The Ibubu people are very sullen; not a bit like those on the other side of the Oti. The women, as well as the men, eyed us askance; and the children edged away from us, and remained silent, when spoken to. This I took to be a bad sign, for these people are not "savages," in the sense that the far northern tribes are, and that they declined to make friends was, therefore, clearly due to the influence of their elders. Both Schomburgk and I—I flatter myself that I am getting quite experienced in the ways of natives by now—had a sort of feeling, a presentiment if you like, that all was not well; and so it turned out.
In the morning only twelve carriers turned up, whereas we wanted at least fifty, and the interpreter reported that the chief either could not, or would not, supply any more. Here was a pretty go. It is difficult for an outsider to realise how completely a caravan in the African hinterland is dependent on man transport. If we could not secure a sufficiency of carriers, it meant either one of two things, abandoning the bulk of our belongings—an unthinkable alternative—or doing "relay work" backwards and forwards between Ibubu and Banjeli, the next stage, the latter as heartbreaking and tedious an operation as can well be conceived. Then, too, there was this further cause for anxiety; an official who was acting for the Commissioner at Sokode—who happened to be on leave at the time—had had bother with the natives at this very village, and serious trouble was only narrowly averted.
Schomburgk acted at once, and in a manner which—I hope he will pardon me for saying so—struck me at the time as being somewhat high-handed, although I have no doubt now, from what subsequently transpired, that it was the only way. He sent a peremptory demand for the chief to attend before him at once. Soon he appeared, escorted by our two soldiers. He was very cheeky, not to say overbearing. In effect he said that the twelve carriers he had sent were all that were at present available, and he "couldn't make carriers out of mealie cobs, could he?" However, after talking to him for five minutes or so in terms the reverse of polite, Schomburgk got a promise from him to let us have ten more.
The chief was a tall, big man, and Schomburgk is of quite medium size; consequently he had to bend his neck backwards at an angle, and look up at the huge Konkombwa towering above him like a rock, in order to address him. This, I think, made him even angrier than he otherwise would have been. A short man carrying on an altercation with a tall man is always at a disadvantage, be the taller black or white. Schomburgk called him everything but a gentleman, "long slab of misery," being among the mildest term of abuse he applied to him, and when the interpreter interpreted the chief at first looked puzzled, then bowed and seemed quite pleased. Schomburgk couldn't make this out. He thought the chief was, speaking vulgarly, "trying to take a rise out of him," and it made him wilder than ever. Not until long afterwards did it transpire that the interpreter, fearing for his own skin, had interpreted all his abusive terms into eulogistic ones, "long slab of misery" becoming "tall and strong chief," and so on.
Well, the promised ten carriers turned up, making twenty-two in all, and Schomburgk sent me on with these, and one of the soldiers, he remaining behind with the interpreter and another soldier. After leaving Kugnau, the scenery changes. We are now quitting the Togoland Sudan, and going back to the more thickly-wooded part of the country. The scenery is magnificent. In the blue haze of the early morning one can see the purple mountains outstanding round Banjeli, whither we are now bound, and beyond, as far as Bassari, ridge upon ridge. Presently Hodgson passed me on his bicycle, and I was surprised at seeing him, as I supposed him to be staying behind helping Schomburgk. The latter told me afterwards that Hodgson had gone off, leaving him to deal with the bother alone, and he was very angry with him about it. In fact, he hardly spoke to him again all that day.
Presently we begin to go uphill by a tortuous rocky path, and after a while we came in sight of the village of Banjeli, beautifully situated on the crest of a long rise, and backed by an imposing array of lofty, wooded mountains. I had heard a lot about this place, partly because it was the farthest point north that Schomburgk had got on his previous trip, and also on account of its being the principal seat of the famous iron industry, which affords occupation to large numbers of natives throughout this district. Already, on our way up, we had passed several of the curiously shaped furnaces, concerning which I shall have more to say later on. The rest-house here is in the form of a square of pretty round huts, from the windows of which one has at this season of the year a lovely view of the mountains, their slopes lightly shrouded in the haze of the harmattan, which, however, lies thick as a woollen blanket in the valleys between.
Hardly had I got settled in the rest-house, when Schomburgk turned up with a few carriers and some more loads, but not all. He told me that he had had a lot of bother with the Kugnau people. First he had gone to the village and collected a few women, telling the chief that as his men would not carry, the women must. They did not seem to mind greatly, and he promised them good pay, and put each woman by a load, arranging everything beautifully, as he thought. Then he turned for a moment to speak to the interpreter, and when he looked again, about half of them had vanished. "I could not believe my eyes," he said, "and had to rub them to make sure I was not dreaming. I never saw any manœuvre executed so swiftly and silently in my life. One moment they were there, the next they were not. Talk about the disappearing trick! Why those women could give points to Maskelyne and Devant."
At last, it transpired, he succeeded in collecting a few more carriers, but still not enough for the loads. He had come on with these, leaving the interpreter and the soldier behind to get other carriers as best they could, and bring along the rest of the baggage. He also placed the chief under arrest, and told the soldier to bring him along with him, intending to hand him over to the authorities at Bassari, which station has jurisdiction over all this part of the Konkombwa country.
The last batch of carriers, with the rest of the loads, shepherded by the interpreter, turned up sooner than we had ventured to expect. With them was the soldier, in charge of the chief. The latter looked very crestfallen. All his cheeky, overbearing manner had gone, and he seemed to wish he had behaved himself properly in the beginning. Amongst the last arrived lot of carriers we found, to our surprise, ten women. This seemed to show that the chief really could not prevail upon the men of the village to carry, and made Schomburgk even more determined than ever to take him on to Bassari and have the whole matter threshed out there, since a chief who cannot impose his authority on his people, when called upon to do so, is worse than useless from the Government's point of view. Schomburgk also announced that only those carriers who had come voluntarily in the morning would be paid for their work, the others would get nothing. He expected them to be disappointed and crestfallen on hearing this decision, but greatly to his disgust they did not seem to care in the least, laughing and joking amongst themselves about it, women as well as men, as though being docked of their wages was the greatest fun imaginable. Whether they really did not care, or whether they acted as they did in order to show their independence, I am unable to say. It is practically impossible to fathom the workings of the native mind in regard to a case like this.
