The jungle folk of Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

PASTOR AND ELDERS OF THE BATANGA CHURCH.

His name was Keli. When a child he had been taken by his father on a visit to a neighbouring tribe. While there he was stolen from his father and taken to a distant village where he became a slave. Some time afterwards he was taken to the coast and sold to a chief of the coast tribe. Finally the chief sold him to a white man, who in turn gave him to another white man and he was taken to Gaboon. His master was a Frenchman, and Keli was his personal attendant. The boy made himself so useful that when the Frenchman went on furlough to France he took him along. After living in Paris a considerable time the Frenchman concluded not to return to Africa; whereupon he sent Keli to England and gave him into the charge of an English trader who was expecting soon to sail for Africa. With this trader Keli returned to Africa. Not long after this the trader having occasion to visit Batanga took Keli with him. This was his opportunity. In the night he fled to the forest. Finally he fell in with a caravan going to the Bulu country, and at last reached his town, after an absence of seven years, during which his father and mother had died, and he had been long-forgotten. Keli had not been trained by his various masters in wisdom and judgment, and he made the mistake of telling the people all that he had seen in Paris and London—all about the big buildings and multitudes of people, all about the clothes they wore and the very cold season of snow and ice, all about horses and carriages and railway trains—quite overtaxing their credulity, and earning the reputation of a notorious liar and incorrigible fool. Missionaries sometimes make the same mistake and pay the same penalty.

Meantime Keli had become accomplished to the extent of knowing French and English and five native dialects. But, alas! how destitute of moral power is civilization alone! Keli did not seem to have any moral ideas. The restraining fear of his former fetishism had been expelled, and no moral motive implanted. His morality was much below that of the average Bulu, except in the shedding of blood. Nothing but long familiarity can make that an indifferent matter to any man however degraded; and Keli had a horror of blood. We took him home with us to Efulen and made him cook and houseboy, for we were in our usual strait at the time. He knew his work well and was unapproached in service for the short time that he behaved. But at the first opportunity, one Sunday during the service, Keli captured and stole a chicken, the mother of a young brood. He strewed feathers along a bush-path to make believe that a wild animal had taken it. Of course it will be remembered that among a people who have so little, a chicken is one of the high values. The theft was not insignificant in the mind of the Bulu. But for us the really serious import of the matter was that it raised the question as to whether they could steal from us with impunity, or with any possibility of not being detected. They had never attempted it before, being restrained by the dread of our supposed fetishes, which Keli knew to be a delusion. I need not say that we had never fostered the delusion, yet it had served a providential use. It was now likely to be dispelled and we were not certain as to the consequences. Keli immediately killed the chicken and gave it to a Bulu man, his accomplice, who wrapped it in a loin-cloth and took it to his town while Keli himself came running to me in great distress, as soon as the service was concluded, telling a most interesting story of a bushcat that he had seen just as it was disappearing with the chicken, and how he had given chase and had tried to rescue it. Of course I suspected himself, but I said nothing until, by a chain of evidence that I have forgotten, I traced it to him. We made him a prisoner, and Dr. Good soon wrung a confession from him. He said he would find the chicken—which, however, having lost its head, could never be the same chicken again. I took him to town still a prisoner, a workman walking behind him with a rope around his waist. He led me through the town to the house of his accomplice. Entering the house he proceeded directly to the bed and from underneath it produced the chicken, wrapped in the cloth of the other thief.

I took the chicken and the cloth and started back to the station, still accompanied by Keli, and a long procession of natives. I had gone but a short distance when the owner of the cloth with a number of men following, came running from behind, and dashing past me with a shout, immediately turned about, placed himself in the narrow path before me, and with his long knife in his raised arm demanded his cloth. It may have been mere bluff on his part, one cannot tell. The chief danger, if there was any, was not their natural brutality so much as their excitement. Of course I could not yield to a demand that was really a threat and so bring us into contempt. But I was far from comfortable and I would gladly have made a present of the entire incident to my worst enemy. My resources were, in the first place, straight bluff, and second, the moral prestige of the white man. Keeping my eye fixed upon him I ordered him out of the path, and as he did not obey, I suddenly struck him as heavy a blow as I could,—so suddenly that he was taken completely off his guard and was thrown headlong into the thicket, while I passed on. Surprised more than hurt, it took him some time to recover himself and to take counsel with his fellows. Meantime, wishing to avoid an ugly palaver, and still to retain personal authority, I unfolded the cloth, discovered before the eyes of the people that it was very dirty and full of holes, laughed at it and got them to laugh, and finally threw it aside, saying: “Tell him that this cloth is not fit for a white man to take.” As I moved on I heard the man and his friends coming again, running and yelling; but as he came up the people shouted that they had his cloth, and the sight of it appeased his anger.

That night we kept Keli a prisoner in our house. Dr. Good thought that in our peculiar situation we could not afford to let him go unpunished. With great reluctance he advised that he ought to be flogged in the presence of the people. He was always kind and considerate towards the natives, but he was not a man who would shirk a duty because it was disagreeable. For myself, my mind was not quite clear that flogging was a moral necessity. But I knew Dr. Good well and had learned to trust him, so I consented that he should do as he thought best. The next morning, therefore, he and I took Keli down to the principal town, and having called all the people together, Dr. Good told them, in native fashion, the story of Keli’s wrong. And he added that in view of Keli’s youth and the hard circumstances of his life he had decided that he would only flog him and dismiss him. Thereupon, with a rod prepared for the purpose, he began to administer the flogging.

Now, if I were relating fiction and not reality, I should certainly proceed to have Keli properly flogged and the mind of the community deeply impressed in consequence. But as reality never quite attains the ideal, and as I may not substitute imagination for history in this sober narrative, I must tell of “the slip twixt the cup and the lip.” Prominent among Keli’s moral discrepancies was cowardice; and even before the rod descended for the first time he uttered a scream that evidently startled Dr. Good, for he let go his hold and Keli bounded from him. Dr. Good chased him and could easily have caught him but it had been raining and the clay surface of the street was smooth and slippery, giving Keli’s bare feet a decided advantage. They both resembled amateur performers on roller skates. The chase that followed seemed to appeal peculiarly to the humour of the natives, which was the more excessive because of the strong reaction from fear and apprehension. They laughed wildly. Keli led the way around the palaver-house once or twice, then down the street, Dr. Good following him close and reaching after him, while he administered what would have been a severe flogging but that the strokes persistently fell about twelve inches behind Keli’s shoulders, affording him, I imagine, an acute realization of the old adage, “A miss is as good as a mile.” Soon they reached a steep slope in the street, and Keli, steadily gaining, at last made his escape. I, looking on, maintained an exterior of stern gravity that was the very antithesis of my feeling. But deeper than outward gravity and inward laughter I was praying that nothing might happen to impede Keli’s steady progress; for this flogging in pantomime served to impress a moral lesson, while it left no marks on poor Keli’s skin, whom seven tribes and nations had helped to degrade. I should not wonder if Dr. Good himself felt somewhat as I did.

On our way home Dr. Good intimated to me the moral propriety of not mentioning the incident to Mr. Kerr or any of the missionaries at the coast, for I was soon going to the coast.

“Indeed,” said I, “you could not possibly bribe me to silence regarding the episode of this morning. It would be a great wrong, in this weary land, to deprive my fellow missionaries of such an entertainment, and I am really thinking of going to the coast a day earlier than I had expected.”

No man could yield to the inevitable with better grace than Dr. Good. Before we reached home he was laughing; and he was even disposed to anticipate me in telling the story, which he did with dramatic effects and graphic touches inimitable.