Alone in West Africa

by Mary Gaunt

Then at the other end of the social scale are the Basel Missions. They combine business and religion very satisfactorily in a thoroughly efficient German spirit, and while the missionaries attend to the souls of the heathen and set up schools to teach them not only to read and write, but various useful trades as well, the Basel Mission Factories do a tremendous trade in all the necessaries of life. These Basel missionaries are most kindly, worthy people, and to their kindness I owe much. Occasionally I have come across a man of wide reading and with clever, observant eyes, but as a rule they are chosen from the lower middle classes among the Swiss and Germans; very often the missionary spirit runs in the families, and it passes on from father to son, from mother to daughter. These people, too, come out if not for life, like the Roman Catholics, at least for long periods of years. It is generally believed on the Coast, and I have never heard it contradicted, that when a man attains a certain standing he is allowed to marry, even though he is not due for a holiday in Europe. They have at headquarters photographs of all the eligible maidens in training for the mission field, and the candidate for matrimony may choose his wife, and she is duly forwarded to him, for the heads of the Basel Missions, like me, believe in matrimony for Africa. And most excellent wives do these Basel missionary women make. They bear their children here in West Africa where no English woman thinks she can stay more than six months, and their homes are truly homes in the best sense of the word. If example is good for the heathen, then he has it in the Basel Missions. Another thing, they must make the most excellent nucleus for German interests, for no one who has been in a Basel Mission Station or Factory can but respect these men and women and little children who make a home and a garden in the wilderness. And what I have said about the Basel Missions applies to the Bremen Missions, except that these are more pronouncedly German. But better women may I never hope to meet in this wide world than those in the Bremen Missions. And in between these two extremes are missionaries of every class and description. Against the individuals I have nothing to say, save and except this—I want to discount the admiration given to the “poor missionary.” They are good men I doubt not, but they are earning a living just as I who write am earning a living, or you who read, and to my mind they are earning a living in the halo of sanctity very much more comfortably than the struggling doctor or the poor curate in an East-End parish. Whatever their troubles, they have never the bitterness of seeing the ghastly want that they cannot relieve, and if they do not live in England, they have always the joy of making a home in a new country, and that is a joy that those who talk so glibly about exile do not seem to realise.

“But we must have the negroes taught reading and writing and trades,” said a man to me once when we were discussing the missionary question; and I agree it is necessary, but I do not see why I am to regard the teacher as on a higher plane than he who teaches the same in England. And as for the religion that is taught, the only comment I have to make upon it is that no man that ever I heard of would take a mission boy or a Christian for a servant when he could get a decent heathen. Finally, considering the amount of destitution and terrible want in the streets of England, if I had my way I would put a heavy tax on all money contributed for the conversion of the heathen. Before it was allowed to go out of the country I would if I could take heavy toll, and with that toll give the luckless children of my own colour a start in life in the Colonies.

Finally, West Africa is the country of raw material. It should be England's duty so to work that country that it be complementary to England, the great manufacturing land. The peasant of the Gold Coast burning the bush to make his cocoa plantations is absolutely necessary to the girl fixing the labels on the finished product; her very livelihood depends upon him. The nearer these two are brought together in a commercial sense the better for both, and what we say of cocoa we may say of palm oil and groundnuts and other vegetable fats, of rubber, of hemp, of gold, of tin. This country which produces with tropical luxuriance should be, if properly worked, a source of immense wealth to the nation that possesses it.

And as we rise in the social scale, think of the openings this country, thickly populated, well cultivated, flourishing, would offer for the young men of the middle classes seeking a career. A political service like the Civil Service of India, officered by men who have won places there by strenuous work and high endeavour, who are proud of the positions they have won, and a busy mercantile community, serving side by side with these political officers, would go some way to answering the question on the lips of the middle-class father, “What shall I do with my son?” The work of women is widening every day, and I, who honestly believe that an ordinary woman may go where an ordinary man can, may with profit take up work even as a man may do, see scope for the women of the future there too, not only as wives and helpmeets to the men, but as heads of independent enterprises of their own.