West African studies

by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

If you will carefully study the account given of the organisation of the Ghagas and also of the organisation of the Kingdom of Congo, I think you will see that in the Ghagas you have a true Negro State form, while in the Congo Kingdom you have something different; something that is nowadays called Bantu. What became of the Ghagas when foiled by the Portuguese in destroying the Kingdom of Congo is not exactly known, but there is a definite ground for thinking that, modified by intermarriage and a different environment, they split up, and are now represented by the warlike South African tribes and East African tribes, such as the Matabele, and the Massai, and so on. The modification of this portion of the true Negro stem in the south and the east is akin to the modification the stem has undergone nearer to its true home on the West Coast of Africa, where to the north of Sierra Leone and behind the coast regions of the Ivory, Gold, and Slave Coasts it has, by admixture with the Berber tribes of the Western Soudan, produced the Black Moors, namely the Mandingo, the Hausa, and Oullaf. These Black Moors of the Western Soudan have attained to a high pitch of barbaric culture; it appears to be a further development of the true Negro culture, but it is so suffused with the Mohammedan idea and law that it is not in this state that we can best study the native culture of the pure Negro. Neither can we study it well in those south and east regions where it has adopted Bantu language and culture to a certain extent.

I will not, however, attempt to enter here upon the question of the continental distribution of the Negro and Bantu stocks; I will merely beg observers of African tribes to note carefully whether their tribe is given to street-cleaning, to keeping slaves in separate villages, or to venerating a great female god. If it is, it has got a Bantu culture; if, in addition, it has a regular military organisation, or a keen commercial spirit, or a certain ability to rule over the tribes round it, I beg they will suspect Negro blood and do their best to give us that tribe’s migration history; and then we may in future times be able to settle the question of race distribution on better lines than our present state of knowledge allows of. Having said that the law and institutions of the true Negro stock cannot best be studied in those regions where they are adulterated by alien cultures, it remains to say where they can best be studied. I think that undoubtedly this region is that of the Oil Rivers.

The thing you must always bear in mind when observing institutions and so on from Sierra Leone down to Lagos, is that the fertile belt between the salt sea of the Bight of Benin and the sand sea of Sahara is but a narrow band of forest and fertile country, while, when you get below Lagos—Lagos itself is a tongue of the Western Soudan coming down to the sea—you are in the true heart of Africa, the Equatorial Forest Belt; and that it is in this belt that you will get your materials at their purest. Therefore take the regions inhabited by the true Negro. In the regions from Sierra Leone to the Gold Coast, you have, it is true, not much white influence or adulteration, mainly because of the rock-reefed shore being dangerous to navigators. There is in this region undoubtedly a great and yearly increasing so-called Arab, but really Mohammedanised Berber, influence working on the true Negro. The natives themselves have their State-form in a state of wreckage from the destruction of the old Empire of Meli, which fell, from reasons we do not know, some time in the 16th century. We have, however, miserably little information on this particular region of Sierra Leone, the Pepper and Ivory Coasts, owing to its never having been worked at by a competent ethnologist; but the accounts we have of it show that the secret societies have here got the upper hand to an abnormal extent for the Negro state. Then we come to the Gold Coast region which has been so excellently worked at by the late Sir A. B. Ellis. Here you have a heavy amount of adulteration in idea, and, moreover, the long-continued white influence—1435-1898—has decidedly tended to a disorganisation of the Negro State-form, and to an undue development of the individual chief; nevertheless the law-form now existent on the Gold Coast is, when tested against a knowledge of the pure Negro law-form as found in the Oil Rivers, almost unaltered, and I think if you will carefully study that valuable book, Sarbar’s Fanti Customary Law, you will also see that the State-form is identical in essence with that of the Oil Rivers—the House system.

The House is a collection of individuals; I should hesitate to call it a developed family. I cannot say it is a collection of human beings, because the very dogs and canoes and so on that belong to it are part of it in the eye of the law, and capable therefore alike of embroiling it and advancing its interests. These Houses are bound together into groups by the Long ju-ju proper to the so-called secret society, common to the groups of houses. The House itself is presided over by what is called, in white parlance, a king, and beneath him there are four classes of human beings in regular rank, that is to say, influence in council: firstly, the free relations of the king, if he be a free man himself, which is frequently not the case; if he be a slave, the free people of the family he is trustee for; secondly, the free small people who have placed themselves under the protection of the House, rendering it in return for the assistance and protection it affords them service on demand; the third and fourth classes are true slave classes, the higher one in rank being that called the Winnaboes or Trade boys, the lower the pull-away boys and the plantation hands.[79] The best point in it, as a system, is that it gives to the poorest boy who paddles an oil canoe a chance of becoming a king.

Property itself in West Africa, and as I have reason to believe from reports in other parts of tropical Africa that I am acquainted with, is firmly governed and is divisible into three kinds. Firstly, ancestral property connected with the office of headmanship, the Stool, as this office is called in the true Negro state, the Cap, as it is called down in Bas Congo; secondly, family property, in which every member of the family has a certain share, and on which he, she, or it has a claim; thirdly, private property, that which is acquired or made by a man or woman by their personal exertions, over and above that which is earned by them in co-operation with other members of their family which becomes family property, and that which is gained by gifts or made in trade by the exercise of a superior trading ability.

Every one of these forms of property is equally sacred in the eye of the African law. The property of the Stool must be worked for the Stool; working it well, increasing it, adds to the importance of the Stool, and makes the king who does so popular; but he is trustee, not owner, of the Stool property, and his family don’t come in for that property on his death, for every profit made by the working of Stool property is like this itself the property of the Stool, and during the king’s life he cannot legally alienate it for his own personal advantage, but can only administer it for the benefit of the Stool.

The king’s power over the property of the family and the private property of the people under his rule, consists in the right of Ban, but not arrière Ban. Family property is much the same as regards the laws concerning it as Stool property. The head of the family is the trustee of it. If he is a spendthrift, or unlucky in its management, he is removed from his position. Any profit he may make with the assistance of a member of his own family becomes family property; but of course any profit he may make with the assistance of his free wives or wife, a person who does not belong to his family, or with the assistance of an outsider, may become his own. Private property acquired in the ways I have mentioned is equally sacred in the eyes of the law. I do not suppose you could find a single human being, slave or free, who had not some private property of his or her very own. Amongst that very interesting and valuable tribe, the Kru, where the family organisation is at its strictest, you can see the anxiety of the individual Kruman to secure for himself a little portion of his hard-earned wages and save it from the hands of his family elders. The Kruman’s wages are paid to him, or changed by him, into cloths and sundry merchandise, and he is not paid off until the end of his term of work. So he has to hurry up in order to appropriate to himself as much as he can on the boat that takes him back to his beloved “We” country, and industriously make for himself garments out of as much of his cotton goods as he can; for even a man’s family, even in Kru country, will not take away his shirt and trousers, but I am afraid there is precious little else that the Kruman can save from their rapacity. What he can save in addition to these, he informs me, he gives to his mother, or failing his mother, to a favourite sister, who looks after it and keeps it for him, she being, woman-like, more fit to quarrel if need be with the family elders than he is himself. But all private property once secured is sacred, very sacred, in the African State-form. I do not know from my own investigations, nor have I been able to find evidence in the investigations of other observers, of any king, priesthood, or man, who would openly dare interfere with the private property of the veriest slave in his district, diocese, or household. I know this seems a risky thing to say, and I do not like to say it because I feel that if I were a betting man I could make a good thing over betting on it, for experience has taught me that every time an African’s property is taken by a fellow African under native law, and in times of peace, it is taken after it is confiscated by its original owner, either in bankruptcy or crime. You will hear dozens of accounts of how everything an African possessed was seized on, etc., but if you look into them you will find in every case that the individual so cleaned out owed it all, and frequently far more, before he or she fell into the hands of the Official Receiver, the local chief.

One of the most common causes of an individual’s entire estate being seized upon is a conviction for witchcraft. Every form of property in Africa is liable to be called on to meet its owner’s debts, and the witch’s is too heavy a debt for any individual’s private estate to meet and leave a surplus. For not only does the witch owe to the family of the person, of whose murder he or she is convicted, the price of that life, but it is felt by the Community that the witch has not been found out in the first offence, and so every miscellaneous affliction that has recently happened is put down to the convicted witch’s account. Mind you, I do not say all these claims are satisfied out of the estate of the witch deceased, (witches are always deceased by the authorities with the utmost despatch after conviction) because the said property has during the course of the trial got into the hands of Officialdom and has a natural tendency to stop there. But one thing is certain, there is no residuary estate for the witch’s own relations. Not that for the matter of that they would dare claim it in any case, lest they should be involved with the witch and accused as accomplices.

Still, legally, the witch’s relations have the consolation of knowing that, if things go smoothly and they evade being accused of a share in the crime, they cannot be called on to meet the debts incurred by the witch. From a family point of view better a dead witch than a live speculative trader.