Yet alas! as I dream the faint, immodest blush of dawn tints the distant sky-line. It is the birth of grief and beauty; awakening sunrise is agleam in her warm eyes; her sandals are dipped in fire and the stars are in her hair. Onward she creeps, in the beauty of her maiden nakedness, cloaked in glorious, unreal tinsel and grief. Blushing like a goddess she comes, treading the sky! The glorious, wonderful harlot—Civilisation!
It was a grey day when I next found myself outbound, going down Channel on a tramp steamer for the Canary Isles and Sierra Leone. I had often wished to go to West Africa, and so, when the opportunity came, I did not hesitate.
I will not dwell at any length on the events that preceded my arrival on the West Coast, but will briefly give my impression of things as they appeared to me in those days.
You cannot, however imaginative you may be, imagine you are elsewhere than on the Gold Coast. The atmosphere of the moist jungle, the barbarian hubbub of excited native voices, the beating of the tom-toms in the far-off villages, the toiling natives, driven by the loud-voiced white overseer of the gold mines, continually remind you that you are in the barbarian paradise of unconventionality.
For miles and miles the primeval jungle stretches; and standing on the hill-tops you can see the far-off native huts looking like groups of peg-tops against the sunset.
On the higher slopes, by the gold mines, stand the bungalows of the white men. They are comfortable inside and well furnished, sheltered from the blazing sunlight by mahogany and palm trees. The white men who are employed on the mines loaf about near them and the Gold Coast natives supply their wants. For a brass ring, or a piece of sham jewellery, they can purchase native labour, and for a pound or so buy dusky female slaves, whom they call “Mammies.” Virtue is not the most prominent characteristic of Gold Coast natives.
As the white men sit in those bungalows by night they can hear the native drums beating far away, and watch the lizards and scorpions slipping across the moonlight of their bedroom walls, and, maybe, hear their comrade in the next bungalow raving in the delirium of fever. Malaria, black-water fever and other things often end the exile’s career. At night the living can dream and think of home, and watch from their bungalow doors the little white stones and crosses glimmering in the African moonlight in the hollows where the homesick dead white men lie asleep.
Settler’s Home, Gold Coast