Our dreams are spiritual and beautify our brief existence. When we cease to dream we are truly dead; the memory of yesterday’s dream gilds the hollowness of to-day as flowers sadly beautify old graves. I have often met the dead walking the streets, avaricious skeletons without real eyes, and have touched their cold hands and felt the chill of death. I have also met the living where I least expected it—in savage huts, in wild lands, where the inhabitants gave me their primitive food, with brotherhood or sisterhood breathing through their kind eyes, and then cried and sang as I played my violin to them. A bird singing at sunset, up in the banyans or coco-palms, would appeal to their wild brains; its tuneful throat expressed the voice of some infant goddess of their innocent mythologies: the winds stirring the forests, the noise of waves, all were voices calling to them from shadow-land. When the forests of those isles have disappeared, and the spires of the cities rise everywhere, the thundering wail and crash of the Fijian cathedral organ will fail to do that which the small bird did with its tiny, tuneful throat.
I have written of the seamy side of native life, both on the Gold Coast and elsewhere, but as in everything else the bright side of the sorrow is also there. Years have changed many things and the advancement of time has swept much of the dross away. The name of “The White Man’s Grave” now sounds as primitive as “King of the Cannibal Isle” in Fiji. Where once the swamp mist lay yellowish in the hollows, sparkling atmosphere now shines; drainage is plentiful, so the evils have departed. The gold mines are run on advanced scientific and medical lines; forty miles from the coast are the Abbontiakoon Mines, and the Abosso, Broomassie, Anglo Ashanti Gold-Fields, and many others. Right up to Nigeria, with its tin mines, all is now healthy and cheerful. Elevated bungalows stud the heights round the mines; they are well drained, and as you enter the tent door of those dwellings, half hidden by jungle bananas and palm, you see the white man living in comfort and cleanliness that would often outrival the homes of his native country. The mine-owners pay excellent wages to the whites, and the natives are ruled by fines and kindness; to whip a native, or to strike one, is a dangerous offence.
The gold mines are a blessing to the West Coast natives. The wages they receive provide them with plenty for their primitive requirements; but they have to be strictly watched as they dig, for they hate work and will try all possible subterfuges to save digging to the proper depth.
Gold is found almost everywhere, but not in payable working quantities. The country is chiefly owned by native kings, who sell their territory to the whites who go that way prospecting. I have met men in London who owned large tracts of jungle-land in West Africa, wherein gold, four ounces to the ton, lay. They showed me the deeds, signed by the native king. But the next day I have met another man who owned the very same land and did not know the other owner; for those artful native kings sell the same tract of land to every white man who wants to buy it. So it is well to be careful in buying shares in Gold Coast mines, though the mines I have mentioned are equal to any in the world, and are equipped with the latest machinery. The managers from London go out there at frequent intervals, and the whole business is worked by educated white men. But for the black-faced natives and the surrounding jungle and bungalows it might be in London’s highest commercial centre. Indeed men employed by them are better off than in London, for they give splendid wages, palatial bungalows and medical attention, as well as paying fares out to the coast, and home again when their employee’s time is up.
The bungalows are all on elevated country and are consequently healthy, and now, wherever mines exist on the Gold Coast and in Southern Nigeria, you come across smiling Englishmen enjoying the wild jungle life and smoking by the bungalow doors, while natives rush about waiting on the Gold Coast potentates—for such they are. Often they go motoring, and the delighted natives go with them in the white man’s wonderful train. When they reach the outlying villages the whole population rushes forth to see the car tear along the jungle track, and if the hooter sounds their black bodies fly off into the jungle in all directions, the piccaninnies too, all frightened out of their lives.
Often one hears the tom-toms and native orchestra playing in the distance. The music drifting on the hot night wind across the jungle is impressively weird and carries one away back, back to the barbaric ages.
The African natives for centuries have had a kind of mysterious wireless code. Warnings of the approaching enemy are drifted on the winds, from tribe to tribe, travelling through the medium of drum sounds, a tone code of quick taps and slow booms, for hundreds of miles down the coast and across country. If a great chief dies mysterious drums beat and are heard miles away in the next village, where the villagers beat their drums in turn and pass the sounds on; and so it goes onward, to fade with the sunset into the last friendly kraal of the dominion.
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