With all their apparent sins they seemed deeply religious. We knew not what their creeds expressed, or on what mythology they were founded. We only knew that Abassi and Sowoko were great gods, and their subjects were life and death, as in all creeds they must be. Their Ju-Jus were hideous enough to express the agony and ultimate end of all we know and all that is born of flesh. The Ju-Jus they knelt before were as deaf to their appeals as the images of the Virgin Mary and other idols of Catholic and Protestant high churches are.
When we left King Buloa we wandered on mile after mile and continually entered other countries; for you cross frontier lines at every river and swamp, and come across tribes who speak a different dialect and worship off-shoot gods: the Akanaka tribe, Egbosh, Apiaongs and many others. On the rivers sailed dug-out canoes, long enough to hold from twelve to fifteen natives, and smaller canoes wherein ebony youths paddled their sweethearts and sang the latest tribal hits.
All the villages were familiar with white men, for traders came long distances, from Sierra Leone or the Gold Coast, and from Calabar, to bargain for copra and palm-nuts and many other things.
Slavery was in vogue, and rich chiefs bought young girls and youths and took them into their homes. I saw a witch scene, much like the scenes I had seen in Fiji; hideous old women and men consulted the Ju-Ju, then haunted the credulous natives with lying stories and prophecies of good and bad things.
I played the violin to several tribes, with the special idea of seeing how my music appealed to them. Some were curious only, and others seemed to enjoy the melodies. A native girl from Sierra Leone sang as I played, and had a really fine voice, with an earnest note in it. I think the West African natives, on the whole, have good, musical ears and a genuine love for music, greater than that of the English people. I have heard native military bands perform, and heard no difference in the playing when compared, of course, with amateur bands in Great Britain.
The First Motor-Car in a Gold Coast Village
In one native village we discovered a white man living. He was about fifty years of age, and very grey and sunburnt. At first he was reticent, but T—— got him on some interesting topic, and I played the fiddle, and then he opened out. I cannot tell his name or what he said. He was not hiding, but was sick of life and wished to end his days out there with those wild men. I can still see his blue eyes gazing at us, among the black ones, as the natives stood by their village huts and waved good-bye as we tramped off.
The population of Ashanti was very mixed. Moors, Mohammedans, negroes, Arabs and many more, who had emigrated across the Sahara to the West Coast in ages past, had left their types in the blood of the natives.
We went to Accra, Akamabu and Sekondi, where we stayed with an old chief who was about eighty or ninety years of age. He had white whiskers, and was shrivelled up like a mummy, but he was a most interesting man and spoke good English. He had fought under King Osae Tutu, the Ashanti king who in 1822 defeated the British, who in turn revenged themselves in 1826 on the Pra river.