_The burying of the village dead--For Ju-ju--The glory of the
morning--The catastrophes by the way--The cook is condemned to
death--Redeemed for two shillings--The thunderous surf--The charm of the
shore--Traces of white blood--A great negro town--Our quarters--Water
that would induce a virulent typhus in any but a negro community--The
lonely German trader--Difficulties of entertaining a negro
potentate--The lair of the hunted._
The King's Highway is along the shore here easy enough going when the
tide is out and the golden sand is hard; very heavy indeed when the
roaring waves break almost at the foot of the cocoa-nut palms that stand
in phalanxes tall and stately, or bending somewhat towards the sea that
is their life, all the way from Axim to Half Assinie, and beyond again
to the French border. There is no other way than this way along the
shore. Occasionally, if the “sea be too full,” as the carriers say, they
may go up to a rough path among the cocoa-nut palms, but it is a very
rough path. Husks of the cocoa-nuts lie there, palm fronds drying and
withering in the sun, a great creeping bean flings its wandering
stalks across the path as a trap to the unwary, and when there is other
greenery it stands up and stretches out thorny branches to clutch at
the passer-by. Besides, the villagers--and there are many villages--bury
their dead here, and they consider two feet a deep enough grave, so that
the odour of decay rises on the hot air. All along the shore, which
is the highway, just under the cocoa-nut palms, I saw tiny miniature
sloping thatches over some pots--a sign that someone has been buried
there. At first I was touched to think so many of the living mourned the
dead; but my sentimental feelings are always receiving rude shocks, and
I found that these thatches had not been raised in tender remembrance,
but to placate the ghosts of the dead and to prevent them from haunting
the living. They must be rather foolish ghosts, too, and easily taken
in; for I observed that a bunch of cock's feathers evidently simulated
a chicken, and the pots were nearly always rather elderly and often
broken. There were more gruesome signs of Ju-ju too; a crow suspended
with outspread wings, a kid with drooping head and hanging legs. I hope
these things were not put up while they were alive and left to suffer
in the tropical sunshine, but I fear, I fear. The negro is diabolically
cruel.
When we were children we always ate the things we liked least first,
bread and butter, and then cake; and there is much to be said for the
plan. Afterwards I found it was much easier and nicer travelling in the
bush, but on that first journey travelling along the shore had great
charms for me. In the early morning a whitish mist hangs over the sea
and veils the cocoa-nut palms, and there is a little chill in the air
which makes travelling pleasant. We always got up before dawn. At the
first streak of light we were having our breakfast, porridge and
eggs and marmalade and fruit, bananas, pines, or oranges, quite as
comfortably as if we were in civilised lands, though the servants were
waiting to pack our breakfast equipage, and we watched our beds and
boxes and baths borne away on men's heads as we drank our coffee. There
were catastrophes sometimes, of course.
There was the morning when the coffee had been made on top of the
early-morning tea, and the evening when the peaches were agreeably
flavoured with household soap; the day when some unknown hand had
conveyed native peppers, which are the hottest things in creation
outside the infernal regions, into the sparklet bottle; and the day when
the drinking water gave out altogether, and was replaced by the village
water, black and greasy, and sufficient to induce in any but a negro
community a virulent typhus. But all disasters paled before the day when
neither the dinner nor the cook were forthcoming at Beyin.
The Forestry officer, in the kindness and hospitality of his heart, had
asked me to be his guest, so that we always had chop together, and I
gained experience without any trouble to myself.
I was sorry there was no dinner, because it seemed a long time since we
had had tea, but otherwise I was not troubled.
“Where be cook, Kwesi?” asked the Forestry officer of his immediate
attendant.
Kwesi spluttered and stammered; he was so full of news. Round at a
little distance stood the people of the town of Beyin--men in cloths;
women, some with a handkerchief round their heads, but some with a
coiffure that suggested the wearer had been permanently surprised,
and her hair had stood up on end and stayed there ever since; little
children, who shyly poked their heads round their mothers' legs to look
at the strange white woman. The truth was hardly to be told in Kwesi's
agitated pigeon English. It was awful. The cook had marched into the
town on business bent and demanded chickens for the white master and
the white missus, and the inhabitants, with a view to raising the market
price, had declared there was not a chicken within miles of the place,
and they had not seen such a thing for years. Cook was aggravated,
for the chickens were walking about under his very eyes, not perhaps
well-bred Dorkings or Buff Orpingtons, but the miserable little runt
about the size of a self-respecting pigeon that is known as a chicken
all over West Africa, and the sight was too much for him. He seized one
of those chickens and proceeded to pluck and dress it, and before he
was half-through the Omahin's men had come down and hauled him off to
durance vile, for he had committed the iniquitous offence of stealing
one of the Omahin's guard's chickens, and public opinion was almost
agreed that only death could expiate so grievous a crime. Of course,
there was the white woman to be considered, an unknown quantity, for
many of them had never seen a white woman before; and there was the
Forestry officer, by no means an unknown quantity, for it was pretty
certain he would resent any harm to his cook. Finally, with much yelling
and shouting and tremendous gesticulation, the case was laid before him
and the demand made that his cook should be handed over to the powers
he had offended. I am bound to say that young man held the scales of
justice with a niceness that is only to be properly appreciated when we
remember that it was his dinner that was not forthcoming and his cook
whose life was threatened. He listened to both sides, and then decreed
that the cook was to be redeemed by the payment of two shillings, that
the crowd was to disperse, and dinner to come up forthwith.
“Two shillings,” said the next white man we met, the preventive officer
at Half Assinie, close to the Border, “two shillings! I should think so
indeed. The price of a chicken is sixpence, and it's dear at that.”
They are such arrant savages, these people of the King's Highway; often
enough they are stark save for a loin cloth, and I have seen men without
even the proverbial fig leaf. The very decencies of life seem unknown to
them, and yet they calculate in sixpences and shillings, even as the man
in the streets in England does.
They have touched the fringe of civilisation for so many hundred years;
for this is the Coast of the great days of the slave trade, and
along this seashore, by this roaring surf, beneath the shade of these
cocoa-nut palms, have marched those weary companies of slaves, whose
descendants make the problem of America nowadays. It must have been the
same shore, the very same. Here is the golden sand and the thunderous
surf that only the men of the Coast will dare, and between Axim and the
French Ivory Coast not always they. The white scallop shells are tossed
aside by the feet of the carriers; the jellyfish that twinkle like lumps
of glass in the strong sunshine must be avoided, for they sting; plover
and little wading birds like snipe dart into the receding wave, or race
back from its oncoming; and the little crabs, like brown pincushions on
stilts, run to hide themselves in the water. Here are crows, too, with
neat black coats and immaculate white waistcoats and white collars,
who fly cawing round the villages. We saw an occasional vulture, like a
ragged and very dissipated turkey, tearing at the carcass of a goat
or sheep. Such is the shore now. So was it four hundred years ago. The
people must have changed a little, but very, very little in this western
portion of the Gold Coast, which is given over to the mahogany cutters,
the gold-seekers, and the men who seek mineral oil. And the people are
born, and live, and die, and know very, very little more than their
forefathers, who lived in fear of the trader who would one day tear them
from their homes, and force civilisation upon them with the cat and with
the branding iron. In the old days they got much of their sustenance
from the sea, and so do they get it still; and when the surf was not too
bad we saw the dark men launching their great surf boats, struggling
to get them into the surf, struggling to keep them afloat till they got
beyond it, when they were things of life. And when the surf was too
bad, as it was on many days, they contented themselves with throwing in
hand-nets, racing back as the sea washed over them, racing forward as it
receded; and the women and children gathered shell-fish just where sand
and surf met, carrying in their hands calabashes, or cocoa-nut shells,
or those enamelled iron-ware basins which are as common now on the Coast
as they are in London town. It seems to me that enamelled iron ware is
one of the great differences between now and the days when the English
and Dutch and Portuguese adventurers came first to this coast trading
for gold and ivory and slaves.
There are other traces of them, too, though they only built forts and
dared hardly go beyond the shelter of their walls. Not infrequently the
skin of the man who bore me was lightened to copper colour; every now
and then I saw straight features and thin lips, though the skin was
black, and I remembered, I must perforce remember, that these traders
of old time made the dark women minister to their passions, and that the
dark women bore them children with pride, even as they do to-day.
Beyin is one of the biggest purely negro towns along the Coast. It is
close on the shore, a mass of negro compounds huddled close together;
the walls of the compounds and of houses are alike made of raffia palm,
and the roofs are thatched with the fronds, looking not unlike peasant
cottages in Somerset or Brittany.
And the people who live in them are simple savages. They chatter and
shriek, talking at the top of their voices about--God knows what; for it
seems as if nothing in the nature of news could have happened since the
long-ago slave-raiding days. In the street they pressed me close; only
when I noticed any particular one, especially a woman or a child, that
one fled shrieking to hide behind its neighbour. We sent our orderly
forward to tell the Omahin we proposed to honour them with our
presence for two days, and to ask for a house to live in. The house was
forthcoming, a great two-storied house, built of swish, and whitewashed.
It was right in the centre of the town, so closely surrounded by the
smaller houses that, standing on the balcony, I could drop things easily
on to the roofs below; but it had this advantage, that unless the people
climbed on their roofs--they did as a matter of fact--we could not be
overlooked. We had three rooms: an enormous centre room that someone
had begun to paint blue, got tired, and finished off with splashes
of whitewash, the council chamber of the town; and two side-rooms for
bedrooms. And words fail me to describe those bedrooms. There were iron
beds with mattresses, mattresses that looked as if they had been rescued
from the refuse heap specially to accommodate us, and tables covered
with dirt and the most wonderful collection of odds and ends it has ever
been my fortune to come across. They were mostly the cheapest glass and
china ornaments, broken-down lamps that in their palmy days must have
been useless, and one of those big gaily painted china sitting hens that
humble households sometimes serve up their breakfast eggs under. The
first thing was to issue strict orders that not even the ground sheet
was to touch that bed; the next was to clear away the ornaments, wipe
down the table, cover it with clean paper and a towel, sweep the floor,
lay down the ground sheet, put up the bed, and decide whether I would
wash in sea water or in the black and greasy liquid which comes from a
mile away across the swamp, and which was the only alternative. I
may say I tried them both, and found them both unsatisfactory; and I
finished with the sea water because I knew that, however uncomfortable,
it was at least clean.
Here we used the last of our drinking water and had to beg a little
from the only white trader in the town, who gave generously of his
small store, as white men do help each other beyond civilisation. He
was German, and somewhat difficult to understand at times when he grew
excited; but he stood on the same side of the gulf as we other two,
while the black people, those who served us, and those who stared at us,
were apart on the other side. A weary, dreary life is the trader's. He
had a house just on the edge of the surf. His “factory” was below it.
His only companions were a beautiful green-crested clock-bird and a
little old-man monkey with a white beard. The ghastly loneliness of it!
Nothing to do but to sell cotton stuffs and enamel ware and gin to the
native, and count the days till it was time to tramp to Axim and take
the steamer that should bear him back to the Fatherland and all the joys
of wife and children.
“I saw the homeward-bound steamer to-day,” he said pathetically, though
he did not know he was pathetic. “I always look for it.”
“The steamer! I did not know it came close enough in.”
“It doesn't. Of course it was only the smoke on the horizon.”
Surely, surely, the tragedy of the exile's life lay in those words.
We had sent our orderly forward to say we were going to visit the
Omahin, and soon after our arrival we called upon him. His palace is a
collection of swish huts with palm-thatched roofs, built round a sanded
compound; and we were ushered into a cramped, whitewashed room--his
court. The population packed themselves into the body of the court to
stare at the white people and native royalty; and the Omahin and his
councillors were crowded up in the corner, whence, I presume, justice
is dispensed. The exalted personage was clad in a dark robe of
many-coloured silks, with a band of the same material round his
black head. Round his neck was a great, heavy gold chain, on his arms
bracelets of the same metal, and on his fingers heavy gold rings. Some
of his councillors were also dressed in native robes, and they carried
great horns of gold and the sticks that mark his rank with gold devices
on top of them. The incongruity was provided by the “scholars” among
his following--the linguists, the registrar, and other minor officials.
These functionaries were clad in the most elderly of cast-off European
garments, frock coats green with age, shirts that simply shrieked for
the washtub, and trousers that a London unemployed would have disdained.
However, they interpreted for us, and we explained to the Chief how
pleased the white lady was with his country and how much she wished to
visit the lake village, which was three hours away on the trade route
to the back-country. He expressed his willingness to give us a guide
through the swamp that lay behind the town, and then with a great deal
of solemnity we took our leave and retired to our own somewhat delayed
afternoon tea.
We were mistaken if we thought we were going to be allowed to have it
in peace. We had not sat down a moment, the Forestry officer, the German
trader, and I, when the ragged travesty of a Gold Coast policeman, who
was the Omahin's messenger, came dawdling upstairs to announce that the
Omahin was coming to return our call; and he and his councillors and
linguists followed close on his heels. The linguist explained that it
was the custom to return a ceremonial call at once, and custom rules the
roost in West Africa. That might be, but our conversational powers had
been exhausted a quarter of an hour before, and not the most energetic
ransacking of our brains could find anything to say to this negro
potentate, who sat stolidly in a chair surrounded by an ever increasing
group of attendants. I asked him if he would have tea. No. Cake,
suggested the Forestry officer frantically. No. Toast and butter we
both offered in a breath. No; he had no use for toast and butter, or
for biscuits or oranges, which exhausted our tea-table. And then
the Forestry officer had a brilliant idea: “You offer him a
whisky-and-soda.” I did, and the dusky monarch weighed the matter a
moment. Then he agreed, and a glass of whisky-and-soda was given him.
We did not offer any refreshment to his followers. It would have left us
bankrupt, and then not supplied them all. For a moment the Omahin looked
at his whisky-and-sparklet, then he held out the glass, and aman stepped
forward, and, bending low, took a sip; again he held out the glass,
choosing his man apparently quite promiscuously from among the crowd,
and again the man bent low and sipped. It was done over and over again.
I did not realise that a glass could have held so much liquid as
one after another, the chosen of the company, among whom was my most
troublesome hammock-boy, sipped. At last there was but a teaspoonful
left, and the Omahin put it to his own lips and drank with gusto, handed
it to one of his attendants, took it back, and, tipping it up, drained
the very last dregs; then, solemnly holding out a very hard and horny
hand, shook hands with us and departed.
The next day we visited Lake Nuba. Beyin stands upon a narrow neck
of land between the sea and a swamp that in the rainy season is only
passable in canoes, but when I was there in the middle of the dry season
a winding path took us through the dense swamp grasses to the place that
is neither land nor water, and it is difficult to say whether a hammock
or a canoe is the least dangerous mode of progression. Be it understood
that this is a trade route. Rotting canoes lay among the grasses; and
there passed to and fro quite an array of people laden with all manner
of goods, plantains, and cassava, stink-fish (which certainly does
not belie its name), piles of cotton goods for the interior, and great
enamelled-ware basins piled with loam to make swish houses in Beyin.
Most often these heavily laden folks are women who stalk along with a
child up on their backs, or suckling it under their arms. They stared
with wonder at the white woman in the hammock and moved into the swamp
to let her pass, but I should think they no more envied me than I
envy the Queen of England driving in the Park. Presently the way was
ankle-deep in water, knee-deep in mud. Raffia palm, creepers, and all
manner of swamp grasses grew so close that the hammock could barely
be forced through, and only two men could carry it. We went up perhaps
twenty feet in squelching, slippery mud. We came down again, and
the greenery opened out into an expanse of water, where starry-white
water-lilies opened cups to the sky above, and the great leaves looked
like green rafts on the surface of the water. There were holes hidden by
that water, but it is the trade route north all the same; and has been
the trade route for hundreds of years since the Omahins of Beyin raided
that way, and brought down their strings of slaves, carrying the tiny
children lest they should be drowned, to the Dutch and Portuguese
and English traders on the Coast. Presently we came to a more marked
waterway, and here were canoes waiting for us. I draw a veil over the
disembarking out of a hammock into an extremely crank and wet canoe. I
was up to my knees in water, but the Forestry officer expressed himself
as delighted. I held up a dripping skirt, and he made his men paddle
over, and inspected. It was, of course, as we might have expected; the
natives had seen that the most important person in their eyes, the man,
got the only fairly dry canoe, and my kindly guardian was shocked, and
insisted on an immediate change being made. And if it is necessary
to draw a veil over the disembarking from a hammock to a canoe it is
certainly necessary to draw one over the changing from one crank canoe
to another. I can assure you it cannot be done gracefully. Even a
mermaid who had no fear of being drowned could hardly accomplish that
with elegance. But it was done at last, and we set off up the long and
picturesque waterway fringed with lilies and palms and swamp grasses
that led to Lake Nuba. And sometimes the waterway was deep, sometimes
shallow. The canoe was aground, and every man had to jump overboard to
help push it over the obstruction, but more than one man went over his
head in slime and water. At each accident the lucky ones who had escaped
roared and yelled with laughter as if it were the best of jokes. Perhaps
it was. It was so hot that it could have been no hardship to have a
bath, and they had nothing on to spoil. But at last we got out on the
lake. It looked a huge sheet of water from the little canoe, and it took
a good hour's paddling till we came to the lake village.
This is the lair of the hunted, though it does lie on the trade route.
Behind it lies the swamp which is neither land nor water in the dry
season, and it looks just a tangle of raffia palm and swamp grass, and
all manner of tropical greenery. The huts, like the huts of Beyin are,
are built of raffia palm, but they go one better than Beyin and the
fishing villages, even the flooring is of the stems; and the whole
village is raised on stakes, so that it hangs over the water, and the
houses can only be reached by a framework of poles.
“If you _will_ go exploring,” said the Forestry officer, as I gathered
up my skirts and essayed the frail ladder.
I here put it on record that I think savage life can by no manner of
means be recommended, save and except for its airiness. There is plenty
of air. It is easy enough to see through those lightly built walls of
raffia palm, and the doings of the occupants must be fairly open to
the public. Also, except in one room, where a hearth had been laid down
about six feet by three in extent, the flooring is so frail that in
trying to walk on it I slipped through, and was nipped tightly by the
ankles. I couldn't rescue myself. I was held as in a vice till the
grinning King's messenger and a Kroo-boy carrier got me out, wherefore I
conclude the inhabitants of those villages must spend the most of their
time on their backs. In the dry season there is a little bit of hard
earth underneath the huts. In the wet season there is nothing but water
and the raffia palm flooring or a crank canoe for a resting-place. No
wonder even the tiny children seem as much at home in a canoe as I am in
an easy chair. And yet the village is growing, so there must be a charm
about it as a dwelling-place. We had “chop” on the verandah of the
Chiefs house. The Chief had apparently quite recently buried one of
his household, for at the end of the platform close against the
dwelling-chambers was erected one of the miniature sloping roofs with
offerings of cock's feathers, shells, and pots to placate the ghost. It
was quite a new erection, too, for the palm-leaf thatch was still green;
but where the dead body was I do not know, probably sunk in the swamp
underneath, and why so close I do not know either, since the people
evidently feared his ghost. However, even if we were lunching over a
grave, it did not trouble us half so much as the fate of the toast which
was being brought across from another hut in a particularly crank canoe,
and was naturally an object of much curiosity.
[Illustration: 0160]
The people were very courteous. It seems to me that the farther you get
from civilisation the more courteous the population. Village children
eager to see the lions in a circus could not have been more keen than
the people of this lake village to see the white woman, but they did not
even come and look till our linguist went forth and announced that the
white people had had their chop, and were ready to receive the headman.
He came, bringing his little daughter--a rough-looking, bearded old man,
who squatted down in front of me and rammed the tail of his cloth into
his mouth; and immediately there followed in his train, I should think,
the entire village, men, women, and children, and ranged themselves in
rows on the bamboo flooring, and looked their fill. Rows of eyes staring
at one are embarrassing; I don't care whether they be those of a
cultured people or of savages clad in scanty garments. If you stand up
before an audience in a civilised land you know what you are there for,
and you either succeed or fail, so the thing marches and comes to an
end. But sitting before a subdued crowd clad in Manchester cotton or
simply a smile, with all eyes centred on you, I at least feel that my
rôle is somewhat more difficult. What on earth am I to do? If I move
they chatter; if I single one out to be touched, he moves away, and
substitutes a neighbour, who is equally anxious to substitute someone
else, and the production of a camera causes a stampede. Looking back, I
cannot consider that my behaviour at the lake village reflected any
particular credit upon me. I felt I ought really to have produced more
impression upon a people who had, many of them, never in their lives set
eyes on a white woman before. They tell me, those who know, that for
these people, whose lives move on in the same groove from the cradle to
the grave, the coming of the Forestry officer and the white woman was a
great event, and that all things will bear date from the day when the
white missus and the white master had chop on the Chief's verandah.
Before we left Beyin, I promised to take the Omahin's photograph. Early
in the morning, when we had sent on our carriers, we wended our way to
his house, where an eager crowd awaited us. They kept us waiting, of
course; I do not suppose it would be consistent with an African chief's
dignity to show himself in any hurry. When I grew tired of waiting and
was turning away, the linguist came out to know if I would promise a
picture when it was taken. I agreed. Certainly. More waiting, and then
out came the linguist with a dirty scrap of paper and a lead pencil in
his hand, and demanded of the Forestry officer his name and address.
“Why?” asked the astonished young man.
“So we can write to you when pictures no come.” It was lucky I was
pretty sure of my own powers, but it was a little rough to make the
Forestry officer responsible for any accident that might happen. It
was a great relief to my mind when there came back to me from Messrs
Sinclair a perfect picture of the Omahin and his following and his
little son. I sent them the picture enlarged, but I never heard from
that respectable linguist what they thought of it.
[Illustration: 0164]