The origin of Sierra Leone—The difficulties of disposing of freed slaves—One of the beauty-spots of the earth—Is it possible that in the future, like Jamaica, it may be a health-resort?—Zachary Macauley's views—Few women in Freetown—Sanitary matters taken out of the hands of the Town Council and vested in a sanitary officer—Marked improvement in cleanliness and health of the town—A remarkable man of colour—Extraordinary language of the Creole—Want of taste in dress when they ape the European—Mrs Abraham Freeman at home.
I had no intention of going to Sierra Leone, but in West Africa as yet you make your way from one place to another along the sea-board, and not only did Sierra Leone lie directly on my way, but the steamer, the Zaria, in which I was travelling, stayed there for four days.
In the old days, a little over one hundred years ago, England, successfully policing the world, was putting down the iniquitous slave-trade all along the coasts of Africa, and found herself with numbers of black and helpless men, women, and children upon her hands. They had been collected from all parts of the Coast; they themselves often did not know where their homes lay, and the problem—quite a difficult one—was to know what to do with them. To land them promiscuously on the Coast was to seal their fate; either they would be killed or at the very best they would at once relapse into the condition from which they had been rescued. In this dilemma England did perhaps the only thing she could do. She bought from the chiefs a strip of land round the mouth of a river and landed there her somewhat troublesome charges to make for themselves, if they could, a home. Of course she did not leave them to their own devices; to do that would have been to insure their destruction at the hands of the Mendi and Timini war-boys, but she planted there a Governor and some soldiers, and made such provision as she could for the future of these forlorn people. Then the colony was but a little strip of land. It is but a small place still, but the British Protectorate now takes in those warlike Timinis and Mendis, and extends some hundreds of miles inland and as far south as the negro republic of Liberia, which I was on my way to visit.
0083
I don't know who chose Sierra Leone, but whoever he was the choice does him infinite credit. It is the most beautiful spot on all the west coast of Africa. I have seen many of the beautiful harbours of the world, Sydney, and Dunedin, and Hobart, which to my mind is the most beautiful of them all, Cape Town, and Naples, and Vigo, Genoa, Palermo, Messina, and lovely Taormina, which after all is not a harbour. I know them intimately, and with any of these Sierra Leone can hold her own. We entered the mouth of the river, passed the lighthouse, a tall, white building nestling among the palms, and all along the shore were entrancing little green bays, with green lawns. They looked like lawns from the ship, shaded by over-hanging trees. The blue sea met softly the golden sands, and the hills behind were veiled in a most alluring mist. It lifted and closed down and lifted again, like a bride longing yet fearing to disclose her loveliness to her lord. Here it seemed to me that a man might, when the feverish heat of youth is passed, build himself a home and pass the evening of his days resting from his labours; but I am bound to say I was the only person on board who did think so. One and all were determined to impress upon me the fact that Sierra Leone was known as the White Man's Grave, and that it deserved the name. And yet Zachary Macauley, who ruled over it in the end of the eighteenth century, staunchly upheld its advantages. I do not know that he exactly recommends it as a health-resort, but something very near to it, and he is very angry when anyone reviles the country. Zachary Macauley was probably right. If a man is not prepared to stand a certain amount of heat he must not go to the Coast at all; and if he does go he must be prepared so to guide his life that it is possible to conform to the rules of health demanded of the white man in the Tropics. If he looks for the pleasures and delights of England and her temperate climate, he will find himself bitterly disappointed, but if he seeks for what Africa can give, and give with lavish hand, he will probably find that the country will treat him well.
We cast anchor opposite the town appropriately named Freetown, and I landed, presented my letter, and was asked by the kindly Governor to stay for a few days at Government House.
The majority of the Europeans, with the exception of the Governor, do not live in Freetown. They have wisely built their bungalows on the healthier hillsides, and I suppose as the colony increases in importance the Governor will go too; but I am glad when I was there he was still at Fort Thornton.
0087
Of the history of the fort I know nothing. The bungalow is raised on thick stone walls, and you go up steps to the dwelling-house, past great rooms that are railed off with iron bars. There are ornamental plants there now, but there is no disguising the fact these are evidently relics of old slave days; I presume the barracoons of the slaves. But behind the one-time courtyard is filled up and sown with Bahama grass kept close-cropped and green, so that croquet and bowls may be played upon it. The bastions are now embowered in all manner of tropical greenery, and the great guns, the guns that Zachary Macauley used against the French privateers, peep out from a tangle of purple bougainvillea, scarlet hibiscus, fragrant frangipanni, and glorious white moon flowers.
There are white women in Freetown, not very many, but still fifteen or sixteen—the wives of the soldiers, of the political officers, medical officers, and the traders, and their number is growing, so that when the Governor gives a garden-party, the lawn that was once the courtyard of the fort is gay with bright muslin dresses, ribbons, and flowers. They seemed to like it too, those to whom I spoke, and there is no doubt that the place is improving from a health point of view. Until within the last two or three years the management of sanitary affairs was in the hands of the Town Council, of whom a large number were negroes, and the average negro is extremely careless about things sanitary; at last, so evil a reputation did the most beautiful town on the Coast get that it was found necessary to vest all power in the hands of a strong and capable medical officer, and make him responsible for the cleanliness of the town. The result, I believe, has more than justified all hopes. Perhaps some day the town may be as healthy as it is beautiful.
But I really know very little about Sierra Leone. I intended to come back and go up the railway that goes a couple of hundred miles up country, but as yet I have not had time, and all I can speak about with authority is its exceeding beauty. The streets are wide and rather grass-grown, for it is difficult to keep down vegetation in a moist and tropical climate, and I am glad to say there are, though the town is by no means well-planted, some beautiful trees to be seen. Government House is embowered in verdure, and the first station on the railway that runs up to the hill-top is “Cotton-tree.”
And the dwellers in this earthly paradise? Knowing their pathetic and curious history I was anxious to see this people sprung from men and women gathered from all corners of Africa, unfortunate and unhappy.
Frankly, I share with the majority of Coasters a certain dislike to the educated negro. But many of the men I like best, the men whose opinion I have found well worth taking about things West-African, tell me I am wrong. You cannot expect to come up from savagery in a few decades, and the thing I dislike so in the negro clerk is but a phase that will pass. Here in Sierra Leone I met one man who made me feel that it would pass, that the time will come when the colour of the skin will make no difference, and that is the African known to all the world as Dr Blyden. He is an old man now and he was ill, so I went to see him; and as I sat and talked to him one still, hot evening, looking down the busy street where men and women in all stages of dress and undress were passing to and fro, carrying burdens on their heads, shrieking and shouting at one another in the unintelligible jargon they call English, had I not looked and seen for myself that his complexion was the shadowed livery of the burnished sun, I should have thought I was talking to some professor of one of the older Universities of England. His speech was measured and cultivated and there was no trace in it of that indescribable pompous intonation which seems peculiar to the educated black man. He gave me good advice, too.
0091
“What shall I write about?” I asked, and halfexpected him to enter into a long dissertation upon the possibilities that lay latent in his race. But I might have known this man, who had conquered more difficulties on his way upwards than ever I had dreamed about, better than that.
“Write about what you see,” said he. “And if you do not understand what you see then ask until you do.”
So I have taken his advice and I write about what I have seen, and though afterwards I found reason to like much the peasant peoples of West Africa, I did not like the Creoles, as these descendants of freed slaves call themselves. Do I judge them hardly, I wonder? If so, I judge only as all the West Coast judges. They are a singularly arrogant people, blatant and self-satisfied, and much disliked along the Coast from the Gambia to San Paul de Loando. But they have taken advantage of the peace which England has ensured to them, and are prosperous. Traders and town-dwellers are they if they can manage it, and they pursue their avocations up and down the Coast. A curious thing about them is their language. If you ask them they would tell you it is English, and they would tell you they know no other; and English it is, as to the words, but such an extraordinary jargon it is quite as difficult to understand as any unknown tongue. Yet it is the peculiar bastard tongue that is spoken all over the Coast. Many who speak it as the only means of communication between them and their boys must have wondered how such a jargon ever came into existence, and it was not till Mr Migeod wrote his book on the languages of West Africa that anyone in fact ever thought of classing it as a separate language. But once pointed out, the fact is undoubted. Sierra Leonese is simply English spoken with a negro construction.
Listening very carefully, it took a great deal of persuasion to make me believe the words were English. When I bought bananas from a woman sitting under the shade of a spreading cotton tree and the man behind her came forward and held out his hand, saying: “Make you gi'e me heen ooman coppa all,” I grasped the fact that he intended to have the money long before I understood that he had said, in the only English, the only tongue he knew: “Give me her money,” even though I did know that “coppa” stood for money. Some of the words, of course, become commonplaces of everyday life, and I am sure the next time I call on a friend, who is rich enough to have a man-servant, association of ideas will take me back, and I shall ask quite naturally, “Massa lib?” instead of the customary “Is Mrs Jones at home?” Of course, in the case of Mrs Jones it would be “Missus,” but it was generally a master I was inquiring for in Africa.
Sunday or some high holiday is the day to see Freetown in its best clothes. Then the black gentleman appears in all the glory of a tall, black-silk hat, a frock coat, a highly starched waistcoat, the gayest of ties, scarlet or pink, the palest of dove-coloured trousers, and bright-yellow kid gloves; and the negro woman hides her fine figure with ill-fitting corsets, over which she wears an open-work muslin blouse, through which her dark skin shows a dull purple. Of all the places in Africa to transgress the laws of beauty and art Freetown is the very worst, and if ever a people tried their best to hide their own charms it is the Creoles of Sierra Leone. It would be comic if it were not pathetic. And yet, that these clothes are not part and parcel of the lives of these children near bred to the sun is promptly seen if a shower of rain comes on. In a lightning flash I saw a damsel, who might have come out of Fulham Road, or, at the very least, Edgeware Road, strip off the most perishable of her precious finery, do them up in a neat parcel that would carry easily under her umbrella, and serenely and unembarrassed march home in her white chemise and red petticoat. And she seemed to think as she passed me smiling she was doing the only right and proper thing to be done; as indeed she was.
I was a seeker after knowledge while I was in Freetown, and was always anxious to go anywhere and everywhere if a reason could be possibly contrived, so it happened that on one occasion I went to Lumley in search of fish. Lumley is a little village in the environ of Freetown, and the fish was to be bought from one Abraham Freeman, who dwelt at the side of the lagoon there. I went in a hammock, of course, and the way was lovely, up hill and down dale, through country that looked like a gigantic greenhouse run wild. The village was mostly built of mud with thatched roofs, but sometimes the houses were of wood, and the upper parts very wisely of trellis-work so as to insure a free current of air. When I arrived I looked round and told my hammock-boys to set me down at a cottage where a negro clad in a white shirt and trousers was lolling in a hammock. He did not scream at the scenery. He was rather suitably clad, I thought. It seemed he was the schoolmaster and a person of authority in the place.
“Can you tell me where Abraham Freeman lives?” I asked.
He corrected me gently but decidedly in his pompous English.
“Mr Freeman's abode is a little farther on by the lagoon. I believe Mr Freeman is absent in his boat, but Mrs Freeman is at home and will receive you.”
So we went on a little farther through the tangle of greenery till the waters of the lagoon showed up. A dried mud-shack, thatched with palm leaves, stood between the row of cocoa-nut palms that fringed the lagoon and the roadway, and there my hammock-boys set me down.
“Dis Abraham Freeman's?” They were Timini and did not waste their breath on titles for a Creole, whom they would have eaten up save for the presence of the white man.
I got out and a tall, skinny black woman clad in a narrow strip of blue cloth round her hips came forward to meet me. Nothing was left to the imagination, and all her charms had long since departed. She hadn't even a handkerchief round her head, and the negro woman has lost all sense of vanity when she leaves her wool uncovered. Mrs Abraham Freeman was at home! My boys found a box for me to sit upon, and I contemplated Mrs Freeman and her family. Rebecca Freeman, about fifteen, was like a bronze statue so beautifully moulded was she; she really did not need anything beyond the narrow cloth at her hips, and being very justifiably vain she wore a gaily coloured silk turban. Elkanah Freeman, when he took off his coat to shin up a cocoa-nut palm, wore no shirt, was built like a Greek god; and “my little gran'-darter, Deborah,” stark but for a string of green beads round her middle, was a delightful little cuddlesome thing, but “my sistah Esther an' Mistah Freeman's sistah Elizabeth” were hideous, skinny, and withered old hags, and the little strips of cloth they wore did not hide much. Each had a stone between her bony knees, and on it was breaking up some small sort of shell-fish like periwinkles. I got Mrs Freeman to show me the inside of her house. It was just four windowless rooms with openings under the eaves for air, with walls of dried clay, and for all furniture two wooden couches heaped up with rags. Outside on three stones a pot was boiling, and I asked her what was in it and could not make out her answer till she pointed out three skinny pigs rooting among the unsavoury refuse of the yard, then I grasped she was saying “hog,” and I was thankful I was not going to have any of that dinner. She begged from me on the score of her poverty, and in pity I gave her a shilling, and then the little grand-daughter was so winsome, she had to have a penny, and then the two poor old souls, cracking shell-fish and apparently done with all that makes life good for a woman, begged so piteously that they had to have something; so, on the whole, it was rather an expensive visit, but it was well worth it to see Mrs Freeman “at home.”
But I don't know Sierra Leone. I speak of all the West Coast as a passer-by speaks of it; but I know less of Sierra Leone than any other place I visited. Only it charmed me—I am going back some day soon if I can afford it—and I went on with regret to the negro republic.
