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THE FETISH FOLK OF WEST AFRICA

AMVAMA, A FANG CATECHIST (See p. [316]).

The Fetish Folk of West Africa

By

ROBERT H. MILLIGAN

Author of “The Jungle Folk of Africa”

ILLUSTRATED

New York      Chicago      Toronto

Fleming H. Revell Company

London and Edinburgh

Copyright, 1912, by

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue

Chicago: 125 North Wabash Ave.

Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.

London: 21 Paternoster Square

Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street

Preface

In this book as in the one that preceded it, The Jungle Folk of Africa, the author endeavours to exhibit the humanity of the African as it impressed himself.

The difference between the two books is chiefly a difference of emphasis, and is indicated in the titles. In the former the African is described in relation to his surroundings—his exterior world. Much is said about the forest—deep, solemn, vast, impenetrably mysterious—wherein he roams at large with nature’s own wild freedom; contending also with its mighty forces, and wresting from it the means of existence by his own resourcefulness of expedient. In the present volume the author essays the more difficult task of revealing the interior world of the African—his mental habits and beliefs. Much is said about fetishism and folk-lore.

If, despite all that is said herein, the philosophy of fetishism should remain obscure—and there is no doubt of it; if the reader should close this book with the consciousness of a broad, comprehensive ignorance of the subject, it may be to some extent the fault of fetishism itself, which is the jungle of jungles, an aggregation of incoherent beliefs. The world of the African is as wild and strange as the weird world that we often visit on the brink of sleep. It was far from Africa that Siegfried thought it worth while to encounter the dread dragon, Fafner, and slay him for the possession of the magic tarnhelm forged by the Nibelung. In Africa everybody has a tarnhelm. Second-hand tarnhelms are for sale everywhere. I myself had a rare one; but I have lost it, or mislaid it. To us, who think of nature as the realm of law, order, and uniformity, the world of the African seems to have gone mad. This madness, however, is more apparent than real. The African thinks in terms of the miraculous; natural effects are explained by supernatural causes; supernatural, but not therefore unintelligible, still less irrational. Therefore, if we should not find the fabled thread out of this amazing labyrinth of fetishism, it may be possible to find a thread into it; and not only possible, but also worth while, if within the labyrinth we shall find the African himself and come to know him, mind and heart, a little better.

One need not apologize for the space given to folk-lore so long as Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox retain their present popularity with old and young; for in African folk-lore we have the originals of the stories of Uncle Remus. Aside from the entertaining quality of folk-lore, its idealism has a human value. In Mr. Lecky’s essay, Thoughts on History, published since his death, the great historian pays the following remarkable tribute to idealism:

“Legends which have no firm historical basis are often of the highest historical value as reflecting the moral sentiments of their time. Nor do they merely reflect them. In some periods they contribute perhaps more than any other influence to mould and colour them and to give them an enduring strength. The facts of history have been largely governed by its fiction. Great events often acquire their full power over the human mind only when they have passed through the transfiguring medium of the imagination, and men as they were supposed to be have even sometimes exercised a wider influence than men as they actually were. Ideals ultimately rule the world; and each, before it loses its ascendency, bequeaths some moral truth as an abiding legacy to the human race.”

Inasmuch as the history of most African tribes must ever remain unknown to us, their legends and all that is included in their folk-lore possess additional anthropological value as a medium through which to study the African mind.

The African, despite his degradation, is interesting; and that, not merely as an object of religious endeavour, but on the human level, as a man. The testimony of Mr. Herbert Ward—traveller, adventurer, soldier and artist—who first went to Africa with Stanley, and afterwards went a second time and spent several years, is the testimony of all sound-hearted men who have lived in Africa. Mr. Ward, in A Voice From the Congo, says:

“There was a good side even to the most villainous-looking savage.... They appealed strongly to me by reason of their simplicity and directness, their lack of scheming or plotting, and by the spontaneity of everything they did.” And again: “It has been my experience that the longer one lives with Africans, the more one grows to love them. Prejudices soon vanish. The black skin loses something of its unpleasant characteristics, for one knows that it covers such a very human heart.”

Nevertheless, the degradation of the African is a fact. And it is being proved that there is no power of moral renovation for him inherent in material progress. Christianity, and nothing else, vitalizes his moral nature; and therefore it contains the potentialities of civilization. When Mr. Giddings, and other sociologists of a certain class, ignoring spiritual values, demand a gospel for the life that now is, we offer them the same Gospel of Christ, and point to its actual results in Africa; maintaining that the missionary is the chief agent in Africa’s civilization, and affirming that civilization is but the secular side of Christianity.

One of the stories in this volume appears also in Dr. Robert H. Nassau’s admirable book, Fetishism in West Africa; and two of the stories are told, in slightly different form, in Mr. R. E. Dennett’s interesting book on the folk-lore of the Fjort. Most of the illustrations are from photographs taken by Mr. Harry D. Salveter.

Robert H. Milligan.

New York.

Contents

Illustrations

I
THE WHITE MAN’S GRAVE

For that matter the whole west coast of Africa is called by the natives The White Man’s Grave; and everywhere the fever stalks along the beach like a grim sentinel warning the stranger to stay away and ready to beat him into delirium and death if he lands. But the name, The White Man’s Grave, is especially attached to several of the oldest of the coast settlements. Notable among these is Gaboon, in the French Congo, almost exactly at the equator, where I lived for nearly six years, the period of my second term in Africa.

On the long voyage of five weeks from Liverpool to Libreville I had been duly prepared for the worst by the Old Coasters on board, who deem it their duty to instruct all newcomers in regard to the evils of the climate and the certainty of an early death. This duty constitutes a daily exercise during the entire voyage and is discharged faithfully and conscientiously. Each morning at the breakfast-table the young missionary is told that the African fever is inevitable, and to expect it will bring it on in two days. The healthy die first. “Missionaries die like flies.” The abnormal mortality among missionaries is due to several persistent delusions; chief among them, the temperance delusion, and the quinine delusion. According to the Old Coaster, everybody whose mind is open to conviction knows that temperate habits are no defense and that total abstinence is a quick method of suicide. Quinine only aggravates the fever; everybody knows that also; but missionaries will not admit it. Then there is the minor delusion of the umbrella. All those people who regularly carried umbrellas are dead. Those who didn’t carry them are dead too, but they lived longer.

The dreadful racking pain of the fever is adequately described, and then there is added the consoling thought that a man may sometimes escape having it fatally by having it frequently. “Fatally, or frequently:” the poets among them dwell fondly on the alliteration.

After we have begun to call at the African ports this elementary instruction is reinforced by a circumstantial and realistic account of the death of the “poor chaps” who have “pegged out” since the last voyage. The number is large: I did not know there were so many white men on the coast. Many among them were of my particular build, complexion and general appearance—I was told.

It is not that the Old Coaster is indulging a barbarous sense of humour in trying to frighten the newcomer, but he has become fairly obsessed with the thought of the climate. Sooner or later this morbid distemper seizes upon most of those who live for any length of time in West Africa.

After such an unappetizing conversation at the breakfast-table, a certain young missionary escaped to the upper deck where he was soon joined by an Old Coaster who asked him if he happened to have a prayer-book. Delighted that the conversation had taken a turn (and such a good turn) he replied that he hadn’t a prayer-book, not being an Anglican, but that he might procure one from a fellow passenger.

“I’d be ever so much obliged,” says the Old Coaster, “if you would; for I want to write down the burial service. You see, no matter how a man may have lived, it’s a comfort to him out here on the coast to think that he’ll have a decent burial; so we’re neighbourly, and we read the service for one another.”

In one last desperate effort to turn the conversation from the dead to the living, the missionary remarked, with considerable force: “But people don’t all die of fever out here! What about those that don’t?”

“Oh, no,” he replies; “they die of many other things besides fever. Let’s see;”—and he counts them off on his fingers:

“There’s kraw-kraw. Kraw-kraw is an awful nasty disease that just decomposes a man’s legs and nothing can stop it.

“There’s dysentery. A lot of people die of that. There’s every kind of tuberculosis. There’s abscesses. There’s pneumonia. There’s ulcers——”

“And kraw-kraw,” says another Old Coaster, coming up behind him. “Why, there was my friend So-and-so——”

“I’ve already said kraw-kraw,” says the other, and he passes on to the next finger.

“There’s Portuguese itch. Maybe you think you know what itch is, but you don’t if you’ve never had the Portuguese itch of the coast.

“There’s the Guinea worm. It favours the leg and is sometimes ten feet long. You may possibly get it out if you don’t try to wind it from the tail; but anyway it leaves a wound that doesn’t heal in this climate.

“There’s enlarged spleen. There’s——”

“Kraw-kraw,” says another arrival. “Why, there was So-and-so——”

“I said kraw-kraw,” answers the leader.

“There’s smallpox—in frequent epidemics,” he continues.

“And there are so many other parasites feeding on a man, inside and out, that one who has lived on this coast for several years ought to be able to furnish in his own body a complete course for a class of medical students.”

“Did you mention kraw-kraw?” says a late arrival.

“Kraw-kraw?” interposed the missionary. “I know all about kraw-kraw. The highest authorities on tropical diseases have declared that it is not a physical, but a mental, malady that attacks the Old Coaster. The victim imagines that he is an old crow, and he goes around flapping his wings and crying, ‘Kraw-kraw.’”

One morning at the breakfast-table, when the conversation turned for a moment to the cheerful subject of cocktails, a youngster exclaimed: “Gentlemen, gentlemen, I protest against this cheerfulness. For a whole minute the conversation has been utterly irrelevant. Men are mortal and the dead are accumulating. Let us therefore return to the obsequies.”

A solemn-eyed Old Coaster leaned towards his neighbour and in a loud, sepulchral whisper remarked: “I give him a month.”

“I give him two weeks,” replied the other.

Many of those who came aboard, especially those from the more lonely places, looked like haunted men. Extreme isolation invites madness. There were moments when the heart of the traveller faltered or stood still, almost crushed by the pathos and tragedy of it all.

At the annual mission-meeting I was appointed not to Gaboon, but to Angom, seventy miles up the Gaboon River. Angom had a peculiarly evil reputation even in Africa, and the appointment was made only after a prolonged discussion in which some contended that the place ought to be abandoned and the climate of that particular station pronounced impossible. The facts arrayed in support of this opinion presented such a gloomy outlook that when, in conclusion, a missionary physician and his wife and myself were assigned to Angom, the appointment sounded in our ears somewhat like an order for our execution.

Three weeks after we reached Angom I stood one morning on the bank of the river, exceedingly lonely as I gazed after the boat that bore away the physician and his wife, both of them sick and returning to the United States. I remained alone at Angom only a few months, but I was expecting to remain for the entire year, sixty miles from the nearest white man, and unable as yet to speak the language of the jungle folk around me. And besides the barrier of an unknown language between them and me, there was at first such a mental and moral aloofness from the natives that their presence, and especially the sound of their constant laughter, only drove me to the centre of a vaster solitude.

Often in those first days I fought against loneliness and fever together, each aggravating the other. When loneliness would make its most terrible onslaught it assumed a disguise—and invariably the same disguise. More than half the battle was fought when I had penetrated the disguise and learned to recognize the foe even from afar. It invariably approached in the form of discouragement—the intolerable feeling that all I was doing was useless; that I was the fool of a pathetic delusion whose only redeeming feature was a good intention. The doubt suddenly emptied life of all that was worth while and left an aching void; and nothing in the whole world can ache like a void. In our nobler aims and enthusiasms doubt is the worst foe of courage—the thought that one may be making a fool of himself; the highest courage is to resist the doubt, and the highest wisdom is to know when to resist it. I think Hawthorne said something like that.

Let me anticipate the years so far as to say that, although I was always more or less alone in Africa, and drank the cop of solitude to the dregs, I completely outlived these attacks. And, strange enough, the very question which had been my dreaded foe became my strongest ally and defense, namely, the question, Is it worth while? For I fought that question out to a sure affirmative. In later years the dominant feeling, that which constituted the irresistible attraction of missionary life, and made its privations as nothing, was the constant feeling that life in Africa was infinitely worth while, and that nowhere else in the world could my life count for so much to so many.

The first letters from missionaries at the coast advised that I should not think of staying alone at Angom, but should move to the coast and join them at Baraka, our Gaboon station. This did not seem to me advisable, since it would separate me from the interior tribe, the wild Fang, among whom I was expecting to work and whose language I was learning. The coast tribe, the Mpongwe, were already provided for and did not need me. But as time passed letters came from all over the mission making so strong a protest that it seemed inadvisable to “insist upon being a martyr”—as my fellow missionaries expressed it, with naïve candour. One friend added that if I died, or rather when I died, I would have no one to blame for it but myself. That settled it. The idea of dying with no one to blame for it, after the lonely life at Angom, was entirely too unsensational; so I moved to Baraka, where some one could be blamed when I died.

The name Gaboon is used, especially by the English, in a general way to designate not only the river of that name but all the adjacent territory. Most people prefer it to the name Libreville, because it is of native origin; and they like the far-away sound of it. If we would be strictly accurate, however, the name belongs only to the great estuary of the river. The Gaboon River is not long, but it receives many tributaries and for the last hundred miles from the sea it is magnificent. Forty miles before it reaches the sea it bends northward by northwest and widens out into a broad estuary from five to fifteen miles in width and forty miles long, which I have always called the bay. It is one of the few, and one of the best, harbours on the entire coast of Africa. Libreville, the old French capital of the Congo Français, and Baraka, our mission station, are situated on the east bank of the estuary and opposite its broad mouth. They look therefore directly over the sea.

Gaboon was known in the Middle Ages and probably in the early centuries. Travellers and adventurers of a superstitious age, passing upon the high seas, reported that it was a dreadful land where at night strange fires bursting from the earth leaped to the clouds and reddened the sky, fires which probably came from “inferno” not far beneath. It is quite possible that the fire which they saw may have issued from Mount Kamerun, farther to the north, which is now an extinct volcano; but there is a more likely explanation. The country around Gaboon is more open than most parts of West Africa. A dense undergrowth of shrubbery and long grass grows up each year, which towards the end of the dry season is burned off by the natives, in some places to clear their gardens, and in some places for the fun of seeing it burn. As seen from the mission hill the fires are seldom extensive, though the effect is a ruddy glow upon the clouds and is beautiful. But as I have seen them when out upon the bay at night, and upon the sea, the effect of their full extent, the glowing sky and its reflection in the sea, were sufficient to inspire awe and impress deeply the superstitious mind of a sailor gazing on a strange land of savage people.

Libreville as it is approached from the sea is one of the most beautiful places on the entire West Coast. The government buildings stand upon a hill, the Plateau, from which a handsome boulevard runs to the south parallel with the beach, between rows of giant coco-palms. On this boulevard are the trading-houses, French, Portuguese, German and English. The buildings are nearly all white, including the iron roofs; but some of them have roofs of red tile. There are many beautiful trees. The houses are only half visible through screens of foliage; and along the walks every unsightly thing, every deserted building or decaying hut is overgrown with vines of delicate beauty and the wildest profusion of scarlet, purple and lavender flowers.

The beach is strewn with logs of African mahogany of great value, which the traders are preparing to ship. For these they have exchanged a variety of goods. They carry a large stock of flint-lock guns especially for the interior trade. The average price of a trade-gun is five dollars. They are called “gas-pipe” guns in the vernacular of the coast. The barrel is three feet four inches long, and the bore Mr. Richard Harding Davis compares to an artesian well. “The native fills four inches of this cavity with powder and the remaining three feet with rusty nails, barbed wire, leaden slugs, and broken parts of iron pots.” This dreadful weapon “kicks” so violently in the recoil that it is always a question as to which is the more dangerous end. Of course, if the contents of the barrel should actually enter a man’s body it would tear him all to pieces. But there is always a doubt about the aim, and there is no doubt about the kick.

Two miles south of the Plateau there is another hill nearly as high, and having the finest outlook towards the sea. On this hill is the mission station, Baraka.

MISSION HOUSE AT BARAKA, GABOON.
The roof is of palm thatch, upon which poles of bamboo are placed.

The house, as one approaches it, appears through a screen of palms and orange-trees, of the strong-scented frangipani, the scarlet hibiscus, and oleander growing as high as the house. There is an abundance of roses everywhere. There are also a few coffee-trees in the yard, and one exquisite cinnamon.

The view from the veranda of the mission house at Baraka is a scene of magic beauty. The joyous lavishness of colour excludes from the mind the thought of the deadly serpent and the relentless fever-fiend that stealthily glide within the shadows. The long hillside sloping to the beach is half covered with mangoes and palms, oleander and orange-trees, and the graceful plumes of the bamboo that wave to and fro and tumble in the breeze like children at play. In front is the open sea. On the left, looking up the estuary, one sees in the bright morning light a fairy island of deep emerald set in a silver sea, and beyond it a distant shore in dim purple and gold. And even while one is looking, the island, the silver sea and the golden-purple shore gradually dissolve and disappear in the haze that gathers and deepens as the day advances. But again, and always, it appears in the clear evening light, more beautiful than ever.

I found it impossible to persuade my friends that Gaboon is not the hottest place in the world, since it is not only in Africa, but at the equator. This was also my own idea of Gaboon until it was corrected by experience. It is not as hot at the equator as it is several hundred miles north or south of it. The thermometer ranges between 72° and 86°, seldom going above or below this range. But the humidity is extreme (not surpassed, I believe, in the world) and this makes it seem hotter than these figures would indicate. The atmosphere feels as if it were about fifty per cent. hot water. At the coast there is the delightful sea-breeze—but as soon as one says it is “delightful” he is reminded that it is very dangerous.

One hears from the natives of the coast more complaints of cold than of heat and in the hottest weather their black skin is always cool. The hot months are December and January; and the coolest are June and July.

The wet and dry seasons of Gaboon are very distinct. The dry season begins in May and lasts for four months, during all which time there is not a shower. Then the wet season begins in September and lasts four months, during which it rains almost incessantly. This is followed by a short dry season of two months and a short wet season of two months, thus completing the year. This succession of the seasons is as regular and distinct as our winter and summer. The effect of the long dry season corresponds in some respects to our winter, giving vegetation a rest. Europeans delight in the dry season, although towards the last they long for the rain. But the natives dislike the dry season, which is too cool for their comfort; and since the land-breeze is very strong, and their bodies but slightly protected with clothing, there is much sickness among them in these months.

I never told the Africans about ice, nor described snow, lest it would overtax their credulity and discredit me; for if they should doubt I had no way of proving it. But after the French hospital was built the Gaboon people not only heard about ice but many of them actually saw it. One day we obtained a piece of ice at Baraka, sufficient to make ice-cream. When we had finished eating I took some of it out to the men of my boat-crew and after telling them that it was something which we liked very much, I gave a teaspoonful to Makuba, the captain. No sooner had it entered his mouth than he leaped into the air with a wild yell—wild even for Africa. He shouted: “I’m killed! I’m burned to death! I’m burned to death!”

The extremest sensation of cold seems to be not distinguishable from that of extreme heat. Never having tasted anything cold, it is positively painful to them.

Despite the exaggeration of the Old Coaster we are constantly reminded that, after all, Gaboon is The White Man’s Grave. There were a number of Anamese prisoners of war whom the French had transported from Anam. They were employed in the construction of two miles of road along the beach. During the few months of work seventy out of one hundred died. In this dreadful death rate there were probably unusual factors. The road crosses a marsh that is a first-class incubator for mosquitoes. And besides, it is not likely that the men were reasonably provided with food or medical attendance.

Even upon the subject of the climate opinions differ. There are some persons—very few—who, after living in West Africa a number of years, become so used to its death record that they seem to think that every other place is just the same. One or another of these occasionally becomes an indignant champion of the climate. At one of our annual mission meetings I offered a resolution appealing to the Board of Missions in New York for an extra allowance for health changes, in view of the “hostile climate.” A veteran missionary, whose many years in Africa made him the wonder of the coast, objected to the word hostile, declaring that unless it were stricken out he would vote against the resolution. But with charming inconsistency he added that he fully realized the need of the extra allowance and he would gladly vote for it if only, for the word hostile, we would substitute the word peculiar.

Next morning after breakfast, Mr. Gault, in whose home I was staying, said to me: “Apropos of the objection made yesterday to the word hostile as applied to this salubrious climate, have you observed that every one who asks a blessing at the breakfast-table seems to be thankful—and surprised—that none of us has been stricken down during the night and that we are all again able to get to the table?

“The more remarkable,” he added, “when we recall that we were chosen by the Board not because we were either good or clever, but chiefly because of our constitutions.”

It was only a short time afterwards that Mr. Gault himself one morning was not able to get to the breakfast-table. Two days later they buried him at Batanga. He was one of the truest and best men I have ever known.

There is less fever now than there was a few years ago, and the death record is decreasing. Not that the conditions are much improved; but common sense has prevailed, and men as soon as they become seriously ill hasten away on the first steamer. Besides, the proper use of quinine as a preventive is better understood as the result of the knowledge of the sources of malaria and its various stages.

The mosquito theory—that the Anopheles mosquito is the carrying agent of the malaria parasite—is of course generally accepted. The late Dr. Koch advised that a liberal dose of quinine every eighth or ninth day ought to be an effective preventive with most persons. Major Ronald Ross, head of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, advised the destruction of the mosquito, chiefly by drainage, and the segregation of white people from the natives. The natives have become at least partially immune; but there are numerous malaria parasites in their blood constituting the source from which it is carried by the mosquito, which after biting a native bites a white person; and when the white man’s blood is malarious a little exposure to the tropical sun, a slight chill, even a mental shock or undue strain, anything that lowers the vitality, is likely to precipitate the fever.

I myself, after several years of frequent fever, at last gained practical immunity by taking five grains of quinine every night, which I did without omission for three years, until I left the coast. If my vitality had not been already reduced to the minimum I would not have required so much quinine. Many persons, instead of taking quinine regularly, wait until the fever actually comes and then take very large, nerve-shattering doses for successive days, from thirty to sixty or even ninety grains a day. One may recover from the fever, but one does not entirely recover from the quinine until he leaves the coast.

Sometimes the newcomer is fairly frightened into a fever by those who have lived in Africa long enough to have become obsessed with the thought of the climate and whose conversation it completely absorbs.

Near the end of my voyage to Africa I spent a night ashore at a certain mission, where a good lady who was in a very sociable mood, having shown me to my room, stood in the doorway telling me of the various persons—not a few—who had died in that particular room, and giving some graphic detail of each death. It was gradually borne in upon me that there must be some horrible fatality attached to that room. Finally she advised me not to lock my door. “For,” said she, “Mr. P——, who always locked his bedroom door, was found dead in bed one morning in this very room, although he went to bed looking as well as you do now. About noon next day they broke the door open, and sure enough there he was—lying right there!”

I replied: “My dear lady, won’t you please knock on my door very early in the morning, and if I do not answer, open the door and walk in; for I fully expect to be dead.”

A certain American lady, who was a missionary for some years in Liberia, tells how that when she landed, expecting to proceed to a station some distance inland, where she would join several other missionaries, she was met with the news that the missionaries of that station (four, I believe) had all died of fever a few days before she landed, one immediately after another. Nevertheless, the person who had the authority for her appointment escorted her to that desolate station and left her there alone. A partition of boards in the house was nearly all gone; it was only a few feet from the floor. She asked the explanation of this appearance and was told that the boards had been used to make coffins. Having received this interesting, though somewhat curious information, she was left alone to find what comfort she could in the reflection that there was enough of the partition left for one more coffin.

She told me about it herself—many years afterwards.

II
THE WISE ONES

At Gaboon, in the French Congo, one sees all the successive stages in the process of civilization. First, there is the savage, whose whole apparel is a little palm-oil and a bit of calico half the size of a pocket-handkerchief; then there is the man who wears “two fathoms” of cloth wound about him gracefully and falling below his knees; next, there is the man who wears this same robe with a shirt; then the man who discards the native robe and wears a shirt and trousers, but with the shirt always outside the trousers; and, last of all, the gentleman who wears his shirt inside his trousers. These several classes are somewhat distinct. One does not classify the man with a taste for simplicity who wears a rice-sack with holes for his head and arms; nor the untutored dude who wears a pink Mother Hubbard or a lady’s undergarment. These freakish modes represent attempts to hasten the process of civilization and to pass prematurely from one of the above classes to another.

In general, the distinction of culotte and sansculotte indicates the difference between the Mpongwe—the old coast tribe—and the Fang—the interior tribe, who have only reached the coast in recent years. The Mpongwe is the most civilized of all the tribes south of the Calabar River. Many of them, besides wearing trousers, live in deck-houses, that is, houses with wooden floors. The first floor ever seen by the natives was the deck of an English ship; hence the name deck-house. It was also from contact with English sailors that the native learned to speak of a “fathom” of cloth.

The Mpongwe are the proudest people of West Africa. An African woman is never allowed to marry into an inferior tribe; although the men may do so. And since the Mpongwe have no social equals among the adjacent tribes, it follows that no Mpongwe woman can marry outside of her own tribe, unless with a north-coast man or a white man. The Fang, the great interior tribe, are mere “bush-animals” in the mind of the Mpongwe. A Fang man, though he were perfectly civilized, and even educated in France, would not be allowed the social status of the meanest Mpongwe. The coast women can all speak Fang; for they trade with them and buy their daily food from them; but they are ashamed to be heard speaking it. Often when I addressed them in Fang they would shake their heads as if they had never heard the language before; whereupon I nearly always asked them a question on some matter of interest to themselves; the price of a parrot, for instance, if I knew that the lady was anxious to sell it. Such a question invariably made the dumb to speak.

The Mpongwe call themselves The Wise Ones. And other tribes generally admit their claim and take them at their own self-estimate. In former days, when they had real kings, they buried their kings in secret, not more than ten persons knowing the hidden grave, lest some other tribe might steal the body, for the sake of obtaining the brains, which would be a very powerful fetish and would make them wise like the Mpongwe.

The king was chosen from among the people by the elders and was selected for his wisdom. The ceremonies of his enthronement were such that he required not only wisdom, but also courage, physical strength and a superb digestion. The man’s first intimation that he had been chosen by the elders was an onrush of the people—not to do him honour, but to abuse and insult him. They would hurl opprobrious epithets at him, curse him, spit upon him, pelt him with mud and beat him. For, they said, from this time he would do all these things to them, while they would be powerless to retaliate. This, therefore, was their last chance. They also reminded him of all his failings in graphic and minute particulars. If the king survived this treatment, he was then taken to the former king’s house, where he was solemnly invested with the insignia of the kingly office, in the shape of a silk hat. No one but the king was permitted to wear a silk hat.

Following the inauguration ceremony, the people came and bowed before the new king in humble submission, while they praised him as enthusiastically as they had before reviled him. Then he was fed and fêted for a week, during which time he was not allowed to leave his house, but was required to receive guests from all parts of his dominion and eat with them all. These ceremonies ended, he turned to the comparatively easy and commonplace duties of his kingly office. This custom, like many others, has passed away under the influence of civilization.

In former days the Mpongwe were divided into three distinct classes. There were, first, the slaves, the largest class of all. Then there was a middle class, of those who although free were of slave origin, or had some slave blood in their veins—even a drop. And then there was a very small aristocracy of pure Mpongwe.

Of these three classes the middle class probably had the hardest time. They had freedom enough for initiative and trade enterprise and they often became rich. But so sure as they did, they were at once an object of envy and class hatred on the part of the aristocracy, with the result that they were in constant danger of being accused of witchcraft and put to death, their goods being confiscated for the benefit of the governing class—the aristocracy.

Since slavery has been formally abolished by the French government the line between slaves and this middle class has almost disappeared—but not quite, for slavery has not been entirely abolished. But the “aristocracy” is as distinct as ever.

Domestic slavery is rarely attended with the usual horrors of alien enslavement. Mpongwe slaves were serfs rather than slaves. Until the advent of the white slaver they were rarely sold or exchanged. Mpongwe slaves were sometimes taken for debt and sometimes stolen from other tribes.

Several Mpongwe men have told me that their slaves were children of the interior whom they had rescued when their parents had thrown them away, either into the bush to perish by the beasts, or into the river. They must have been driven to this by some cruel superstition; for the African loves his children, and the mother of his children is his favourite wife. Perhaps the children were twins. In many tribes there is such a fear of twins that they are often put to death and their mother with them. In some of these tribes they are believed to be the result of adultery with a spirit.

Many former slaves have chosen to maintain the old relationship—somewhat modified—rather than accept full freedom, and be left without friends, family or possessions; a peculiar misfortune for those who have never had an opportunity to acquire a habit of independence.

At one time a man named Ndinga was working for me. He was a faithful workman, except for one inexplicable fault. Occasionally he would stay away half a day or the entire day without asking to be excused, or notifying me. Several times he did this when I was about to make a trip up the river, and was depending upon him to make one of the crew. At length I dismissed him and he departed without explanation or complaint. But one of the other men came to me and told me Ndinga’s plight. He was really the slave of an Mpongwe chief, right under the eyes of the government. The master allowed him to work for himself, but I imagine he took part of his wages. He also exercised the right to call upon him at any time for personal services, and each time that he had stayed away from his work he had been called by the master, who ignored my claim upon Ndinga and the consequent inconvenience to me, though he claimed to be my personal friend. Ndinga was sufficiently civilized to feel the degradation of his position, and the poor fellow submitted to rebuke and final dismissal rather than tell me he was a slave. I learned also that he had lost several other positions in the same way and had usually been dismissed with cursing and abuse. I sent for him immediately, and without explanation told him that I had changed my mind and that he could return to work. Meantime, I called the master, and reminding him that slavery was strictly forbidden, I told him that if he should again call Ndinga away from work I would notify the government. There was no further trouble.

This man, Ndinga, was in pitiable need of a friend. It is extremely easy for a slave to get a bad reputation, and Ndinga was said to be a “leopard-man,” that is, a man who changes himself into a leopard—either in order to kill an enemy or devour a sheep. I have heard Ndinga accused of this frequently; and there were many who regarded him with great fear. Every hysterical woman who thought that she saw a leopard was ready to swear that it was Ndinga. If the leopards had been active in the community at that time all their doings would have been charged against him.

The Mpongwe women are regarded as the best-looking and most graceful women on the entire coast. Wherever there are communities of white men, even hundreds of miles north and south of Gaboon, there are Mpongwe women; for it is with them more than the women of any other tribe that white men form temporary alliances.

The Gaboon belle has a brown complexion and faultless skin, fine features and dreamy dark eyes with long lashes. She moves so easily that she carries her folded parasol, or bottle of gin, or other indispensable, on her head. She dresses her hair neatly and with great pains; usually parting it in the middle and arranging it in numerous small braids which she fastens behind. Her dress is a large square robe of bright colours, often of fine material, wound around her, immediately below her arms, reaching to her feet and kept in place by a roll around the top of it—a peculiar twist of leger de main which only a black hand can perform. Somewhere in this roll her pipe is usually hidden away. This dress leaves her graceful shoulders and arms uncovered. She wears slippers with white stockings, and upon her head a very large silk handkerchief of bright colour, beautifully arranged in a turban. Add to this a lace or silk scarf thrown over one shoulder, not forgetting her silk parasol carried unopened on her head; then add a lot of jewelry and plenty of perfume, and her attire is complete. Moreover, she has a soft voice, and does not yell except when she quarrels, and she seldom quarrels when she is dressed in her best. Most of the Christian women wear an unbelted wrapper, or Mother Hubbard.

The Mpongwe people are peculiarly gentle, and courteous in their manners; and in this respect the men even surpass the women. Travelling in a boat with an Mpongwe crew, one is always surprised at their courtesy and thoughtful consideration. Courtesy, indeed, which some one calls “benevolence in little things,” is a racial characteristic. I was once obliged to make a very hard journey from Batanga to Benito, a hundred miles down the coast. For this purpose I purchased a bicycle in a German trading-house at Dualla, the capital of Kamerun. The bicycle weighed fifty pounds, and cost me a dollar a pound. I did not realize what I was undertaking. The sea-breeze was against me; portions of the beach were of soft sand and parts of it were so rough and rocky that I had to climb steep banks and stretches of rock, carrying the fifty-pound wheel on my shoulders. I had been long in Africa and my strength was greatly reduced. Several times, almost overcome with exhaustion, I threw myself down upon the beach and lay there for half an hour before I could go on. There were various misadventures along the way and a sensational escape from quicksand. It was an opportunity, however, to test the kindness of the native.

I took no food, but depended upon the hospitality of those to whom I was a stranger; although if hospitality had failed, I could have paid for food; but not once did it fail along the way. Wherever there was a stream to be waded, if a native was anywhere in sight, either on the beach, or fishing out on the sea, in his canoe, I called or beckoned to him, and he came and carried me over—for a white man must not get wet when he is exposed to the wind; then he went back and got my wheel. In one place the water was to the man’s shoulders, and there was a current, but he held me in a horizontal position above his head, and exerting his whole strength, with firm, slow step he proceeded, and set me down dry on the other side. Then he cheerfully turned about and went after my wheel. In another place heavy crags projected into the sea and at high tide there was no beach for a quarter of a mile, so that I was compelled to carry the wheel. At this place, I met a native carrying a load who was evidently returning from a journey to the interior; and upon my request for help, he at once hid his load by the way and taking my wheel carried it over the rocks, nearly all this distance, to the better beach beyond. In every case I told the man beforehand that I did not expect to pay him for his service except in friendship, and friendship sufficed. Nor did I pay anything for my food; and not once on the entire journey had I the least difficulty in procuring it. Some of these people were of other tribes; but in courtesy the Mpongwe surpass them all.

They generally live at peace within the family and the village. The men, at least, rarely fight. Whenever I heard that an Mpongwe fight was in progress, I rushed to the scene; but I must confess to mixed motives. For a fight among Mpongwe men is decidedly picturesque and entertaining, since they fight by butting each other in the stomach with their heads. The women are much more quarrelsome, and these very belles, whose beauty I have praised, have frequent quarrels and occasional fights, the latter usually involving a number of women; for though the quarrel commences with two women, when it gets to a real fight the family and relations of each woman take part in it. From this moment it proceeds somewhat formally. They line up on two sides, and with a lively accompaniment of appropriate language, they rush upon each other, not usually striking, nor scratching, but each woman seeking to tear off her opponent’s robe. I witnessed such a fight in which eighteen women engaged. A woman, when her robe is taken off, admits defeat. For this reason, instead of preparing for a fight by donning her oldest clothes, she prepares by putting on her newest and strongest, which she doubles and ties about her waist, letting it fall to her knees, but she wears no upper garment.

There is a strange war-custom in all the tribes of West Africa unlike anything I have ever heard of elsewhere. Sometimes when one of their number is killed, or a woman stolen by an enemy, instead of avenging his death directly they will kill some one of a third town which has nothing whatever to do with the palaver. This third town is then expected to join with them in punishing the first town, which, being the original offender, was the cause of all the trouble. In The Jungle Folk of Africa I have described this custom thus:

“Among the Mpongwe, in the old days before the foreign power was established, and among the closely related tribes south of them, this custom prevailed in an extreme form. A woman being stolen, the people of the offended town would hurry to another town near by, before the news had reached them, and would kill somebody. This town would then hurry to the next and kill somebody there, each town doing likewise until perhaps five or six persons of as many different towns would be killed in one night. The last town would then, with the help of the others, demand justice from the first. It may be that the object of this frightful custom was to restrain men from committing the initial crime, that might be attended with such wide-spread death, bringing upon themselves the curses of many people. For above all things the African cannot bear to be disliked and cannot endure execration.”

The Mpongwe now have no war-customs. And I am not sure that peace has proved an unmixed blessing. They have lost something of courage and virility.

Despite the veneer of civilization, I fear that this amiable and graceful people—excepting only the few Christians—are as superstitious as ever. Nature is still inhabited by myriad spirits to whose activity natural phenomena are due. They still speak of the great spirit who causes the flow and ebb of the tide by dropping an enormous stone into the sea and again removing it. Trial by ordeal is common even among the most intelligent. And not a death occurs among them that is not attributed to witchcraft.

A man dying in the hospital at Gaboon turns his solemn, beautiful eyes towards one who sits beside him, and tells in confidence what has brought about his death. It is strange how approaching death, as if to testify to man’s divine origin in the hour of his most appalling defeat, dignifies the features and countenance of the lowest with a mysterious dignity that transcends all differences of colour, transforms even natural ugliness, and brings all men to one level. The greatest is no more than human; the lowest is no less. This dying man tells how that some weeks past, having gone on a journey to a certain town forty miles north, and during the night having wondered what his friends at home might be doing, he thought he would visit Gaboon, leaving his body while his spirit alone travelled through the air. But on the way he met a company of spirits making a similar journey, one of whom was an enemy; who, recognizing him, gave him a fatal thrust in the side. He quickly returned to his body; but in the morning he felt the weakness resulting from the fatal stroke, and from that day had grown weaker and weaker until death was upon him.

I was present at the trial of a slave, in a leading Mpongwe town, who was accused of causing the death of one of the relations of the chief, a man who had been ill for a long time with tuberculosis. I had been calling on the sick man regularly. One day, going again to the town, I saw a crowd of people gathered in the street who were very much excited. The man had just died, and as usual the panic-stricken people were determined to blame somebody. The chief who was trying the case was a well-educated man who had been closely associated with white people all his life and was prominent in trade. Arbitrary suspicion had about settled upon this slave—for slaves are always the first to be suspected—when a boy came forward and said that on the preceding night he had discovered the slave standing behind the sick man’s house and that he had watched him while he opened a bundle of leaves which he had in his hand and in which was a piece of human flesh like a fish in size and form. No more evidence was necessary. No one asked the boy how he knew that it was not a fish which he had seen; nor how he knew that it was human.

They would have killed the man instantly but for their fear of the French government; for the town was close beside the capital. When I tried to reason with them, they answered me with the all-sufficient exclamation: “Ask the boy! Ask him yourself!” Those who took the leading part in this trial were dressed like Europeans.

Sickness and death, they believe, may be caused by fetish medicine, which need not be administered to the victim, but is usually laid beside the path where he is about to pass. Others may pass and it will do them no harm. The parings of finger-nails, the hair of the victim and such things are powerful ingredients in these “medicines.” An Mpongwe, after having his hair cut, gathers up every hair most carefully and burns it lest an enemy should secure it and use it to his injury. When sickness continues for a length of time they usually conclude that some offended relation has caused an evil spirit to abide in the town.

An Mpongwe man, Ayenwe, had a severe attack of inflammatory rheumatism. I was going to see him regularly and doing what little I could for him. But his mother’s people, who lived in a town four miles away, concluded that it was a spell of witchcraft, inflicted by his father’s people. So they came one stormy night at midnight and stealing him out of his house, put him in a canoe and carried him on the rough sea to their town. The patient can always be prevailed upon by his relations, if there are enough of them to wear out his resistance. However strongly he may object at first he will finally throw up his hands and say: “Kill me if you will then. The responsibility is yours; I have nothing more to do with it.” A man’s very soul is not his own in Africa.

An Mpongwe woman, Paia, was suffering greatly from salivation, through the injudicious use of calomel. She was a Christian woman and a member in the Mpongwe Church, although her relations were all heathen. She was in agony and a fellow missionary and myself had already reached the point where we could do nothing more for her. The numerous heathen relations were all present. They sat on the floor smoking and expectorating in gloomy silence, with the windows closed, and filled the house so that I could hardly pass in and out. I tried my best to get them to take Paia to the French hospital, but they were horrified at the bare suggestion. The tales in free circulation concerning the hospital—poisons administered by the doctor, mutilation, and death by slow torture—would fill a volume. Several days passed: Paia was worse. They concluded that the house was bewitched—and perhaps the whole town—and resolved to carry her away to another town, across the river. In such cases it is advisable to put a body of water between the victim and the bewitched town. Paia told me that she was more than willing to go to the hospital if they would let her; but she said they would never consent. Next morning about daylight I suddenly appeared before her door with four strong men and a hammock swung on a pole. Before her relations knew what had happened one of the men had carried her out to the hammock, and we started to the hospital. The French doctor, one of the very best on the coast, at my request gave her special attention, and in a few days she was well.

WOMEN’S SECRET SOCIETY OF GABOON.

The lowest reach of Mpongwe degradation is represented by the woman’s secret society, to which a majority of the Mpongwe women belong—practically all, except the Christians, who regard it with abhorrence. I know of nothing in any interior tribe more degrading and immoral. In former times of cruelty and oppression the society probably served for the protection of women against their husbands; but in these times it is the husbands who need protection, and the society, having outlived its usefulness, has degenerated. The women of the society frequently meet together at night, usually in an arbour of palms, and sing unspeakably lewd songs—phallic songs—which are heard all over the village. There is always a crowd of young men gathered around the arbour; and the badinage which passes between them and the women is shocking. And yet these same persons, on all other occasions in their daily intercourse, observe a degree of decorum which would astonish those who think that there is scarcely any such thing as decorum in Africa.

III
A DYING TRIBE

This amiable and attractive people, the Mpongwe tribe, is now but a dying remnant, hurrying to extinction. It is not long since they were numbered by tens of thousands; now there are probably not more than five hundred pure Mpongwe. There are women among them for whom marriage is impossible. For, as I have already said, their social superiority makes it impossible for them to marry into other tribes; but, within their own tribe, many Mpongwe women are related, nearly or remotely, to every surviving family, and the very strict laws of consanguinity forbid the marriage of related persons. It is expected, therefore, that these women will make their alliances with white men; that is, that they will not marry at all.

The first exterminating factor was slavery. Sir Harry Johnston, in The Civilization of Africa, has this to say in regard to the fatal adaptability of the Negro to a condition of slavery:

“The Negro in general is a born slave. He is possessed of physical strength, docility, cheerfulness of disposition, a short memory for sorrows and cruelties, and an easily aroused gratitude for kindness and just dealing. He does not suffer from homesickness to the overbearing extent that afflicts other peoples torn from their homes, and, provided he is well fed, he is easily made happy. Above all, he can toil hard under the hot sun and in the unhealthy climates of the torrid zone. He has little or no race-fellowships—that is to say, he has no sympathy for other Negroes; he recognizes and follows his master independent of any race affinities, and as he is usually a strong man and a good fighter, he has come into request not only as a labourer but as a soldier.”

Sir Harry, speaking as an eye-witness of the capturing and the exportation of slaves, gives a lurid description of their sufferings, which, he says, “were so appalling that they almost transcend belief.” He makes a conservative estimate that in the modern period of the slave-traffic twenty million Africans must have been sold into slavery. The Mpongwe was one of the tribes that suffered most. A large portion of their country was depopulated. The slave-traffic was frightfully demoralizing to the Africans themselves. It excited fiendish passions, stifled every instinct of humanity and inspired craft and cruelty far surpassing anything hitherto known. It was said that three men of the same family dared not leave their town together lest two of them should combine to sell the third.

More than half a century has passed since the last slave ship sailed out of Gaboon harbour and disappeared over the western horizon with its cargo of grief and rage, many of them wailing vengeance in a mournful chant, improvising the words as they sang. For the African sings his bitterest grief as well as his joy. He sings where the white man would weep, or curse; but to the accustomed ear no cry could equal the pity of his song.

It was in this region that Du Chaillu hunted the gorilla and gathered much of the material for his famous books. An interior chief, in appreciation of Du Chaillu’s visit to his town, once presented him with a fat slave; and when Du Chaillu kindly declined the offer, protesting that he would not know what to do with him, the chief exclaimed in astonishment: “You must kill him and eat him, of course.”

Du Chaillu spat violently upon the ground—the African way of expressing disgust and abhorrence.

“Then,” said the bewildered chief, “what do you do with all our people who are sent down the river and far away to your country? We have believed that you fatten them and eat them.”

It is supposed that our present mission station was formerly the site of a slave pen, where slaves were kept until they were shipped—a barracoon; hence the name Baraka.

The slave-traffic was succeeded by the rum-traffic; and it would not be easy to say which of the two has proved the greater evil for Africa. There is more drunkenness in Gaboon, among the Mpongwe, than in most places on the coast. Except among the few Christians, an abundance of rum is used at every marriage and every funeral and both men and women drink to drunkenness. The women drink as much as the men, and there are a greater number of hopeless dipsomaniacs among them.

One day, as I was walking along the beach, I met a bright-looking Mpongwe woman who surprised me by addressing me in English. I was eager to know who she was. She said her name was Elida Harrington, and that when she was very young the wife of one of our missionaries, for whom she had been working, took her to America when she went on furlough and that during the period of the furlough she had attended school in America. Those early days were evidently a sweet memory, and Elida’s face was aglow with pleasure as she told me. Finally I asked her why I had never seen her at the mission. The glow faded from her face, and after a moment of gloomy silence she replied: “You’ll know soon enough.”

I afterwards learned that Elida, when she was young, was married to a man who was given to nagging. He was continually making petty and groundless charges of infidelity against his wife. There is no surer way to inspire the dislike of the African. They are wonderfully generous in forgiving impulsive cruelty, but continual nagging will alienate them. At last, just to spite her husband, Elida told him that all his charges were true; that she had done all those things, and much worse—such things as he had never thought of charging against her. Her husband, when he recovered from a paroxysm of rage and astonishment, told her to pack her things and leave his house; to which she quietly replied that she would be glad to do so, since she had already decided upon that very course.

Soon after my first meeting with Elida I called at her house. It was then that I learned why she kept away from the mission. She was so intoxicated that she could not get to the door. And this was habitual.

One day Elida went to see her sister Jane, who was sick in bed. Jane wanted some bread and gave her the price of a loaf and asked her to go out and buy it for her. Poor Jane never got the bread. And poor Elida! She went only as far as the first rum-shop.

I think of another, a young man who bore an honoured name, Augustus Boardman, and who from his childhood was closely connected with the mission. He spoke English not like an African but as if it were his native tongue. I never knew a native who understood the finer feelings of white people as Augustus did. I never knew a native who had in himself so much of what we call sentiment. On one occasion he went with me to Angom where Mr. Marling was buried. Mr. Marling, who had been dead for five years, was the missionary whom Augustus had known best and loved most. In the evening, just before leaving for the coast, I happened to pass Mr. Marling’s grave, and there I saw a beautiful wreath of flowers carefully woven, which Augustus had laid upon the grave. The African is strangely indifferent to flowers, and I have never known another who would have done what Augustus did.

On another occasion I received a letter from him when he was up the Ogowè River. He wrote that while visiting at our old mission on the Ogowè he had come across an English song-book, in which he had found a song, the words of which were the most beautiful he had ever read in his life; so beautiful that he had committed them to memory; and he was wondering whether it was well known and commonly sung among English-speaking people. He copied the words of the entire song and enclosed them in the letter. The song was The Lost Chord. The anguish of the lost chord in his own life was the secret of the deep impression that the song made upon him.

In America a child can be kept out of the way of the worst temptations until he has reached years of discretion, but such separation is impossible in Africa. This boy, when he was a little child, was taught to drink rum; his mother died a hopeless victim of it; and by the time he was a young man the appetite for it was insatiable and complete master of him. The finer feelings which characterized him seemed to make him all the more the victim of this inordinate desire. He fought it as he might have fought a python of his native jungles, but in vain. On one occasion, in the presence of Mr. Marling, he pledged himself with the solemnity of an oath never to taste it again. A few days afterwards he was walking down the street of an interior town when most unexpectedly he met a boy with a bottle of rum. He sprang at the boy, snatched the bottle from him and drank the contents. Other efforts ended similarly. He afterwards made such promises to me, weeping and fairly prostrated with shame and humiliation; yet he soon fell again. He became at length quite hopeless, and it was necessary to dismiss him from all service in the mission. He got several good positions, but lost them immediately. When I last saw him he was a moral wreck and almost an outcast even in Africa, where there are no outcasts. Augustus has since died; one more victim of poisoned rum.

He is full of compassion and plenteous in mercy. And, knowing Augustus as I knew him, I dare to hope that he has again at last heard the long-lost chord, and the sound of the great Amen.

The native is constitutionally incapable of being a moderate drinker. And, besides, drunkenness is not disgraceful; they have not the spirit that revolts from it. I have personally seen little children intoxicated. I have seen them intoxicated in the schoolroom. I have known of parents getting their own children to drink to intoxication for their amusement. It is doubtful whether there is another tribe in all West Africa so besotted with alcoholism as the Mpongwe. Physicians agree that it is one of the chief causes of their increasing sterility.

Another factor in the extermination of the Mpongwe is the demoralization of domestic life incident to methods of trade. The Mpongwe man is a trader by instinct. In shrewdness and diplomacy I doubt whether he has a superior among all the tribes of West Africa. This shrewdness he expresses in many homely proverbs; as, for example, when he says: “If you must sleep three in a bed, sleep in the middle.” White traders all along the coast employ the Mpongwe as middlemen between them and the interior people, who possess the export products. The white man gives the middleman a certain quantity of goods on trust. With these he goes to the interior and establishes a small trading-post in one or several towns. It is a life of privation and danger, a lonely, miserable existence, but he endures it with patience for the joyful hope that at the end of a year or two he may return to his beloved town and family in Gaboon, so rich that he can afford to “rip” for six months; to dress so that the women will adore him and the men hate him. His goods being soon exhausted by his numerous relations as well as himself, he starts off for another year or two. He has a wife, or wives, at Gaboon, and he takes to himself a wife or two at each of his interior trading-centres.

In the dangers of these middlemen and the necessities of trade Miss Mary H. Kingsley finds a plausible argument for polygamy, amounting, in Miss Kingsley’s opinion, to a full justification. Indeed, for various reasons, the majority of traders defend and advocate native polygamy. The journeys of these native traders to the interior are dangerous, and I agree with Miss Kingsley that they deserve credit for their courage. “Certainly they run less risk of death from fever than a white man would; but, on the other hand, their colour gives them no protection; and their chance of getting murdered is distinctly greater; the white governmental powers cannot revenge their death in the way they would the death of a white man, for these murders usually take place away in some forest region, in a district no white man has ever penetrated.”

There are two reasons why so many of them nevertheless survive. The first is that trade follows definite routes and the trader is expected about once in six months by all the towns along the way, in which the people are eager for trade-goods, the men “fairly wild for tobacco” and the women impatient for beads and other ornaments. Under these circumstances, for the people of any one town to kill the trader would mean trouble between that town and the other towns along the route.

But this consideration alone is not sufficient; and Miss Kingsley gives us the means that he employs for his further safety, as follows: “But the trader is not yet safe. There is still a hole in his armour, and this is only to be stopped up in one way, namely, by wives; for you see, although the village cannot safely kill him and take all his goods, they can still let him die safely of a disease, and take part of them, passing on sufficient stuff to the other villages to keep them quiet. Now the most prevalent disease in the African bush comes out of the cooking-pot, and so to make what goes into the cooking-pot—which is the important point, for earthen pots do not in themselves breed poison—safe and wholesome, you have got to have some one who is devoted to your health to attend to the cooking affairs; and who can do this like a wife?—one in each village of the whole of your route. I know myself one gentleman whose wives stretch over 300 miles of country, with a good wife base in a coast town as well. This system of judiciously conducted alliances gives the black trader a security nothing else can, because naturally he marries into influential families at each village, and all the wife’s relations on the mother’s side regard him as one of themselves and look after him and his interests. That security can lie in woman, especially so many women, the so-called civilized man may ironically doubt, but the security is there, and there only, and on a sound basis; for remember that the position of a travelling trader’s wife in a village is a position that gives the lady prestige, the discreet husband showing little favours to her family and friends, if she asks for them while he is with her; and then she has not got the bother of having a man always about the house, and liable to get all sorts of silly notions into his head, if she speaks to another gentleman, and then go and impart these notions to her with a cutlass, or a kassengo, as the more domestic husband, I am assured by black ladies, is prone to.”[^[1]]

[1]. Travels in West Africa, p. 252.

This picture is not untrue to the facts. And yet some of us who have old-fashioned ideas of morality are not convinced that polygamy is thereby justified with its beastly immorality on the part of those men and of all those women who prefer not to have husbands hanging about the house with silly notions—that is to say, moral notions—about the behaviour of women. And however heartrending may be the condition of those interior men and women, without tobacco and without beads, we cannot agree that their necessity justifies any such degrading practice for its relief. As for the slight excess of rubber and ivory that civilized folks obtain by this means, it may soothe the civilized breast to know that all, or nearly all, this trade produce would reach the coast in other and more legitimate ways without these middlemen, whose presence is a curse to the interior people, whose absence is a curse to their own tribe, and who are above all a curse to themselves.

This demoralization of domestic life is even worse for the Mpongwe women than for their absent husbands. There is a large settlement of white men in Gaboon, most of them government officials. And because of the climate the white population is always rapidly changing. Nearly all the Mpongwe women become the mistresses of those men. And the worst of it is that instead of being deemed disgraceful this only gives them social prestige among their own people. A woman said to me one day:

“Iga is so proud she won’t speak to me any more.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh, she is living with a white man now,” was the reply.

The marriage tie in Gaboon has long ceased to be a “tie.” It was much more binding before the advent of the white man, and it is more binding to-day among the uncivilized Fang.

The dreadful diseases that have been imported into Africa are certainly a factor in the extermination of the Mpongwe. But the subject is too unpleasant to discuss at length in this place.

Again, the disregard of native institutions and the destruction of tribal authority by the foreign government tends to break down all authority and remove all moral restraints. This is more or less true in all West Africa. The native form of government among the Mpongwe is somewhat patriarchal; authority belongs to the head of the family, the head of the clan and the head of the tribe. The native reverence for the authority of these men is the saving virtue that sustains the tribe. But the chief’s authority and this reverence are destroyed together when the people see him tied up occasionally and flogged; or ruthlessly flung into prison; or his authority superseded by that of a native policeman. The kingly office goes begging for an occupant when men find that the grandeur of royalty consists in being held more or less responsible for all the misdoings of all the tribe, while, perhaps, some black mistress of a government official has more real power than the native king.

The authority of custom, in former times, even exceeded the authority of kings. But the foreigner ignores native customs, or ridicules them, or even condemns and forbids them—often without understanding them. The tribal customs of Africa, from the most trivial to the most revolting, are not arbitrary, but have a moral meaning and significance; though they sometimes outlive their usefulness. They either embody such rude justice as the African has attained; or else they represent the operation of the law of self-preservation. One can give a rational explanation even of the most cruel and revolting custom that I have ever known in Africa, namely, the custom of burying a man’s wives alive with him when he dies. Africa abounds with deadly poisons, and African wives frequently contract an unpleasant habit of using them in the cooking-pot. How common the practice is may be judged by the African proverb: “We don’t eat out of the same dish,” used for instance as follows: “So-and-so is angry but what do I care? We don’t eat out of the same dish.” The wife prepares her husband’s food and has the daily opportunity of using this deadly weapon. But this burial custom—the fact that when he dies she will be buried with him—gives her a personal interest in keeping him alive. It is scarcely necessary to say that I think that this custom ought to be suppressed and its observance severely punished. But meantime something ought to be done to improve the morals of the African wife.

The dowry paid for a wife among the Mpongwe is forty dollars. Among the uncivilized Fang it is several times this amount, although the Fang are very poor in comparison. The Mpongwe dowry was reduced by the French government as a step in the direction of its abolishment; for it is nothing more than a purchase price. But the result of this forced reduction of the dowry has been demoralization rather than civilization. The custom among all tribes is that if a wife desert her husband her family must pay back the dowry or send back the wife. It is not easy to send back a large dowry, and the people, being unable or unwilling to do it, will send the woman back unless she has a very strong case against her husband. But forty dollars can easily be raised, especially if there should be several white men to help. So there is nothing to prevent the Mpongwe woman from leaving her husband when she pleases; and it pleases her to change him frequently. Until the African attains the moral sentiment that makes the marriage bond sacred it is better that there should be the bond of outright purchase and ownership rather than no marriage at all.

It is so with the whole body of custom. It expresses the inward life of the people. It contains such rudimentary morality as they know, or embodies a principle that is necessary for the preservation of society. It is on the level of the African’s moral culture. It corresponds with his beliefs and has the consent of his mind. The foreigner may by sheer force change his outward condition, but unless there be also a corresponding inward change he does not respond to the new obligations; his moral responsibility is not equal to the new demands, and the result is moral degeneration followed inevitably by physical degeneration.

This very matter of the dowry illustrates the different method of the missionary and, I believe, the true principle of progress. Our early missionaries made no church laws against the dowry, but they faithfully preached the equality of woman and the higher idea of marriage; and as the Christians became imbued with this sentiment they themselves abolished the dowry within their own society. But they did it at the instance of a moral sentiment which made marriage more secure than ever. The inward preceded the outward change. The missionary does as much harm as anybody else when he adopts the easy method of ruthless and indiscriminate assaults upon native customs and beliefs. It was not the Master’s method. Even slavery Jesus did not attack with violence; that were as vain—if I may use the illustration of Dr. Richard Storrs—as vain as to attack an Arctic ice-field with pick and drill; but He turned upon it the summer sunshine and it slowly melted away. He inspired men with a sentiment of human brotherhood and destroyed slavery by expelling the spirit that made it possible. The African has a rooted antipathy to the pick and drill, but he loves the sunshine; he is responsive to truth and capable of high and transforming affections.

It is said on the coast that England rules her African colonies for commerce, France for revenue and Spain for plunder. The English policy gives the utmost encouragement to native enterprise and thrift, and on the whole the English colonies are the most prosperous and promising. The French policy of revenue imposes such a burden of taxation that life no longer consists in eating and drinking and talking palavers, but in paying taxes. And the enormous import and export duty stifles enterprise and in the end defeats its own purpose. But it must be said that the French officials, of all classes, in their personal intercourse with the natives, are free and friendly, and in consequence are much better liked than the English officials, who, though usually just, are often arrogant, and, while they care for the welfare of the native, care nothing for his feelings. One recalls that in the early days of America the French got on with the Indians much better than the English.

The German policy cannot be described in one word. Their policy is commercial; but they love government for its own sake and they govern far too much. There is an element of militarism in their rule that is entirely too rigorous for the African, and must ultimately destroy him unless it becomes modified through knowledge and experience. It is certain that Germany has not yet solved the problems of colonial government in Africa. Some years have passed since I lived in Kamerun and it may be that conditions have improved—though I doubt it; but it used to be that the first visible institution of government in a new district was the whipping-post. Whatever Germany does she does with all her might, and the activity of this institution made the proximity of a government station an undesirable neighbourhood if one chanced to have a human heart. The outpost of civilization in Africa is frequently a whipping-post.

TRADING-HOUSE AT GABOON.
The beach strewn with logs of mahogany in preparation for shipment.

The fatal defect, both of trade and government, as independent civilizing agencies, is that they have forcibly altered the outward conditions of the native without changing the inward man. The African is somewhat in the position of the poor Indian in our own country a few generations ago. He was a hunter in a land stripped of game, a warrior deprived of arms and obliged henceforth to seek his rights by legal technicalities—while he was still the very same old Indian, inwardly not a whit better, and by no means equal to the demands and moral obligations which the new conditions imposed upon him. One may clip the claws of the tiger and even pull his teeth, but he is still a tiger; and a French uniform on an African cannibal does not make him a vegetarian.

IV
A LIVING REMNANT

The diminishing number of the Mpongwe, the hostility of the climate, the insistence by the government that French must be the language of the schools, the great difficulty of procuring a corps of French-speaking missionaries, the curse of rum, the presence of a large community of white men and the natural irresponsibility of the white man in Africa—all these have combined to limit the work of our mission among the Mpongwe and to make it exceedingly difficult. And besides, there is, especially, the strong opposition of the French Jesuits who have a large mission in Gaboon and any number of missionaries that the work may demand. Their hostility makes coöperation impossible. Their methods, of course, are Jesuitical. We have the authority of certain historians for the statement that in the early days of missions among the American Indians the Jesuit Fathers taught the Iroquois of Canada that Jesus was a big Indian Chief who scalped women and children. If that was ever true—and I doubt it—their object of course was to gain first the outward adherence of the Indian, submission to their authority, with the intention of afterwards instructing him in the full content of Christianity, as they understood it. The French Jesuits, perhaps with the same good intention, have baptized nearly all the polygamy, drunkenness, immorality and fetishism of Gaboon, and they call it Christianity. But I believe it is more inaccessible to moral and spiritual influence than it was before.

One day shortly after the news of the death of Pope Leo XIII reached Gaboon, and before I had heard of it, I was passing along the beach when I heard in a small village the ululu of women who were wailing for the dead. Their mourning has usually a local occasion, and I had no doubt but that somebody was dead in their own village; so I hurried over. The mourning ceased abruptly at my approach—a triumph of curiosity over grief. When I asked who was dead, the leader answered: “The Pope!” She followed the answer with a prolonged howl in which they all joined, and the tearless mourning proceeded. That is how I learned of the death of Leo XIII.

The Protestant Christians of Gaboon are a very small community; but they are the best Christians, and the dearest people, I have known in Africa. They alone, of the Mpongwe, have good-sized families of healthy children. They are the living remnant of a dying tribe.

When I moved to Baraka the Mpongwe work, the oldest in the mission, was in charge of a fellow missionary, Mr. Boppell, and I had not expected to take any part in it. But before the first year had passed, Mr. Boppell’s health compelled him to leave Africa, his wife having died at the beginning of the year. From that time I had charge of the Gaboon Church, besides the work among the Fang. In particular I undertook the training of an Mpongwe candidate for the ministry, who since Mr. Boppell’s departure was occupying the pulpit and preaching very acceptably. This man, Iguwi, I instructed four hours each week; but after most of the year had passed, I felt that I could perhaps spend the time to better advantage.

Iguwi was the best educated and the most eccentric man of the entire Mpongwe tribe. He was a monk by nature. The African is distinctly a marrying man. He is usually very much married. But Iguwi at the age of forty-five was still single and was therefore a mystery to the natives. He and myself were the only two single men in the entire region of Gaboon. My own case seemed strange enough to the natives. They never lost an opportunity of asking me for an explanation. “Mr. Milligan,” says a wistful and sympathetic inquirer, “you nebber get wife?”

“No, I nebber get one.”

After a period of silence:

“Well, Mr. Milligan, why you nebber get wife? You no have money for buy her? or she done lef’ you and run ’way wid odder man?”

In reply to these frequent queries, I gave so many answers that I have almost forgotten which was the right one.

Iguwi was the only African I have ever known who was not a marrying man. I have known other single men among them, but they were either busy laying plans to run away with some other man’s wife, or were working day and night and stealing, according to opportunity, to obtain sufficient dowry.

Iguwi was extremely bashful; and in this also he was an exception to his race. On one occasion, an elder of the church and his wife, intimate friends of Iguwi, invited him to a chicken breakfast. They lived beside him and he passed their house several times a day. Nevertheless, he replied in a letter that he hoped they would excuse him on account of his bashfulness; but that he would be very grateful if they would send him his portion of the chicken. Iguwi was born in slavery, and as he became educated and somewhat cultivated he was very sensitive in regard to his birth. This indeed may account largely for his bashfulness.

But quite as prominent as Iguwi’s bashfulness and quaint eccentricities was his transparent sincerity and goodness. His religion had not the African tendency to exhaust itself in mental transports. The poor always had a friend in him. I have had to remonstrate with him for giving away all that he had. On one occasion, he came to me and asked the monthly payment of his salary in advance. I expressed surprise at his need of it, seeing that only a few days before I had paid him for the past month. But I found afterwards that he had expended the whole mouth’s payment in helping a poor widow to repair her house. She was not in any way related to him; and she had relations who were able to help her; but she had a sharp tongue and had turned them away from her, and when poverty and distress came there was none to help her. The most degraded of the heathen believed in Iguwi and would never have doubted his honesty or truth. In this sense, indeed, he was a “living epistle” of Christ which all could read and which none misunderstood. For so gentle a spirit he had a set of categories that were especially drastic. On one occasion, when I asked him how many persons had attended his village prayer-meeting, he replied: “Fifteen Christians and six sinners.” The attendance on the preceding Sunday was “ninety Christians and twenty-five sinners.”

Iguwi was a remarkably good preacher. He had been taught in the mission school at Baraka in the old days when English was still permitted, but at best he received there only the equivalent of a primary-school education. After he decided to study for the ministry he received further training in a theological class. It was a mystery to me how a man so bashful and diffident had ever chosen the ministry for a profession. But when Iguwi stood on the platform his diffidence disappeared entirely and his speech was perfectly free and courageous. The people all enjoyed his preaching and were helped by it. He was so absent-minded, however, in regard to his dress, that a committee should have been appointed to look him over before he went into the pulpit, in order to see that nothing essential had been omitted, and that his clothes were fastened on him securely. A perpetual problem to the native mind is how to get clothes to stay on without buttons—a problem of which polite African society anxiously awaits the solution. Even with buttons, the imported garments of civilization are still uncertain, when worn by those who are not to the manner born. Sometimes, as if by a sudden act of disenchantment, the buttons simultaneously unfasten, strings untie and clothes fall off. Iguwi’s trousers were supported by a red sash, which often got loose and began to unwind slowly as he preached. When the loose end of the sash touched the floor, it was a question as to what the climax of the sermon would be. I finally advised him either to preach shorter sermons or wear a longer sash.

Iguwi’s sermons were thoughtful and spiritual. It was strange how so unpractical a man could preach such practical sermons. They must have come to him by intuition rather than by any exercise of judgment. It was also indicative of a remarkable intellect that a man without any library, who had read only a few books that he had borrowed from missionaries, could preach sermons that were always well constructed and thoughtful. I happen to recall an outline which he submitted to me one day on the text, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.” His three main points were: First, The Spirit leads to the cross of Christ; second, He leads to moral conflict (Iguwi probably said to “war”); third, He leads to victory.

When I was leaving Africa, I gladdened Iguwi’s heart with a set of Matthew Henry’s commentaries—which more than doubled his library. The quaintness, the homely simplicity and spirituality of Matthew Henry were not unlike Iguwi himself.

I have said that outside the pulpit Iguwi, with all his goodness, was utterly unpractical. Often, indeed, he seemed to lack common sense. I once gave him a book to read in which the writer, by way of illustrating the evanescence of human glory, referred to the gorgeous palace of ice which was built by Catherine of Russia, and so soon dissolved beneath the sun. Iguwi had heard of ice and knew very well what it was, but being unfamiliar with its resources of illustration he was deeply impressed. While he was still reading this book, one night in prayer-meeting he offered a prayer in which I, who did not understand the Mpongwe language, was suddenly startled by the English words, ice, palace, Catherine, Russia.

Even if the congregation had known English the illustration would still have been unintelligible to them. For aught they knew Russia might be the name of an African tribe, or a river in America, and they were as ignorant of the other words; and since those four words comprised the whole illustration, the force and beauty of it must have been somewhat lost upon them. It occurred to me at the time that a library, instead of being a help to Iguwi, would probably have spoiled his preaching.

Iguwi was so unpractical it seemed best not to ordain him. If the worst heathen of Gaboon had asked admission to the membership of the church Iguwi would have received him with a God-bless-you. But he continued to visit the sick and to give away his living to the poor. His goodness shone along all the lowly paths of service.

A service in the Gaboon Church is much like a service in one of our best coloured churches in America. There is perfect order and good attention, and we need not labour too much to be simple, for they listen intelligently. Occasionally, however, one is reminded that it is really Africa and not America. I have seen a man, in the first pair of shoes that he ever possessed, come to church unusually late, tramp as heavily as reverence would allow in coming up the aisle, and then sit in the end of the seat, assuming an unnatural and uncomfortable position in order to keep his feet in the aisle. What is the use of spending money for shoes and wearing them with so much discomfort if people are not to know that you have them? Shoes for the African trade are purposely made with loud-squeaking soles; the African will not buy shoes that do not “talk.” Sometimes, in localities further from the coast, the head of the family will enter the church alone, wearing the shoes, and upon reaching his seat will throw them out of the window to his wife, who also will wear them into the church, and perhaps others of the family after her.

Among the Mpongwe it was deeply impressed upon me that the sincerity of piety is not to be judged by its fluency. Most white people who acquire the art of public speaking, especially in religious meetings, are obliged to cultivate it; and only a small minority of Christians can offer a prayer in public. But the African speaks with perfect freedom and entire absence of selfconsciousness. He can offer a public prayer long before he becomes Christian, or has any such intention. It took me a long time to put the proper estimate upon fluency. One day I visited a woman, Nenge, who was going further and further astray through rum and other Mpongwe vices. I was so greatly impressed by her eloquent expression of ideals and aspirations that I inferred a great change in her life. I prayed with her and asked her if she would pray for herself. Without the slightest hesitation she began a prayer of considerable length that almost brought tears to my eyes. She prayed for herself and me. But I found out afterwards that she had not the least intention of parting with either of her great sins, and she was surprised that I had so misunderstood her. She had not meant to deceive me. The truth is that any native could offer such a prayer. After several such experiences I became wary. It is a great gift, however, when it is truly consecrated. An Mpongwe prayer-meeting never lags.

The Gaboon Church in its early history was ministered to for many years by Toko Truman, probably the most eloquent native preacher who was ever trained in the West Africa Mission. He was entirely blind for seven years before he died. The first time I visited Gaboon Toko was still living. I was on my way home to America and was detained several days at Gaboon, waiting for a French steamer. I had heard much of Toko, and I visited him every day. Among ever so many incidents of interest which he related I recall his reply to a certain white trader, a very profane man, who took pleasure in mocking at Toko’s faith and self-denial. One day the trader remarked that if there was any such place as heaven, he himself was as sure of an entrance there as anybody.

Toko replied: “I have read the words of Jesus, ‘Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven,’ that is to say, not even all those who pray shall enter; and the chances would seem to be small for you, who do not pray at all. Heaven is not as cheap as you think.”

Izuri is an elderly woman, a member in the Mpongwe Church, whose charity towards the Fang of the interior presents a striking contrast to the spirit of the coast people generally. I have already said that, in the mind of the coast people, the Fang belong to the orders of lower animals, and that the coast women are ashamed to be heard speaking Fang, though they all speak it; for they trade with them daily. Izuri, when I had charge of the Mpongwe Church, was sewing for a trading-house one whole day each week, thereby earning twenty cents, which she gave to help support a native missionary among the Fang. The Fang come down the river long distances to sell food and building material in the Gaboon market. They must travel with the tide, and often they remain at the coast all night. It is sometimes hard for them to obtain shelter; and, moreover, they are subjected to every form of temptation by those who would get from them the money or goods they have procured for their produce. Izuri might often be seen going along the beach in the evening, inviting these homeless people to her town where she gave them shelter in a house which she owned but did not occupy. And often in the evening, sitting down in their midst, she would talk to them in their own language, fairly scandalizing her neighbours. I presume Izuri still continues her ministry to the poor Fang.

An Mpongwe man, Ntyango, showed this same spirit towards the Fang and went among them and preached to them. He died about the time I went to Gaboon, and was buried in the mission graveyard. Some years afterwards the workmen were cutting grass in the graveyard. Among them was a Fang man named Biyoga, whom Ntyango had taught to read when he was a small boy. As Biyoga was cutting grass and occasionally spelling out the names on the tombstones he found Ntyango’s name on one of them. Sacred memories stirred the heart of the wild Fang. The next day he came to me and told me that since the days, long ago, when he had known Ntyango he had never met another man like him. All the time since finding his name and while working beside his grave he had been thinking of him, recalling his kindness to the Fang, especially to the children, and his Christian teaching, and now he wished only to be the kind of man that Ntyango was.

AN MPONGWE WEDDING.
The bride is a daughter of Lucina, who stands at the left of the bride.

I think of Sara whose honesty and goodness had beautified her face. Left a widow with five young children, and very poor, she often felt the burden of care too heavy for her shoulders; but she went bravely on. When her daughter was married and the customary dowry of forty dollars was offered Sara by the young husband, she refused to take it, believing that it was not in accord with Christian principle. The king of the Mpongwe tribe, being jealous for old customs, resented Sara’s action, and having invited her to his town made her a prisoner, thinking to intimidate her; but he failed even to pick a quarrel with her, and after a few days he released her.

I think of Lucina, than whom the Mpongwe Church never had a more faithful member. Lucina’s husband, preferring a dissolute life of drunkenness and polygamy, left her with five young children. Indeed, when he took other wives he had to leave her; for her character embraced the sensibility as well as the faithfulness of Christian wifehood. She brought up her children under great difficulties, working for them like a very slave; and though she was young, educated and extremely attractive, the breath of scandal never tarnished her reputation. When her husband accepted a dowry for their daughter and sent a portion of it to Lucina, she sent it back to him saying that if he had sold their daughter for a price, her conscience would not allow her to share it with him.

And, among others, there was Sonia, a white-haired old man with the heart of a child. Sonia had as many stories as Uncle Remus; but his best stories were the incidents and adventures of his own life.

One still night as we lay at anchor, in the middle of the swift-rolling river, with the moonshine lying in silver ringlets across its surface, the boat-boys asked Sonia to tell them a story. As usual his first reply was that he did not know any stories—excepting a few foolish old stories that they had heard till they were tired of them. But at length—as usual—he thought of one, and then another, and still another.

He first told a typical story about the tortoise and his creditors. The tortoise in African folk-lore is notorious for unscrupulous cunning.

Once upon a time there was a great famine in the land and food was very dear. So the tortoise called upon his friends, the worm, the cock, the bushcat, the leopard and the hunter, and borrowed from each a box of brass rods, promising to pay them at the end of the season on different days. On the day appointed the worm appeared and asked for the payment of the loan. Then the tortoise asked him to wait until he should go and fetch the money. So the tortoise went off to get the money, and the next day he came back with the cock, who also came according to appointment for the payment of his loan. Then the worm and the cock met, and the cock ate the worm.

Then the cock asked for his money and the tortoise asked him to wait until he should go and fetch it. And he went off again, and came back next day with the bushcat, who had come for the payment of his loan. Then the cock and the bushcat met and the bushcat killed the cock and ate him.

Then the bushcat asked for his money and the tortoise asked him to wait until he should go and fetch it. And he went off again, and came back the next day with the leopard, and the leopard killed the bushcat and ate it.

Then the leopard asked for his money, and the tortoise asked him to wait until he should go and fetch it. And he went off again, and came back with the hunter. And the hunter and the leopard killed each other.

Then the tortoise laughed at them all for being fools. And the moral is that it is not wise to lend to a man lest he may wish you evil and seek to kill you. But Sonia reminds the boys that the story contains only the wisdom of the heathen, and that Jesus teaches us to help those who need our help even if we should lose by it.

After various comments on the moral of the story, to the effect that “loan oft loses both itself and friend,” Sonia tells a story of two friends and a wag.

There were two friends who had been friends from childhood, and who were more than brothers to each other; and these two friends had never been known to quarrel. Now there was a wag in a neighbouring town, who one day, when he heard the people talking about these two friends who had never quarrelled, declared that he would make them quarrel. That day he put on a coat of which one side was blue and the other side red and then walked down the road that ran between the two men’s houses. In the evening the friends met as usual and one of them said: “Did you see the wag pass to-day with a red coat on?”

“Yes,” said the other, “I saw him pass; but it wasn’t a red coat. It was blue.”

“I am sure it was red,” said the first.

“But it wasn’t. It was blue,” said the other.

And so they disputed until one of them called the other a fool; and then they fought.

“Take that,” said one.

“And that,” said the other.

So they fought until their wives came running to them and parted them. But they went to their houses with heavy hearts. For they had been friends for a lifetime and now their friendship was broken. And all the people felt sorrow. But the wag, when he came along, laughed and told them how he had worn a coat which was red on one side and blue on the other. And the friends and their wives ever afterwards hated the wag.

Sonia’s stories were most interesting when he recounted real incidents in his own life. When a young man, he told us, he had lived as a trader at this Fang town opposite which we were anchored. The noise of drumming, dancing and singing had ceased and the town was wrapped in untroubled sleep. There is no stillness in the world like that of an African town in the night.

Sonia told us about a battle he had witnessed, which was fought upon the river, at this very place where we lay; a battle between this town and a town which then stood on the opposite bank, but of which nothing now remained. This town was already old at the time of the war but the other was new, the people having come recently from the far interior, being driven forth by the hostility of more powerful clans behind. There was no quarrel between the towns; but the people of the old town thought that it would be good policy to give their new neighbours a whipping upon their arrival in order to insure a wholesome respect.

First, I believe, they stole a woman. Then followed a guerrilla warfare, in which each side killed as they had opportunity, waylaying individuals, or rushing from ambush upon a party of venturesome stragglers from the enemy’s town. In this way a number were killed on each side; and the war, which was first undertaken more as a vain exploit or adventure than from any serious motive, was soon prosecuted with feelings of deadly hate and a purpose of revenge. Every night, from each town, the wail of mourning for the dead was wafted across the river; and curses were mingled with the mourning.

At length one canoe attacked another in the river, where they had been fishing. Immediately other canoes came to their help, and still others, ever so many of them, pushing off rapidly from each side until all the men of the two towns, young and old, were in the middle of the river where they fought to a finish. When fighting in canoes, whatever other weapons they may have, they carry a small battle-ax, which is used especially to prevent the capsizing of the canoe by those who are already in the water. Sonia told how that, again and again, at a blow they severed a man’s hand, or completely disabled him. They swim so well that they could still make a strong fight after being capsized. The battle was long, and the river ran red with their blood. Those who were killed were carried by the current out to the sea to feed the sharks.

The people of the new town lost. Those of them who were left pulled down their town and moved to another place. In a few years nothing remained of it but one or two skeletons with the grass growing through their ribs. But for years afterwards the superstitious native passing along the river in the dead of night heard again the noise of battle—fierce cries and dying groans. And whenever this sound is heard, they say, again the river runs red like blood.

One incident of the war, prior to the final battle, I recall, as Sonia told it that night.

The people of the old town captured a man of the other side, and his son, a little boy. They bound the father, and before his eyes deliberately killed his son—and ate his flesh. The main motive of cannibalism, under such circumstances, would be neither wanton cruelty nor a vicious appetite, but fetishism. By eating one of their number they render the enemy powerless to do them any farther injury. Some time afterwards they slew the father. But already they had broken his heart, and with hands uplifted he welcomed the death-blow.

The emotion with which old Sonia told this whole story indicated how his own heart had been wrung. He said not a word about any effort of his to dissuade the people from their cruelty; but I knew him well, and I was confident that the part he had taken was not unheroic. That is a story that was never told.

Sonia in his latter years, between long intervals of sickness, was a missionary to the Fang. They all regarded him with love and reverence. The oldest savage among them, and the wildest, were as children when they addressed him.

In the little graveyard, on the mission hill at Baraka, are the graves of those who have thought that life itself was not too great a price to pay for the saving of such men and women from degradation. Henry Drummond said that while in Africa he had been in an atmosphere of death all the time, and that he realized, as never before, the awful fact of death and its desolation as something calling for an answer. One of my first experiences in Gaboon reminded me that I was again in the land of death, when I assisted in the burial service of the beautiful young wife and bride of a fellow missionary, less than three months after their arrival in Africa. So far away from home we enter deeply into each other’s sorrows. I was standing by in the last hour, when with pale face the stricken but silent husband stepped to the open door and nervously plucked a flower growing there, a large crimson hibiscus, the beauty of the tropics, which he laid on the pillow beside his unconscious wife, and the two broken flowers drooped and died together, while the shadows darkened around us and the night came on. In the unconscious act there was something more affecting than in any words of grief. It seemed to relate this death to all death everywhere, in a world where forms of life appear only to vanish into darkness and day hurries to the night.

Soon after our patient sufferer had ceased to breathe, in the midst of the stillness that followed the prolonged struggle with the fever, a storm that had been gathering with the darkness broke forth with great violence that shook the house. I had only arrived in Africa. I went out into the storm unspeakably oppressed with doubt, to which it was a kind of relief. Was it a noble sacrifice? or an appalling waste? In the intervals of the storm, and mingling with it, there came the sound of a dirge, the hopeless death-wail, from a village close by, where the poor natives were mourning for one of their number who had died that day, a young man at whose bed I had stood a few hours earlier, the only son of a heart-broken mother. Those who have always known the words of One who brought life and immortality to light cannot realize the heathen view of death, and the abysmal darkness of the invisible world. There is no sound so well known in Africa, and none that so haunts the memory in after years, as the mourning dirge, in which with united voices they chant their sorrow for the dead—their despair and desolation; the sound that is borne upon every night-wind and becomes to the imagination the very voice of Africa. The groaning of the palm-trees in the darkness of that night, as they bent beneath the tempest, and in the distance the sound of the troubled sea, were the fitting accompaniment and interlude. But in our house, beside our dead, there was light—and doubt was vanquished. There, hope was whispering to a stricken heart sweet promises of life; and faith was saying: “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

V
AFRICAN MUSIC

It was many years ago, among the Bulu, in Kamerun. Dr. Good and myself were holding a religious service in the town of a great chief, Abesula, whose thirty-five wives were seated around him. After we had sung several hymns Dr. Good began to preach, but had not proceeded as far as secondly when Abesula, interrupting, exclaimed: “Say, white man, won’t you stop talking and sing again? And I wish you would dance with your singing; for I don’t care for singing without dancing; and I don’t like preaching at all.”

We found that Abesula’s whole family were united in this preference for comic opera. But Dr. Good and I were in hopeless disagreement as to which of us should do the dancing. Besides, the Africans themselves are expert dancers and qualified judges; and if our music had “charms to soothe the savage breast,” I am afraid that our dancing would have made more savages than it would have soothed.

After a few months among the Bulu I had an organ brought up from the coast, a baby-organ, which when folded a man could carry on his head. The people had heard that something wonderful was coming with the next caravan; and on the day of its arrival it seemed as if the whole Bulu tribe had assembled on our hill. Having unpacked the organ I set it on the porch while they all stood on the ground below. The tension of suspense during the slow progress of preparation was a test of endurance. At last, everything being ready, I sat down at the organ, filled the bellows, and amidst profound silence suddenly sounded a loud chord. Instantly the crowd bolted. Nothing was to be seen but disappearing legs. The men, being more fleet of limb, reached the hiding-places first; then the women and larger children, the smaller children being left to their fate. To them the organ was of course a fetish, and full of talking spirits. Gradually they came out from their hiding-places. Then, as fear subsided, each one began to laugh at the others and to tell his ancestors all about it. In the ensuing noise the organ had a rest. They soon became devotedly fond of it, and it was a great help in our mission work. Regularly on Sunday morning after the service I would set the organ on the porch and play for them until I was tired—and that was not very long; for in that climate the bellows were soon in such condition that the playing was prominently spectacular, done with the feet, reinforced by all the muscles of the body. In after years, among the Fang of the French Congo, I always carried an organ with me.

To all the interior natives, Bulu and Fang, and even to the coast tribe of Batanga, my playing of that little organ was much the most wonderful thing about me. In going to Africa a second time, after four years’ absence, on my way to Gaboon I landed at Batanga for a few hours. The natives remembered me as having a beard, and I was now shaved. But there was with me a fellow traveller who had just such a beard as mine had been; so that, to the natives, he looked more like me than I did myself. They of course mistook him for me; and the stranger got a friendly reception which pleased him as much as it surprised him. He said he never had met such friendly natives. But upon my protest they discovered their mistake and began to pay me some attention. I insisted that they had forgotten me and that my feelings were hurt; at which they made the most excited remonstrance. They remembered that I had played the organ. One of the boys, in his eagerness to convince me that they had not forgotten me, began to imitate my motions at the organ, which he exaggerated to an outlandish caricature in which hands, feet, head, mouth and eyes were equally active, saying as he performed: “Look me, Mr. Milligan; this be you.” Following his example, they all engaged in a performance that would have scandalized any company of self-respecting monkeys, saying the while: “This be you, Mr. Milligan; this be you.”

My fellow traveller, who may have felt somewhat chagrined at finding that the hearty reception accorded him was intended for me, turned to me and made some remarks that have no rightful place here.

We are all familiar with the legend that Pythagoras invented the first musical instrument after listening to the blacksmith’s hammers. Longfellow repeats it in the poem, “To a Child”:

“As great Pythagoras of yore,

Standing beside the blacksmith’s door,

And hearing the hammers, as they smote

The anvils with a different note,

Stole from the varying tones that hung

Vibrant on every iron tongue

The secret of the sounding wire,

And formed the seven-corded lyre.”

Shakespeare also refers to this reputed origin of music in “The Two Noble Kinsmen.” Pirithous, relating the death of Arcite, tells how he rode the pavement on a horse so black that the superstitious would have feared to buy him, a prancing steed whose iron-shod feet seemed only to touch the stones—as if counting them, rather than trampling them, and—

“thus went counting

The flinty pavement, dancing as ’twere to the music

His own hoofs made—for, as they say, from iron

Came music’s origin.”

Nevertheless, this story—like many others that cluster about the name of Pythagoras, as, for instance, that he was seen in two cities at the same time—is seriously vulnerable, and is probably pure myth, without enough of fact to qualify as a legend. The obvious objection, that various hammers striking upon an anvil give out, not different notes, but the same—for the notes vary with the anvil and not with the hammers—Longfellow meets by using the plural, anvils.

In the latest of Mr. H. E. Krehbiel’s learned and interesting books, The Pianoforte and Its Music, the writer holds that the first of all stringed instruments was the bow. Every boy knows the musical twang of the bowstring at the moment that the arrow flies. In the Iliad, Apollo, the god of music, is also the god of archery, and is called the “bearer of the silver bow.” Mr. Krehbiel also recalls the passage in the Odyssey in which Ulysses tries his bow, after the suitors of Penelope, one by one, had tried and failed; and when Ulysses drew the arrow to its head and let it go, the string rang shrill and sweet as the note of a swallow. This theory of the origin of musical instruments is strikingly supported by the instruments in present use among the savage and primitive tribes of West Africa.

A Kombe cook, at Gaboon, each day after dinner, lay down for a nap and played himself to sleep upon an instrument which was nothing but a bow with a single string. The string was made of a certain runner, the fibre of which is very tough and gives a resonant note. The cook found that by plucking the string with a metal, rather than with his fingers, he produced a better note; so for this purpose he regularly used the bread-knife and took it to bed with him. When I first heard this unclassical music I thought he was playing on a Jew’s-harp.

The native improves this instrument when he attaches to one end of it a gourd or calabash, in the shape of a bowl, to augment the sound—the first sound-box. When he plays he places the flat side of the gourd against his chest. He improves the instrument immensely when he adds three strings, making four in all, successively shorter. The four strings pass over a central bridge, which is notched at different heights for the different strings. This makes eight strings and produces eight different notes. The gourd, or sound-box, is placed in the middle of the bow, opposite the bridge. This instrument is usually made from the midrib of a palm-leaf. The bent midrib itself forms the bow; while the strings are the loosened fibres of its own tough skin. These are made taut by the vertical bridge, and their vibrating length is regulated by strong bands passing around the ends of the strings and the bow.

Another native instrument is a harp, both in shape and in principle. The upper end is a bow, or half-bow; the lower end is an oblong sound-box covered with a perforated skin—monkey-skin or goatskin. The upper ends of the strings are attached to pegs inserted in the bow, by which the strings may be tuned. There is also a five-stringed lyre, with a sound-box somewhat like the harp, but instead of a single bow at the end, there are five bent fingers, each with its string. There is a very rudimentary dulcimer, and a xylophone, and various modifications of the instruments which I have described.

The favourite of all these instruments, and the one of largest musical capacity, is the harp. The native uses it most frequently to accompany his singing. There are professional singers among them, whose position is somewhat analogous to that of minstrels several centuries ago in Europe. The songs of these professional singers are usually lengthy ballads—traditional tales in lyric form. The monotony of the solo, which is a dramatic recitative, is broken by a somewhat regular and frequent choral response. The singer half closes his eyes and sways his body as he sings. He seems oblivious of time and place. I have sometimes thought that there was an element of hypnotism in his influence upon his audience. Upon the instrument he plays a running and unvaried accompaniment to his song. But it would be a great mistake to judge the song, or the African capacity for melody, by the miserably inadequate instrument. The singer’s voice far exceeds the instrument, both in range and in the division of intervals.

The fact is, however, that the only one of his musical instruments which the African regards with profound respect is his dearly-beloved tom-tom—the drum to which he dances. From this some have inferred that, to the African savage, rhythm without melody is music, which of course is a mistake. It is even doubtful whether his sense of melody be not altogether as keen as his sense of rhythm, though not equally appealed to. The drum is very easy to construct; but not so the harp or viol; and the Negro is so lacking in mechanical genius that he cannot invent an instrument capable of reproducing his melodies. Therefore the melodies are always vocal. They do not dance to the drum, by itself; for they invariably sing when they dance. Dancing without singing is almost impossible; at least I have never seen it during seven years in Africa. They are passionately fond of singing and have good voices. The voices of the men are much better than those of the women and have sometimes the resonant sonority of a deep organ-tone, or an exquisite melancholy, which it is to be hoped they may never lose through future conditions of civilization.

The native songs are elementary but fascinating. Few white men, however, can sing them; for the scales, or tone-systems, upon which most of them are based, are entirely different from our major and minor modes. Their scales have not a distinct tonic, that is, a basal tone from which the others in the system are derived, as, for instance, the first tone, do, of our major scale. It follows that the cadences of their music are not clearly defined; or, as a friend of mine would say, “They don’t taper off to an end like ours.”

Although their music is so difficult for the white man, the natives learn our music with astonishing ease, even their oldest men and women, and sing it well—if they have half a chance. But is it surprising that—since our scales are new to them—they at first need a little careful training, or at least the lead of a clear-toned organ reasonably well played? Otherwise they are not unlikely to substitute the tones of their own scales. The result is indescribable. Imagine a large congregation singing the doxology with all their might, and about half of them singing it in G minor instead of G major! But the comparison is inadequate. The singing in some mission congregations is enough to cause a panic. The first Sunday that I spent in Africa was at Batanga, where the people had learned the hymns before any white missionaries went to live among them. I was near the church when the large congregation started the first hymn. It was a translation of “God is the Refuge of His saints, When storms of sharp distress invade.” The tune of this storm of sharp distress was good old Ward, but, alas, in such a state of decomposition that I did not recognize it until they had sung it through twice. And so it was with many of the tunes. Their own music has no extended range of high and low notes; and so, in these hymns, whenever they came to a high passage, or even a single high note, they sang it an octave lower, and the low notes they sang an octave higher. It was a vocal feat, and no audience of white people could have done it without training; but it did not sound much like music, still less like worship.

So great a musician as Dvorak, when he came to America, was profoundly moved by the original melodies of the American Negro, and became their enthusiastic champion. Indeed, they inspired the most beautiful of all his symphonies, the one entitled, “Aus der Neuen Welt.” I do not refer, of course, to the so-called Negro melodies composed by white men. Some of these are beautiful; but they are not Negro melodies. They do not express the Negro’s emotional life and he does not care much for them. Those wonderful songs of the Fisk Jubilee Singers are the real thing. Some of those very melodies may have originated in Africa. Others are more developed than any that I heard in Africa; but they are very similar, and they use the same strange scales, which makes them unfamiliar to our ears and difficult to acquire. Among them, I really believe, are occasional motives as capable of development as those of Hungary.

For a long time the music of Africa defied every attempt on my part to reduce it to musical notation. Very few persons have made the attempt; for it is easier to reduce their language to writing than their music. At first it seemed as inarticulate and spontaneous as the sound of the distant surf with which it blended, or the music of the night-wind in the bamboo.

The melody of African music is strange to our ears, because, as I have said, it is usually derived from tone-systems that are unlike either our major or minor scales. They have the pentatonic scale, that is, a major scale without the fourth and the seventh notes, thus avoiding the use of semitones; but their other scales are strange to most people. Among them are some of the scales of the plain-song of the Roman Catholic Church—the Gregorian chant. The plain-song is the only survival (among ourselves) of ancient music. Modern music is based upon harmony, and consists essentially in a progression of chords. The successive tones of a modern melody acquire their character not chiefly from their own sequence, as do ancient melodies, but from the chords to which they belong; and the chords even when they are not voiced are always understood. But harmony itself is modern, dating from about the thirteenth century. African melodies cannot always be harmonized, and when the harmony is added it is not usually effective.

But in African music another scale is employed which is not Gregorian, but oriental. It is a minor scale with an augmented interval—a tone and a half—between the sixth and seventh notes, that is, with a minor sixth and a major seventh. This peculiarly effective interval imparts an intense melancholy. Verdi, with delightful propriety, makes use of this very scale in Aïda, in the hymn of the Egyptian priestesses in the first act, where an extant Arab melody is introduced. This scale is probably the oldest tone-system in the world and may have come originally from the banks of the Ganges, in the far-distant past.

The African, like the oriental, conceives of the scales, and the melodies derived from them, as moving downward, instead of upward like our own. All African music sings downward. Another striking peculiarity is that they lack tonality, as the musician would say; that is, they seem not to be in any particular key. The strong feeling of the key-note which characterizes our major scale is entirely absent; and this, of course, accounts for the absence of a well-defined cadence, to which I have alluded. The weird fascination of the African dirge is largely due to this absence of tonality. Musical genius could hardly surpass this instinctive expression of despair—the desolation of an everlasting farewell.

The emotion which it represents, however intense, is rather disappointingly transient. Sometimes it is even unreal; I mean to say that it is sometimes indulged for its own sake. And this is true of the Negro everywhere. A few days ago I came upon an article in an old magazine, in which a Southern woman, in “Rambling Talks About the Negro,” tells of a mourning party of Negroes that assembled one night beside her house to finish a mourning ceremony that ought to have been a part of a funeral a few days earlier; but a storm had interrupted it. The unearthly mournfulness of their music was intensified by their beautiful voices until it became unbearable, and the woman bowed her head upon the window sill and cried without restraint, while imagination conjured up fictitious woes, such as the sudden death of her children and of all her friends, until she was alone in a bleak world. Then it occurred to her that it was wrong for people to indulge a voluntary anguish and make a luxury of misery; so she sent a servant to offer a barrel of watermelons to the party of mourners on condition that, instead of mourning, they should dance and jollify; to which they heartily responded, after first making sure that the melons were in good condition, for they really preferred to mourn.

When, to the peculiar scales which Africans employ, one adds the further fact that in African music (and indeed in the Negro melodies of our South) the note which corresponds to our seventh in the scale (a step below the tonic) is seldom a true seventh, but is slightly flatted, enough to make a distinct note with a character of its own, one has probably accounted for the peculiar plaintiveness, the elusiveness, the vague mysteriousness, which constitutes the charm of all true Negro music.

The rhythm of African music is a further impediment to our appreciation. In the music of the dance the rhythm is of necessity somewhat regular. But even in this music it is variable and does not conform throughout to any one time-scheme but changes back and forth from duple to triple within the same melody. This also is characteristic of oriental music. In most African music the rhythm is regulated by the words, like the recitative, the rhythmic imitation of declamatory speech. But it has the symmetry that feeling secures. The best way to learn the African’s song is to watch the swaying of his body and imitate it, and if the words have meaning let their feeling possess one. Mr. William E. Barton, the compiler of a small collection of choice Negro melodies, tells how that “Aunt Dinah,” who had been trying to teach a Negro hymn to a young lady, at last seeing her begin to sway her body slightly and pat her foot upon the floor, exclaimed: “Dat’s right, honey! Dat’s de berry way! Now you’s a-gittin’ it sho nuff! You’ll nebber larn ’em in de wuld till you sings ’em in de sperrit.”

The African sings not only his joy, but his grief; not only his love, but his anger, his revenge and his despair. Livingstone was greatly surprised, upon approaching a slave caravan, to hear some of them singing. But as he listened he found that they were singing words of grief and vengeance—for usually they were betrayed and sold by some of their own people. So it was everywhere, as old men of Gaboon have told me; they went away chanting their desolation and their curses upon those who had betrayed them.

There is no doubt that music is the art-form of the Negro. He is the most musical person living. His entire emotional life he utters in song. He has not yet done any great thing. His day is still future. But I believe that when he comes, he will come singing.

DANCE SONG OF MPONGWE
The time signature is only approximately correct, and forces a rhythmic symmetry which African music does not possess. The energetic momentum is characteristic of African dance music.

CANOE SONG OF GABOON
All African music, like Oriental music, sings downward.

A MOURNING DIRGE
This is chanted by an individual, or a succession of individuals, and is not the usual wail in which all join, though it is much like it. African music is not always based upon harmony; nor does harmony always improve it.

VI
PESTS

It is part of the squalid commonplace of life in Africa that the most exciting adventures are not with elephants but with ants, and our worst danger is not the leopard but the mosquito. And this struggle against minute enemies requires more patience than the fight with beasts, both because it is not occasional, but an unremitting warfare, and because it does not appeal to our love of the heroic, nor stimulate with the promise of praise. When Paul tells us that he fought with beasts at Ephesus, our hearts swell with admiration; but if he had said: “I have fought with the mosquitoes in Africa,” he would have elicited no sympathy and some ridicule; although the latter is also a fight for life, and attended by greater danger and weariness and pain.

It is significant that it was in Africa that Moses summoned the ten plagues to his aid in humbling the haughty Pharaoh. If ten had not been sufficient he might have summoned ten times ten, and without exhausting the domestic resources.

We are grateful that common houseflies are not sufficiently numerous to constitute a pest, except where cattle are bred in large numbers. In Gaboon there was no need for screens on doors and windows.

But there are many kinds of flies, and the natives who have not learned to wear clothing commonly carry a fly-brush made of a bunch of stiff grass about two feet long, that they may defend the whole area of the back, where the fly usually makes its attack. When one sees a fly on a neighbour’s back it is regarded as a duty of friendship to come up behind that neighbour slowly and stealthily, giving the fly full time to bite his worst and so be deserving of death, then to strike an awful blow on the neighbour’s back, fit to bring him to his feet with a yell. It seldom harms the fly, but it expresses great indignation, and, by implication, sympathy with your neighbour. The habit of killing flies, or attempting to kill them when they alight, is an obsession with the native, and it seems a physical impossibility for him to resist. He does it in church. When I first preached in Batanga, to a large congregation, I was very much disturbed by this unlooked-for and constant slapping on bare backs. And whenever I saw a man creep quietly across the aisle or forward several seats to perform this friendly office, I could not help watching until I heard the slap, when I always felt like stopping the discourse long enough to ask: “Did you kill it?” For in the mind of all those around there seemed to be nothing else going on in that church but this exhibition of applied Christianity.

Forgetting that the white man is protected by his clothing, they vie with each other in the discharge of this courtesy; and the exasperating blows that the white man receives from his black friends are the chief discomfort that he suffers from the larger flies. One day shortly before leaving Africa I was riding in an open boat when a native man sitting behind me suddenly gave me a slap on the back that actually hurt, and so startled me that I did some fool thing a little short of leaping into the sea. I turned around and asked the man in a tone of cold politeness whether he was trying to make my back the same colour as his.

“Why, no,” said he, “I am killing flies.”

“I’m no fly,” I replied frigidly.

A few minutes later, when I was indulging in a somnolent reverie, he struck me again—I think it must have been in the same place, it hurt so much worse than the first time; whereupon I turned about and, striking a very dangerous attitude (for a missionary), I threatened that if he did it again I would land him a blow in the stomach whether there was a fly there or not. My boat-boys, who knew the uses of clothing and appreciated the immunity of my back from fly-bites as well as the greater tenderness and sensitiveness of the white man’s body, laughed at this interesting diversion. Then they undertook to enlighten their friend from the bush as to the white man’s view-point, combining theoretical instruction with practical sense by removing him to another seat: for they well knew that if he should see another fly on my back, even while they were talking, he would strike again. He cannot help it: the habit is coercive.

Among the worst pests, and peculiar to Africa, is the driver ant. They go together in countless and incomprehensible numbers. The first sight that one gets of them is a glistening black, rapid-running stream about two inches wide crossing the path before him. Upon closer inspection he finds that the stream is composed of ants; and recognizing the driver ant of which he has heard many incredible stories on the way to Africa, he feels like shouting “Fire!” and running for his life. But as a matter of fact he may with impunity examine them as closely as he pleases so long as he does not touch them. They are so occupied with their own serious purpose that they will take no notice of him.

In the middle of the black stream are the females, about the size of our common, black wood-ant, while along the sides run the soldiers guarding from attack, and these are about four times the size of the others. The defense of the females is no matter of necessity, but rather gallantry, for those female viragoes are abundantly able to defend themselves. No creature so small ever had such a bite. They are all provided with jaws and with stings and they know how to work both vigorously. Some fine day as the newcomer saunters along, his eyes engaged with the beauty of the landscape, he walks into the ants. It may be one minute, perhaps two, and possibly five, before he knows anything of the serious mistake he has made. Then suddenly he experiences a sensation which is usually compared to numerous red-hot pincers applied implacably; for these ants do not let go. If he follows the course prescribed by ardent advisers, he will do either of two things: he will instantly strip off his clothing, even if he should be in the governor’s courtyard, yelling the while at the top of his voice so that those who object may go some other way; or he will make a dash for the nearest rain-barrel and tumble into it. Fortunately, their bite is not poisonous and leaves no bad effects afterwards. After this experience he will never allow more than one eye to dwell upon the charm of the landscape; the other will be directed to the path before him. If a man must go out at night he always carries a lantern.

When these ants come to a place where there is food to their liking, they scatter and spread out over a large area. Then, of course, they are not so quickly discovered, and one may easily walk into them. They are one of the trials of bush-travel, and the worst living nuisance of the bush, where the undergrowth hides them even from the keen eye of the native. There is seldom a day on a bush journey that the caravan does not march into the drivers. Then there is some wild yelling by those in the lead; the cry, “Drivers!” goes all along the line and each man as he comes to them makes a lively dash through them, stamping heavily as he runs; for it is possible thus to keep them off or to shake them off before they get a hold. All other insects and animals flee before them, including the python and the leopard.

Travellers have frequently told how that the silent, sleeping forest has suddenly become all astir and vocal, the angry boom of the gorilla or the frightened bleat of the gazelle alternating with a cry of the leopard and the scream of the elephant; all forgetful of their mutual hostility and vying with one another in the speed of their escape from the driver ant, abroad on a foraging expedition, to the number of infinity.

They make frequent visits to the native villages and the white man’s premises, usually in the night, spreading over the whole place,—the ground, the houses, inside and out, and through the roofs. Here they act as scavengers, driving before them all other insect nuisances, such as the cockroaches and centipedes, which especially infest the thatched roofs. Nevertheless, if one should hear the language of the average white man, upon the occasion of one of these nocturnal visitations, when the drivers have wakened him rudely and driven him headlong out into the dark, and perhaps the rain, there to shiver during this untimely house-cleaning, one would not for a moment mistake it for an expression of gratitude.

Setting hens must be kept carefully out of their way. In one instance I knew of the drivers visiting a nest one night when the young chickens were just coming out of the shells. The empty shells were there in the morning, but no chickens. If they should gain undiscovered access to a chicken-house in the night, they would leave nothing but bones and feathers. At Efulen we built our chicken-house against the workmen’s house, on the side away from the bush, so that the drivers on their approach should first visit the workmen and we should be warned in time to save our chickens.

We had been there only a short time when we were awakened one night by the familiar outcry as the men were driven out of their house. But the drivers had come from a different direction that night, and when we went to the chicken-house we found it already in their possession. It was but the work of a minute or two to tuck our pajamas inside our socks, bind our sleeves with handkerchiefs around the wrists, tie another handkerchief around the neck and pull a cap down over the head. Thus prepared I entered the chicken-house, the ground and walls of which were a glistening black mass. Stamping my feet all the time, I snatched the chickens one by one from the roost, stripped the handful of loose ants from their legs and handed them out to Dr. Good and Mr. Kerr, who picked off the remaining ants, after which we brought the chickens into our house and put them on the pantry shelves until morning, meanwhile building a line of fire around the house to keep the drivers back.

But it was not long after this that they found the house unguarded one morning just at daylight when I was alone at Efulen. I was awake but not yet ready to rise when I heard a low, rustling sound upon the floor of my room. After a few minutes, observing that it was becoming more distinct, I drew back my mosquito-net and looked out. Almost the entire floor was black with the drivers, and they were close to the bed. From the foot of the bed towards the door it was still possible for me to escape by a good jump; and in a moment I found myself shivering out in the yard while my clothes were still in the house.

One day, as Dr. Good and I were entering a native village, Dr. Good walked through some stray drivers. He began to preach to the people, who as it happened were already gathered in the street where they had been taking a palaver. Before he had been preaching more than a minute I observed that his gestures were more animated than I had ever seen before. Soon they became violent, noticeably irrelevant and even of questionable propriety. It was a little like Brer Rabbit, one evening when the mosquitoes were bad, telling the wolf about his grandfather’s spots. I looked on with increasing amazement and consternation, until at last even Dr. Good’s indomitable will was overborne, and he shouted: “Drivers!” and bolted abruptly for the bush. I tried to go on with the service, but it was almost impossible because of the laughter of the audience. Each one insisted upon telling his neighbours all about it, to the accompaniment of a broad caricature of Dr. Good’s gestures.

There was once a native man in Gaboon who was slightly deranged in his mind. The government advised, and at last insisted, that he should not be allowed at large. His family, being averse to confining him, chiefly, I imagine, because of the care it would entail upon them, sent him to a village of their relations across the river ten miles distant. There he remained for some time. The people there bound him at night lest he might set fire to the town while they slept. He objected to this and at last became troublesome by calling out continually during the night. Then they improvised a rude shelter back a short distance from the town, where they placed him at night and as usual bound him. One night he was more noisy than ever before, yelling and screaming hideously so that he wakened the people. They thought that he had become demented but no one went to him until morning, and then they made the horrible discovery that the drivers had attacked and devoured him.

In some tribes criminals are sometimes punished by being bound to the ground in the track of the drivers. One can hardly conceive of anything more horrible; for they would enter ears and eyes and nostrils. But I believe this is very rarely done. When death is decided upon, the Africans usually accomplish it by quick means.

There is another ant which I would say is worse than the driver, were it not that as yet its distribution is limited and it may be only transient. It is a very small red ant difficult to see with the naked eye except in a good light and on a white surface. It takes to dark closets, upholstered furniture, hair mattresses and those who would sleep upon them. It has not been long known in those portions of West Africa that are familiar to the white man. It has come from the southeast towards the coast. In 1900 it took possession of our mission-house at Angom, which was not occupied at that time.

It is doubtful whether this ant would be likely to infest a house when the grass around it is kept closely cut and the house well opened to the light and air; but when once infested it is not clear that these precautions would drive it out. One of Woermann’s trading-houses on the Ogowè had to be abandoned because of it.

My first experience with it was in 1900 when I visited Angom and slept in the mission-house that had been occupied only occasionally for more than a year. I was no sooner asleep than I was awakened by an extremely painful sensation, as if red-hot pepper had been sprinkled all over me. I felt no sharp bite, but only this intolerable smarting pain. It occurred to me that I might have been poisoned during the day by some violently poisonous herb in the bush or the overgrown garden; but I remained in bed never thinking that the cause of it was there. The natives told me in the morning what it was. My flesh was badly inflamed and I had fever all that day. After that I always slept in the boat, or in later years, the launch, when I visited Angom.

Among African pests there is another red ant, very small, though not so small as the last. It does not bite nor attack the person, but is nevertheless a great nuisance, particularly to housekeepers. All table food must be kept out of its way. Any food remaining on the table even an hour is covered with them. They are especially fond of sugar; and if it is left on the table or unprotected from one meal to the next, it is found a living red mass. By what powerful instinct they immediately discover the place where food is, and where they come from in such numbers, are among the mysteries that the white man will often ponder. Most of our food is imported, in tins, and once a tin is opened it is kept away from these ants by being placed in a safe suspended from the ceiling by tarred rope. The safe is a light frame of wood covered with wire screen or netting.

Besides these, there are numerous other varieties of ants, less harmful, or altogether harmless. The ground is so infested with them that neither white man nor native ever thinks of sitting down upon it, as we might sit upon the grass in this country. Altogether, more than five thousand varieties of ants have been described and classified; and most of these are found in Africa.

Among the worst of the African pests is the jigger. Those who are most sensitive to it would without doubt call it the worst of all. If the pest of the small ant travels from the interior towards the coast, this pest began at the coast and is extending towards the interior. It has evidently been imported—tradition says from Brazil, in the cargo and sand ballast of sailing vessels. The older inhabitants along the coast remember when it first became known, and I am sure that it made itself known very soon after it arrived. The jigger is a tiny species of flea, so small that the naked eye sees it with difficulty. It has all the reprehensible habits of its kind. The males hop all over one’s person in a playful manner, giving him a nip here and a nip there; but the females burrow beneath the skin. The favourite place is the feet, especially under the nails, but they are frequently found also under the finger nails and sometimes in the elbows and knees. Here the female, unless discovered and removed, forms a sac which expands to the size of a small pea, and which contains hundreds of little jiggers who soon begin to “jig” for themselves, and burrow again in the same flesh. Many of them however are scattered on the ground; those that remain keep multiplying, until if neglected the whole foot becomes a festering sore.