory that would have been allotted to the plantation holder in
the former case, went in this case to the young rubber hunters.
Such are the pursuits, sports and pastimes of my friends the Fans.
I have been considerably chaffed both by whites and blacks about my
partiality for this tribe, but as I like Africans in my way--not a
la Sierra Leone--and these Africans have more of the qualities I
like than any other tribe I have met, it is but natural that I
should prefer them. They are brave and so you can respect them,
which is an essential element in a friendly feeling. They are on
the whole a fine race, particularly those in the mountain districts
of the Sierra del Cristal, where one continually sees magnificent
specimens of human beings, both male and female. Their colour is
light bronze, many of the men have beards, and albinoes are rare
among them. The average height in the mountain districts is five
feet six to five feet eight, the difference in stature between men
and women not being great. Their countenances are very bright and
expressive, and if once you have been among them, you can never
mistake a Fan. But it is in their mental characteristics that their
difference from the lethargic, dying-out coast tribes is most
marked. The Fan is full of fire, temper, intelligence and go; very
teachable, rather difficult to manage, quick to take offence, and
utterly indifferent to human life. I ought to say that other
people, who should know him better than I, say he is a treacherous,
thievish, murderous cannibal. I never found him treacherous; but
then I never trusted him, remembering one of the aphorisms of my
great teacher Captain Boler of Bonny, "It's not safe to go among
bush tribes, but if you are such a fool as to go, you needn't go and
be a bigger fool still, you've done enough." And Captain Boler's
other great aphorism was: "Never be afraid of a black man." "What
if I can't help it?" said I. "Don't show it," said he. To these
precepts I humbly add another: "Never lose your head." My most
favourite form of literature, I may remark, is accounts of
mountaineering exploits, though I have never seen a glacier or a
permanent snow mountain in my life. I do not care a row of pins how
badly they may be written, and what form of bumble-puppy grammar and
composition is employed, as long as the writer will walk along the
edge of a precipice with a sheer fall of thousands of feet on one
side and a sheer wall on the other; or better still crawl up an
arete with a precipice on either. Nothing on earth would persuade
me to do either of these things myself, but they remind me of bits
of country I have been through where you walk along a narrow line of
security with gulfs of murder looming on each side, and where in
exactly the same way you are as safe as if you were in your easy
chair at home, as long as you get sufficient holding ground: not on
rock in the bush village inhabited by murderous cannibals, but on
ideas in those men's and women's minds; and these ideas, which I
think I may say you will always find, give you safety. It is not
advisable to play with them, or to attempt to eradicate them,
because you regard them as superstitious; and never, never shoot too
soon. I have never had to shoot, and hope never to have to; because
in such a situation, one white alone with no troops to back him
means a clean finish. But this would not discourage me if I had to
start, only it makes me more inclined to walk round the obstacle,
than to become a mere blood splotch against it, if this can be done
without losing your self-respect, which is the mainspring of your
power in West Africa.
As for flourishing about a revolver and threatening to fire, I hold
it utter idiocy. I have never tried it, however, so I speak from
prejudice which arises from the feeling that there is something
cowardly in it. Always have your revolver ready loaded in good
order, and have your hand on it when things are getting warm, and in
addition have an exceedingly good bowie knife, not a hinge knife,
because with a hinge knife you have got to get it open--hard work in
a country where all things go rusty in the joints--and hinge knives
are liable to close on your own fingers. The best form of knife is
the bowie, with a shallow half moon cut out of the back at the point
end, and this depression sharpened to a cutting edge. A knife is
essential, because after wading neck deep in a swamp your revolver
is neither use nor ornament until you have had time to clean it.
But the chances are you may go across Africa, or live years in it,
and require neither. It is just the case of the gentleman who asked
if one required a revolver in Carolina and was answered, "You may be
here one year, and you may be here two and never want it; but when
you do want it you'll want it very bad."
The cannibalism of the Fans, although a prevalent habit, is no
danger, I think, to white people, except as regards the bother it
gives one in preventing one's black companions from getting eaten.
The Fan is not a cannibal from sacrificial motives like the negro.
He does it in his common sense way. Man's flesh, he says, is good
to eat, very good, and he wishes you would try it. Oh dear no, he
never eats it himself, but the next door town does. He is always
very much abused for eating his relations, but he really does not do
this. He will eat his next door neighbour's relations and sell his
own deceased to his next door neighbour in return; but he does not
buy slaves and fatten them up for his table as some of the Middle
Congo tribes I know of do. He has no slaves, no prisoners of war,
no cemeteries, so you must draw your own conclusions. No, my
friend, I will not tell you any cannibal stories. I have heard how
good M. du Chaillu fared after telling you some beauties, and now
you come away from the Fan village and down the Rembwe river.