AMVAMA, A FANG CATECHIST _Frontispiece_
_Facing page_
MISSION HOUSE AT BARAKA 22
WOMEN’S SECRET SOCIETY 41
TRADING-HOUSE AT GABOON 54
AN MPONGWE WEDDING 65
A FANG FAMILY 110
FANG TRADERS WITH IVORY 128
THE _DOROTHY_ 158
CREW OF THE _DOROTHY_ 171
THE PRIMARY CLASS 179
A LITTLE SCHOLAR 187
THE DAILY CLINIC 187
SCHOOLHOUSE AND DORMITORY AT GABOON 205
SEVERAL STRIDES TOWARDS CIVILIZATION 264
A FASHIONABLE WEDDING IN KAMERUN 283
ANYOROGULI 306
RETURNING FROM THE GARDENS 306
FANG CHRISTIANS 323
I
THE WHITE MAN’S GRAVE
For that matter the whole west coast of Africa is called by the natives
_The White Man’s Grave_; and everywhere the fever stalks along the beach
like a grim sentinel warning the stranger to stay away and ready to beat
him into delirium and death if he lands. But the name, _The White Man’s
Grave_, is especially attached to several of the oldest of the coast
settlements. Notable among these is Gaboon, in the French Congo, almost
exactly at the equator, where I lived for nearly six years, the period
of my second term in Africa.
On the long voyage of five weeks from Liverpool to Libreville I had been
duly prepared for the worst by the Old Coasters on board, who deem it
their duty to instruct all newcomers in regard to the evils of the
climate and the certainty of an early death. This duty constitutes a
daily exercise during the entire voyage and is discharged faithfully and
conscientiously. Each morning at the breakfast-table the young
missionary is told that the African fever is inevitable, and to expect
it will bring it on in two days. The healthy die first. “Missionaries
die like flies.” The abnormal mortality among missionaries is due to
several persistent delusions; chief among them, the temperance delusion,
and the quinine delusion. According to the Old Coaster, everybody whose
mind is open to conviction knows that temperate habits are no defense
and that total abstinence is a quick method of suicide. Quinine only
aggravates the fever; everybody knows that also; but missionaries will
not admit it. Then there is the minor delusion of the umbrella. All
those people who regularly carried umbrellas are dead. Those who didn’t
carry them are dead too, but they lived longer.
The dreadful racking pain of the fever is adequately described, and then
there is added the consoling thought that a man may sometimes escape
having it _fatally_ by having it _frequently_. “Fatally, or frequently:”
the poets among them dwell fondly on the alliteration.
After we have begun to call at the African ports this elementary
instruction is reinforced by a circumstantial and realistic account of
the death of the “poor chaps” who have “pegged out” since the last
voyage. The number is large: I did not know there were so many white men
on the coast. Many among them were of my particular build, complexion
and general appearance—I was told.
It is not that the Old Coaster is indulging a barbarous sense of humour
in trying to frighten the newcomer, but he has become fairly obsessed
with the thought of the climate. Sooner or later this morbid distemper
seizes upon most of those who live for any length of time in West
Africa.
After such an unappetizing conversation at the breakfast-table, a
certain young missionary escaped to the upper deck where he was soon
joined by an Old Coaster who asked him if he happened to have a
prayer-book. Delighted that the conversation had taken a turn (and such
a _good_ turn) he replied that he hadn’t a prayer-book, not being an
Anglican, but that he might procure one from a fellow passenger.
“I’d be ever so much obliged,” says the Old Coaster, “if you would; for
I want to write down the burial service. You see, no matter how a man
may have lived, it’s a comfort to him out here on the coast to think
that he’ll have a decent burial; so we’re neighbourly, and we read the
service for one another.”
In one last desperate effort to turn the conversation from the dead to
the living, the missionary remarked, with considerable force: “But
people don’t all die of fever out here! What about those that don’t?”
“Oh, no,” he replies; “they die of many other things besides fever.
Let’s see;”—and he counts them off on his fingers:
“There’s kraw-kraw. Kraw-kraw is an awful nasty disease that just
decomposes a man’s legs and nothing can stop it.
“There’s dysentery. A lot of people die of that. There’s every kind of
tuberculosis. There’s abscesses. There’s pneumonia. There’s ulcers——”
“And kraw-kraw,” says another Old Coaster, coming up behind him. “Why,
there was my friend So-and-so——”
“I’ve already said kraw-kraw,” says the other, and he passes on to the
next finger.
“There’s Portuguese itch. Maybe you think you know what itch is, but you
don’t if you’ve never had the Portuguese itch of the coast.
“There’s the Guinea worm. It favours the leg and is sometimes ten feet
long. You may possibly get it out if you don’t try to wind it from the
tail; but anyway it leaves a wound that doesn’t heal in this climate.
“There’s enlarged spleen. There’s——”
“Kraw-kraw,” says another arrival. “Why, there was So-and-so——”
“I _said_ kraw-kraw,” answers the leader.
“There’s smallpox—in frequent epidemics,” he continues.
“And there are so many other parasites feeding on a man, inside and out,
that one who has lived on this coast for several years ought to be able
to furnish in his own body a complete course for a class of medical
students.”
“Did you mention kraw-kraw?” says a late arrival.
“Kraw-kraw?” interposed the missionary. “I know all about kraw-kraw. The
highest authorities on tropical diseases have declared that it is not a
physical, but a mental, malady that attacks the Old Coaster. The victim
imagines that he is an old crow, and he goes around flapping his wings
and crying, ‘Kraw-kraw.’”
One morning at the breakfast-table, when the conversation turned for a
moment to the cheerful subject of cocktails, a youngster exclaimed:
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, I protest against this cheerfulness. For a whole
minute the conversation has been utterly irrelevant. Men are mortal and
the dead are accumulating. Let us therefore return to the obsequies.”
A solemn-eyed Old Coaster leaned towards his neighbour and in a loud,
sepulchral whisper remarked: “I give _him_ a month.”
“I give him two weeks,” replied the other.
Many of those who came aboard, especially those from the more lonely
places, looked like haunted men. Extreme isolation invites madness.
There were moments when the heart of the traveller faltered or stood
still, almost crushed by the pathos and tragedy of it all.
At the annual mission-meeting I was appointed not to Gaboon, but to
Angom, seventy miles up the Gaboon River. Angom had a peculiarly evil
reputation even in Africa, and the appointment was made only after a
prolonged discussion in which some contended that the place ought to be
abandoned and the climate of that particular station pronounced
impossible. The facts arrayed in support of this opinion presented such
a gloomy outlook that when, in conclusion, a missionary physician and
his wife and myself were assigned to Angom, the appointment sounded in
our ears somewhat like an order for our execution.
Three weeks after we reached Angom I stood one morning on the bank of
the river, exceedingly lonely as I gazed after the boat that bore away
the physician and his wife, both of them sick and returning to the
United States. I remained alone at Angom only a few months, but I was
expecting to remain for the entire year, sixty miles from the nearest
white man, and unable as yet to speak the language of the jungle folk
around me. And besides the barrier of an unknown language between them
and me, there was at first such a mental and moral aloofness from the
natives that their presence, and especially the sound of their constant
laughter, only drove me to the centre of a vaster solitude.
Often in those first days I fought against loneliness and fever
together, each aggravating the other. When loneliness would make its
most terrible onslaught it assumed a disguise—and invariably the same
disguise. More than half the battle was fought when I had penetrated the
disguise and learned to recognize the foe even from afar. It invariably
approached in the form of discouragement—the intolerable feeling that
all I was doing was useless; that I was the fool of a pathetic delusion
whose only redeeming feature was a good intention. The doubt suddenly
emptied life of all that was worth while and left an aching void; and
nothing in the whole world can ache like a void. In our nobler aims and
enthusiasms doubt is the worst foe of courage—the thought that one may
be making a fool of himself; the highest courage is to resist the doubt,
and the highest wisdom is to know when to resist it. I think Hawthorne
said something like that.
Let me anticipate the years so far as to say that, although I was always
more or less alone in Africa, and drank the cop of solitude to the
dregs, I completely outlived these attacks. And, strange enough, the
very question which had been my dreaded foe became my strongest ally and
defense, namely, the question, Is it worth while? For I fought that
question out to a sure affirmative. In later years the dominant feeling,
that which constituted the irresistible attraction of missionary life,
and made its privations as nothing, was the constant feeling that life
in Africa was infinitely worth while, and that nowhere else in the world
could my life count for so much to so many.
The first letters from missionaries at the coast advised that I should
not think of staying alone at Angom, but should move to the coast and
join them at Baraka, our Gaboon station. This did not seem to me
advisable, since it would separate me from the interior tribe, the wild
Fang, among whom I was expecting to work and whose language I was
learning. The coast tribe, the Mpongwe, were already provided for and
did not need me. But as time passed letters came from all over the
mission making so strong a protest that it seemed inadvisable to “insist
upon being a martyr”—as my fellow missionaries expressed it, with naïve
candour. One friend added that if I died, or rather _when_ I died, I
would have no one to blame for it but myself. That settled it. The idea
of dying with no one to blame for it, after the lonely life at Angom,
was entirely too unsensational; so I moved to Baraka, where some one
could be blamed when I died.
The name _Gaboon_ is used, especially by the English, in a general way
to designate not only the river of that name but all the adjacent
territory. Most people prefer it to the name _Libreville_, because it is
of native origin; and they like the far-away sound of it. If we would be
strictly accurate, however, the name belongs only to the great estuary
of the river. The Gaboon River is not long, but it receives many
tributaries and for the last hundred miles from the sea it is
magnificent. Forty miles before it reaches the sea it bends northward by
northwest and widens out into a broad estuary from five to fifteen miles
in width and forty miles long, which I have always called the _bay_. It
is one of the few, and one of the best, harbours on the entire coast of
Africa. Libreville, the old French capital of the Congo Français, and
Baraka, our mission station, are situated on the east bank of the
estuary and opposite its broad mouth. They look therefore directly over
the sea.
Gaboon was known in the Middle Ages and probably in the early centuries.
Travellers and adventurers of a superstitious age, passing upon the high
seas, reported that it was a dreadful land where at night strange fires
bursting from the earth leaped to the clouds and reddened the sky, fires
which probably came from “inferno” not far beneath. It is quite possible
that the fire which they saw may have issued from Mount Kamerun, farther
to the north, which is now an extinct volcano; but there is a more
likely explanation. The country around Gaboon is more open than most
parts of West Africa. A dense undergrowth of shrubbery and long grass
grows up each year, which towards the end of the dry season is burned
off by the natives, in some places to clear their gardens, and in some
places for the fun of seeing it burn. As seen from the mission hill the
fires are seldom extensive, though the effect is a ruddy glow upon the
clouds and is beautiful. But as I have seen them when out upon the bay
at night, and upon the sea, the effect of their full extent, the glowing
sky and its reflection in the sea, were sufficient to inspire awe and
impress deeply the superstitious mind of a sailor gazing on a strange
land of savage people.
Libreville as it is approached from the sea is one of the most beautiful
places on the entire West Coast. The government buildings stand upon a
hill, the _Plateau_, from which a handsome boulevard runs to the south
parallel with the beach, between rows of giant coco-palms. On this
boulevard are the trading-houses, French, Portuguese, German and
English. The buildings are nearly all white, including the iron roofs;
but some of them have roofs of red tile. There are many beautiful trees.
The houses are only half visible through screens of foliage; and along
the walks every unsightly thing, every deserted building or decaying hut
is overgrown with vines of delicate beauty and the wildest profusion of
scarlet, purple and lavender flowers.
The beach is strewn with logs of African mahogany of great value, which
the traders are preparing to ship. For these they have exchanged a
variety of goods. They carry a large stock of flint-lock guns especially
for the interior trade. The average price of a trade-gun is five
dollars. They are called “gas-pipe” guns in the vernacular of the coast.
The barrel is three feet four inches long, and the bore Mr. Richard
Harding Davis compares to an artesian well. “The native fills four
inches of this cavity with powder and the remaining three feet with
rusty nails, barbed wire, leaden slugs, and broken parts of iron pots.”
This dreadful weapon “kicks” so violently in the recoil that it is
always a question as to which is the more dangerous end. Of course, if
the contents of the barrel should actually enter a man’s body it would
tear him all to pieces. But there is always a doubt about the aim, and
there is no doubt about the kick.
Two miles south of the Plateau there is another hill nearly as high, and
having the finest outlook towards the sea. On this hill is the mission
station, Baraka.
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