‘CHOP’ WITH KING JA-JA.
Rumours of war came floating down the Bonny river to the traders at its mouth. The oil-canoes which came sluggishly alongside the towering black hulks brought whispers of solemn palavers and Egbo meetings in the recesses of the far river reaches; and the long black war-canoes of the Bonny chiefs, with their forty or fifty little black slave-boy rowers, were manœuvring every day with an amount of shrieking and yelling out of all proportion to the result attained. Will Braid and Yellow, two mighty black chiefs, were understood to be in open rebellion against their lawful sovereign, King Amachree of New Calabar. Forts of mud and wattles had been thrown up on the New Calabar river, and Gatling guns and other gruesome instruments had been mounted thereon, and the two recalcitrant niggers were having a high good time of it challenging the universe at large to mortal combat, and, what was of much more importance, stopping the all-dominating palm-oil trade on the New Calabar river. The puissant kingdom of Bonny, too, next door, was supposed to be mixed up in the quarrel, and was lending more or less overt assistance to the rebellious chiefs, and things were tending generally to one of those lingering, little, all-round wars which so delight the West African nigger, and so sorely afflict the unfortunate white or rather yellow traders who wear out their few years of life on hulks at the mouths of the fever-breeding oil-rivers.
At this juncture, the great king-maker, righter of wrongs, and arbitrator-in-chief, Her Majesty’s Consul-general at Fernando Po, was invoked; and the result was the convocation of the greatest ‘palaver’ that had taken place for years, on board the big hulk Adriatic in the Bonny river. One by one the long war-canoes shot alongside, the glistening brown backs of the long line of rowers bending like one great machine to the rhythm of their shrill song, and the swish and dig of their paddles in the green water. One by one the gorgeous beings who sat on a raised platform in the centre of each canoe emerged from under the great umbrellas that covered them, and took their places on the quarter-deck of the hulk. They were a motley lot to look upon, these owners of thousands of their fellow-men, many of them decked up for the occasion with gaudy, ill-fitting European garments, but mostly wearing bright plush waistcoats, high hats, and what is called a fathom of cloth round their loins, this fathom of cloth being two large-sized, brilliant-patterned cotton handkerchiefs joined together.
A table covered with the union-jack was placed upon the quarter-deck, under the penthouse roof of the hulk, at which sat the British consul in his war-paint, surely the best of good fellows and finest of officers. Poor fellow! He never wore his war-paint again, as the sequel will show. On each side of the consul sat a wandering M.P. and myself as visitors; and next to us, again, sat Captain Barrow, the secretary of the governor of the Gold Coast, who was down here to prepare for a Niger recruiting expedition; and Captain Von Donop of Her Majesty’s ship Decoy, whose orders would not allow him to bring his ship into the pestilent river, but who came in himself, accompanied by two black Houssa troops. In a semicircle in front of us sat the Bonny chiefs; and similarly behind us were ranged the New Calabar chiefs, most of whom carried a large portion of their wealth round their necks in the form of enormous coral beads, of almost fabulous value, and some of whom had their arms literally covered with beautiful ivory bangles. In advance of the Bonny-men sat King George, a fine, tall, well-educated young negro, well known in London, and a very favourable specimen of his race, but an utter cipher in his so-called kingdom; a well-dressed and well-behaved enough young oil-merchant, but, from a regal point of view, a decided fraud, as his father was before him.
It had been proposed that the neighbouring King Ja-Ja of Opobó should act as arbitrator in the dispute, which was really between Bonny and New Calabar, the insurgent Will Braid and Yellow being quite powerless to resist their sovereign without the Bonny-men’s assistance; and across the thick yellow haze and sheets of falling rain, which blurred the endless vista of mangrove swamps, we all stretched our eyes to watch for the arrival of King Ja-Ja. But Ja-Ja had once, and not so long ago, been a Bonny chief himself; and after many years of fierce warfare with his great rival, the mighty Oko Jumbo, had slipped away one night in the dark with all his people, his wives, and his riches, and founded a kingdom for himself a few miles away on the Opobó river, where he had waxed rich and powerful; so the wily old Ja-Ja thought it wisest to avoid the reaches of the Bonny, even with the king-making consul as his friend, for who could tell whither the far-reaching vengeance of the dread Oko might extend? So Ja-Ja sent a very diplomatic message, saying he had mistaken the day, and hoped to see the consul next week to talk over the matter at Opobó.
The consul began by stating the case—that he could not allow trade to be stopped by this war, and severely took the Bonny-men to task for helping the rebels to withstand King Amachree, their lawful sovereign—and a great deal more to the same effect, which, being interpreted by the king of Bonny, produced a very depressing effect on gentlemen in front of us, and a most liberal display of ivories and broad smiles from the potentates in our rear. The Bonny-men were ill at ease, and many and many a time their opal eyeballs strained across the yellow mist and falling torrents as their king began, sadly and apologetically, albeit in good English, to reply to the consul’s scolding; for the greatest of all Bonny-men, before whom King George is but a puppet—the overpowering Oko Jumbo—had not arrived, and the Bonny-men saw how hopeless was their case with the great white consul against them and their own champion absent.
But suddenly, as the king was speaking, came faintly at first, through the wet sickly air, the shrill song of the paddlers, and a cry went up from the Bonny-men, and many a dusky finger pointed to where Oko’s canoe, with its sixty rowers and its ostrich feathers at the prow, came swiftly gliding over the waters. The king ceased speaking with a sigh of relief; and soon the master of Bonny stepped on the hulk’s deck. A grand old pagan of the bygone school is Oko Jumbo, tall and strong, with a fine handsome face and powerful head, with very little attempt at European dress, or indeed dress of any sort, although his two sons, who reside mostly in England, are civilised gentlemen.[1] Oko, in a few trenchant words, closed the business for the day. He would undertake to produce the two rebel chiefs on board the hulk on the next Thursday, if the white consul would guarantee the attendance of King Ja-Ja the arbitrator, all things in the meantime to remain in statu quo. Of course everybody knew that one promise was as improbable of fulfilment as the other; but a palaver which comes to a definite conclusion at a first, second, or even third sitting would be against all precedent, so both sides were satisfied, and the high contending parties adjourned for refreshment, amidst much friendly snapping of fingers and other strange rites.
Early next morning, the little steam launch Ewaffa started from Bonny to convey the consul, his secretary, and myself to visit the domains of Ja-Ja. A broad river stretches on either side of us, the waters of which are thick and green with the rotting slime of myriads of fallen leaves. The banks are not of land, but a dense jungle of trees growing down into the water, and dropping long suckers from their outstretched arms to form fresh trees. The roots of this jungle intercept as in a net the mud and slime and vegetable débris brought down by the river, and in course of time the inner parts of the jungle become sufficiently solid to afford footing for crocodiles and hippopotami, but quite impenetrable to human beings, the outskirts of the jungle being always comparatively new trees, growing dense and rank in the water itself, and interlaced thickly with great, strong, green hanging creepers, upon which swing and chatter the mangrove monkeys. As we steam up the river and across its numerous branches, no sound but the shrill chirp of these monkeys breaks the oppressive stillness. Now and again the black snout of a hippopotamus shows out of the thick ooze on the banks, or a motionless crocodile is seen basking in the sun. Occasionally, a long, low canoe glides noiselessly by; the boat, rower, and paddles all jet black, and hardly visible against the dark-green background of impenetrable jungle. The air is soft and sickly, with a whiff now and then of unutterable nastiness. The great fierce sun casts a yellow, all-pervading, hazy glare on the thick water, which is covered with a festering scum of miasmatic air-bubbles.
After some monotonous hours of this unvarying prospect, with a rare glimpse of the far-away sea through some of the maze of creeks, we suddenly stick fast in the mud. Oh, those three hours! Our nude crew of fine stalwart Krooboys up to their waist in water pushing and tugging; the screw of the launch stirring up the horrors at the bottom, and the blistering sun on the fetid water, made up an ensemble I shall never forget. And so we dragged on all the weary day, now sticking fast, now going on a few miles, the consul’s secretary already down with fever; past several batteries of Gatling guns mounted upon canoes moored across the mouths of creeks, and past the river and town of Andony, with its little mud battery and six-pounder Krupp guns, until, turning sharply the corner of an island of jungle, we find ourselves in the Opobó river, with the distant sea and the white men’s hulks on the horizon. Soon we come to an inlet in the dense mass of verdure, and, passing the mournful wrecks of two hulks half submerged in the muddy ooze, we land, carried on the stalwart shoulders of our Krooboys to a little sandy gully, and are received by about three-quarters of the population of Ja-Ja’s kingdom, with perhaps a dozen yards of clothing amongst the lot. Some old muzzle-loading guns, nine and eighteen pounders, of obsolete pattern, were scattered about, half buried in the deep white sand, unused and unusable. Inward, following the course of the gully, was what may be called the main street of the town, although no attempt was made at uniformity, the houses, such as they were, merely mud and palm-leaf huts, being scattered at random under and amidst the great palms and india-rubber trees. Followed at a respectful distance by the male portion of the crowd, the females being generally rather shy of white men, and apparently desirous of hiding behind tree trunks and peeping round at us from afar, we advanced up the gully to the interior of the town.
Ja-Ja is a most fanatical fetich-man, and signs of his paganism were to be seen at every few steps in the numerous ju-jus on our way. These ju-jus may, and do, assume any shape, and the most unlikely objects may be made sacred by their dedication, although no information is obtainable with regard to the exact rites practised or the supposed uses of the ju-jus. Idols in the usually accepted sense of the word they certainly are not, but rather things set apart for the worship of unseen spirits, or dedicated to the honour of a certain supposed god. A very common ju-ju, and, as it happened, the first one that met our eyes in Opobó, is a white hen cruelly nailed up alive to the top of a pole and left to starve and flutter to death. Then, in succession, we saw a grotesque human figure of yellow clay surmounted by an ox-skull, and covered with a penthouse roof of thatch; a miscellaneous collection of bones in a suspended grass cradle; a conical mound of yellow clay daubed and decorated with colour, and stuck all over with cocks’ feathers; a Bass’s beer-bottle on the top of a white pole; and so on ad infinitum. The great ju-ju house itself is much smaller than the celebrated building of human skulls at Bonny, and is a conical mud building with a high thatch roof, surmounted by an ox-skull, and lined with human skulls in the usual artistic, West African fashion.