[D] These Bagers are remarkable for their honesty, as I was convinced by several anecdotes related, during my stay in this village, by my trading clerk. He took me to a neighboring lemon-tree, and exhibited an English brass steelyard hanging on its branches, which had been left there by a mulatto merchant from Sierra Leone, who died in the town on a trading trip. This article, with a chest half full of goods, deposited in the “palaver-house,” had been kept securely more than twelve years in expectation that some of his friends would send for them from the colony. The Bagers, I was told, have no jujus, fetiches, or gree-grees;—they worship no god or evil spirit;—their dead are buried without tears or ceremony;—and their hereafter in eternal oblivion.
The males of this tribe are of middling size and deep black color; broad-shouldered, but neither brave nor warlike. They keep aloof from other tribes, and by a Fullah law, are protected from foreign violence in consequence of their occupation as salt-makers, which is regarded by the interior natives as one of the most useful trades. Their fondness for palm-oil and the little work they are compelled to perform, make them generally indolent. Their dress is a single handkerchief, or a strip of country cloth four or five inches wide, most carefully put on.
The young women have none of the sylphlike appearance of the Mandingoes or Soosoos. They work hard and use palm-oil plentifully both internally and externally, so that their relaxed flesh is bloated like blubber. Both sexes shave their heads, and adorn their noses and lower lips with rings, while they penetrate their ears with porcupine quills or sticks. They neither sell nor buy each other, though they acquire children of both sexes from other tribes, and adopt them into their own, or dispose of them if not suitable. Their avails of work are commonly divided; so the Bagers may be said to resemble the Mormons in polygamy, the Fourierites in community, but to exceed both in honesty!
I am sorry that their nobler characteristics have so few imitators among the other tribes of Africa.
CHAPTER XV.
When the rains began to slacken, a petty caravan now and then straggled towards the coast; but, as I was only a new comer in the region, and not possessed of abundant means, I enjoyed a slender share of the trade. Still I consoled myself with the hope of better luck in the dry season.
In the mean time, however, I not only heard of Joseph’s safe arrival at Matanzas, but received a clerk whom he dispatched to dwell in Kambia while I visited the interior. Moreover, I built a boat, and sent her to Sierra Leone with a cargo of palm-oil, to be exchanged for British goods; and, finally, during my perfect leisure, I went to work with diligence to study the trade in which fortune seemed to have cast my lot.
It would be a task of many pages if I attempted to give a full account of the origin and causes of slavery in Africa. As a national institution, it seems to have existed always. Africans have been bondsmen every where: and the oldest monuments bear their images linked with menial toils and absolute servitude. Still, I have no hesitation in saying, that three fourths of the slaves sent abroad from Africa are the fruit of native wars, fomented by the avarice and temptation of our own race. I cannot exculpate any commercial nation from this sweeping censure. We stimulate the negro’s passions by the introduction of wants and fancies never dreamed of by the simple native, while slavery was an institution of domestic need and comfort alone. But what was once a luxury has now ripened into an absolute necessity; so that MAN, in truth, has become the coin of Africa, and the “legal tender” of a brutal trade.