Here the dialogue ends, and men confess by their looks that travelling sometimes does throw us into the strangest society.
Even in Sierra Leone, where the negro claims to be civilised, a dusky belle, after dropping her napkin at a Government House dinner, has been heard to say to her neighbour, 'Please, Mr. Officer-man, pick up my towel.' The other day a dark dame who missed her parasol thus addressed H.E.: 'Grovernah! me come ere wid my umbrellah. Where he be, my umbrellah Give me my umbrelláh: no go widout my umbrelláh.'
For our black and brown passengers, fore and aft, there is a graduated and descending scale of terminology: 1. European, that is, brought up in England; 2. Civilised man; 3. African; 4. Man of colour, the 'cullered pussun' of the United States; 5. Negro; 6. Darkey; and 7. Nigger, which here means slave. All are altogether out of their assiettes. At home they will eat perforce cankey, fufu, kiki, and bad fish, washing them down with mimbo, bamboo-wine, and pitto, hopless beer, the pombe of the East Coast. Here they abuse the best of roast meat, openly sigh for 'palaver-sauce' and 'palm-oil chop,' and find fault with the claret and champagne. Chez eux they wear breech-cloths and nature's stockings—eoco tutto. Here both men and women must dress like Europeans, and a portentous spectacle it is. The horror reaches its height at Sierra Leone, where the pulpit as well as the press should deprecate human beings making such caricatures of themselves,
In West Africa we see three styles of dress. The first, or semi-nude, is that of the Kru-races, a scanty pagne, or waist-wrapper, the dark skin appearing perfectly decent. The second is the ample flowing robe, at once becoming and picturesque, with the shalwar, or wide drawers, of the Moslems from Morocco to the Equator. The third is the hideous Frank attire affected by Sierra Leone converts and 'white blackmen,' as their fellow-darkies call them.
Many of the costumes that made the decks of the s.s. Senegal hideous are de fantaisie, as if the wearers had stripped pegs in East London with the view of appearing at a fancy-ball. The general effect was that of 'perambulating rainbows en petit surmounted by sable thunder-clouds.' One youth, whose complexion unmistakably wore the shadowed livery of the burnished sun, crowned his wool with a scarlet smoking-cap, round which he had wound a white gauze veil. The light of day was not intense, but his skin was doubtless of most delicate texture. Another paraded the deck in a flowing cotton-velvet dressing-gown with huge sleeves, and in bottines of sky-blue cloth. Even an Aku Moslem, who read his Koran, printed in Leipzig, and who should have known better, had mimicked Europeans in this most unbecoming fashion.
Men of substance sported superfine Saxony with the broadest of silk-velvet collars; but the fit suggested second-hand finery. Other elongated cocoa-nuts bore jauntily a black felt of 'pork-pie' order, leek-green billycocks, and anything gaudy, but not neat, in the 'tile'-line. Their bright azure ribbons and rainbow neckties and scarves vied in splendour with the loudest of thunder-and-lightning waistcoats from the land of Moses and Sons. Pants were worn tight, to show the grand thickness of knee, the delicate leanness of calf, the manly purchase of heel, and the waving line of beauty which here distinguishes shin-bones. There were monstrous studs upon a glorious expanse of 'biled' shirt; a small investment of cheap, tawdry rings set off the chimpanzee-like fingers; and, often enough, gloves invested the hands, whose horny, reticulated skin reminded me of the black fowl, or the scaly feet of African cranes pacing at ease over the burning sands. Each dandy had his badine upon whose nice conduct he prided himself; the toothpick was as omnipresent as the crutch, nor was the 'quizzing-glass' quite absent. Lower extremities, of the same category as the hands, but slightly superior in point of proportional size, were crammed into patent-leather boots, the latter looking as if they had been stuffed with some inanimate substance—say the halves of a calf's head. Why cannot these men adopt some modification of the Chinese costume, felt hat and white shoes, drawers, and upper raiment half-shirt, half-doublet? It has more common sense than any other in the world.
It is hardly fair to deride a man's ugliness, but the ugly is fair game when self-obtruded into notice by personal vanity and conceit. Moreover, this form of negro folly is not to be destroyed by gentle raillery; it wants hard words, even as certain tumours require the knife. Such aping of Europeans extends from the physical to the moral man, and in general only the bad habits, gambling, drinking, and debauching, are aped.
The worst and not the least hideous were the mulattos, of whom the negroes say they are silver and copper, not gold. It is strange, passing strange, that English blood, both in Africa and in India, mixes so badly for body and mind (brain) with the native. It is not so with the neo-Latin nations of Southern Europe and the Portuguese of the Brazil. For instance, compare the pretty little coloured girls of Pondicherry and Mahé with their sister half-castes the Chichis of Bengal and Bombay.
As for the section conventionally called 'fair,' and unpolitely termed by Cato the 'chattering, finery-loving, ungovernable sex,' I despair to depict it. When returning north in the A.S.S. Winnebah, we carried on board a dark novice of the Lyons sisterhood. She looked perfectly ladylike in her long black dress and the white wimple which bound her hair under the sable mantilla. But the feminines on board the Senegal bound for Sierra Leone outrage all our sense of fitness by their frightful semi-European gowns of striped cottons and chintzes; by their harlequin shawls and scarves thrown over jackets which show more than neck and bare arms to the light of day, and by the head-gear which looks like devils seen in dreams after a heavy supper of underdone pork. Africa lurks in the basis: the harsh and wiry hair is gathered into lumps, which to the new comer suggest only bears' ears, and into chignons resembling curled up hedge-hogs. Around it is twisted a kerchief of arsenic-green, of sanguineous-crimson, or of sulphur-yellow; and this would be unobjectionable if it covered the whole head, like the turban of the Mina negress in Brazilian Bahia. But it must be capped with a hat or bonnet of straw, velvet, satin, or other stuff, shabby in the extreme, and profusely adorned with old and tattered ribbons and feathers, with beads and bugles, with flowers and fruits. The tout ensemble would scare any crow, however bold.
I am aware that the sex generally is somewhat persistent in its ideas of personal decoration, and that there is truth in the African proverb, 'If your head is not torn off you will wear a head-dress,' corresponding with our common saying, 'Better out of the world than out of the fashion.' But this nuisance, I repeat, should be abated with a strong hand by the preacher as well as by the pressman. The women and the children are well enough as Nature made them: they make themselves mere caricatures, figures o' fun, guys, frights. If this fact were brought home to them by those whose opinions they value, they might learn a little common sense and good taste. And yet—wait a moment—may they not sometimes say the same of us? But our monstrosities are original, theirs are borrowed.