The jungle folk of Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

During my second year in the French Congo I opened a school at Baraka with a small class of boys, and gradually enlarged it until in my last year there were seventy-five boys. The whole plan as projected in my mind, which it took several years to establish, was to have one central boarding-school at Baraka, with primary day-schools in many of the towns. In these latter the people, old and young, boys and girls, as many as wished, were taught to read in their own language. Boys were required to be able to read in their own language before being admitted to the boarding-school. Religious teaching was an important part of the curriculum. Some of the most advanced Christian boys of the boarding-school became catechists and were sent to those towns where there were groups of professing Christians (catechumens) awaiting a course of instruction before being received into the church. For no converts were baptized inside of two years, during which time they received a careful course of instruction as nearly continuous as possible. Ultimately some of these catechists, I hoped, would become ministers.

The government inspection of the mission schools and the strictness of the law’s enforcement in regard to the language, depended, as I found, not much upon the amount of French taught in the school, but upon the good or ill will of the inspector. Shortly after I went to the French Congo the missionaries withdrew from the interior station, Angom, but a day-school in charge of a native teacher was kept open for some time afterwards, which was quite outside the theory of the plan I have outlined for the town schools. It was a regular primary school in hours and curriculum and was not taught by a catechist as a mere adjunct to his religious work. This school therefore came under the government inspection. It had been exceedingly difficult to keep a competent teacher in charge of it, as the government required. Those who knew sufficient French to teach were few and in great demand for the government service, in which they received higher wages than we could afford to pay.

A certain Mpongwe man, Remondo, was left in charge of the school when the missionaries withdrew, but only as a temporary expedient, that the pupils might be kept together until a competent teacher could be procured. Remondo was a Roman Catholic, but he was quite willing to lay aside his scapulary, and his conscience for that matter, for the slight remuneration incident to the position. Remondo nearly always had a rag on his toe. Some of his pupils had not even that much clothing. He wrote his name without a capital letter, and in a line as nearly vertical as horizontal; and the obliquity of his writing was equalled by the iniquity of his French; while there was such an uncertainty about his addition that I used to say that mathematics was not an exact science in Remondo’s hands. Finally, not being able to procure a competent teacher, I decided to close the school. Remondo was amazed and he firmly protested. The fact that he was not doing the work made the position all the more congenial to his temperament, and made it also, in his opinion, the more ungenerous to disturb him. Why close the school? Was not the attendance good? Was not the discipline perfect? I admitted that he had all the accessories of a good teacher and lacked nothing but the essentials. Nevertheless, my mind being set upon it, I closed the school.

During this interval while Remondo was in charge, I was in constant dread of an official visit from the chef de poste of the district, who would naturally be the government inspector for that school. This dread had become chronic when one day I was amazed at the receipt of a very kind letter from the governor himself, informing me that the chef de poste, whom he had directed to visit the school at Angom, had reported that he had examined the pupils and conversed with the teacher and that the school was highly satisfactory in every way and a credit to the mission. The governor hoped that we might open other schools of the same kind! Goodness gracious! I lost no time in making inquiry of a certain official as to who was the chef de poste of that district—for I knew there had been a change lately. He replied: “M. de la R⸺.” Then I understood it all.

The late M. de la R⸺ had already been in the service of the Congo Français for thirteen years when I first met him. He endured the climate remarkably well and only at long intervals returned to France on furlough. He belonged to a good family. He also had a wife and children in France. His wife once went to Africa with him but she soon returned home; I was told that she was a fine woman; he himself when I met him was the pitiful remains of a gentleman who had been ruined by the two vices which have made West Africa in many minds a synonym for perdition. During his first years he was faithful in his official duties and he rose in the service. He was at one time administrator at Bata, not far from our mission station, Benito. It was under the administration of this very man that our long-established schools at Benito were closed by the government on the ground that the law in regard to the French language was not being strictly observed. But our missionaries of that station believed that the action of M. de la R⸺ was due to the influence of the French priests.

After many years of increasing dissipation he was dismissed from the service for various discrepancies. His health was not good, and he was prematurely old. He had not been in France for many years, and he said that he would never go there again. Thus he was an outcast and without means of support in a foreign and hostile climate. At length a certain trader of Libreville took pity on him. Eight miles back in the bush, the trader had a coffee-farm that had about petered out; and there he sent the ex-administrator, and gave him employment for which he paid him enough to keep him alive. He lived alone there for more than a year, separate from all white men, a black mistress his only companion.

One day visiting some interior towns, I followed a road that passed through the farm. I was greatly surprised at seeing a white man there, but not at all surprised that in such a place he was dressed only in pajamas. Leaving the road I went to the house to salute him. He told me who he was and urged me not to hurry on but to stay with him awhile; it was so good to see a white man. I felt so sorry for him that I thought I could do no better missionary work for that day than to visit with him; so I changed my plans accordingly, remained with him all morning and ate dinner with him, the table being served by his black mistress. I thought he would probably live but a short time and I felt as if I were performing his obsequies. It is strange how a man whose dignity resides not within himself, but wholly in outward circumstances, in social position, in pecuniary abundance, or the tawdry pomp of authority,—it is strange how such a man, when these all fail, sinks in his self-respect to the level of abject prostration. M. de la R⸺ had been fastidiously regardful of his dress and his personal appearance; but now he spent his days in shabby pajamas and even shunned the acquaintance of soap and water.

He spent the whole time of my visit in telling me of the wrongs done him by fellow officials, that had culminated in his dismissal from the government service. He shed some tears and I fancied that they made clean streaks down his face. He told me what a respectable life he had lived; and I declare that I should never have suspected it. But when he also claimed sobriety as one of his chief virtues, nothing but the odour of his breath kept me from becoming an anti-temperance fanatic on the spot. Several of the men who had informed against him had since died, and in this he saw the finger of God; for of course they would never have died if they had not been his enemies. He, the animated remains of M. de la R⸺, was still the centre and explanation of the government of the universe, and God was simply a convenient instrument of vengeance. To that extent he was quite religious. And I ought to add that he believed in forgiving his enemies—but only after they were dead. But I pitied him greatly, and stayed with him most of the day. When I left him I had not the least expectation that I would ever see him again.

A year after this, by a strange turn of the wheel of fortune, this man was reinstated, and was appointed a chef de poste. He easily resumed his former dignity of manner and care of dress. But he lived only a few months to enjoy his recovered prestige. During those months, however, he was appointed to inspect the school at Angom and his enthusiastic report (for which I hope he may have been forgiven) was the expression of his gratitude for the visit I had made him when he was without position, without money and without friends. Thus the bread of a little kindness cast upon the waters returned after many days multiplied into loaves. And he was the man who, years before, had closed our splendid school at Benito, because, forsooth, the missionaries were not diligent enough in teaching the French language. I also learned from Remondo that at the close of his inspection of the school at Angom he gave each of the little boys and girls a present of some tobacco.

When I opened the school at Baraka I found it very difficult to procure boys. There were many boys who desired to come, but their parents would not consent. At the beginning of the term I gathered the boys with the launch, Dorothy. The red-hot contentions between me and the fathers and mothers made this work of opening the school the most exhausting and trying of the whole year. Often I was constrained to regard the parental institution as an intolerable nuisance and the orphan estate as a consummation that the African child might devoutly wish for.