AN AFRICAN NIGHT.
From the juju house the witch doctor emerged, bedaubed with colored
earths and bright ashes. The drums renewed their frantic, resounding
thunder. The torchbearers capered more actively, and yelled more
excitedly. The drumming had gone on all day and its hypnotic effect
had culminated in a species of ecstasy in which the blacks yelled and
capered, and capered and yelled, without any clear notion of why or
what they yelled.
With great solemnity, the witch doctor led forward a young native girl,
her face bedaubed with high juju signs. She was in the last stage of
panic. If she did not flee, it was because she believed a worse fate
awaited her flight than if she submitted to whatever was in store for
her now.
Two men stepped forward and threw necklaces of magic import about her
neck. Two other men who upon occasion acted as the assistants of the
chief witch doctor seized the girl's hands. The shouting mass of blacks
formed themselves into a sort of column.
At the front were the drums, those incredible native drums hollowed
out of a single log, and which come from the yet unknown fastnesses
of the darkest interior, far back of Lake Tchad. Behind them came
the torchbearers, yelling a rhythmic chant and capering in almost
unbelievable attitudes as they passed along. Next came the witch
doctor, important and mysterious. Behind him came more torchbearers,
yelling hysterically at the surrounding darkness. Then came the two
assistants, dragging the young girl who was almost paralyzed with
terror. And the entire population of the village followed in their
wake, carrying flaming lights and yelling, yelling, yelling at the
eternally unamazed African forest.
The tall, dank tree trunks loomed mysteriously above the band of
vociferous natives, with their thumping, rumbling, booming drums
sounding hollowly from the front of the procession. The lights wound
into the forest, deep into the unknown and unknowable bush. The yelling
became fainter, but the drums continued to boom out monotonously
through the throbbing silence of the African night. Boom, boom, boom,
boom! Never a variation from the steady beat, though the sound was
muted by the distance it had to travel before reaching us.
I glanced across to where Evan Graham sat smoking. We were on the
veranda of the casa on his plantation, four weeks' march from the city
of Ticao, in the province of Ticao, Portuguese West Africa. From the
veranda we could see through the cleared way to the village, a half
mile away, and the whole scene of the juju procession had been spread
before our eyes like a play.
It puzzled me. I knew Evan made no faintest attempt to Christianize his
slaves--and the villagers were surely his slaves--and yet, white men do
not often allow witch doctors to flourish in their slave quarters. And
the girl who had been led away--I had no idea what might become of her.
Voodoo still puts out its head in strange forms in strange places. It
might well be that some hellish ceremony would take place far back in
the bush that night.
Whatever was to happen had been planned long before, because I had
arrived some four hours previously from a trip up beyond the Hungry
Country, and the drums were beating then. I looked curiously at Evan to
see what he thought of the open practice of juju by his slaves under
their master's eyes. His expression was inscrutable. I knew better than
to ask questions, but I could not help wondering what it all meant.
Evan was a queer sort, at best, but to allow his natives to practice
black magic--as was evidently the case here--before his very nose was
queerer than anything he had done before.
He was not taken by surprise, I know. I had heard the drums that
afternoon, long before I entered the village. They were beating
with the rhythmic monotony that is so typical of the African when
he is disturbed in spirit and wants to be comforted, or when he is
comfortable and wants excitement. Either way will do.
My "boys," wandering along in a more or less listless fashion with the
conventional forty-five pounds on their backs, had heard the drumming
and became more interested. My caravan did not close up, however. It
was spread out over anywhere from a mile to a mile and a half of the
old slave trail that goes down to Venghela, and those in the rear
hastened by precisely the same degree as those in front.
According to instructions, the foremost pair halted while still half a
mile away from the village and waited for the rest of us to come up.
For three months I had been back inland, a part of the time back even
of the Hungry Country, where the grass is bitter to the taste, and all
the world is half mad for salt. For three months I had been moving
quickly and constantly.
Having quit the country--I fervently hope for good--it will do no
harm to admit that my constant moving was due less to the demands of
business than to a desire to be elsewhere when the Belgian officials
arrived. The Belgian Kongo is just north of the province of Ticao,
and I had been skimming its edges, buying ivory and rubber from the
natives across the line. The colonial government does not encourage
independent traders, and it would not have been pleasant for me had
I been caught. In Ticao, of course, I was not molested. A small
honorarium to the governor of the province made him my friend, and my
conscience did not bother me. I paid ten times the prices the natives
usually got and I imposed no fines or contributions on the villages.
If you know anything about the Kongo, you will regard me as I regarded
myself--as more or less of a benefactor.
After three months of that, though, and two or three close shaves
from a choice of fighting or capture, I was glad to get back to
civilization, even such civilization as Evan Graham's casa. Away from
Ticao, Evan Graham would have been shunned for the sort of man he was.
In Ticao, one is not particular. There are few enough Anglo-Saxon white
men of any sort--the two consuls, half a dozen missionaries, and about
three men like myself, who take chances in the interior. The rest of
the population is either Portuguese or black, preponderatingly black,
with a blending layer of half- and quarter-breeds.
Evan was a cad and several different kinds of an animal, but he was
a white man, he talked English such as one hears at home, and he had
a pool table and civilized drinks all of four weeks' march from the
city of Ticao. I always stopped overnight with him on my way back from
the interior. I knew that he had bribed the governor to overlook the
law which prescribes that no white man shall settle more than forty
kilometers from a fort, because he wanted to have a free hand with
his natives. I knew, too, that he had no shred of title to the land
he tilled, or to the services of the natives he forced to work in his
fields. He had come out there with four or five of the dingy-brown
half-castes that are overseers for half the rocas in Ticao, had
frightened or coerced the inhabitants of three villages into signing
the silly little contracts that bind them to work for a white man for
so many years at ridiculous wage, and now had a plantation that was
tremendously profitable.
I never had understood just how he made the blacks serve him so well.
He seemed to have them frightened nearly to death. Most plantations
have the slave quarters--the blacks are officially "_contrahidos_," or
contract laborers, but in practice they are slaves--most plantations
have the slave quarters surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and let
savage dogs loose outside the fence at night, but Graham allowed his
natives to live in the villages they had occupied before his coming and
seemed to take no precautions against their running away.
This open practice of juju before his eyes and apparently with his
consent was of a piece with the rest of his queerness. My own boys
always seemed to be glad to get away from the neighborhood of his
plantation. I had heard a word or two passed among them that seemed to
hint at a juju house in some secret clearing near the village. I had
thought it possible that it was by means of some mummery in that temple
that he kept his natives in hand, but juju is a dangerous thing for a
white man to meddle with.
In any event it was none of my business. I was sitting on his porch,
one of his drinks at my elbow, smoking one of his cigarettes especially
imported from London, and it behooved me to display no curiosity unless
he should choose to speak. He looked over at me and smiled quizzically.
"I wonder what those poor devils think they get by all that juju
palaver," he said ruminatively.
"I don't know," I admitted. "My own boys are constantly at it, of
course. There's a witch doctor just outside of Venghela who'll be rich
when my caravan gets there, for his services in bringing my bearers
back without falling into the tender hands of our neighbors."
My carriers were free men, whom I hired and paid. It would have been
cheaper to adopt the _servaçal_ system and buy contract slaves for
carriers, but being free men they served my purpose better. For one
thing, they gave the Kongo natives more confidence in me, and for
another, they traveled faster when there was danger of pursuit. A slave
would merely have changed masters if I had been caught, but these men
had something to lose.
"I'm going to stop this juju sooner or later," said Graham lazily.
"My brother Arthur has come out and is up after a gorilla in the
Kongo--probably around where you've been--and he's been asking me to
hold on to a real juju doctor for him to interview. When he's through,
I think I'll stop all that. Queer old duck of a witch doctor here."
He clapped his hands and one of the house servants came out with a
siphon and bottle of gin. The man was trembling as he stood beside his
master's chair. Graham snapped two or three words in the local dialect
and the man's knees threatened to give way. He fled precipitately into
the house and came out again--trembling more violently--with limes.
"Never can train blacks properly," Graham grumbled, as he sliced a lime
in half and squeezed it into his tumbler. "Now, a Japanese servant is
perfect."
He poured his gin and the seltzer fizzed into the glass. He lifted it
to his lips and drained it.
"Japan?" I asked. "I've never been there."
"I have," said Graham morosely. "Been everywhere. England, America,
Japan, India. All rotten places."
"No rottener than this," I said disgustedly. "I had three weeks of
fever up in the Kongo, with a Belgian Kongo Company agent after me the
whole time. I'm still shaky from it. When I can go back to white man's
country again----"
I stopped. Graham was lighting a cigarette, and I noticed that the
flame wavered as he held the match. There are some men who are cold
sober up to a certain point, and then what they have drunk takes hold
of them all at once. Graham was such a person. When he spoke again his
words were slurred and sluggish.
"White man's country," he repeated uncertainly, and then made an effort
to speak clearly. "I'm goin' back some day. Got dear old home, family
servants, broad lawn--everything. Not mine though. Younger son. Had to
win hearth an' saddle of m'own. Arthur's got it all, damn him. Always
was lucky beggar. Got all family estates, all income, I got nothing.
Then I liked girl. Second cousin. Arthur got her, or goin' to. Engaged.
Damn lucky beggar. Always was lucky chap. Steady and dependable. Damn
stodgy, I think. Told him so. Called him a ---- ---- an' he kicked me
out. All because I got into trouble and signed his name to somethin',
to get out."
"Easy there, Graham," I warned. "I don't want to hear anything, you
know."
"You better not," he said suddenly, in a clear voice. He turned
beastlike eyes on me. "If anybody tries to pry into my affairs, they
don't get far."
I blew a cloud of smoke over the railing of the veranda and said
nothing. Through the moonlit night the throbbing of the drums came
clearly to us sitting there. They beat on steadily, monotonously,
hypnotically. There was something strangely menacing in the rhythmic,
pulsing rumble. The cries of night birds and insects, and occasionally
an animal sound, seemed natural and normal, but the muttering of those
drums with that indescribable hollow tone they possess, seemed to
portend a strange event.
"Juju," said Graham abruptly, "is the key to the African mind. I don't
give a damn for the natives. All I care about is what I can get out of
this country, but I say that juju is the key to the African mind."
I smoked on a moment in silence. "I'd rather not meddle with it," I
remarked. "Sooner or later it means ground glass in your coffee of a
morning. Just before I left Ticao, Da Cunha found some in his. He shot
his cook and then found it was another boy entirely."
"I'd have whipped him to death with a _chiboka_," said Graham viciously.
"That's what Da Cunha did," I informed him mildly. "But the governor's
made him leave Ticao for six months. He's over in Mozambique."
"My boys'll never dare try to poison me," declared Graham. He leaned
toward me in drunken confidence. "They believe that if they did----"
"The procession has started again," I said, interrupting him. "I hear
the yelling."
It was so. The drums still beat monotonously and rhythmically, but
beneath their deep bass muttering, a faint, high, continuous sound
could be heard. The procession seemed to be making its way back to the
village.
"I'm goin' to bed," announced Graham sharply. "You go t' bed too. Don't
sit out here an' smoke. Go to bed."
He stood up and waited for me to enter the house. Puzzled, and rather
annoyed, I went inside. I heard Graham walk heavily and uncertainly
through to the rear and heard him speak to several of the servants. The
contrast between his rasping, harsh tones and the frightened voices of
his servants was complete. They were very evidently in deadly fear of
him.
The sound of the procession grew louder and louder. Something about it
perplexed me for a moment, but then I realized that it was not making
direct for the village. It was coming toward the house. I frowned a
moment, and looked to make sure that my automatic was handy and in
proper working order.
The procession was very near. I looked out of the window and saw the
twinkling lights of the torches through the bush. The drums were
thunderous now, but the beat was not the war beat. It was purely
ceremonial. The yelling was high-pitched and continuous.
The head of the procession emerged from the bush and advanced across
the clearing about the house. It swung and headed for the rear of the
house, and the long line of capering, torch-bearing humanity followed
it.
The witch doctor came into view, and the girl. Her panic had reached
its pitch now. I have never seen such ultimate fear as was expressed on
that girl's face, outlined by the flickering light of the torches. The
procession moved until the end had passed beyond the rear corner of the
casa, then turned, and evidently turned again.
I saw it moving back toward the village. A pregnant fact impressed
me. The native girl was missing. She had evidently been left behind
somewhere about the rear of the house. The yelling mass of black
humanity capered and shrilled its way down the cleared way to the
village and gathered in front of the juju house.
Then some dance or ceremony seemed to begin. What it was, I do not
know. I was very tired and presently I went to sleep. But the drums
beat steadily, all night long. They entered the fabric of my dreams and
made my rest uneasy. It could not have been long before morning when I
awoke with a start and found myself sitting up with every nerve tense.
There was no sound, but I had a feeling as if I had been awakened by a
scream, somewhere about the house.