West African studies

by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

This good beginning was continued under great difficulties by these first traders with little profit or success for about two years, owing to the great power of Ja Ja amongst the interior tribes and the pressure he was able to bring to bear on the Ibo and Kwo natives.

In the meantime, clouds had been gathering round the head of King Ja Ja. His wonderful success since 1870 had gradually obscured his former keen perception of how far his rights as a petty African king would be recognised by the English Government under the new order of things just being inaugurated in the Oil Rivers; honestly believing that in signing the Protectorate treaty of December 19th, 1884, with the sixth clause crossed out, he had retained the right given him by the commercial treaty of 1873 to keep white men from proceeding to his markets, he got himself entangled in a number of disputes which culminated in his being taken out of the Opobo River in September, 1887, by Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul, Mr. H. H. Johnston, C.B., now Sir Harry Johnston, and conveyed to Accra, where he was tried before Admiral Sir Hunt Grubbe, who condemned him to five years’ deportation to the West Indies, making him an allowance of about £800 per annum and returning a fine of thirty puncheons of palm oil, value about £450 in those days, which the late Consul Hewett had imposed upon him, a fine that the Admiral did not think the Consul was warranted in having imposed.

Poor Ja Ja did not live to return to his country and his people whom he loved so well, and whose condition he had done so much to improve, though at times his rule often became despotic. One trait of his character may interest the public just now, as the Liquor Question in West Africa is so much en evidence, and that is, that he was a strict teetotaler himself and inculcated the same principles in all his chiefs. In his eighteen years’ rule as a king in Opobo he reduced two of his chiefs for drunkenness—one he sent to live in exile in a small fishing village for the rest of his life, the other, who had aggravated his offence by assaulting a white trader, he had deprived of all outward signs of a chief and put in a canoe to paddle as a pull-away boy within an hour of his committing the offence.

During the Ashantee campaign of 1873 Sir Garnet Wolseley sent Captain Nicol to the Oil Rivers to raise a contingent of friendly natives; on his arrival in Bonny he was not immediately successful, so continued on to Opobo, where he was the guest of the writer. Upon Captain Nicol explaining his errand, Ja Ja furnished him with over sixty of his war-boys, most of whom had seen considerable fighting in the late war between Bonny and Opobo. The news reaching Bonny of what Ja Ja had done, put the Bonny men upon their mettle, and when Captain Nicol reached Bonny on his way back to Ashantee, he found a further contingent waiting for him from the Bonny chiefs.

This combined contingent did good work against the Ashantees, being favourably mentioned in despatches. Poor Captain Nicol, who raised them, and commanded them in most of their engagements with the enemy, was, I regret to say, killed whilst gallantly leading them on in one of the final rushes just before Coomassie was taken.

In recognition of the above services of his men, Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria presented King Ja Ja with a sword of honour, the King of Bonny receiving one at the same time.

Shipwrecked people were always sure of kindly treatment if they fell into the hands of Ja Ja’s subjects, for he had given strict orders to his people dwelling on the sea-shore to assist vessels in distress and convey any one cast on shore to the European factories, warning them at the same time on no account to touch any of their property. He was also the first king in the Delta to restrain his people from plundering a wrecked ship, though the custom had been from time immemorial that a vessel wrecked upon their shores belonged to them by rights as being a gift from their Ju-Ju—an idea held by savage people in many other parts of the world.

It seems a pity that a man who had so many good qualities should have ended as he did. He was a man who, properly handled, could have been made of much use in the opening up of his country. Unfortunately, the late Consul Hewett was prejudiced against Ja Ja from his first interview with him, finding in this nigger king a man of superior natural abilities to his own.

Had the late Mr. Consul Hewett had the fiftieth part of the ability in dealing with the natives his sub and successor, Mr. H. H. Johnston, showed, there would never have been any necessity to deport Ja Ja. Unfortunately, between Ja Ja’s stubbornness and the late Consul Hewett’s bungling, matters had come to such a pass that some decisive measures were actually necessary to uphold the dignity of the Consular Office.

When Mr. H. H. Johnston succeeded the late Mr. Consul Hewett, the Opobo palaver was in about as muddled a state as it was possible for it to have got into. Matters had been in an unsatisfactory state for some years between King Ja Ja and the late Consul. Ja Ja had over-stepped the bounds of propriety in more ways than one. He tried the same tactics with Mr. Johnston, who to look at, is the mildest-looking little man you can imagine, and therefore did not fill the native’s eye as a ruler of men; but Mr. Johnston very soon let Ja Ja and the natives generally see he was made of different stuff to his predecessor, and the first attempts on Ja Ja’s part not to act up to the lines he laid down for him settled his fate. Mr. Johnston offered him the choice of delivering himself up quietly as a prisoner or being treated as an enemy of the Queen, his town destroyed and himself eventually captured and exiled for ever. He elected to give himself up, was taken to Accra and there tried and condemned after a fair hearing. I was present myself at the trial, and old friend as I was to him, I don’t think the verdict would have been otherwise had I been in the judge’s place, though there were many extenuating circumstances in his case, all of which were fully considered by Admiral Hunt Grubbe in his final sentence.