The landing here was shockingly bad; it is so still, I think, for the last time I left I was drenched to the skin, so the powers that be set to work at enormous cost to build a breakwater behind which the boats might land in comparative safety. Only comparative, for still the moment the boat touches the shore the boatmen seize the passenger and carry him as swiftly as possible, and quite regardless of his dignity, beyond the reach of the next breaking wave.
“Ah,” said a high official, looking with pride at the breakwater, “how I have watched that go up. Every day I have said to myself, 'something accomplished, something done'”; and he said it with such heartfelt pride that I had not the heart to point out the sand pump, working at the rate of sixty tons a minute, that this same costly breakwater had necessitated, for the harbour without it would fill up behind the breakwater; not exactly, I fancy, what the authorities intended. The breakwater isn't finished yet, but the harbour is filling fast; by the time it is finished I should doubt whether there will be any water at all behind it.
I did Accra thoroughly. I lived in that little bungalow beside the fort, and I went up and down the streets in my cart and I saw all I think there was to be seen. But for one good friend, a medical officer I had known before, the lady who was head of the girls' school, a thoroughly capable, practical young woman, and the one or two friends they brought to see me, I knew nobody, and so I was enabled to form my opinions untrammelled, and I'm afraid I had the audacity to sit in judgment on that little tropical capital and say to myself that things might really be very much better done. The Club may be a cheerful place if you know anyone, but it is very doleful and depressing if the only other women look sidelong at you over the tops of their papers as if you were some curious specimen that it might perhaps be safer to avoid, and I found the outside of the bungalows, with their untidy, forlorn gardens, the houses of sojourners who are not dwellers in the land, anything but promising. Yet money is spent too—witness the breakwater—and in my wanderings I came across a tombstone-like erection close to James Fort, which I stopped and inspected. Indeed it is in a conspicuous place, with an inscription which he who runs may read. At least he might have read a little while ago, but the climate is taking it in hand. The stone is of polished granite, which must have cost a considerable amount of money, and by the aid of that inscription I discovered that it was a fountain erected to commemorate the opening of the waterworks in Accra. Oh Africa! Already it is difficult to read that inscription; the unfinished fountain is falling into decay, and the water has not yet been brought to the town! When future generations dig on the site of the old Gold Coast town, I am dreadfully afraid that tombstone will give quite a wrong impression. Now it is one of the most desolate things I know, more desolate even than the forlorn Danish graveyard which lies, overgrown and forgotten, but a stone's throw from my bungalow at Christiansborg. A heavy brick wall had been built round it once, but it was broken down in places so that the people of Christiansborg might pasture their goats and sheep upon it, and I climbed through the gap, risking the snakes, and read the inscriptions. They had died, apparently most of them, in the early years of the nineteenth century, men and women, victims probably to their want of knowledge, and all so pitifully young. I could wish that the Government that makes so much fuss about educating the young negro in the way he should go, could spare, say ten shillings a year to keep these graves just with a little respect. It would want so little, so very little. Those Danes of ninety years ago I dare say sleep sound enough lulled by the surf, but it would be a graceful act to keep their graves in order, and would not be a bad object-lesson for the Africans we are so bent on improving.
Behind the town are great buildings—technical schools put up with this object in view. They are very ugly buildings, very bare and barren and hot-looking. Evidently the powers who insist so strongly upon hand and eye training think it is sufficient to let the young scholars get their ideas of beauty and form by sewing coloured wools through perforated cards or working them out in coloured chalks on white paper; they have certainly not given them a practical lesson in beauty with these buildings. They may be exceedingly well-fitted for the use to which they are intended, but it seems to me a little far-fetched to house young negroes in such buildings when in such a climate a roof over a cement floor would answer all purposes.