Alone in West Africa

by Mary Gaunt

He hesitated. He could not make up his mind which he was most afraid of, me or the men. Finally he decided that I was the most terrifying person and he gingerly picked up one of those basins and carefully put it down under a shrub.

“Policeman,” I said, and I was emphatic, “that's not the way to throw away chop. Scatter it round,” and with one glance at me to see if I meant what I said, he scattered it on the ground. What surprised me was that the men let him. Certainly those round the second dish seized it and fled up towards the rest-house, and we came after them. When we arrived the men were still eating, but there was still some rice in the dish, and I made the policeman seize it and fling it away, and then every one of those men came back meekly to work, picked up their loads or waited round the hammock for me.

I saw the loads off with the headman, and told him to get across the Prah River if he could and on to Kommenda, where I proposed to have my luncheon, and then I stayed behind to take some photographs of the old fort. It took me some time to take my pictures. The heat was intense, and beyond the fort, which is quaintly old-world, there is not much to see. The town is the usual Coast village built of clay, which they call swish, with thatched roofs; the streets between the houses are hot and dry and bare, and little naked children disport themselves there with the goats, sheep, pigs, and chickens. There are the holes from which the earth has been taken to make the swish—man-traps in the night, mosquitobreeding places at all times—and there are men and women standing gossiping in the street, wondering at the unusual sight of a white woman, just for all the world as they might do in a remote Cornish village if a particularly smart motor passed by. They are fishing villages, these villages along the Coast, living by the fishing, and growing just a little maize and plantains and yams for their own immediate needs; and it is a curious thing to say, but they give one the same sleepy, out-of-the-world feeling that a small village in Cornwall does. There is not in them the go and the promise there is in an Ashanti village, the dormant wealth waiting to be awakened one feels there is along the Volta. No, these places were exploited hundreds of years ago by the men who built the fort that frowns over them still, and they are content to live on from day to day with just enough to keep them going, with the certain knowledge that no man can die of starvation, and when a young man wants distraction I suppose he goes to the bigger towns. So I found nothing of particular interest in Chama, and I went on till I reached the Prah River, just where it breaks out across the sands and rushes to meet the ocean.

I wondered in that journey to Accra many times whether my face was set hard, whether my lips were not one firm, stern line that could never unbend and look kindly again. My small camp mirror that I consulted was exceedingly unflattering, but if I had not before been certain that no half-measures were of any use I should have been certain of it when I reached the river. There lay my loads, and sitting down solemnly watching them like so many crows, rather dissipated crows, were my men. They rose up as my hammock came into view.

“Missus, men want drink water. It be hot.”

It was hot, very hot, and the river it seemed was salt; moreover, the only house in sight, and that was a good way off, was the hut apparently belonging to the ferryman. I looked at them, and my spirits rose; it was borne in on me that I had them well in hand, for there was no reason why they should not have gone off in a body to get that much-needed water.

But I gave the order, “One man go fetch water.”

Why they obeyed me I don't know now, and why they didn't take the bucket I don't know now. I ought to have sent one man with a bucket; but experience always has to be bought, and I only realised that I was master of the situation, and must not spoil it by undue haste. So I solemnly stood there under my sun umbrella and watched those men have a drink one by one out of an empty marmalade pot. Whenever, in the future, I see one of those golden tins, it will call up to my memory a blazing hot day, a waste of sand and coarse grass, a wide river flowing through it, and a row of loads with a ragged company of black men sitting solemnly beside them waiting while one of their number brought them a drink. That drink was a tremendous piece of business, but we were through with it at last, and though I was rather weary and very hot I was inclined to be triumphant. I felt I had the men fairly well in hand.

Still, they weren't all that I could have desired. The road was very, very bad indeed, sometimes it was down on the heavy sand, sometimes the rocks were too rough—the hammock had to be engineered up and down the bank by devious and uncomfortable ways, sometimes we stopped to buy fruit in a village, and sometimes the men stopped and declared: “Missus, oder hammock-boy, he no come.”

Then I was hard. I knew it was no good being anything else.