_The safety of the seashore--Why they do not plant trees in English
territory--The D.C.'s prayer--Quittah or Keta--The Bremen Sisters--The
value of fresh air as a preventive of fever--A polygamous household--The
Awuna people--The backsliding clerk of the Bremen Mission--Incongruity
of antimacassars and polygamy--Naming the child--“Laughing at last”
and “Not love made you”--Forms of marriage--The cost of a wife--How to
poison an enemy--Loving and dutiful children--The staple industry of the
place--Trading women--The heat of Keta._
Having got into Lome the question was how to get out of it. I wanted
to go to Keta, twenty-seven miles away in British territory, and my idea
was to go by sea as I could do it in three hours at the very most, and
Elder Dempster, having very kindly franked me on their steamers, it
would cost me nothing save the tips to the surf boats that landed me;
but there was one great thing against that--my hosts told me that very
often the surf was so bad it was impossible to land at Keta. The head
of Swanzy's had a man under him at Keta, and when he went to inspect he
invariably went overland. That decided me. I too must go overland.
But carriers were by no means cheap. I had got hammock-boys to carry
me the thirty miles from Ho to Palime for two shillings, and here for
twenty-seven miles along the shore I paid my hammock-boys six shillings
and sixpence and my carriers five shillings and sixpence, so that my
pots were adding to their original price considerably.
So on a fine, hot morning in May I was, with my train of carriers, on
the road once more. First the going was down between groves of palms by
the Governor's palace, which is a palace indeed, and must have cost a
small fortune. A very brief walk brought us to the Border, and then
the contrast was once more marked. The English villages were untidy and
filthy, with a filth that was emphasised now that I had seen what could
be done by a little method and orderliness; those Coast villages remain
in my mind as a mixture of pigs, and children, and stagnant water, and
all manner of litter and untidiness. One saving grace they had was that
they were set among the nice clean sand of the seashore that absorbed as
much as possible all the dirt and moisture, and we passed along through
groves of cocoa-nut palms that lent a certain charm and picturesqueness
to the scene. I am never lonely beside the sea; the murmur of its waves
is company, and I cannot explain it, but I am never afraid. I do not
know why, but I could not walk in a forest by myself, yet I could walk
for miles along the seashore and never fear, though I suppose many deeds
of violence have been done along these shores; but they have been done
on the sand, and the waters have swept over them, and washed all memory
of them away.
Soon it was evident that we were travelling along almost as narrow a way
as that which led along the shore to Half Assinie. There was a lagoon on
the right hand, and the sea on the left, and the numerous villages drew
their sustenance from the sea and from the cocoa-nut palms in which they
were embowered.
All the hot long day we travelled, and at last, towards evening, on
either side of the road, we came upon fine shade-trees of an order of
_ficus_, planted, it is hardly needful to say, by the Danes who owned
this place over thirty years ago. It makes such a wonderful difference,
this tree-planting, that I have preached it wherever I went. I met
one young D.C. who agreed with me heartily, but explained to me the
difficulties of the job in English territory.
I had suggested they might get trees from the agricultural stations
that Government is beginning to dot over the country, and he said it was
quite possible. In fact they had planted three hundred the year before.
The place I was in was rather barren-looking, so I asked where they
were. He shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the native sheep and
goats; they are only to be distinguished by their tails, and a certain
perkiness about the goats.
“But,” said I, surprised, “if you plant trees, you should certainly
protect them.”
“How?” said he.
“Barbed wire,” was my idea.
“And where are we to get the money for barbed wire? We put cactus all
round those three hundred trees we planted, and then the medical officer
got on to us because the cactus held water and became a breeding place
for mosquitoes, and so we had to take it away, and I don't believe six
of those trees are alive now. You see it is too disheartening.”
Another thing that is very disheartening is the fact that tours, as they
call a term of service among the English, last twelve months, and that a
man at the end of a tour goes away for five months, and very often never
again returns to the same place, so that he has no permanent interest in
its welfare.
“Give peace in my time, oh Lord,” they declare is the prayer of the
West-African D.C., and can we wonder? A man is not likely to stir up
strife in a place if he is not going to remain long enough to show that
he has stirred it up in a good cause. Fancy a German D.C. explaining his
failure to have proper shade-trees by the fact that the native sheep and
goats had eaten them!
The English have decided that Keta shall be called Quittah, which means
nothing at all, but the native name is, and I imagine will be for a long
time to come, Keta, which means “On the sand,” and on the sand the town
literally is. It is simply built on a narrow sand-bank between the ocean
and a great lagoon which stretches some days' journey into the interior,
and at Keta, at its widest, is never more than a quarter of a mile in
extent.
I appealed to the D.C. for quarters, and he very kindly placed me with
the Bremen Mission Sisters, and asked me to dinner every night. I feel
I must have been an awful nuisance to that D.C., and I am most grateful
for his kindness, and still more grateful for his introduction to those
kindly mission Sisters.
“Deaconesses” they called themselves; and they had apparently vowed
themselves to the service of the heathen as absolutely as any nun, and
wore simple little cotton dresses with white net caps. Sister Minna, who
had been out for ten long years, going home I think in that time twice,
spoke the vernacular like a native, and Sister Connie was learning it.
They kept a girls' school where some three hundred girls, ranging from
three to thirteen, learned to read, and write, and sew, and sum, and I
was introduced to quite a new phase of African life, for never before
had I been able to come so closely in touch with the native.
Again I have to put it on record that I have absolutely no sympathy with
missionaries. I cannot see the necessity for missions to the heathen;
as yet there should be no crumbs to fall from the children's table while
the children of Europe are in such a shameful state as many of them are,
far worse than any heathen I have ever seen in Africa. But that did not
prevent me admiring very much these Sisters, especially Sister Minna.
It was a pity her services were lost to Germany, and given to these
heathen, who, I am bound to say, loved and respected her deeply.
But Keta was hot. Never in my life have I lived in such a hot place, and
the first night they put me to sleep in their best bedroom, in which was
erected a magnificent mosquito-proof room, also the window that looked
on the back verandah was covered carefully with coloured cretonne to
ensure privacy. In spite of all their kindness I spent a terrible night;
the want of air nearly killed me, and I arose in the morning weary to
death, and begging that I might be allowed to sleep in the garden. There
there was a little more air, but the ants, tiny ones that could get
through the meshes of my mosquito curtains, walked over me and made life
unbearable. Then I put up a prayer that I might be allowed to sleep
on the verandah. The good Sisters demurred. It was, in their opinion,
rather public; but what was I to do? Sleep I felt I must get, and so
every night Grant came over and put up my camp-bed on the verandah,
or rather balcony, and every night I slept the comfortable, refreshing
sleep of the fresh-air lover, and if a storm of rain came up, as it did
not infrequently, this being the beginning of the rainy season, I simply
arose and dragged my bed inside, and waited till it was over. I admit
this had its drawbacks, but it was better than sleeping inside. The
Sisters were perpetually making remarks on my healthy colour, and
contrasting it with their own pale faces, and their not infrequent
attacks of fever with my apparent immunity, and they came to the same
conclusion that I did, that it was insured by my love of fresh air. Why
they did not do likewise I do not know, but I suspect they thought it
was not quite proper; not the first time in this world that women have
suffered from their notions of propriety.
Under the guidance of Sister Minna I began a series of calls, visiting
first one of the head chiefs, who had about sixty wives. Some dwelt in
little houses off his compound, some were scattered over the town, and
some were away in the country. It was the first time I had really been
introduced into a polygamous household with understanding eyes, and I
went with interest. It is approaching the vital points of life from an
entirely different angle.
The Chief received us most graciously. He was a big man, old, with a
bald head on which was a horrid red scar, got, he explained, in a big
fight. He said he was very pleased to see me, spoke for a moment to one
of his attendants, and then presented me with a couple of florins, and
wished me well. After all, that was certainly a most substantial sign of
goodwill. Then I called upon his wives, young, old, and middle-aged,
and I don't even now understand how he managed to have so many without
interfering seriously with the natural distribution of men and women. Of
course his descendants are many, and many are the complications, for I
have seen a married woman, the grand-daughter of the Chief, nursing on
her knee her little great-aunt, his daughter, and well spanking her too
if she did not come to school quick enough.
One of his old wives had broken her leg, and we visited her; she had a
room in his house, and was lying on her bed on the floor, while beside
her sat another wife who had come to see how she was getting on.
“If I were a wife,” said I, from the outlook of a monogamous country, “I
should not call upon another wife a man chose to take, even if she were
sick.”
“I don't know,” said kind-hearted Sister Minna. “I have lived so long in
a country like this that I think I should. It is only kind.”
And we went from one household to another, and were received most
graciously, and generally Sister Minna was given some small sum of money
to entertain me. Sometimes it was sixpence, sometimes it was a shilling,
sometimes it even rose as high as two shillings, and she was instructed
to buy chickens and bananas that I might be well fed. Also they can
never tell a white person's age, and many a time she was asked, because
I was short, whether I was not a child.
Altogether I was most agreeably struck with these Awuna people, and
found there was even something to be said for the polygamous system.
I have always, from my youth upwards, admired the woman who worked and
made a place for herself in the world, and here were certainly some
of my ideals carried out, for every woman in this community was
selfsupporting for the greater part of her life, and not only did she
support herself, but her children as well. It was in fact not much of
a catch to marry a chief; of course, being a rich man, he probably gave
her a little more capital to work upon in the beginning, but she had to
pay him back, and work all the same.
We visited another household, the home of a clerk in the Bremen Mission
Factory, a gentleman who wore a tweed suit and a high collar, and who
once had been a pillar of the mission church. He had four wives, and he
lived inside a compound with small houses round it, and his house, the
big house, on one side. Each wife had her own little home, consisting
of two rooms and a kitchen place; the wife without children was the
farthest away from him, and the last wife, just married, had a room next
his. His sitting-room was quite gorgeous, furnished European fashion
with cane chairs, and settee, coloured cushions, an ordinary lamp with
a green shade, and a rack, such as one sees on old-fashioned ships, hung
with red and green wineglasses. I don't know why I should have felt that
antimacassars and tablecloths were out of place with polygamy, but I
did, especially as the wives' houses were bare, native houses, where
the women squatted on the floor, their bedrooms were dark and dismal hot
places, with any amount of girdle beads hanging against the walls. For
clothes are but a new fashion in Keta, and the time is not far off when
a woman went clothed solely in girdle beads, and so still it is the
fashion to have many different girdle beads, though now that they wear
cloths over them they are not to be seen except upon the little girls
who still very wisely are allowed to go stark. Each woman's children,
not only in this house, but in the Chief's house, ran in and out of the
other wives' houses in very friendly fashion, and they most of them bore
English names--Grace, Rosina, and Elizabeth. And the names, when they
are not English, are very curious and well worth remembering. A couple
had been married for many years, and at last the longed-for child came.
“Laughing at last,” they called it. “Come only” is another name. “A cry
in my house”--where so long there had been silence. “Every man and his,”
meaning with pride, “this is mine, I want nothing more.” But they are
not always pleased. “God gives bad things”--a girl has been born and
they have been waiting for a boy. “A word is near my heart,” sounds
rather tender, but “I forgive you” must have another meaning, and the
child would surely not be as well loved as the one its mother called
“Sweet thing.” Then again girls do not always marry the man they love
or would choose, and they will perhaps call their child “Not love made
you,” but on the whole I think pleasant names predominate, and many a
child is called “So is God,” “God gives good things,” or merely
“Thanks.” Often too a child is called after the day of the week upon
which it is born.
“What day were you born?” asked the Chief of me.
“Wednesday,” I said.
“Then your name is Aquwo,” said he.
Marriage in a country like this has a somewhat different status
from what it does, say in England. What a woman wants most of all is
children; motherhood is the ideal, and the unmarried woman with a child
is a far more enviable person than the married woman without, and
even in this land, where motherhood is everything, there was in every
household that I visited an unhappy woman without children, because vice
has been rampant along the Coast for hundreds of years. You may know
her at once by her sad face, for not only is she deeply grieved, but
everyone despises her, as they do not despise the woman who has had a
child without being married. Of course parents prefer their daughters
to be chaste, and if a man marries what the Sister described as a “good”
girl, he will probably give her a pair of handsome bracelets to mark his
appreciation of the fact, but if on the other hand a daughter, without
being married, suddenly presents the household with an addition, they
are not more vexed than if the daughter in civilised lands failed to
pass her examination, outran her allowance, or perhaps got herself too
much talked about with the best-looking ineligible in the neighbourhood.
It is a natural thing for a girl to do, and at any rate a child is
always an asset.
[Illustration: 0409]
There is one binding form of marriage that is absolutely indissoluble.
If the man and woman, in the presence of witnesses, drink a drop or two
of each other's blood, nothing can part them; they are bound for ever, a
binding which tells more heavily upon the woman than the man, because
he is always free to marry as many wives as he likes, while she is bound
only to him, and whatever he does, no one, after such a ceremony, would
give her shelter should she wish to leave him. All other marriages are
quite easily dissolved, and very often the partings occasion but little
heart-burnings on either side. The great desire of everyone is children,
and once that is attained, the object of the union is accomplished,
wherefore I fancy it is very seldom couples, or rather women, take the
trouble to bind themselves so indissolubly. The most respectable form of
marriage is for a man to take a girl and seclude her with an old woman
to look after her for from five to nine months after marriage. She does
no work, but gives herself up to the luxury and enjoyment of the petted,
spoiled wife. Her brothers and sisters and her friends come and see her,
but she does not pass outside the threshold, and being thus kept from
the strong sunlight, she becomes appreciably lighter in colour, and is
of course so much the more beautiful. He may take several women after
this fashion, and all the marriages are equally binding, but of course
this means that he must have a little money. Another kind of marriage is
when the man simply gives the woman presents of cloths, and provides her
with a house. It is equally binding but is not considered so respectful;
there is something of the difference we see between the hasty
arrangement in a registry office and the solemn ceremony at St George's,
Hanover Square.
One thing is certain, that when an Awuna man asks a girl to marry him,
she will most certainly say “No.” Formerly the parents were always
asked, and they invariably said “No,” and then the man had to ask again
and again, and to reason away their objections to him as a suitor.
Now, as women are getting freer under English rule, the girl herself
is asked, and she makes a practice of saying “No” at least two or three
times, in order to be able to tell him afterwards she did not want him.
Even after they are Christians, says Sister Minna, the women find it
very hard to give up this fiction that they do not want to marry, and
the girl finds it very difficult to say “Yes” in church.
She likes to pretend that she does not want the man. As a rule this is,
I believe, true enough. There is no trust or love between the sexes; you
never see men and women together. A woman only wants a man in order that
she may have children, and one would do quite as well as another.
After marriage the woman has a free time for a little. She does not have
to begin cooking her husband's meals at once, and this also holds good
after the first baby is born. A man is considered by public opinion a
great churl if he does not get somebody to wait on his wife and fetch
her water from the well at this time. After the second baby they are
not so particular, and a woman must just make her own arrangements and
manage as best she may. It is a woman's pride to bear children, and
to the man they are a source of wealth, for the boys must work for the
father for a time at least, and the girls are always sold in marriage,
for a wife costs at least five or six pounds.
With all due deference to these kindly missionaries, I cannot think that
Christianity has made much progress, for these Awuna people have the
reputation of being great poisoners. One of the Chief's wives offered me
beer, stuff that looked and tasted like thin treacle, and she tasted it
first to show me, said the Sister, that it was quite safe; but also she
explained they insert a potent poison under the thumb nail, drink first
to show that the draft is innocuous, and then offer the gourd to the
intended victim, having just allowed the tip of the thumb nail to dip
beneath the liquid.
The early morning is the correct time to do the most important things.
Thus if a man wants a girl in marriage he appears at her parents' house
at the uncomfortable hour of four o'clock in the morning, and asks her
hand. The morning after the Chief had given me a dash, I sent Grant
round early, not at four o'clock I fear, when in the Tropics it is quite
dark, with a box of biscuits and two boxes of chocolates and the next
morning early he sent me his ring as a sign that he had received my dash
and was pleased. If by any chance they cannot come and thank you in
the morning, they say, “To-morrow morning, when the cock crows, I shall
thank you again.” They use rather an amusing proverb for thanking; where
we should say, “I have not words to thank you,” they say, “The hen does
not thank the dunghill,” because here in these villages, where they do
not provide food for the fowls, the dunghill provides everything. Sister
Minna once received a very large present of ducks and yams from a man,
so she used this proverb in thanking him, as one he would thoroughly
understand. Quick came the response, “Oh please do not say so. I am the
hen, and you are the dunghill,” which does not sound very complimentary
translated into English.
It was delightful staying here at the Mission House, and seeing quite
a new side of African life, seeing it as it were from the inside. Every
day at seven o'clock in the morning the little girls came to school, and
I could hear the monotonous chant of their learning, as I sat working
on the verandah. Somewhere about nine school was out and it was time for
the second breakfast. The second breakfast was provided by the little
markets that were held in the school grounds, where about a dozen women
or young girls came with food-stuffs to sell at a farthing, or a copper,
for they use either English or German money, a portion. They were rather
appetising I thought, and quite a decent little breakfast could be
bought for a penny. There were maize-meal balls fried in palm oil,
a sort of pancake also made of maize meal and eaten with a piece of
cocoa-nut, bananas, split sections of pine-apple, mangoes, little balls
of boiled rice served on a plantain leaf, and pieces of the eternal
stink-fish. Every woman appears to be a born trader, and I have seen a
little girl coming to school with a platter on her head, on which were
arranged neatly cut sections of pine-apple, She had managed to acquire
a copper or two, and began her career as a trader by selling to the
children for their school breakfast. She will continue that career into
her married life, and till she is an old old woman past all work, when
her children will look after her, for they are most dutiful children,
and Christian or heathen never neglect their parents, especially their
mother.
Old maids of course you never see, and it is considered much more
natural, as I suppose it is, that a woman should have a child by a man
whom she has met just casually, than that she should live an old maid.
There was a good missionary woman who took a little girl into her
household and guarded her most carefully. The only time that girl was
out of her sight was once or twice a week for half an hour when she went
to fetch water from the well. Presently that girl was the mother to a
fine, lusty boy, and the missionary's wife was told and believed that
she did not know the father. He was a man she had met casually going to
the well.
When they asked me, as they often did, how my husband was, I always
explained that he was very well, and had gone on a journey; it saved a
lot of trouble, but it amused me to find that Sister Minna, when she was
among strangers, always did the same. She explained that once on her way
to Lome she stopped her hammock and spoke to a woman. This woman brought
up a man, who asked her how her husband was, and in her innocence she
explained she had none. The man promptly asked her to marry him, and as
she demurred, the ten or twelve standing round asked her to choose
among them which man she would have for a husband. The situation was
difficult. Finally she got out of it by explaining that she was here to
care for their children, and if she had to cook her husband's dinner it
would take up too much of her time. Of course in Keta they now know
her, and appreciate her, and respect her eccentricities if they do not
understand them, but if she goes to a strange place she is careful to
hide the fact that she has not a husband somewhere in the background. It
is embarrassing to be single.
She is a firm believer in the good that the missions are doing; I am
only a firm believer in the good that a woman like Sister Minna could
not help doing in any land.
Keta is the place whence come all the cloths of the Guinea Coast, and
again and again in a compound, in a little, sheltered dark corner, you
may come across a man working his little loom, always a man, it is not
women's work, and often by his side another winding the yarn he will
use, and the product of their looms goes away, away to far Palime and
Kpando, and all along the Coast, and up the railway line to Kumasi, and
into the heart of the rubber country beyond.
But here, being an enterprising people, they are beginning to do their
own weaving, and have imported, I am told, men from Keta to show them
the best way.
[Illustration: 0417]
I shall not soon forget Keta. If I shut my eyes I can see it now. The
bare hot sand with the burning hot sun pouring pitilessly down upon it;
the graceful cocoa-nut palms; the great _ficus_ trees that stand in rows
outside the little Danish fort that is so white that it makes your eyes
blink in the glare; the flamboyant tree, all red blossom, that grows
beside it. Some Goth of a D.C. took the guns from the walls, and stood
them upside down in the earth in a row leading down to the beach, and
subsequent Commissioners, making the best of a bad job, have painted
them carefully with tar to keep them from rusting. At the wells the
little naked girls with beads round their middles draw the water, and in
the streets, making the best of every little patch of shade, though they
have not initiate enough to plant for themselves, are the women sitting
always with some trifle to sell, early-morning porridge, or maize-meal
balls, or portions of pine-apple, or native sweets made from imported
sugar. Once I went into a chiefs house and wanted to photograph the
people at work under the shade of the central tree in the courtyard. He
sent word to say he would like to be photographed too, and as there
was nothing particularly striking or objectionable about his shirt and
trousers, I agreed. He kept me waiting till the light was almost gone,
and then he appeared in a tourist cap, a light-grey coat, a red tie, a
pink shirt, khaki breeches, violent green socks pulled up over the ends
of his breeches, and a pair of red-and-yellow carpet slippers. I
sent the plate home, but have been unable to discover that photograph
anywhere, and I think in all probability the plate could not stand him.
So I did not get the people at work. The market is held on a bare piece
of ground close to the lagoon, and whenever there is a high tide it is
half under water, and the Chief calls upon the people to bring sand from
the seashore to raise the ground, and after about six hundred calabashes
have been spilled, it looks as if someone had scattered a handful of
sand there. Indeed, though Keta has existed for many years, it looks
as if at any moment an extra high tide might break away into the lagoon
behind, and the whole teeming population, for whose being there I can
see no possible reason, might be swept into the sea.
It was hotter in Keta than any other place I visited along the Coast, as
there are no cool sea breezes for all they are so close to the sea.
The sand-bank on which it is built runs almost north and south, and the
prevailing wind, being from the south, blows always over hot-baked sand
instead of over the cool sea. But yet I enjoyed life in that Mission
House very much. It was a new piece of the world to me, and kind Sister
Minna told me many things about the native mind. When first she came she
had tried to do without beating the children, tried to explain to them
that it was a shame that a girl should be beaten, but they would have
none of her ways. All they thought was that she was afraid of them,
the children despised her, and the school was pandemonium. Now she has
thoroughly grasped their limitations, and when a girl does wrong she
beats her, and they respect and love her, and send their children to her
to be corrected.
“I have beaten thirty to-day,” she would say with a sigh, as we sat down
to dinner, or if we were going to the Commissioner's there was generally
one in prison who had to be released before we could go. Sometimes, if
she were specially bad, a girl was kept in prison all day and all night,
in addition to her beating. Once in the compound opposite I saw a little
stark-naked girl about thirteen stand screaming apparently without any
cause. The Sisters stood it for about half an hour, then I saw them
stealing across the road; they entered the compound, and promptly
captured the small sinner. Her aunt, who was the owner of the compound,
had apparently given her up as hopeless, and she looked on with
interest. I had thought the captive's lungs must have given out long
before, but as they crossed the road she put on a fresh spurt, and she
yelled still more heartrendingly when she was beaten. But the next
day she came trippingly along the verandah, confident, and happy, and
apparently all the better for the correction she had received the day
before. I do not know what her sin was. Probably she had not obeyed her
aunt when she told her to rub the beads. Beads are bought in strings
in Germany or England, and then every bead has to be rubbed smooth with
water on a stone. It must be a dull job, but the women and children are
largely occupied in doing it; the stones you see in every compound are
worn hollow, and the palms of the woman's hands are worn quite hard. But
it is part of a woman's education and she must do it just as a man must
do the weaving.
[Illustration: 0421]
The day came at last when I had to go, and I sat on the beach,
surrounded by my goods and chattels, waiting for the surf boat that was
to take me to the ship. Grant was bidding regretful farewells to the
many friends he had made, and I was bidding my kind Sisters good-bye.
Then I was hustled into a boat in a man's arms, hastily we dashed
through the surf, and presently I was on board the _Bathurst_ bound for
Addah at the mouth of the Volta River.
[Illustration: 0425]