By permission of
Maj. H. Schomburgk, F.R.G.S.
A Woman's Work
Five phases of a native woman's life are given here. She brings in the firewood and the water, does the cooking, and attends generally to domestic duties and family cares, whilst her lord and master passes the time in pleasant oblivion under a tree.
Reproduced from Cinematograph Films.
Next morning he was all smiles and kindly courtesy, and as I showed by my manner that I had forgiven his boorishness of the previous night, we made a first-rate start. We are now bound for Sansane-Mangu, the northernmost Government station in Togo, by way of Kadjamba and Nali, and are in the heart of the Togoland Sudan. The days are intensely hot, and the nights seem to get colder and colder. This morning, for instance, the frost lay thick on the ground, so that we shivered under our thick wraps. These extremes of temperature are very trying. For at least nine out of the twelve hours of sunshine that one gets in these latitudes, the sun pours down scorching rays from a cloudless sky upon sandy plain and mountain rock, and the whole landscape shimmers and glows like the mouth of the furnace; but with the coming of night a sudden chill seems to fall from the stars, the heat radiates rapidly into space, and the mercury in the thermometer drops often as many as forty or fifty degrees in hardly more than as many minutes. Of course the above applies to the dry season only.
On leaving Gerin-Kuka we did not take the main road, but branched off into a side-path which it is only possible to use in the dry season. After riding a few miles, Schomburgk stopped his horse, and, stooping down, called my attention to a small round depression, or hole, in the hard clay soil. It looked for all the world as if some one had jabbed the bottom of a bucket deep down into the clay when it was soft, and that the indentation so made there had then been left to harden. I looked at it, as he bade me; but I did not see anything very remarkable about it, and I said so. "Perhaps not," replied Schomburgk. "Nevertheless, it happens to be an elephant's spoor, the first you have ever set eyes on." Of course my interest was aroused at once, and I dismounted in order to examine it more closely. Schomburgk explained that it was an old spoor from the last rainy season. I thought the footprint an enormous one, but Schomburgk said that it was made by quite a small elephant. We followed up the spoor for some little distance, and I received my first lesson in wood-craft, Schomburgk pointing out to me where the beast had stopped to feed, breaking off the branches and uprooting a number of small trees, and where he had stopped to rest for a while. In the rainy season all this part of the country is under water and impassable, and the elephants then come here to feed from the mountain country of the north-east, and from the Kara River region, where, in the "gallery forests," as they are called, there are elephants all the year round. Later on, during the next day's march, we struck this same Kara River, and I saw spoor of hippopotami and buffalo. We also encountered immense flocks of guinea-fowl. The flesh of these birds is eatable, but tough.
Kadjamba we found to be quite a small village. We could not even get carriers to take us on to Nali, the next stage, but had to keep those we had brought from Gerin-Kuka. There was only a small rest-house, and I slept under my tent, being badly bitten by mosquitoes, which swarmed about the place in countless myriads. Amongst them were numbers of anophele, the carriers of the malarial fever microbe. Only the female anophele stings, and she has got to be herself previously infected by the fever germ before she can convey infection to the person bitten. Consequently, anopheles inhabiting densely populated regions are far more dangerous than those found in comparatively deserted ones, such as we were now in. In and around the big villages practically every anophele is a germ carrier, and capable of breeding infection, while those breeding out in the bush are comparatively innocuous.
Next day we started at 6 A.M. as usual, and after an hour and a half's ride we reached and crossed the great river Kara, our horses going in up to their saddle-flaps. This river drains the Kabre Mountains, and is one of the main tributaries of the Oti, the big river of Northern Togo, and which is itself in its turn a tributary of another and yet bigger river called the Volta, which forms the boundary between the British and German territory. In the dry season, which is of course now, the Kara is only about 100 yards wide and comparatively shallow, with a slow, sluggish stream; but in the wet season it is, I was informed, fully 500 yards wide, and so deep and swift as to be quite unfordable.
The Konkombwa country, in which we now are, differs from the Tschaudjo country in many respects, and especially as regards the number and extent of the villages. The Konkombwa live in little homesteads of two or three huts, distributed thickly but unevenly all over the country, the reason being that these people are in the main agriculturists, getting their living from the soil. The Tschaudjo, on the contrary, are traders and warriors, caring little for agriculture, and so in the course of ages they have come to concentrate together more and more. Paratau, which may be described as the capital of Tschaudjoland, has a population of several thousand souls, and Bafilo is even bigger.