The fetish folk of West Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

Another factor in the extermination of the Mpongwe is the demoralization of domestic life incident to methods of trade. The Mpongwe man is a trader by instinct. In shrewdness and diplomacy I doubt whether he has a superior among all the tribes of West Africa. This shrewdness he expresses in many homely proverbs; as, for example, when he says: “If you must sleep three in a bed, sleep in the middle.” White traders all along the coast employ the Mpongwe as middlemen between them and the interior people, who possess the export products. The white man gives the middleman a certain quantity of goods on trust. With these he goes to the interior and establishes a small trading-post in one or several towns. It is a life of privation and danger, a lonely, miserable existence, but he endures it with patience for the joyful hope that at the end of a year or two he may return to his beloved town and family in Gaboon, so rich that he can afford to “rip” for six months; to dress so that the women will adore him and the men hate him. His goods being soon exhausted by his numerous relations as well as himself, he starts off for another year or two. He has a wife, or wives, at Gaboon, and he takes to himself a wife or two at each of his interior trading-centres.

In the dangers of these middlemen and the necessities of trade Miss Mary H. Kingsley finds a plausible argument for polygamy, amounting, in Miss Kingsley’s opinion, to a full justification. Indeed, for various reasons, the majority of traders defend and advocate native polygamy. The journeys of these native traders to the interior are dangerous, and I agree with Miss Kingsley that they deserve credit for their courage. “Certainly they run less risk of death from fever than a white man would; but, on the other hand, their colour gives them no protection; and their chance of getting murdered is distinctly greater; the white governmental powers cannot revenge their death in the way they would the death of a white man, for these murders usually take place away in some forest region, in a district no white man has ever penetrated.”

There are two reasons why so many of them nevertheless survive. The first is that trade follows definite routes and the trader is expected about once in six months by all the towns along the way, in which the people are eager for trade-goods, the men “fairly wild for tobacco” and the women impatient for beads and other ornaments. Under these circumstances, for the people of any one town to kill the trader would mean trouble between that town and the other towns along the route.

But this consideration alone is not sufficient; and Miss Kingsley gives us the means that he employs for his further safety, as follows: “But the trader is not yet safe. There is still a hole in his armour, and this is only to be stopped up in one way, namely, by wives; for you see, although the village cannot safely kill him and take all his goods, they can still let him die safely of a disease, and take part of them, passing on sufficient stuff to the other villages to keep them quiet. Now the most prevalent disease in the African bush comes out of the cooking-pot, and so to make what goes into the cooking-pot—which is the important point, for earthen pots do not in themselves breed poison—safe and wholesome, you have got to have some one who is devoted to your health to attend to the cooking affairs; and who can do this like a wife?—one in each village of the whole of your route. I know myself one gentleman whose wives stretch over 300 miles of country, with a good wife base in a coast town as well. This system of judiciously conducted alliances gives the black trader a security nothing else can, because naturally he marries into influential families at each village, and all the wife’s relations on the mother’s side regard him as one of themselves and look after him and his interests. That security can lie in woman, especially so many women, the so-called civilized man may ironically doubt, but the security is there, and there only, and on a sound basis; for remember that the position of a travelling trader’s wife in a village is a position that gives the lady prestige, the discreet husband showing little favours to her family and friends, if she asks for them while he is with her; and then she has not got the bother of having a man always about the house, and liable to get all sorts of silly notions into his head, if she speaks to another gentleman, and then go and impart these notions to her with a cutlass, or a kassengo, as the more domestic husband, I am assured by black ladies, is prone to.”[^[1]]

[1]. Travels in West Africa, p. 252.

This picture is not untrue to the facts. And yet some of us who have old-fashioned ideas of morality are not convinced that polygamy is thereby justified with its beastly immorality on the part of those men and of all those women who prefer not to have husbands hanging about the house with silly notions—that is to say, moral notions—about the behaviour of women. And however heartrending may be the condition of those interior men and women, without tobacco and without beads, we cannot agree that their necessity justifies any such degrading practice for its relief. As for the slight excess of rubber and ivory that civilized folks obtain by this means, it may soothe the civilized breast to know that all, or nearly all, this trade produce would reach the coast in other and more legitimate ways without these middlemen, whose presence is a curse to the interior people, whose absence is a curse to their own tribe, and who are above all a curse to themselves.

This demoralization of domestic life is even worse for the Mpongwe women than for their absent husbands. There is a large settlement of white men in Gaboon, most of them government officials. And because of the climate the white population is always rapidly changing. Nearly all the Mpongwe women become the mistresses of those men. And the worst of it is that instead of being deemed disgraceful this only gives them social prestige among their own people. A woman said to me one day:

“Iga is so proud she won’t speak to me any more.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh, she is living with a white man now,” was the reply.