Alone in West Africa

by Mary Gaunt

And yet the old Portuguese were right. It is an ideal site for a capital. The Castle is on a promontory which juts out into the sea, and is almost surrounded by water, for the Sweetwater River, which was very salt when I was there, runs into the sea in such a fashion as to leave but a narrow neck of land between the Castle and the mainland. The land rises behind the town, it is clear of scrub and undergrowth, so that horses and cattle may live, as there is no harbour for that curse of West Africa, the tsetse fly; there is sufficient open space for the building of a large town, and it is nearer to Kumasi, whence comes all the trade from the north, than Sekondi, which was chosen, instead of it, as a railway terminus. A grievous pity! It is England's proud boast that she lets the man on the spot have a free hand, knowing that he must be the better judge of local conditions and needs; it is West Africa's misfortune that she had so evil a reputation that the best and wisest men did not go there; and hence these grave mistakes.

I had always believed that every coloured man was yearning to come under the British flag, therefore was I much astonished to hear that in 1874, when Britain took over this part of the Coast, the natives resented the change of masters very bitterly. They would not submit, and the big village to the west of the fort, old Elmina native town, was in open rebellion. At last the guns from the fort were turned upon it, the inhabitants evacuated it hastily, it was bombarded, and the order went forth that no one should come back to it.

Even now, thirty-seven years later, the old law which prohibits the native from digging on the site of the old town is still in force, and since the natives were in the habit of burying their wealth beneath their huts, great store of gold dust is supposed to be hidden there. Again and again the solitary official in charge of Elmina has been approached by someone asking permission to dig there, generally with the intimation that if only the permission be granted, a large percentage of the hidden treasure shall find its way into the pockets of that official.

“It is hard,” said Dr Duff, “for the native mind to grasp the fact that the English official is incorruptible, and the law must be kept—but I confess,” he added, “I should like to know if there really is gold in old Elmina.”

The town has been a fine town once. The houses are substantially built of stone, they are approached by fine flights of stone steps, there are the ruins of an old casino, and picturesque in its desolation is an old Dutch garden. If I were to describe the magnificent old Castle, I should fill half the book; it is so well worth writing about. I walked up the hill behind the Castle where they have built up the roadway with discarded cannon, and there I took photographs and wished I had a little more time to spare for the place, and vowed that when I reached England the British Museum should help me to find out all there is to be known about this magnificent place and the men who have gone before.

For the man of the present it must be a little difficult to live in, if it is only for the intense loneliness. It must be lonely to live in the bush with the eternal forest surrounding you, but at least there a man is an outpost of Empire, the trade is coming to him, he may find interest and amusement in the breaking of a road or the planning of a garden, while the making of a town would fill all his time, but in Elmina there are no such consolations. The place is dead, slain by the English; the young men go away following the trade, and the old mammies with wrinkled faces and withered breasts lounge about the streets and talk of departed glories.

I had not expected to find one white man here, and I found two, the other being a school-inspector who was on his way along the Coast inspecting the native schools. He was in a fix, for he had sent on his carriers and stores and could get no hammock-boys. They had promised to send them from Cape Coast and they had not come. The medical officer made both us strangers hospitably welcome, but stores are precious things on the Coast and one does not like to trespass, so he was a troubled school-inspector.