Alone in West Africa

by Mary Gaunt

So by myself I set out into the heart of the rubber country north of Kumasi. I was fairly beyond civilisation now. Ten years ago this country was in open rebellion against English rule, and even now there are no European stores there; there is no bread, no kerosene, no gin—those first necessities of an oncoming civilisation; it was simply the wild heart of the rubber country, unchanged for hundreds of years. It has been known, but it has not been lightly visited. It has been a country to be shunned and talked of with bated breath as “the land of darkness.” The desert might be dared, the surf might be ventured, the black man might be defied, but the gloom of the forest the white man feared and entered not except upon compulsion. The Nile has given up its secrets, the Sahara yields to cultivation, but still in Africa are there places where the all-conquering white man is dwarfed, and one of them is the great forest that lies north of the capital of Ashanti.

Here we know not the meaning of the word forest. England's forests are delightful woods where the deer dwell in peace, where the rabbits scutter through the fern and undergrowth, and where the children may go for a summer's holiday; in Australia are trees close-growing and tall; but in West Africa the forest has a life and being of its own. It is not a thing of yesterday or of ten years back or of fifty years. Those mighty trees that dwarf all other trees in the world have taken hundreds of years to their growth. When a slight young girl came to the throne of England, capturing a nation's chivalry by her youth and innocence, the mahogany and kaku and odoum trees were old and staid monarchs of the forest. When the first of the Georges came over from Hanover, unwelcome, but the nation's last hope, they were young and slim but already tall trees stretching up their crowns to the brilliant sunlight that is above the gloom, and now at last, when the fifth of that name reigns over them, at last is their sanctuary invaded and the seclusion that is theirs shall be theirs no longer. For already the axe is laid to their roots, and through the awe-inspiring forest runs a narrow roadway kept clear by what must be almost superhuman labour, and along that roadway, the beginning of the end, the sign that marks the peaceful conquest of the savage, that marks also the downfall of the forest though it is not even whispered among the trees that scorn them yet, flows a perpetual stream of traffic, men, women, and children. Backwards and forwards from the north to Kumasi and the sea they come, and they bear on their heads, going north, corrugated iron and cotton goods, kerosene, and flour, and chairs, all the trifles that the advance of civilisation makes absolute necessaries; and coming down they bring all in their season, hides, and heavy cakes of rubber, and sticks of dried snails, and all the other articles of native produce that a certain peace has made marketable along the way or in the markets of Kumasi.

The spell was upon me the moment I left the town. That road is like nothing else in the world. The hammock and the carriers were dwarfed by the great roots and buttresses of the trees to tiny, crawling ants, and overhead was a narrow strip of blue sky where the sunlight might be seen, but only at noon did that sunlight reach the roadway below. We travelled in a shadow pleasant in that heat; and on either side, close on either side, were the great trees. Looking down the road I could see them straight as a die, tall pillars, white and brown; ahead of me and close at hand the mighty buttresses that supported those pillars rose up to the height of perhaps ten men before the tree was fairly started, a tall trunk with branches that began to spread, it seemed to me, hundreds of feet above the ground. And between those tree-trunks was all manner of undergrowth, and all were bound and matted together with thickly growing creepers and vines. It was impossible to step an inch from that cleared path. There would be no getting lost in the bush, for it would be almost impossible for the unpractised hand to get into the bush. There is nothing to be seen but the brown, winding roadway, the dense green of the undergrowth, and the trunks of the trees tall and straight as Nelson's column and brown or white against the prevailing green. And there are all shades of green, from that so pale that it is almost golden to that so dark it is almost black, but never a flower breaks the monotony, the monotony that is not monotony but dignity, and the flowers of an English spring or an autumn in Australia would but cheapen the forest of the Gold Coast. There must have been orchids, for sometimes as I passed their rich, sensuous smell would come to my nostrils, but I only knew they were there by my sense of smell just as sometimes I smelt a strong smell of mice, and knew, though I could not see them, that somewhere in the depths of the gloom were hidden away a great colony of fruitarian bats that would not come out into the daylight.

When there was a village there was, of course, a clearing, and on the first day I passed several villages until at last I came to Ofinsu, where I had arranged to spend the night. Ofinsu is on the banks of a river, and the road comes out of the forest and passes broadly between two rows of mud-walled houses with steeply pitched, high-thatched roofs, and my carriers raced along and stopped opposite a small wooden door in a mud wall and rapped hard.