The fetish folk of West Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

The food for an entire day was given out at noon. They cooked their fish all together in a large kettle. During the entire year there was never a quarrel over the division of their food. I provided knives and forks and a beautiful service of tin plates and spoons, all of which was new to them as well as eating off a table—in this instance a broad shelf around the outside of the house covered by the projecting eaves. The only plates that they had ever known were leaves; so they called the plates leaves, and had no other name for them. But I was rather puzzled the first time a boy came and asked me for a “leaf”—“a white man’s leaf.”

The schoolhouse was an old discarded residence, which had been used by native ministers and others connected with the mission. It had been good in its day, and it had a board floor; but it was now in an advanced stage of decay. It was divided into two rooms. One day I was in the smaller room teaching a class of fifteen little boys seated on three long benches when suddenly the floor gave way and the whole class fell through. White ants were probably responsible for the collapse. The floor was elevated on posts and the ground was several feet below. One side of the room went down before the other, declining the benches so that the boys slid to the lower end and fell off all in a heap. They got up after a while and having crawled out they went around the schoolhouse and marched in at the front door. Nduna, who was teaching a class, being surprised at their entrance, said: “I thought you boys were in this other room.” Esona, the wittiest boy in the school, replied: “We thought so too but we were mistaken.”

SCHOOLHOUSE AND DORMITORY AT GABOON.

The dormitory was a long, low building with earth floor, walls of bamboo and roof of palm thatch. The teacher lived in one end of it, in a large room separated by a partition. The bed was a bunk five feet wide which ran around the walls of the whole interior. This bunk was a simple device of my own. I made it with the assistance of a native carpenter out of boxes, of which there was always a great pile on hand, in which shipments of goods had been received. The bare boards with nothing else would have been by far the best beds that the boys from the interior and many of the others had ever slept upon. But there were rolls of discarded matting in the storeroom which had been accumulating for a generation. I had this washed, and spread on the beds, and even doubled, which made them positively luxurious. Their house was kept as clean as such a house could be kept. They did their cooking outside under a roof without walls, and the house was very little used except for sleeping.

This all may seem very simple—ludicrously simple. But the simple life is a popular vogue in these days, at least in theory; and we were only practicing what others preached. For those boys it was such a change as cannot easily be imagined. They were taught habits of order and cleanliness, self-respect and consideration for others, to work and to think, all that is essential to civilization, and the great religious truths which are its foundation and which centre in the cross of Christ. Even if they do not become professed followers of Christ they are far removed from their former life. That life and its surroundings will never be the same to them, and will never again satisfy them.

Parents were more willing to give me sick children than any others, because these were of little or no use at home, and they soon learned that those who went away sick were more than likely to return well.

Each day after school hours I opened the dispensary. At the beginning of the term there were usually twenty or thirty boys who were treated daily. None of them, of course, were very serious cases. Most of them had itch, all of them had worms, many had ulcers, and there were a few fevers and a few fits. In my last year in Africa a fellow missionary relieved me of most of this medical work. Some of the ulcers were dreadful, for the blood of many of these children, especially those who live near the coast, is so tainted with venereal disease that a small cut or scratch is liable to become an ugly sore, and such wounds are rarely cleansed. Long before the close of the term, however, they were nearly all well and their bodies clean and smooth.

In a former chapter I have told at some length of the scourge of the jigger, and how the discipline of the school was concentrated in an effort to make the boys keep them out of their feet. A boy who had jiggers got no food until his feet were clean. It was hard discipline, but it would have been cruel to have done otherwise. The whole of the morning recess was spent in examining their feet. Without exception the boys who had been long in the school kept themselves perfectly clean from jiggers, and they in turn were willing to examine the other boys’ feet and report to me. It was a measure of self-protection; for one boy whose feet were full of jiggers would scatter thousands of them. Sometimes in the dry season, when they are worst, I had the boys haul barrels of salt water from the sea and flood the house with it.

The program of daily studies covered the subjects usually taught in primary schools, besides French and the Bible. With the help of a missionary friend I translated into Fang a simple catechism of fifty questions and answers and a number of hymns. They committed to memory both catechism and hymns. These they invariably taught in their towns upon their return home. Some few of the boys are very bright in all their studies and learn fast—as fast as American boys; others are stupid in everything—as stupid as some American boys. The average African schoolboy, however, is not as clever as the average American boy. In the acquisition of a foreign language the African boy far surpasses the American. Yet this is not now regarded as a high order of faculty. It rather belongs to the elementary mind and the highly civilized nations tend to lose it.