Alone in West Africa

by Mary Gaunt

They have touched the fringe of civilisation for so many hundred years; for this is the Coast of the great days of the slave trade, and along this seashore, by this roaring surf, beneath the shade of these cocoa-nut palms, have marched those weary companies of slaves, whose descendants make the problem of America nowadays. It must have been the same shore, the very same. Here is the golden sand and the thunderous surf that only the men of the Coast will dare, and between Axim and the French Ivory Coast not always they. The white scallop shells are tossed aside by the feet of the carriers; the jellyfish that twinkle like lumps of glass in the strong sunshine must be avoided, for they sting; plover and little wading birds like snipe dart into the receding wave, or race back from its oncoming; and the little crabs, like brown pincushions on stilts, run to hide themselves in the water. Here are crows, too, with neat black coats and immaculate white waistcoats and white collars, who fly cawing round the villages. We saw an occasional vulture, like a ragged and very dissipated turkey, tearing at the carcass of a goat or sheep. Such is the shore now. So was it four hundred years ago. The people must have changed a little, but very, very little in this western portion of the Gold Coast, which is given over to the mahogany cutters, the gold-seekers, and the men who seek mineral oil. And the people are born, and live, and die, and know very, very little more than their forefathers, who lived in fear of the trader who would one day tear them from their homes, and force civilisation upon them with the cat and with the branding iron. In the old days they got much of their sustenance from the sea, and so do they get it still; and when the surf was not too bad we saw the dark men launching their great surf boats, struggling to get them into the surf, struggling to keep them afloat till they got beyond it, when they were things of life. And when the surf was too bad, as it was on many days, they contented themselves with throwing in hand-nets, racing back as the sea washed over them, racing forward as it receded; and the women and children gathered shell-fish just where sand and surf met, carrying in their hands calabashes, or cocoa-nut shells, or those enamelled iron-ware basins which are as common now on the Coast as they are in London town. It seems to me that enamelled iron ware is one of the great differences between now and the days when the English and Dutch and Portuguese adventurers came first to this coast trading for gold and ivory and slaves.

There are other traces of them, too, though they only built forts and dared hardly go beyond the shelter of their walls. Not infrequently the skin of the man who bore me was lightened to copper colour; every now and then I saw straight features and thin lips, though the skin was black, and I remembered, I must perforce remember, that these traders of old time made the dark women minister to their passions, and that the dark women bore them children with pride, even as they do to-day.

Beyin is one of the biggest purely negro towns along the Coast. It is close on the shore, a mass of negro compounds huddled close together; the walls of the compounds and of houses are alike made of raffia palm, and the roofs are thatched with the fronds, looking not unlike peasant cottages in Somerset or Brittany.

And the people who live in them are simple savages. They chatter and shriek, talking at the top of their voices about—God knows what; for it seems as if nothing in the nature of news could have happened since the long-ago slave-raiding days. In the street they pressed me close; only when I noticed any particular one, especially a woman or a child, that one fled shrieking to hide behind its neighbour. We sent our orderly forward to tell the Omahin we proposed to honour them with our presence for two days, and to ask for a house to live in. The house was forthcoming, a great two-storied house, built of swish, and whitewashed. It was right in the centre of the town, so closely surrounded by the smaller houses that, standing on the balcony, I could drop things easily on to the roofs below; but it had this advantage, that unless the people climbed on their roofs—they did as a matter of fact—we could not be overlooked. We had three rooms: an enormous centre room that someone had begun to paint blue, got tired, and finished off with splashes of whitewash, the council chamber of the town; and two side-rooms for bedrooms. And words fail me to describe those bedrooms. There were iron beds with mattresses, mattresses that looked as if they had been rescued from the refuse heap specially to accommodate us, and tables covered with dirt and the most wonderful collection of odds and ends it has ever been my fortune to come across. They were mostly the cheapest glass and china ornaments, broken-down lamps that in their palmy days must have been useless, and one of those big gaily painted china sitting hens that humble households sometimes serve up their breakfast eggs under. The first thing was to issue strict orders that not even the ground sheet was to touch that bed; the next was to clear away the ornaments, wipe down the table, cover it with clean paper and a towel, sweep the floor, lay down the ground sheet, put up the bed, and decide whether I would wash in sea water or in the black and greasy liquid which comes from a mile away across the swamp, and which was the only alternative. I may say I tried them both, and found them both unsatisfactory; and I finished with the sea water because I knew that, however uncomfortable, it was at least clean.

Here we used the last of our drinking water and had to beg a little from the only white trader in the town, who gave generously of his small store, as white men do help each other beyond civilisation. He was German, and somewhat difficult to understand at times when he grew excited; but he stood on the same side of the gulf as we other two, while the black people, those who served us, and those who stared at us, were apart on the other side. A weary, dreary life is the trader's. He had a house just on the edge of the surf. His “factory” was below it. His only companions were a beautiful green-crested clock-bird and a little old-man monkey with a white beard. The ghastly loneliness of it! Nothing to do but to sell cotton stuffs and enamel ware and gin to the native, and count the days till it was time to tramp to Axim and take the steamer that should bear him back to the Fatherland and all the joys of wife and children.

“I saw the homeward-bound steamer to-day,” he said pathetically, though he did not know he was pathetic. “I always look for it.”

“The steamer! I did not know it came close enough in.”

“It doesn't. Of course it was only the smoke on the horizon.”

Surely, surely, the tragedy of the exile's life lay in those words.

We had sent our orderly forward to say we were going to visit the Omahin, and soon after our arrival we called upon him. His palace is a collection of swish huts with palm-thatched roofs, built round a sanded compound; and we were ushered into a cramped, whitewashed room—his court. The population packed themselves into the body of the court to stare at the white people and native royalty; and the Omahin and his councillors were crowded up in the corner, whence, I presume, justice is dispensed. The exalted personage was clad in a dark robe of many-coloured silks, with a band of the same material round his black head. Round his neck was a great, heavy gold chain, on his arms bracelets of the same metal, and on his fingers heavy gold rings. Some of his councillors were also dressed in native robes, and they carried great horns of gold and the sticks that mark his rank with gold devices on top of them. The incongruity was provided by the “scholars” among his following—the linguists, the registrar, and other minor officials. These functionaries were clad in the most elderly of cast-off European garments, frock coats green with age, shirts that simply shrieked for the washtub, and trousers that a London unemployed would have disdained. However, they interpreted for us, and we explained to the Chief how pleased the white lady was with his country and how much she wished to visit the lake village, which was three hours away on the trade route to the back-country. He expressed his willingness to give us a guide through the swamp that lay behind the town, and then with a great deal of solemnity we took our leave and retired to our own somewhat delayed afternoon tea.