“‘Now,’ said the son of King Raychow, ‘I go to make Moondah enter the Orongo’ (Gaboon); so he went and dug a canal and when this was finished all his men were dead. Then he said, ‘I will go and kill river-horse in the Benito.’ He killed four, and as he was killing the fifth, the people descended from the mountains against him. So he made fetish on his great war-spear and sang
My spear, go kill these people,
Or these people will kill me;
and the spear went and killed the people, except a few who got into canoes and flew to Fernando Po. Then said their King, ‘My people shall never wear cloth till we have conquered the M’pongwe,’ and to this day the Fernando Poians go naked and hate with a special hatred the M’pongwe.”
Now this is a noble story - there is a lot of fine confused feeding in it, as the Scotchman said of boiled sheep’s head.
You learn from it -
A. The name of the first man, and also that he was filled with a desire for topographical nomenclature.
B. You hear of the Hole Wonga Wonga, and this is most interesting because to this day, apart from the story, you are told by the natives of a hole that emits fire, and Dr. Nassau says it is always said to be north of Gaboon; but so far no white man has any knowledge of an active volcano there, although the district is of volcanic origin. The crater of Fernando Po may be referred to in the legend because of the king’s son being sent home in a canoe; but I do not think it is, because the Hole is known not to be Fernando Po, and it has got, according to local tradition, a river running from it or close to it.
C. The kraw-kraw is a frightfully prevalent disease; no one has a remedy for it, presumably owing to Raychow’s son’s forgetfulness.
D. The silence of the son to the questions is remarkable, because you always find people who have been among spirits lose their power of asking for what they want, for a time, and can only answer to the right question.
E. The sudden way in which Raychow’s son gets fired with the desire to turn civil engineer just when he has got a magnificent opening in life as a doctor is merely the usual flightiness of young men, who do not see where their true advantages lie - and the conduct of the men in dying, after digging a canal is normal, and modern experiences support it, for men who dig canals down in West Africa die plentifully, be they black, white, or yellow; so you can’t help believing in those men, although it is strange a black man should have been so enterprising as to go in for canal digging at all. There is no other case of it extant to my knowledge, and a remarkable fact is, that the Moondah does so nearly connect, by one creek, with the Gaboon estuary that you can drag a boat across the little intervening bit of land.