TATAKA, LIBERIA.
“A word from Tataka Mission, this beautiful June day (June 6, 1889), may be interesting. A shower of rain has just fallen and everything looks refreshed, and as I sit on our veranda and look around I wish I could have some of my friends look at the fair picture. All nature is beautiful, but these darkened minds, as dark as their skins, can see no beauty in it. They never gather flowers, for their beauty; at times they bring in a few leaves and roots for medicine.
“At my right hand is a woman cutting wood. This is part of the women’s work, and they have learned the art of using their cutlasses so well, that, in a short time, they cut and carry on their heads more than I can raise from the ground.
“At this season the sounds of drum and dancing can be heard
most every night in merry-making. After crops have been gathered, these poor creatures, to whom enough to eat is their all, spend their strength in dancing out their joy.
“The people recognize there is a God, but only in severe illness do they call on Him. Then their pitiful wail of ‘Oh, Niswa! Oh, Niswa!’ is touching. The devil is really their god and to him they pay rites and ceremonies and of him they are terribly afraid. We talk to them of God and heaven, of wrong and right, and they say: ‘Yes, it be good, but that be white man’s ‘fash,’ we be devil-men.’ They haven’t a desire beside their pot of rice and palm butter and mat to sleep on.
“Our little farm looks nicely now; 500 coffee trees just set out, a new lot of edoes and sweet potatoes and yams coming on, with plenty of rice in the house. Meat we seldom see, fish occasionally can be bought from the natives, but they catch but few and want them for their own ‘chop.’
“The laws and customs of this land are very loose. A man has just done another a foul wrong. He found he was to be called to account, and ran to another town to beg some of the ‘big’ men to go to his town and beg him off. As they say in English: ‘Please, I beg you, do your heart good; I beg you let it pass.’ And they are so persistent with their ‘m-ba-ta’s’ (I beg you), that you are glad to let them go. Thus evil goes unpunished.
“Another custom, that of buying women, is the most dreadful to us. A girl is chosen for a boy when he is still a growing lad. When he is a man and she about 15 to 17 he wants to take her to his house as his woman. He has to pay the whole price settled on: usually two bullocks, two goats, with some cloth, pots, etc. Then if he does not have the means to pay he goes to any man in his family, that is a ‘head man,’ and demands pay for his woman. Just this week one of our big men had to sell his little five-year-old daughter to get money to give his nephew to pay for his wife. Sometimes this is very hard for the parents to do, but their country fash demands it. Some one had to do the same for them. A second or third woman is bought by their own earnings or comes to them by the death of their brothers. When a man dies his women are divided among the nearest relatives, and are their
women thereafter. The first one is head woman, and occupies the big house; each of the others has a small house.
“Every day’s experience shows us how difficult it is to do any real good among this Taboo people. They will shake you by the hand and smile in your face, but behind your back do all they can to overthrow the mission. The green-eyed monster jealousy lives here. A man cannot come out and say, I will do this or that; if he did, he would soon die.
“They will tell you with a good deal of pride, ‘We be devil-men.’” Rose A. Bower.