The fetish folk of West Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

The slave-traffic was succeeded by the rum-traffic; and it would not be easy to say which of the two has proved the greater evil for Africa. There is more drunkenness in Gaboon, among the Mpongwe, than in most places on the coast. Except among the few Christians, an abundance of rum is used at every marriage and every funeral and both men and women drink to drunkenness. The women drink as much as the men, and there are a greater number of hopeless dipsomaniacs among them.

One day, as I was walking along the beach, I met a bright-looking Mpongwe woman who surprised me by addressing me in English. I was eager to know who she was. She said her name was Elida Harrington, and that when she was very young the wife of one of our missionaries, for whom she had been working, took her to America when she went on furlough and that during the period of the furlough she had attended school in America. Those early days were evidently a sweet memory, and Elida’s face was aglow with pleasure as she told me. Finally I asked her why I had never seen her at the mission. The glow faded from her face, and after a moment of gloomy silence she replied: “You’ll know soon enough.”

I afterwards learned that Elida, when she was young, was married to a man who was given to nagging. He was continually making petty and groundless charges of infidelity against his wife. There is no surer way to inspire the dislike of the African. They are wonderfully generous in forgiving impulsive cruelty, but continual nagging will alienate them. At last, just to spite her husband, Elida told him that all his charges were true; that she had done all those things, and much worse—such things as he had never thought of charging against her. Her husband, when he recovered from a paroxysm of rage and astonishment, told her to pack her things and leave his house; to which she quietly replied that she would be glad to do so, since she had already decided upon that very course.

Soon after my first meeting with Elida I called at her house. It was then that I learned why she kept away from the mission. She was so intoxicated that she could not get to the door. And this was habitual.

One day Elida went to see her sister Jane, who was sick in bed. Jane wanted some bread and gave her the price of a loaf and asked her to go out and buy it for her. Poor Jane never got the bread. And poor Elida! She went only as far as the first rum-shop.

I think of another, a young man who bore an honoured name, Augustus Boardman, and who from his childhood was closely connected with the mission. He spoke English not like an African but as if it were his native tongue. I never knew a native who understood the finer feelings of white people as Augustus did. I never knew a native who had in himself so much of what we call sentiment. On one occasion he went with me to Angom where Mr. Marling was buried. Mr. Marling, who had been dead for five years, was the missionary whom Augustus had known best and loved most. In the evening, just before leaving for the coast, I happened to pass Mr. Marling’s grave, and there I saw a beautiful wreath of flowers carefully woven, which Augustus had laid upon the grave. The African is strangely indifferent to flowers, and I have never known another who would have done what Augustus did.

On another occasion I received a letter from him when he was up the Ogowè River. He wrote that while visiting at our old mission on the Ogowè he had come across an English song-book, in which he had found a song, the words of which were the most beautiful he had ever read in his life; so beautiful that he had committed them to memory; and he was wondering whether it was well known and commonly sung among English-speaking people. He copied the words of the entire song and enclosed them in the letter. The song was The Lost Chord. The anguish of the lost chord in his own life was the secret of the deep impression that the song made upon him.

In America a child can be kept out of the way of the worst temptations until he has reached years of discretion, but such separation is impossible in Africa. This boy, when he was a little child, was taught to drink rum; his mother died a hopeless victim of it; and by the time he was a young man the appetite for it was insatiable and complete master of him. The finer feelings which characterized him seemed to make him all the more the victim of this inordinate desire. He fought it as he might have fought a python of his native jungles, but in vain. On one occasion, in the presence of Mr. Marling, he pledged himself with the solemnity of an oath never to taste it again. A few days afterwards he was walking down the street of an interior town when most unexpectedly he met a boy with a bottle of rum. He sprang at the boy, snatched the bottle from him and drank the contents. Other efforts ended similarly. He afterwards made such promises to me, weeping and fairly prostrated with shame and humiliation; yet he soon fell again. He became at length quite hopeless, and it was necessary to dismiss him from all service in the mission. He got several good positions, but lost them immediately. When I last saw him he was a moral wreck and almost an outcast even in Africa, where there are no outcasts. Augustus has since died; one more victim of poisoned rum.

He is full of compassion and plenteous in mercy. And, knowing Augustus as I knew him, I dare to hope that he has again at last heard the long-lost chord, and the sound of the great Amen.

The native is constitutionally incapable of being a moderate drinker. And, besides, drunkenness is not disgraceful; they have not the spirit that revolts from it. I have personally seen little children intoxicated. I have seen them intoxicated in the schoolroom. I have known of parents getting their own children to drink to intoxication for their amusement. It is doubtful whether there is another tribe in all West Africa so besotted with alcoholism as the Mpongwe. Physicians agree that it is one of the chief causes of their increasing sterility.