[CHAPTER XII]
AMONG THE SUMBU SAVAGES
We carried out our intention, as narrated at the end of the last chapter, and stayed at Sumbu several days, making short excursions into the surrounding country, and a dash north-east as far as the French frontier. We have now traversed Togoland from end to end, and I can flatter myself that I am at all events the first white woman to go farther than Sokode, and only one or two, at most, have ever been so far as that.
The people about here are a very wild and mixed lot. Besides the native Tschokossi, who are indigenous to the soil, so to speak, there are many others—Gourma people from the northern plains, Fulani from the central Sudan, Ashantis from the neighbouring British dominions, and Dahomeyans from across the French international boundary, with a sprinkling of individuals belonging to other tribes and peoples from various districts and states, who, for reasons best known to themselves, have sought sanctuary, as it were, in this remote and seldom-visited region, within comparatively easy reach of three different frontiers.
On the afternoon after our arrival the men went out shooting, and I noticed directly that our boys kept close round my tent, and that their usually merry countenances wore an exceedingly staid, not to say sombre, aspect. As this was so entirely unlike their conduct under normal circumstances, I asked them the reason for it. They answered that they were afraid to venture outside the camp. "People here," they said, "very bad people; they very much kill."
This was not very reassuring, and when Messa, the cook, came presently to tell me that he was unable to get any fowls, the interpreter having reported that the people in the village refused to sell, I felt rather uneasy. From where I was, I could see the natives sitting about outside their huts, each one with his bow and quiver of poisoned arrows beside him.
However, I reflected that I had to get dinner somehow against the return of the hunters, so calling the cook I ordered him to come with me to the village. At first he refused, saying that he was frightened. But I told him that if a woman could go there, surely a man could, and eventually he consented, very reluctantly, to accompany me. When we approached the place, the children all ran away screaming. This did not trouble me greatly. I had become used to it. What I did not like was that the women, in obedience to gestures from their men-folk, also went away—where I could not see. This I interpreted as a pretty bad sign, for it is well known that the African natives invariably send away their women and children when mischief is brewing. The men sat still, and scowled at us in silence, making no move, and speaking no word.
At this moment I must confess to feeling very frightened. I remembered the gruesome incident of the white man and the poisoned arrows. The affair had happened quite close to where I then was. It was likely, indeed probable, that some of these very men who sat there scowling at me, had been concerned in that cowardly and treacherous attack. However, I reflected that having adventured myself amongst them I had got to brazen it out. It would never do now to show the white feather, for if we retreated we must of necessity turn our backs upon them—we could not very well retire facing them and walking backwards all the way to the camp—and a flight of arrows let fly on the impulse of the moment would mean the end of the pair of us.
So, stalking along till I came close up to them, I said, addressing one of the biggest of the groups of squatting negroes, that I wished to buy a fowl. Nobody took the slightest notice. I waited a matter of thirty seconds or so, then fixing one of the least truculent-looking of the savages with my eyes, I addressed my request to him personally. I told him that I wanted a chicken, that I was willing to pay anything within reason for a chicken, but that a chicken I must have. Thereupon the man rose, caught a fowl, and handed it to me, still without speaking.
I had not brought with me any salt—the usual currency of the country—so I gave him a whole sixpence in cash. It was probably the first coined money that he, or any of those sitting near him, had ever seen. Everybody pressed round to examine it, and everybody started to express his opinion concerning it. The jabbering was terrific, and hearing the din the women came running up, and even the children ventured near, their wide-open eyes fixed in staring astonishment at the stranger white woman who had dropped from the skies, as it were, into their village, in order to bargain for chickens with tiny bits of metal. Eventually, after being passed from hand to hand all round the circle, the sixpence was returned to me by the man to whom I had originally tendered it, and who now, opening his mouth for the first time, condescended to explain that the price of his chicken was half a cupful of salt—i.e. about three-halfpence. I told him that the sixpence I had given him was worth two whole cupfuls of salt, and ought therefore by rights to purchase four chickens, taking the birds at his own valuation, but that as he had been the only one to oblige me by selling me what I wanted, he could keep the sixpence and I would keep the bird.
He shook his head. Obviously he did not believe me. Most likely he thought I was trying to obtain his valuable chicken in exchange for a worthless fragment of metal, which, assuming him to be fool enough to accept it, his wife would promptly annex as a neck ornament, and which, even at that, would not be much of an ornament. Luckily at this juncture a much-travelled native from a neighbouring village—he had once been as far as Mangu—put in an appearance, and on being appealed to, and after an examination of the sixpence, was able to confirm to his fellows my statement as to the seemingly fabulous value of the coin. At once the spell was broken. Obviously a person who, like myself, was willing to buy chickens at four times the ordinary market rates, was an individual whose acquaintance was worth cultivating.