Alone in West Africa

by Mary Gaunt

These colonies on the West-African coast are as unlike as possible to the colony in which I first saw the light, that my people have helped to build up. I fancy, perhaps, the Roman proconsul and the officials in his train, who came out to rule over Britain in the first century before Christ, must have led lives somewhat resembling those of the Britons who nowadays go out to West Africa. One thing is certain, those Italians must have grumbled perpetually about the inclemency and unhealthiness of the climate of these northern isles; they probably had a great deal to say about the fever and ague that was rife. They were accustomed to certain luxuries that civilisation had made into necessities, and they came to a land where all the people were traders and agriculturists of a most primitive sort. They were exiles in a cold, grey land, and they felt it bitterly. They came to replenish their purses, and when those purses were fairly full they returned to their own land gladly. The position describes three-quarters of the Englishmen in West Africa to-day; but between the Roman and the savage Piet of Caledonia was never the gulf, the great gulf, which is fixed between even the educated African and the white man of whatever nationality. It is no good trying to hide the fact; between the white man and the black lies not only the culture and the knowledge of the west—that gulf might, and sometimes is bridged—but that other great bar, the barrier of sex. Tall, stalwart, handsome as is many a negro, no white woman may take a black man for her husband and be respected by her own people; no white man may take a black girl, though her dark eyes be soft and tender, though her skin be as satin and her figure like that of the Venus of Milo, and hope to introduce her among his friends as his wife. Even the missionaries who preach that the black man is a brother decline emphatically to receive him as a brother-in-law. And so we get, beginning here in the little colony of the Gambia, the handful of the ruling race set among a subject people; so the white man has always ruled the black; so, I think, he must always rule. It will be a bad day for the white when the black man rules. That there should be any mingling of the races is unthinkable; so I hope that the white man will always rule Africa with a strong hand.

The Gambia is the beginning of the English colonies on the Coast, and, the pity of it, a very small beginning.

In the old days, when Charles the Second was king, the English held none of the banks of the river at all, but contented themselves with a barren little island about seventeen miles from where Bathurst now stands. One bank was held by the French, the other by the Portuguese; and the English built on the island Fort St James to protect their interest in the great trade in palm oil, slaves, and ivory that came down the river. Even then the Gambia was rich. It is richer far to-day, but the French hold the greater part of it. The colony of the Gambia is at the mouth of the river, twelve miles broad by four hundred long, a narrow strip of land bordering the mouth of a river set in the heart of the great French colony of Senegal—a veritable Naboth's vineyard that our friends the other side of the Channel may well envy us. It brings us in about £80,000 annually, but to them it would be of incalculable value as an outlet for the majority of their rich trade.

At first I hardly thought about these things. I was absorbed in the wonder of the new life. I stayed at Government House with the Governor, and was caught up in the little whirl of gaieties that greeted his return. The house was tropical, with big, lofty, airy rooms and great wide verandahs that as a rule serve also as passageways to pass from one room to another; for Government House, Bathurst, is built as a tropical house should be—must be—built, if the builder have any regard for the health of its inmates. There were no rooms that the prevailing breeze could not sweep right through. There was a drawingroom and a dining-room on the ground floor, but I do not think either Sir George or I, or his private secretary, ever used the drawing-room unless there were guests to be entertained. The verandahs were so much more inviting, and my bedroom was a delightful place. It ran right across the house. There was no carpet, and, as was only right, only just such furniture as I absolutely needed. The bed was enclosed in another small mosquito-proof room of wirenetting, and it was the only thing I did not like about the house. There, and at that season, perhaps it did not very much matter, for a strong Harmattan wind, the cool wind of the cold, dry season, was blowing, and it kept the air behind the stout wire-netting fresh and clean; but I must here put on record my firm belief that no inconsiderable number of lives in Africa must be lost owing to some doctor's prejudice in favour of mosquito-proof netting. A mosquito-proof netting is very stout indeed, and not only excludes the mosquito, but, and this far more effectually, the fresh air as well. The man who has plenty of fresh air, day and night, will be in better health, and far more likely to resist infection if he does happen to get bitten by a fever-bearing mosquito, than he who must perforce spend at least a third of his time in the vitiated air of a mosquito-proof room. This I did not realise at Government House, Bathurst, or if I did, but dimly, for there in December the strong Harmattan would have forced its way through anything. I spent most of my time on the verandah outside my own room, where I had a view not only of the road that ran to to the centre of the town but right away across the river. Here I had my breakfast and my afternoon tea, and here I did all my writing.

In Africa your own servant takes charge of your room, gets your bath, and brings you your early-morning tea; and here in Bathurst in this womanless house my servant was to get my breakfast and my afternoon tea as well, so the first thing to be done was to look out for a boy. He appeared in the shape of Ansumanah Grant, a Mohammedan boy of three-and-twenty, a Vai tribesman, who had been brought up by the Wesleyan missionaries at Cape Mount in Liberia. When I engaged him he wore a pink pyjama coat, a pair of moleskin breeches, and red carpet slippers; and, when this was rectified—at my expense—he appeared in a white shirt, khaki knicker-bockers, a red cummerbund, and bare feet, and made a very respectable member of society and a very good servant to me during the whole of my stay in Africa.

I always made it a practice to rise early in West Africa, because the early morning is the most delightful time, and he who stays in bed till halfpast seven or eight is missing one of the pure delights of life. When I had had my early breakfast, I went to inspect the town. The market lies but a stone's throw from Government House, and here all the natives were to be found, and the white men's servants buying provisions for the day. To me, before I went to Africa, a negro was a negro, and I imagined them all of one race. My mind was speedily disabused of that error. The negro has quite as many nationalities, is quite as distinct as the European. Here in this little colony was a most cosmopolitan gathering, for the south and north meet, and Yorubas from Lagos, Gas from Accra, mongrel Creoles from Sierra Leone meet the Senegalese from the north, the Hausas from away farther east; and the natives themselves are the Mohammedan Jolloff, who is an expert river-man, the Mandingo, and the heathen Jolah, who as yet is low down in the scale of civilisation, and wears but scanty rags. And all these people were to be found in the market in the early morning. It is enclosed with a high wall, the interior is cemented, and gutters made to carry off moisture, and it is all divided into stalls, and really not at all unlike the alfresco markets you may see on Saturdays in the poorer quarters of London. Here they sell meat, most uninviting looking, but few butchers' shops look inviting; fish—very strange denizens come out of the sea in the Gambia; native peppers, red and green; any amount of rice, which is the staple food of the people, and all the tropical fruits, paws-paws, pine-apples, and dark-green Coast oranges, which are very sweet; bananas, yellow and pink, and great bunches of green plantains. They are supposed to sell only on the stalls, for which they pay a small, a very small rental; but, like true natives, they overflow on to the ground, and as you walk you must be careful not to tread on neat little piles of peppers, enamelled iron-ware basins full of native rice, or little heaps of purple kola-nuts—that great sustaining stimulant of Africa.

There were about half a dozen white women in Bathurst when I was there, including one who had ostracised herself by marrying a black man; but none ever came to the market, therefore my arrival created great excitement, and one good lady, in a are held, half the houses are owned by rich negroes, Africans they very naturally prefer to be called, but the poorer people live all crowded together in Jolloff town, whither my guide led me, and introduced me to her yard. A Jolloff never speaks about his house, but about his “yard.” Even Government House he knows as “Governor's Yard.”