My Overland Journey Begins
The white man’s fetish--I am exchanged with others for rubber and
ivory--My new companions express freely their opinions about the
white men--Why the white men are on the Congo--Native suspicions and
prejudices.
The morning after the steamer arrived all the goods were taken ashore,
put into a huge store, and arranged in their places. Just opposite the
store door was a large image, gaudily coloured and grotesquely ugly. It
was a fetish[6] that the white man had bought of a native “medicine
man,” and had placed it there in the store to frighten the natives and
deter them from stealing. Of course it was no use, for the natives knew
that no “medicine man” would sell a real fetish to the white man,
consequently it did not overawe them, nor keep them from thieving when
they had the opportunity.
Footnote 6:
See note 5, p. 343.
I had not been in the store many days when the box in which I was packed
was carried out and handed over to some natives who had brought some
tusks of ivory and rubber to the white trader for sale. From what I
heard it had taken them a long time to settle the price; but directly
that had been agreed upon they quickly selected their goods, viz. forty
pieces of assorted cloth, ten barrels of gunpowder, fifteen flintlock
guns, one box of brass rods, two demijohns or large bottles of rum, five
cases of gin, and some common looking-glasses, knives, beads and various
other trinkets.
I was carried, with the other trade goods, to the native
sleeping-quarters, and found my new owners were not tall men, but wiry,
lithe, strong fellows, who, after they had bound us with ropes in long
baskets, commenced their tedious overland journey to their town far in
the interior. Before sunset we had crossed the hills, descended the
valley, and forded by means of a canoe the Mposo river. The boys of the
party collected wood and fetched water, and very soon bright cheerful
fires were blazing, and the camp resounded with much chatter and
laughter.
Most of the talk was about white men and their strange ways. One laughed
at them for having such a silly fetish in their store. “Why, I know,”
said he, “the ‘medicine man’ who made it; and he told me himself that he
had put no strong charms in it, as he was not going to hurt his own
people for any white man; but the foolish white man gave plenty of cloth
and gunpowder for it.”
Another asked if they knew Fomu,[7] a white man who lived in the next
district? “Well, he put a weight under his scale, and cheated us for a
long time; but we found him out, and at first we would not trade with
him again, until some one found a way to punish him for defrauding us.”
Footnote 7:
Most white men are known to the natives by native names.
“What did you do?” asked another.
“Well,” answered the first, “we procured some bananas and coated them
with rubber, and sold them to him as solid rubber; and it was a long
time before he discovered it, and then we had to cut every lump of
rubber into pieces; but I think we recovered what he stole from us.”
There was a hearty and good-humoured laugh over this playing off of one
trick against another.
Just then an old man with a long plaited beard chimed in: “Yes,” he
said, “I had a friend who lived in a part of the country where, instead
of using brass rods as we do, they use strings of blue pipe beads as
money--a hundred beads on each string. One day my friend sold some ivory
to a trader there, and received some packets of beads as part payment;
but when he arrived home he found that instead of there being one
hundred beads on each string there were only sixty. He was cheated out
of forty beads on every string, and before he could pass them on the
markets he had to make them up to the proper number.
“After that no native would deal with that trader unless he gave two
strings of beads in the place of one, so he lost in trying to cheat us.
“Pish!” exclaimed the old man, “the white men are cheats! They put heavy
pieces of iron under their scales to rob us; they put lumps of stuff in
their measures to rob us; they give beads in short numbers to rob us;
when we work for them they beat us just before our term is finished so
that we may run away without our pay, and when we have carried loads for
them they often pretend we have stolen from them so as to have an excuse
for not paying us.”
The old man had worked himself into a rage as he recalled wrong after
wrong; but his voice was drowned in a burst of laughter that came from a
group sitting round another fire. “What are you laughing at?” he shouted
aggressively.
“Not at you, father,” respectfully answered one of the young men. “We
are laughing at what we heard yesterday: A trader had treated his house
boys, his people, and his customers very badly for some time, so some of
them met together one evening, went to his house, and stripping him of
his clothes, they carried him into the bush, and rubbed him well with
cow-itch, and then let him go. He had a very bad time; but he has been
better to his people since that night.”
There was much snapping of fingers and chuckling over this joke played
on the white man.
“For what purpose does the white man buy rubber and ivory?” asked one of
the boys of the old man with the plaited beard.
“I don’t know,” replied the old man. “When I was a boy we made pestles
and trumpets of the ivory, and drumstick knobs with the rubber; but I
think the white man only buys rubber and ivory to hide the real reason
of his presence in our country.”
“What is that?” asked the lad.
“Well,” said the old man, with a knowing look in his black eyes, “the
white man does not like the work of making cloth, hence they come to
this country to buy up all the bodies of those who die to send to their
country to make cloth for them. They preserve the bodies in their stores
until there is a good opportunity of sending them away in their
steamers; and when these bodies reach Mputu (the white man’s country)
the spirits are forced to return to them by the magic of their great
‘medicine men,’ and then they are compelled to work for them as their
slaves.
“The white men have very strong magic, surpassing the magic of our
people; but if the white men were not here, very few, if any, of our
people would die. Why, a friend of mine told me all about it the other
day. He said: ‘In the sea there is a hole,[8] and the white man goes in
his steamer to this hole and rings a bell, and the water sprites push up
the end of a piece of cloth, and the white man pulls on it one day, two
days, three days, until he has enough cloth, and then he cuts it off and
measures it into pieces, and binds it into the bales, as we see in their
stores. But before he leaves the hole he throws into it some bodies he
has bought in our country.’ Yes, the white men are very wicked, and
don’t you have anything to do with them. Why, all your relatives who
have died are now, perhaps, slaves in Mputu, and some day you may be the
same.”
Footnote 8:
See note 6, p. 344.
A thrill of horror went through the gaping crowd as the old man in
graphic language and with dramatic gestures told these things. When he
had gained his breath he began again.
“The other day I heard of some exceedingly wicked white men who pretend
to tell people about God, white men who will give you medicine if you
ask for it, and will teach you in a school how to read and write, and
will even take you into their houses and clothe and feed you. Beware of
those white men, for they are only trying to secure you, and you will
soon die and become their slaves in Mputu. The other white men say: ‘We
have come for rubber and ivory,’ and we receive plenty of trade goods
from them in return for our rubbish; but these very wicked ones say: ‘We
have only come to tell you about the great God, and to help you.’ They
are more crafty, cunning and wicked than the others. Keep away from them
always, or you will quickly die!”
By the time the old man had finished there was a large circle of
horror-stricken natives around him, who, with many a cry of rage and
hatred against such evil doings, promised never to go near such wicked
wretches as these white men were, and with many an oath they threatened
they would kill them if ever they had the opportunity.
Soon after this the fires were replenished, and men and boys curled
themselves in their mats and cloths, and went to sleep dreaming of the
cruel wickedness of white men. And all through the night the river went
gliding by to the great Congo and on to the sea to lose itself in the
waters of the Atlantic; and it took no warning to the white men who were
leaving home, friends, and family to tell such as those who slept on its
banks of the great and good God.