Alone in West Africa

by Mary Gaunt

My carriers had been instructed to go to Accra and to Accra they went by the nearest way, sometimes cutting off little promontories, and thus it happened that, looking up on one of these detours, I saw on a hill, between me and the sea, a ruined fort. Of course I stopped the hammock and got out. I had come to see these forts, and here I was passing one. I wanted to go back. My headman demurred. Had I not distinctly said I wanted to go to Accra, and were we not on the direct road to Accra? To get to that old fort, which he did not think worth looking at, we should have to go back an hour's journey, and the men “no be fit.” I am regretful now that I only saw that fort from a distance. It was very very hot, and I don't think I felt very fit myself; at any rate, the thought of two hours extra in the hammock dismayed me and I decided to take a long-distance photograph from where I stood. It was an old Dutch fort—Fort Mori—and was built on high ground overlooking a little bay. I think now it would have been easier for me to do that two hours than to climb as I did, with the assistance of Grant and my headman, to the highest point on the roadside, through long grass, scrub, and undergrowth, there to poise myself uneasily to get a photograph of the ruins. An ideal place, whispered the men of old, for a fort in the bygone days, for it overlooked all the surrounding country, there was no possibility of surprise, and at its feet was a little sheltered bay. Now, on the yellow sands, in the glare of the sunshine, I could see the great canoes that dared the surf drawn up, the thatched roofs of the native town that drew its sustenance from the sea and in old times owed a certain loyalty to the fort and derived a certain prestige from the presence of the white men.

Regretfully I have only that distant memory of Fort Mori, and I went on. Those men who were “no fit” to take me back behaved abominably. Whenever they neared a village they endeavoured to steal from the inhabitants—a piece of suger-cane, a ball of kenky, or a few bananas—and again and again a quarrel called me to intervene. It is very curious how soon one gets an idea of one's own importance. In England, if I came across a crowd of shouting, furious, angry men, I should certainly pass by on the other side, but here in Africa when I was by myself I felt it my bounden duty to interfere and inquire what was the matter. It was most likely some trouble connected with my carriers. I disliked very much making enemies as I passed, and I endeavoured to catch them and make them pay for what they had stolen. And now I understood at last how it is white people living among a subject race are so often overwhelmed in a sudden rising. It is hard to believe that these people whom you count your inferiors will really rise against you. Here was I, alone, unarmed, only a woman, and yet immediately I heard a commotion I attended at once and dispensed justice to the very best of my ability. I fully expected village elders to bow to my decision, and I am bound to say they generally did.

Most of the villages along the Coast bore a strong family resemblance to the one in which I had spent an unhappy hour while my men attended the funeral palaver, and all the shore is much alike. Between Axim and Sekondi is some rough, rugged, and pretty country, but east and west of those points the shore is flat, and the farther east you go the flatter it becomes, till at the mouth of the Volta and beyond it is all sand and swamp. The first day out from Cape Coast it was somewhat monotonous, possibly if I went over it again I should feel that more; but there was growing up in me a feeling of satisfaction with myself—I do trust it was not smug—because I was getting on. I was doing the thing so many men had said I could not possibly do, and I was doing it fairly easily. Of course, I was helped, helped tremendously by the freehanded hospitality of the people in the towns through which I passed, for which kindness I can never be sufficiently grateful, but here with my carriers I was on my own, and I began to regard them as the captures of my bow and spear, and therefore I at least did not find the country uninteresting. Who ever found the land he had conquered dull?

In due course I arrived at Annamabu, an old English fort that the authorities on the Gold Coast hardly think worth preserving, and have given over to the tender mercies of the negro Custom and post office officials. Like Elmina, I could write a book about Annamabu alone, and I was the more interested in it because it is the most perfect specimen of the entirely English fort on the Coast, and is built at the head of a little bay, where is the best landing on the Coast for miles round.

There is a curious difference between the sites chosen by the different nations. The other nations apparently always chose some bold, commanding position, while the English evidently liked, as in this instance, the head of a little bay and a good landing.

Annamabu is quite a big native town, ruled over, I believe, by a cultured African, a man who is well read and makes a point of collecting all books about the Coast, and has, so they say, some rare old editions. I tried to see him and went to his house, a mud-built, two-storied building, where I sat in a covered courtyard and watched various members of his family go up and down a rickety staircase that led to the upper stories, but the Chief was away on his farm, and even though I waited long he never made his appearance. I should like to have seen the inside of his house, seen his books; all I did see was the courtyard, all dull-mud colour, untidy and unkempt, with a couple of kitchen chairs in it, a goat or two, some broken-down boxes and casks, and the drums of state that marked his high office piled up outside the door.

In the fort itself is the rest-house on the bastion, as untidy and dirty as the Chiefs courtyard. There are three rooms opening one into the other, and in the sitting-room, a great high room with big windows—those men of old knew how to build—there is a table, some chairs, a cupboard, and a filter, on which is written that it is for the use of Europeans only, and behind in the bedroom is the forlornest wreck of a bed, and some remnants of crockery that may have been washed about the time when Mrs Noah held the first spring cleaning in the ark, but apparently have never been touched since. It is only fair to say that every traveller, they are like snow in summer, carries his own bedding, and in fact all he needs, so that all that is really wanted for these rest-houses along the shore is a good broom and a good stout arm to wield it, and if a place is left without human occupancy the dirt is only clean dust, for the clean air along these coasts is divine.

But at Annamabu the usual difficulties came in my way; my old men were well broken-in now, but my new mammies were—well—even though I am a woman, and so by custom not permitted to use bad language, I must say they were the very devil. They carried on with the men and then they complained of the men's conduct, and when they arrived at Annamabu—late, of course, and one of them had the chop box—they sent in word to say they “no be fit” to go any farther, and there and then they wanted to go back to Cape Coast.

I said by all means they might go back to Cape Coast, but the loads would have to be left here and sent for from Salt Ponds, and therefore, as they had not completed their contract, they should be paid nothing.

They came and lay down before me in attitudes of intense weariness calculated to move the heart of a sphinx, but I came to the conclusion I must be a hard-hearted brute, for I was adamant, and those weeping women decided they would go on to Salt Ponds.