West African studies

by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

CHAPTER X

EARLY TRADE IN WEST AFRICA

Concerning the accounts given by classic writers of West Africa, and of the method of barter called the Silent Trade.

It is a generally received opinion that there are too many books in the world already. I cannot, however, subscribe to any Institution that proposes to alter this state of affairs, because I find no consensus of opinion as to which are the superfluous books; I have my own opinion on the point, but I feel I had better keep it to myself, for I find the very books I dislike—almost invariably in one-volume form, as this one is, though of a more connected nature than this is likely to be—are the well-beloved of thousands of my fellow human beings; and so I will restrict my enthusiasms in the matter of books to the cause of attempting to incite writers to give us more. If any one wants personally to oblige me he will forthwith write a masterly history of the inter-relationships—religious, commercial, and cultural—of the other races of the earth with the African, and he can put in as an appendix a sketch of the war conquest of Africa by the white races. I do not ask for a separate volume on this, because there will be so many on the others; moreover, it is such a kaleidoscopic affair, and its influence alike on both European, Asiatic, and African seems to me neither great nor good.

For the past fifteen years I have been reading up Africa; and the effect of the study of this literature may best be summarised in Mr. Kipling’s observation, “For to admire an’ for to see, For to be’old this world so wide, It’s never been no good to me, But I can’t drop it if I tried.” Wherein it has failed to be of good, I hastily remark, is that after all this fifteen years’ reading, I found I had to go down into the most unfashionable part of Africa myself, to try to find out whatever the thing was really like, and also to discover which of my authors had been doing the heaviest amount of lying. It seemed clear to the meanest intelligence that this form of the darkening of counsel was fearfully prevalent among them, because of the way they disagreed about things among themselves. Of course I have so far only partially succeeded in both these matters; for, regarding the first, personal experience taught me that things differed with district; regarding the second, that all the people who have been to Africa and have written books on it have, off and on, told the truth, and that what seemed to the public who have not been there to be the most erroneous statements have been true in substance and in fact, and that those statements they have accepted immediately as true on account of their either flattering their vanity or comfortably explaining the reasons of the failure of their endeavours, have the most falsehood in them.

There is another point I must mention regarding this material for that much wanted colossal work on the history of African relationships with the rest of the world—which I do not intend to write, but want written for me—and that is the superiority both in quality and quantity of the portion which relates to the Early History of the West Coast. Yet very little attention has been given in our own times to this. I might say no attention, were it not for Sir A. B. Ellis, that very noble man and gallant soldier, who did so much good work for England both with sword and pen. Just for the sake of the work being worth doing, not in the hope of reward; for twenty years’ service and the publication of a series of books of great interest and importance taught him that West Africa was under a ban that it was beyond his power to remove; nevertheless he went on with his work unfaltering, if not uncomplaining, and died, in 1895, a young man, practically killed by the Warim incident—the true history of which has yet to be written. For the credit of my country, I must say that just before death he was knighted.

I do not quote Colonel Ellis’s works extensively, because, for one thing, it is the duty of people to read them first-hand, and as they are perfectly accessible there is no excuse for their not doing so; and, for another thing, I am in touch with the majority of the works from which he gathered his information regarding the early history, and with the natives from whom he gathered his ethnological information. There are certain points, I grant, on which I am unable to agree with him, such as the opinion he formed from his personal prejudices against the traders in West Africa; but in the main, regarding the regions with which he was personally acquainted and on which he wrote—the Bight of Benin regions—I am only too glad that there is Colonel Ellis for me to agree with.

The fascination of West Africa’s historical record is very great, bristling as it does with the deeds of brave men, bad and good, black and white. What my German friends would call the Blüth-period of this history is decidedly that period which was inaugurated by the great Prince Henry the Navigator; and no man who has ever read, as every man should read, Mr. Major’s book on Prince Henry, can fail to want to know more still, and what happened down in those re-discovered Bights of Benin and Biafra after this Blüth-period closed. This can be done, mainly thanks to a Dutchman named Bosman, who was agent for the great Dutch house of the Gold Coast for many years circa 1698, and who wrote home to his uncle a series of letters of a most exemplary nature reeking with information on native matters and local politics, and suffused with a tender fear of shocking his aunt, which did not, however, seem in his opinion to justify him in suppressing important ethnological facts.