Alone in West Africa

by Mary Gaunt

One of his old wives had broken her leg, and we visited her; she had a room in his house, and was lying on her bed on the floor, while beside her sat another wife who had come to see how she was getting on.

“If I were a wife,” said I, from the outlook of a monogamous country, “I should not call upon another wife a man chose to take, even if she were sick.”

“I don't know,” said kind-hearted Sister Minna. “I have lived so long in a country like this that I think I should. It is only kind.”

And we went from one household to another, and were received most graciously, and generally Sister Minna was given some small sum of money to entertain me. Sometimes it was sixpence, sometimes it was a shilling, sometimes it even rose as high as two shillings, and she was instructed to buy chickens and bananas that I might be well fed. Also they can never tell a white person's age, and many a time she was asked, because I was short, whether I was not a child.

Altogether I was most agreeably struck with these Awuna people, and found there was even something to be said for the polygamous system. I have always, from my youth upwards, admired the woman who worked and made a place for herself in the world, and here were certainly some of my ideals carried out, for every woman in this community was selfsupporting for the greater part of her life, and not only did she support herself, but her children as well. It was in fact not much of a catch to marry a chief; of course, being a rich man, he probably gave her a little more capital to work upon in the beginning, but she had to pay him back, and work all the same.

We visited another household, the home of a clerk in the Bremen Mission Factory, a gentleman who wore a tweed suit and a high collar, and who once had been a pillar of the mission church. He had four wives, and he lived inside a compound with small houses round it, and his house, the big house, on one side. Each wife had her own little home, consisting of two rooms and a kitchen place; the wife without children was the farthest away from him, and the last wife, just married, had a room next his. His sitting-room was quite gorgeous, furnished European fashion with cane chairs, and settee, coloured cushions, an ordinary lamp with a green shade, and a rack, such as one sees on old-fashioned ships, hung with red and green wineglasses. I don't know why I should have felt that antimacassars and tablecloths were out of place with polygamy, but I did, especially as the wives' houses were bare, native houses, where the women squatted on the floor, their bedrooms were dark and dismal hot places, with any amount of girdle beads hanging against the walls. For clothes are but a new fashion in Keta, and the time is not far off when a woman went clothed solely in girdle beads, and so still it is the fashion to have many different girdle beads, though now that they wear cloths over them they are not to be seen except upon the little girls who still very wisely are allowed to go stark. Each woman's children, not only in this house, but in the Chief's house, ran in and out of the other wives' houses in very friendly fashion, and they most of them bore English names—Grace, Rosina, and Elizabeth. And the names, when they are not English, are very curious and well worth remembering. A couple had been married for many years, and at last the longed-for child came. “Laughing at last,” they called it. “Come only” is another name. “A cry in my house”—where so long there had been silence. “Every man and his,” meaning with pride, “this is mine, I want nothing more.” But they are not always pleased. “God gives bad things”—a girl has been born and they have been waiting for a boy. “A word is near my heart,” sounds rather tender, but “I forgive you” must have another meaning, and the child would surely not be as well loved as the one its mother called “Sweet thing.” Then again girls do not always marry the man they love or would choose, and they will perhaps call their child “Not love made you,” but on the whole I think pleasant names predominate, and many a child is called “So is God,” “God gives good things,” or merely “Thanks.” Often too a child is called after the day of the week upon which it is born.

“What day were you born?” asked the Chief of me.

“Wednesday,” I said.

“Then your name is Aquwo,” said he.

Marriage in a country like this has a somewhat different status from what it does, say in England. What a woman wants most of all is children; motherhood is the ideal, and the unmarried woman with a child is a far more enviable person than the married woman without, and even in this land, where motherhood is everything, there was in every household that I visited an unhappy woman without children, because vice has been rampant along the Coast for hundreds of years. You may know her at once by her sad face, for not only is she deeply grieved, but everyone despises her, as they do not despise the woman who has had a child without being married. Of course parents prefer their daughters to be chaste, and if a man marries what the Sister described as a “good” girl, he will probably give her a pair of handsome bracelets to mark his appreciation of the fact, but if on the other hand a daughter, without being married, suddenly presents the household with an addition, they are not more vexed than if the daughter in civilised lands failed to pass her examination, outran her allowance, or perhaps got herself too much talked about with the best-looking ineligible in the neighbourhood. It is a natural thing for a girl to do, and at any rate a child is always an asset.