_A first adventure--Tarkwa--Once more Swanzy to the rescue--Women
thoroughly contented, independent, and well-to-do--The agricultural
wealth of the land--The best bungalow in West Africa--Crusade against
the trees--Burnt in the furnaces--Prestea--The sick women--A ghastly
hill--Eduaprim--A capable fellow-countrywoman--“Dollying” for
gold--Obuasi--Beautiful gardens--75 per cent.--The sensible African
snail._
I was born and brought up on the goldfields. My first adventure--I
don't remember it--was when my nurse, a strapping young emigrant from
the Emerald Isle, lost me and herself upon the ranges, and the camp
turned out to search, lest the warden's precious baby and her remarkably
pretty nurse should spend an unhappy night in the bush. As a small
girl, I watched the men wash the gold in their cradles, and I dirtied
my pinafore when the rain turned the mullock heaps into slimy mud. As I
grew older, I escorted strangers from the Old Country who wanted to go
down the deep mines of Ballarat. I watched, perforce, the fluctuations
of the share market, and men who knew told me that the rise and fall
had very often nothing whatever to do with the output of gold; so that
I grew up with the firmly fixed idea--it is still rather firmly
fixed--that the most uninteresting industry in the world was goldmining.
Wherefore was I not a bit keen on going to the gold mines of West
Africa, and I only went to Tarkwa because I felt it would never do to
come away not having seen an industry which I am told is going up by
leaps and bounds. The question was, where could I go for quarters?
There are no hotels as yet, and once more I am deeply indebted to Messrs
Swanzy and their agent in the mining centre of the Gold Coast. He put me
up and entertained me right royally, and not only did he show me round
Tarkwa, but he saw to it that I should have every chance to see some of
the other mines, Prestea and Eduaprim.
[Illustration: 0464]
Tarkwa is set in what we in Australia should call a gully, and the high
hills rise up on either side, while the road, along which straggles the
European town, runs at the bottom of the gully. For there are several
towns in Tarkwa. There is the European town where are all the stores,
the railway station, and the houses of the Government officials, and
in this town there is some attempt at beautifying the place; some trees
have been planted along the roadside, grass grows on the hillsides,
whether by the grace of God or the grace of the town council I know not,
and round most of the bungalows there is generally a sort of garden, and
notably in one or two, where there are white women who have accompanied
their husbands, quite promising beginnings of tropical gardens.
There is the native town, bare and ugly, without a scrap of green, just
streets cutting each other at right angles, and small houses, roofed
with corrugated iron or thatch, and holding a teeming and mixed
population that the mines gather together, and then every mine has its
own village for its workers; for the labour difficulty has reached quite
an acute stage in the goldfields, and the mines often import labour from
the north, which they install in little villages, that are known by the
name of the mine where the men work, and are generally ruled over by a
white officer appointed by the mine. These villages, too, are about
as bare and ugly as anything well could be that is surrounded by the
glorious green hills and has the blue sky of Africa over it.
Tarkwa gives the impression of a busy, thriving centre; trains rush
along the gully and the hills echo their shrill whistles, the roadways
are thronged with people, and the stores set out their goods in that
open fashion that is half-eastern, so that the hesitating buyer may
hesitate no longer but buy the richest thing in sight. In all my travels
I never saw such gorgeously arrayed mammies as here. The black ladies'
cloths, their blouses, and the silken kerchiefs with which they covered
their heads, all gave the impression of having been carefully studied,
and my host assured me they had. Many of them are rich, and in this
comfortable country they are all of them self-supporting wives.
They sell their wares, or march about the streets, happy, contented,
important people, very sure of themselves. Let no one run away with the
impression that these women are in any way down-trodden. They look very
much the reverse. We may not approve of polygamy, but I am bound to
say these women of Tarkwa were no down-trodden slaves. They looked like
women who had exactly what they wanted, and, curiously enough whenever I
think of thoroughly contented, thoroughly independent, well-to-do women,
I think of those women in the goldmining centre of West Africa.
My host told me they spent, comparatively speaking, enormous sums on
their personal adornment, were exceedingly particular as to the shade
and pattern of their cloths, and were decided that everything, cloth,
blouse, and head kerchief, should tone properly. They lay in a large
store of clothes too, and when Mr Crockett wrote the other day of “The
Lady of the Hundred Dresses,” he might have been thinking of one of
these Fanti women. The reason of this prosperity is of course easy to
trace. The negro does not like working underground, for which few people
I think will blame him, therefore high wages have to be paid, and
these high wages have to be spent, and are spent lavishly, much to the
advantage of these women traders.
[Illustration: 0468]
Because Tarkwa is a great centre of industry, Government have very
wisely made it one of their agricultural stations, and there, set on
a hill, and running down into rich alluvial flats, are gardens wherein
grow many of the plants that will in the future contribute largely to
the industrial development of the Colony. There is a rubber plantation,
a great grove of dark trees already in bearing, plantations of bananas,
pine-apples, hemp, and palm trees, and the director, set in his lonely
little bungalow on the hilltop, rejoices over the wealth and fertility
of the land, which he declares is not in her gold, but in her
agricultural products which as yet we are but dimly realising, and then
he mourns openly because the Government will not let him bring out his
wife. “She would be ready to start in an hour if I might send for her,”
he sighed, “and I would want nothing more. But I mayn't. Oh, think of
the dreary days. And I could work so much better if she were here. I
should want nothing else.”
And I sympathised. Think of the dreary days for him, and the still more
dreary days for her, for at least he has his work. It would surely I
think pay the Government to give a bonus to the woman who proved that
she could see her year out without complaint, and who was to her husband
what a woman ought to be, a help and a comfort.
Another thing in Tarkwa I shall never forget is Messrs Swanzy's
bungalow, where I stayed for nearly a fortnight. My host had
superintended the building of it himself, and it was ideal for a
West-African bungalow. It was built of cement raised on arches above the
ground; floors and walls were of cement. There was a very wide verandah
that served as a sitting-room and dining-room, and the bedrooms, though
they were divided from each other by stout walls of cement, were only
shut off from the verandah by Venetian screens that could be folded
right away. They did not begin till a foot above the floor, and ended
six feet above it, consequently there was always a thorough draught of
air, and Messrs Swanzy's bungalow at Tarkwa is about the only house I
know in West Africa where one can sleep with as much comfort as if in
the open air. Needless to say, they are not so foolish as to go in for
mosquito-proof netting. They keep the mosquitoes down by keeping the
place round neat and tidy, and though the verandah is enclosed with
glass, it is done in such fashion that the windows may be thrown right
open and do not hinder the free passage of air. Flies and mosquitoes
there were, but that, when I was there, was attributed to the presence
of the town rubbish tip on the next vacant allotment, and my host hoped
to get it taken away. Why the Government had a town rubbish tip close to
the handsomest bungalow in the Colony, I do not pretend to say. It was
just one of those things that are always striking you as incongruous in
West Africa. My host used to fret and fume at every evil fly that came
through his windows, and, when I left, was threatening to stand a gang
of Hausas round that tip with orders to kick anyone who desired to
deposit any more rubbish there.
[Illustration: 0472]
It is hardly necessary to say there had been at the same time a great
crusade against the trees in Tarkwa. But a short time ago the whole
place had been dense forest, very difficult to work, and after the usual
fashion of the English everyone set to work to demolish the forest trees
as if they were the greatest enemies to civilisation. The mines, of
course, I believe burn something like a hundred trees a day, and the
softwood trees are no good to them. What their furnaces require are
the splendid mahogany, the still harder kaku, a beautiful wood that is
harder than anything but iron, and indeed any good hard-wood tree; the
worth of the wood is no business of theirs. They consider the wealth of
Africa lies beneath the soil, and they must get it out; wherefore
into their furnaces goes everything burnable, even though the figured
mahogany may be worth £1 a foot, and the tree be worth £1000. It is a
pity, it is a grievous pity, but Tarkwa is certainly prosperous, and I
suppose one cannot make omelettes, and look for chickens. Only I cannot
help remembering that never in our time, nor in our children's time,
nor their children's time, will the hills of Tarkwa be covered with such
trees as she has ruthlessly consigned to the flames. Even the soft-wood
trees such as the cotton, that might have added beauty to the slopes,
have gone because an energetic doctor waged war upon them as shelterers
of the mosquito, and the hill-sides lie in the blazing sun for close on
twelve hours of a tropical day. Oh for a sensible, artistic German to
come and see to the beautifying of Tarkwa, for never saw I a place that
could lend itself more readily to the hand of an artist.
But if Tarkwa is being ruthlessly treated, what shall I say of beautiful
Prestea, which lies but a short railway journey right away in the heart
of the hills. Prestea is a great mine, so large that the whole of the
one hundred and eighty white people who make up the white town are
employed upon it. It is so hilly that there are hardly any paths, and
the people seem to move about on trolleys, winding in and out of the
hills, and, it was reported once, one of the unhealthiest places in
West Africa. The doctor very kindly gave me hospitality, and we promptly
agreed to disagree on every subject. I hate to be ungracious to people
who have been kind to me, but with all the will in the world I have to
keep my own opinion, and my opinion was diametrically opposed to the
doctor's. The nursing Sister who ran the hospital, a nice-looking,
capable, sensible Scotch woman, whom it did my heart good to meet, was
one of the few I have met who put the sickness of the average English
woman in West Africa down to the same causes as I did.
“They come from a class who have nothing to think of, and when they have
nothing to do they naturally fall sick,” said she. “Every woman on this
camp has been sent home this year.”
I debated with her whether I should give my opinion of the climate to
the world in my book. It meant I was up against every doctor in the
place, who ought to know better than I, a stranger, and a sojourner.
“If you don't,” said she, “someone else will come along presently and do
it.”
That decided me. I am doing it.
[Illustration: 0476]
This nursing Sister, while she had to have the hospital mosquito-proof,
in deference to the doctor's opinion, sternly declined to have any such
abomination anywhere near her little bungalow, and so the cool, fresh
night air blew in through her great windows, and we had an extensive
view of the glorious hillsides, all clothed in emerald green, and if a
clammy white mist wrapped us close when we waked in the early morning so
that we could not see beyond our own verandahs, the rolling away of that
mist was a gorgeous sight, ever to be remembered.
Needless to say, the doctor's house was carefully enclosed in
mosquito-proof wire, and I dined in an oppressive atmosphere that nearly
drove me distracted. The bungalow was set high on a hilltop, in the
middle of a garden that should one day be beautiful, but he has of
course cut down every native tree, and owing to the mosquito-proof wire
we got no benefit from the cool breeze that was blowing outside. He took
me to see the new native village he was building, a place that left an
impression of corrugated iron and hard-baked clay. Trees, of course, and
all vegetation were taboo, but I am bound in justice to say that the
old village, a place teeming with inhabitants, drawn from all corners of
West Africa, attracted by the lust for gold, was just as bare and ugly,
and a good deal more unkempt.
He took me out, and pointed out to me the principal hill in the centre
of Prestea, on which are the mining manager's and other officials'
houses, and he pointed it out with pride.
“There's a nice clean hill for you.”
The sun glared down fiercely on corrugated-iron roofs, the soil of the
hill looked like a raw, red scar, and there was not so much as a blade
of grass to be seen. I did not wonder that the unfortunate women of
Prestea had gone home sick if they had been compelled to live in such a
place.
I said, “It's a horrible place. I never saw a beautiful place more
utterly spoiled.”
He looked at me with surprise, and his surprise was thoroughly genuine.
“Why, what's the matter? It's nice and clean.”
I pointed to the beautiful hills all round.
“Mosquitoes,” said he, with a little snort for my ignorance.
“But you want some shade?”
He shook his head doubtfully.
“You can't have trees. The boys would leave pots under them. Breeding
places for mosquitoes.”
He was my host, so I did not like to say all I felt.
“I'd rather die of fever than sunstroke any day,” was the way it finally
came out.
“My dear lady,” he said judicially, as one who was correcting a
long-standing error, “no one dies of fever in Africa.”
“Exactly what I always maintain,” said I; “you, with your ghastly hills
are arranging for them to die of sunstroke.”
But he only reiterated that they could not have the trees, because
the boys would leave pots and pans under them, and so turn them into
mosquito traps. Personally, I didn't arrive at the logic of that,
because it has never seemed to me to require trees for boys to leave
pots about. The theory was, I suppose, that they would not walk out
into the hot sun, while they might be tempted to do work and make litter
under shade-trees. And again I did not wonder that there were no women
save the nursing Sister in Prestea. To live on that hill and keep one's
health would have been next door to impossible.
“It doesn't matter,” said the doctor, “we don't want women in West
Africa. I keep my wife at home. It isn't a white man's country.”
[Illustration: 0480]
But I'm bound to say that they very often arrange it shall not be a
white man's and emphatically not a white woman's country. It suits
somebody's plan that the country should have an evil reputation.
Goldfields, too, must never be judged in the same category as one judges
the ordinary settlements in a country. When I was a tiny child I learned
to discriminate, and to know that “diggers” must not be judged by
the rules that guide the conduct of ordinary men. The population of a
goldfield are a wild and reckless lot, and they lead wild and utterly
reckless lives, and die in places where other people manage to live
happily enough.
When the gold first “broke out” in Victoria, my father was Gold
Commissioner on the Buckland River, among the mountains in the
north-eastern district, and I have heard him tell how the men used to
die like flies of “colonial” fever, and the theory was that there was
some emanation from the dense vegetation that was all around them.
Nowadays the Buckland is one of the healthiest spots in a very healthy
country, and no one ever gets fever of any sort there. Now I do not wish
to say that West Africa is one of the healthiest countries in the world,
but I do say that men very very often work their own undoing.
“You should see Tarkwa,” said a man to me, who was much of my way of
thinking, “when an alcoholic wave has passed over it!”
Eduaprim was another mine I went to see from Tarkwa. But it was in
direct contrast to Prestea, though it too was in the heart of the forest
country. No railway led to it; I had to go by hammock, and so I got my
first taste of forest travelling, and enjoyed it immensely.
It is a solitary mine about nine miles from Tarkwa, and I started off
early in the morning, and noticed as I went that the industry is, for
good or ill, clearing the forests of West Africa, opening up the dark
places, even as it did in my country over fifty years ago. Along the
hillsides we went to Eduaprim, past mines and clearings for mining
villages; sometimes the road was cut, a narrow track on the side of
the hill, with the land rising up on one side and falling sheer on the
other, sometimes a little river had to be bridged, and the road went on
tunnel-like through the forest that must disappear before the furnaces,
but at last I arrived at the top of the hill, and on it, commanding
a wonderful view over the surrounding country, stood a bungalow, in a
garden that looked over the tops of range upon range of high hills. I
saw a storm come sweeping across the country, break and divide at the
hilltop upon which I stood, and pass on, veiling the green hills in
mist, which rolled away from the hills behind, leaving them smiling and
washed and clean under a blue sky. If for no other sight than that, that
journey into the hills was worth making.
[Illustration: 0484]
The wife of the manager of the mine was a fellow-countrywoman of mine.
She liked West Africa, kept her health there, and felt towards it very
much as I did. No one likes great heat. The unchanging temperature is
rather difficult to bear for one unaccustomed to it, but she thought it
might be managed by a woman interested in her work and her husband, and
as for the other discomforts--like me, she smiled at them. “The people
who grumble should live in Australia,” said she, “and do their own
work, cooking, washing, scrubbing. Do it for a week with the temperature
averaging 100 degrees in the shade, and they wouldn't grumble at West
Africa, and wouldn't dream of being sick.” And yet this contented woman
must have led a very lonely life. Some wandering man connected with the
mines, or a stray Commissioner, would come to see her occasionally, and
the news of the world would come on men's heads from Tarkwa. And, of
course, I suppose there was always the mine, which was her husband's
livelihood. They took me into the bush behind the bungalow and showed me
a great mahogany tree they had cut down, and then they showed me what
I had seen many and many a time in my life before, but never in
Africa--men washing the sand for gold. They were “dollying” it first,
that is crushing the hard stone in iron vessels and then washing it, and
the “show,” I could see for myself, was very good.
I lingered in Eduaprim; the charm of talking with a woman who found joy
in making a home in the wilderness was not to be lightly foregone, and I
only went when I remembered that it was the rainy season, the roads were
bad, and Tarkwa was away over those forbidding hills.
And from Tarkwa I went up the line to Obuasi.
This railway line that runs from Sekondi to Kumasi, the capital of
Ashanti, is a wonderful specimen of its class. Every day sees some
improvement made, but, being a reasonable being, I cannot help
wondering what sort of engineers laid it out. It presents no engineering
difficulties, but it was extremely costly, and meanders round and round
like a corkscrew. They are engaged now in straightening it, but still
they say that when the guard wants a light for his pipe all he has to
do is to lean out of his van and get it from the engine. It was laid
through dense forest, but the forest is going rapidly, the trees being
used up for fuel. In the early days, too, these trees were a menace, for
again and again, when a fierce tornado swept across the land, the line
would be blocked by fallen trees, a casualty that grows less and less
frequent as the forest recedes. When first the line was opened they tell
me all passengers were notified that they must bring food and
bedding, as the company could not guarantee their being taken to their
destination. There is also the story of the distracted but pious negro
station-master, who telegraphed to headquarters, “Train lost, but by
God's help hope to find it.” It is a single line of 168 miles, so I
conclude his trust in the Deity was not misplaced.
Obuasi, on the borders of Ashanti, is the great mine of West Africa,
a mine that pays, I think, something like 75 per cent, on its original
shares, and even at their present value pays 12 per cent. It is enough
to set everyone looking for gold in West Africa.
And like Prestea, Obuasi is the mine, and the mine only. There are,
I think, between eighty and one hundred white men, all, save the few
Government officials and storekeepers, in some way or another connected
with the mine, and the place at night looks like a jewel set in the
midst of the hills, for it is lighted by electricity. Every comfort of
civilisation seems to be here, save and except the white woman, who is
conspicuous by her absence. “We want no white women,” seems to be the
general opinion; an opinion, I deeply regret to say, warranted by my
experience of the average English woman who goes to West Africa.
[Illustration: 0488]
The place is all hill and valley, European bungalows built on the hills,
embowered generally in charming gardens such as one sees seldom in the
Colony, and the native villages--for there are about five thousand black
men on the books of the mine--in the valleys. There are miles of little
tramway railways too, handling about 35,000 tons a month, more, they
tell me, than the Government railway does, and the mine pays Government
a royalty of £25,000 a year.
Obuasi is a fascinating, beautiful place; I should have liked to have
spent a month there, but it is not savagery. It is as civilised in many
ways as London itself. I stayed in the mining manager's bungalow, and am
very grateful to him for his hospitality, and the manager's bungalow is
a most palatial place, set on the top of a high hill in the midst of
a beautiful garden. Palm and mango and grape-fruit trees, flamboyant,
palms, dahlias, corallita, crotons, and roses, the most beautiful roses
in the world, red, white, yellow, pink, everywhere; a perfect glory of
roses is his garden, and the view from the verandah is delightful. His
wide and spacious rooms are panelled with the most beautiful native
woods, and looking at it with the eyes of a passer-by, I could see
nothing but interest in the life of the man who had put in a year there.
He will object strongly, I know, to my writing in praise of anything
West-African, and say what can I know about it in a brief tour. True
enough, what can I know? But at least I have seen many lands, and I am
capable of making comparisons.
Every man I met here pointed out to me the evils of life in Africa.
“You make the very worst of it,” said I, and proceeded to tell the story
of a bridge party in a Coast town that began at three o'clock on Friday
afternoon and ended up at ten o'clock on Monday morning.
“And if those men have fever,” said I, feeling I had clinched my
argument, “they will set it down to the beastly climate.”
“So it is,” said my opponent emphatically; “we could always do that sort
of thing in Buluwayo.”
I thereby got the deepest respect for the climate of Buluwayo, and
a most doubtful estimate of the character of the pioneer Englishman.
Perhaps I look on these things with a woman's narrow outlook, but I'm
not a bit sorry for the men who cannot dissipate without paying for it
in Africa. I heartily wish them plenty of fever.
The manager took me on a trolley along one of these little lines, right
away into the hills. This was a new form of progression. A seat for two
people was fixed on a platform and pushed along the line, uphill or on
the flat, by three or four negroes, and fairly flew by its own weight
downhill. It was a delightful mode of progression, and as we flew along,
Xi my host, while pointing out the sights, endeavoured to convert me,
not to the faith that West Africa was unfit for the white woman, that
would have been impossible, but that the mining industry was a very
great one and most useful to the Colony. And here he succeeded.
[Illustration: 0492]
I admired the forests and regretted their going, but he showed me the
farms that had taken their place. Bananas and maize and cassada, said he
truly enough, were far more valuable to the people than the great, dark
forests they had cleared away--ten people could live now where one had
lived before; and so we rolled on till we came to the Justice mine,
where all the hillside seemed to be worked, a mine that has been paying
£10,000 a month for the last three years. Truly, it is a wonderful
place, that Obuasi mine with its nine shafts, an industry in the heart
of savage Africa. They pay £11,000 a week in wages, and when I was
thinking how closely in touch it was with civilisation, the manager told
me how the chiefs had just raised a great agitation against the mine
because it worked on Friday, their sacred day. They complained that the
snails were so shocked at this act of sacrilege that they were actually
leaving the district. Now the snails in Ashanti are very important
people, boundaries are always calculated with reference to them, and if
a chief can prove that his men are in the habit of gathering snails over
a certain area, it is proof positive that he holds jurisdiction over
that land. That the snails should leave the district shocked would be
a national calamity. The African snail looks like an enormous whelk, he
haunts the Ashanti forest, and is at his best just at the commencement
of the rains, when he begins to grow fat and succulent, but is not yet
too gross and slimy. He is hunted for assiduously, and all along the
forest paths may be seen men, laden with sticks on which are impaled
snails drawn from their shells, dried, and smoked. Luckily also these
African snails appear to be very sensible, and when it was put to them
that the mines could not possibly stop working on a Friday, but a small
monetary tribute would be paid to them regularly through the principal
chief, they amiably consented at once to stay and meet their final end,
as a self-respecting snail should, by impalement on a stick.
[Illustration: 0497]