CHAPTER II
The Household
The household in Nigeria, and indeed, all over West Africa, is by no means the complicated affair that one has to cope with in India, and housekeeping is reduced to the greatest simplicity.
The staff consists of a cook, with an attendant satellite, called a ‘cook’s mate,’ a steward, or ‘boy,’ with usually, in a married household at least, an under steward, or perhaps a couple of small boys to assist generally in the housework and table service. There may be an orderly attached, but his duties consist rather in the airing of clothes and boxes, cleaning of guns and boots, and carrying of letters, etc.
Each pony has his own ‘doki-boy,’ whose duties are fully described in the chapter on the stable, and the mistress may, in her enthusiasm, decide to employ a regular gardener. All these good people live in the compound, the only outside servant being the laundress. This lady is only to be found at headquarters (she is usually a Coast woman), in out-stations, and in the bush the washing is done—generally with inconspicuous success—by one’s own boys, or the wife of a doki-boy. It is distinctly useful to bring out from home one or two flat-irons, and make a point of ‘getting up’ one’s most cherished muslin blouses, etc., oneself.
Wages are high, absurdly so, but the demand for fairly capable servants is so great, and the supply so small, that there is little prospect of the present scale of pay being reasonably reduced. Also, alas! in many bachelor establishments, the standard of excellence in service is not high enough to produce a really good class of servants, and I am quite certain that any Englishwoman who has kept house in India would absolutely gasp at the quality and quantity of work done by a highly paid ‘boy,’ in possession of most eulogistic testimonials from previous masters. The following is a fair average of wages paid, per month, all over the country: in some cases, servants of an undesirable kind may be engaged for less, but this is no real economy, while in some other cases even higher wages are paid.
| £ | s. | d. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cook | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| (If an Accra boy £3 or £3 10s.) | |||
| Cook’s Mate | 0 | 15 | 0 |
| Head Steward | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Under Steward | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Laundress | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Doki-boy | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Gardener | 1 | 0 | 0 |
Roughly £100 a year, for the services of seven people, all lazy and stupid, mostly untruthful, and frequently dishonest, ignorant of the first principles of order and cleanliness, and, unmistakably, considering Missis rather a bore when she insists on trying to inculcate these.
My personal experience with house servants is not a very varied one, as we still have some of those we engaged on first coming to West Africa five years ago; but, in fairness to them, I must not omit to say that I have only very rarely found any one of them in the least degree untruthful, and that I know them to be absolutely honest; they have never stolen a single article or a halfpenny from either of us during these years.
Servants may be of all languages and tribes, and they have no ‘caste.’ Some are Mahomedans, some Pagans, some professing Christianity, but their religious convictions do not appear to affect any of them very seriously. One important point for the new-comer is, that one servant, at least—the head steward for choice—should speak good, intelligible English; most of the Coast boys, and those trained by the Roman Catholic missionaries at Onitsha, can do so.