The status of married women amongst the West African native tribes varies widely. Among the pagan Tschokossi of the extreme north, the wife is a chattel and a beast of burden, and her condition is very little, if any, better than that of a domestic slave. The Tschaudjo woman, on the other hand, is a household queen, lording it over everybody, including her husband, who must yield implicit obedience to her lightest whim. In between these two extremes come the great mass of the native women, who are drudges certainly, but willing drudges, and with their rights and privileges well defined and carefully guarded by tribal law and custom. Probably they are neither better nor worse off, according to their lights, than the majority of working wives elsewhere. Certainly, they appear to be happy and contented; conjugal quarrels are comparatively rare; and poverty, as we understand the term in Europe, is practically unknown. The worst off are the widows, who are usually looked down upon and disregarded, although there are plentiful exceptions to this general rule. In the old days the wives of a chief, or other big man, were buried with him; their legs and arms being first broken with a heavy club, after which they were thrown, still breathing, into the open grave. But these barbarous practices have now been, to all intents and purposes, done away with; and now the widow simply shaves her head, and wears a white bandage round her forehead, as signs of mourning. On the man's grave are placed broken guns, bows, arrows, and so forth; on the woman's are calabashes and cooking-pots, also broken, and in each case there are supplies of food to enable the dead person to subsist during his or her long journey to the supposedly far-away land of shades.
The cultivating, gathering, and preparation of food constitutes the most important part of the native wife's duties, as it does, I suppose, amongst all primitive peoples. Native cooking may be almost entirely summed up in one word—porridge. This, however, is not made altogether of meal or flour, but is mixed with herbs and wild vegetables, and is invariably so highly seasoned with native pepper, derived from the wild pepper plant, as to be uneatable by Europeans.
For this reason, if for no other, one is obliged to carefully superintend one's own cooking when on trek. The ordinary native cook will put pepper into all dishes, if he is not carefully watched, and he uses the pepper-pot with no sparing hand. The matter of superintendence and oversight of the culinary department fell to my lot all the time we were on our travels. All our provisions were carried with us up country from Atakpame in old kerosene tins, which a native artisan had previously fitted with hinged lids and locks and keys. These tins, carefully cleansed from all smell or taint of oil, constitute the very best receptacles possible for the conveyance of perishable commodities, as they are white-ant proof and weather-proof.
Each box, as I have previously explained, held a little of everything, and I entered in my store book before starting the contents of each. In this way it was easy at any time to get at any particular article, and I was able to check any tendency to extravagance on the part of our cook; a most necessary precaution when dealing with natives.
Cooking in the bush, I need hardly say, is a very different thing from cooking at home. Largely it is carried out in the open; or at best in a small low hut, with little or no ventilation, and of course minus a chimney. In this latter case, as there is, of course, no outlet for the smoke, the mistress—in this case myself—usually finds it impossible to remain in her "kitchen" for more than a minute or so at a time, and the superintendence of the preparation of a meal resolves itself into a succession of dashes in and out—mostly out—and a continuous rubbing and wiping of smarting eyeballs.
One thing I never dared trust to the cook, and that was the boiling of the water; not only that used for drinking, but also that for washing up in, and for our personal ablutions. It all had to be boiled for a full ten minutes by my watch, and always under my personal supervision. This was done outside the hut on a special stove, but the operation was only carried out systematically and regularly by means of constant pertinacity and insistence on my part, to which Messa, our cook, was wont continuously to oppose as great a measure of passive resistance as he dared. The one objection to boiled water is that, to quote Artemus Ward's dictum anent "biled crow," it "ain't nice." Its taste is about as insipid as it is possible to conceive, and a prolonged course of it as a beverage is unthinkable. Consequently we drank tea when on trek almost entirely; either hot or cold, and flavoured with limes.
Barring his rooted objection to boiling water, and his undue predilection for the pepper-pot, traits which, I am given to understand, he shared with all native servants, Messa was a good cook. He could dish up a fowl so that it looked and tasted like anything but a fowl; an invaluable attribute in a cook in a country where a surfeit of fowls, as fowls, is so quickly and invariably produced. He used to buy for a penny a bone as big as a small log of wood from the villagers, split it open, and serve us delicious marrow on toast. His soups, made out of the most unpromising materials—he used to give us one kind the basis of which was burnt monkey-nuts that was a gastronomic dream—were simply delicious.
His great fault was that he would use tinned stuff whenever possible, even when other fresh food of the same kind was available. For instance, we had amongst other canned vegetables several tins of spinach, of which we were all very fond. Only when it was all gone did I discover that spinach of a most delicious quality—far better than the tinned—grew wild in the bush all along our line of route.
The greatest luxury in the vegetable line up in the bush is the ordinary potato, which cannot be got to grow anywhere in Togo. We had brought one load, 60 lb., up country with us; and when we wanted to give anybody an extra special treat, we would cook them a few potatoes. I remember on one occasion, on our way up, asking our good friend Mr. Kuepers, the schoolmaster at Sokode, to breakfast with us at Paratau, where we were living, the distance between the two places being about three miles. He demurred somewhat, seeking excuses, for to come meant an early rise and an early ride. But when I told him that we had got eggs and bacon, and European fresh potatoes, he agreed to come like a shot. Our great ambition was to take some of the potatoes on to Mangu, and we did succeed, by exercising considerable self-denial, in saving about 15 lb. Then, to our grief and consternation, they began suddenly to go bad. Each morning Messa would sort them carefully out, laying them to dry in the sun, and bringing the black ones to me, saying, with a sorrowful face: "Little mother, four more—or six or seven as the case might be—potatoes gone bad." Eventually, by bestowing upon those remaining as much devoted care and attention as a fond mother does to her new-born babe, or a dog fancier on a litter of pedigree puppies, we got enough good ones into Mangu to give each European there three for his Christmas dinner. Yams, which are the native equivalent to our potatoes, I did not like at all at first; but in the end, mashed and served with butter, I grew to find them at least palatable. Our tinned butter, by the way, became after a while of the consistency of oil, from the constant jolting on the carrier's heads, and could only be used for cooking. The tinned bacon was the best of the canned provisions, keeping good and sweet to the last. It was, however, very expensive, costing 4s. 8d. a pound tin. Native eggs were everywhere plentiful and cheap, costing about a shilling the hundred. They are small, but nice tasting. Fruit, too, was plentiful, especially bananas, of which Messa used to make all sorts of tasty dishes. But when I wanted to give the men a real treat, I used to prepare for them a special Hamburg dish, consisting of dried apples and plums, boiled with bacon and little suet dumplings.