My host told me they spent, comparatively speaking, enormous sums on their personal adornment, were exceedingly particular as to the shade and pattern of their cloths, and were decided that everything, cloth, blouse, and head kerchief, should tone properly. They lay in a large store of clothes too, and when Mr Crockett wrote the other day of “The Lady of the Hundred Dresses,” he might have been thinking of one of these Fanti women. The reason of this prosperity is of course easy to trace. The negro does not like working underground, for which few people I think will blame him, therefore high wages have to be paid, and these high wages have to be spent, and are spent lavishly, much to the advantage of these women traders.
Because Tarkwa is a great centre of industry, Government have very wisely made it one of their agricultural stations, and there, set on a hill, and running down into rich alluvial flats, are gardens wherein grow many of the plants that will in the future contribute largely to the industrial development of the Colony. There is a rubber plantation, a great grove of dark trees already in bearing, plantations of bananas, pine-apples, hemp, and palm trees, and the director, set in his lonely little bungalow on the hilltop, rejoices over the wealth and fertility of the land, which he declares is not in her gold, but in her agricultural products which as yet we are but dimly realising, and then he mourns openly because the Government will not let him bring out his wife. “She would be ready to start in an hour if I might send for her,” he sighed, “and I would want nothing more. But I mayn't. Oh, think of the dreary days. And I could work so much better if she were here. I should want nothing else.”
And I sympathised. Think of the dreary days for him, and the still more dreary days for her, for at least he has his work. It would surely I think pay the Government to give a bonus to the woman who proved that she could see her year out without complaint, and who was to her husband what a woman ought to be, a help and a comfort.
Another thing in Tarkwa I shall never forget is Messrs Swanzy's bungalow, where I stayed for nearly a fortnight. My host had superintended the building of it himself, and it was ideal for a West-African bungalow. It was built of cement raised on arches above the ground; floors and walls were of cement. There was a very wide verandah that served as a sitting-room and dining-room, and the bedrooms, though they were divided from each other by stout walls of cement, were only shut off from the verandah by Venetian screens that could be folded right away. They did not begin till a foot above the floor, and ended six feet above it, consequently there was always a thorough draught of air, and Messrs Swanzy's bungalow at Tarkwa is about the only house I know in West Africa where one can sleep with as much comfort as if in the open air. Needless to say, they are not so foolish as to go in for mosquito-proof netting. They keep the mosquitoes down by keeping the place round neat and tidy, and though the verandah is enclosed with glass, it is done in such fashion that the windows may be thrown right open and do not hinder the free passage of air. Flies and mosquitoes there were, but that, when I was there, was attributed to the presence of the town rubbish tip on the next vacant allotment, and my host hoped to get it taken away. Why the Government had a town rubbish tip close to the handsomest bungalow in the Colony, I do not pretend to say. It was just one of those things that are always striking you as incongruous in West Africa. My host used to fret and fume at every evil fly that came through his windows, and, when I left, was threatening to stand a gang of Hausas round that tip with orders to kick anyone who desired to deposit any more rubbish there.
